stowed, stored, and blowed the hell up

It's been a good week at work.

It hasn't been too busy, and the major projects aboard for 2009 are completed. The little things are progressing, and improvements are being improved upon. We even had an overnight sailing to reposition to an anchorage in Baltimore from our usual haunts on the Delaware river. We've got a modest load of bunker and diesel oil aboard for a job tonight, then off to Philly again tomorrow morning sometime, another 8-12 hours away, dependent upon the tides and currents.

Then one of our generators seized.

Still not sure how that happened, but we're now running on one generator set, which is itself overdue for service. Sooooooo... The generator was offline. She simply wouldn't start. We had to wait until today for a mechanic to catch a launch and come out to declare the patient deader'n' a dead dog.

Anyhow, looks like we're going to be down for maintenance for another day or two after we get back home.

In the meanwhile, it was a pretty rough time at home, so it's been wholly a good thing that work has been light so far this tour. The reality is that my home life is complicated, just now, enough so that even though my home is still an oasis for me, outside of my own family, my wife and son, it's chaos. A lot of the rest of my family is really struggling, and for someone like me, who lives with a certain amount of guilt over being a so distant from my family it's difficult to watch. So this job is a double blessing. My face has gone from a somewhat alarming purple color to my more usual reddish permanently-embarrassed-looking color in just 5 days, and that's a good thing.