Just call me 'Lucky'

 Yesterday was one of those days that made me grateful for the date to click over at midnight to a new one. 

    Now, I woke up at 1am for watch, as today is our day to switch watches and my partner B takes over wearing the big boy pants during the daytime, which has been my role these past few weeks. So today we run dog watches, (called because they're cur-tailed, as Patrick O'Brien once wrote) to ease the pain, essentially working shorter  watches until our watch schedule is 12 hours offset from what it had been before. So even though I had trouble falling asleep and only got a 4 hour nap before my next watch, I am grateful for it, because that means that yesterday is over. 

      So we knew going in that one of the 3 grades of oil we had loaded the night before was off spec- that is, it wasn't chemically exactly as the customer wanted it to be. This happens now and again for various reasons, and can be fixed by either diluting the oil with fresh stuff that is on spec, adding an ultra-clean but pricey oil like diesel (we deal in residual oils, which are less expensive than 'clean oils', so think of it as adding 93 octane gasoline to a tank full of 87 octane because on testing the tank had been showing 86.9 octane.  Sometimes we just send it back ashore and load oil from another shore tank so the shoreside folks can address the issue, too.  As it happens, we chose the former path, and so we would cut the oil in question with some diesel oil to make it come up to snuff,  but first we had to make room in the one tank where it was sitting. This was done by opening up an empty tank and the pipelines between the full tank and the empty one, and letting gravity drain off a particular volume, which when time allowed, the newly empty space would be replaced by diesel, and the newly filled tank can be pumped ashore on a later date.  Easy, standard. But we had to wait for the paperwork, the OK's, and all that hoopla. 

 In the meanwhile, the diesel-engine driven cargo pump I rely on to pump our most in-demand grade of oil (which has it's own designated tanks, pumps and pipelines aboard) decided to get in a fight with the coolant pump, and so on a nice hot July day the water pump on the cargo engine shit the bed. My company moved us to a pier with shore access for a mechanic to come and take care of that while I was pecking away at my calculator and the HQ's computer to run intial numbers, email with the parties involved in the oil issue, and eventually go outside to gravitate the oil to the new compartment... while I was waiting for the mechanic, and before the office staff was in the office, I swapped generators, bringing a new one online so I could change the oil on the old one. I did the oil change but managed to knock over the waste oil container as it was draining out of the engine pan, and so I had to clean up a big splash of  still-hot used engine oil off the gen house floor, which is always a good time. I got the gen house all tidied up just as the mechanic dug into my unhappy cargo pump's engine. He started by dumping the radiator's coolant directly on deck rather than in buckets, so now I have 10 gallons or so of used coolant running down deck and for the scuppers, which I had to stop and clean up. I was a bit pissed, but what price a properly cooled cargo pump?  I spent a nice 20-30 min stretch on my hands and knees, which is awesome when you're fat and also have a very heavily nonskid coat on your deck.  In the meanwhile, I'm still going back and forth on the off-spec oil, making plans and running numbers and messing with questions of trim and list on my barge, and how these things change as oil moves about, all pretty light math but requiring a calculator and the laptop to shift numbers around. 

 At this time the generator which has only been running for a few hours is on the verge of overheating. I had smelled hot diesel engine (if you know you know), and so there was a bit of coolant there that had boiled over but merely increasing ventilation by opening a hatch took care of that, but while I was cleaning up the pint or so of coolant that ended up on deck I dislodged the collection bucket for the crankcase vent, and so I dumped a pint or so of waste crankcase oil directly into the top of my boot and filled up my shoe while my foot was still in it. So I again had to clean the deck, this time with one boot on and one boot off before cleaning my oily boot and switching to my winter boots, my spares, a set of insulated Red Wing logger boots that each weigh about 7 lbs. Good fun on a 90 degree day. 

 By the time this is all done and the messes are cleaned up and the permissions to do what we need to do to get the wayward oil back on spec are all achieved and everyone's on the same page, it's time to sit in the AC with the laptop and run the numbers and do the blending calculations and trim predictions and such... this is good because my socks are already 100% saturated with sweat, as is my shirt. This is when the blue screen of death visits the office computer.  Seriously. At this place, at this time, the computer. Just. Died. Now. 

           I'm old enough to be able to do the calculations I need to do with a pen and paper and a calculator, the old ways. At least I think I can. It's been 10 years since I had to do that. But I can't email and I have no paper record at the moment of the oil we loaded, and no legal paperwork printed out yet... I need a computer and mine is now an expensive paperweight, beyond repair. I pull a spare out of storage and spend the next hour with an IT guru on the phone getting it updated and getting permissions and such to allow it to connect to our network, which wasn't assured as the spare is rather aged. But the guy makes it work, eventually, and while he's at the tail end of this, and I'm stressing out, hungry by this time as breakfast and lunch time have long since passed, I feel the bump of our tugboat arriving to move us to the tank farm to get our replacement oil and the mechanic heads ashore, finished. The usual rigamarole of unmooring and departure happens... but I haven't worn my clunky winter boots in 4 months, and distracted, I trip and fall, thankfully merely landing on my face and knees with slight involvement of my hands, tearing my jeans at the knee and also the knee beneath. Long time since I skinned a knee. I'm thankful I didn't hurt my hands, which are a lot more valuable to me than my face is. Shamefaced, and slightly road-rashed, I am up and moving quickly. 

     The rest of my watch goes about the same.  On the way to the oil terminal I hunt and peck and input the data from the prior loading of oil we did based on a paper copy of the details, as my computer can't yet access the full network drive ashore that has my records and numbers from past work. I get that done just as we arrive to moor. We get all fast at the tank farm, and the cargo surveyor who comes aboard (the same 3rd party guy who signed off on our papers at the first loading) declares that we can't load until he has load orders from the charterer... but not the load orders the charterer gave me to give to him, the ones we spent hours on getting everyone into agreement. He wants different orders, something I haven't ever heard of. He then decides on different volumes to load than the ones I, my office and the charterer all agreed on. By this time I am out of patience, my knee hurts, my foot is sweaty and oily and I am hangry. After going over the numbers to justify our needs, again, I call my office and ask the dispatcher to please unfuck things because my ability to even is about out. I can't even, by this point... and right then, when I am ready to either fall on my sword or go all ham on the surveyor, in comes B, because it's watch change time, and I am saved. 

          A shower cures most of my ills, turns out. Cleaning my scrapes and scraping oil out from under my toenails is a pretty zen activity when you was 30 seconds from going nuclear just 15 minutes before. I have the leisure now to handle the 3 S's and make a BLT, the perfect food for a hot July day.  Just enough time after to read a book and start to unwind, but surprisingly sleep evaded me for a few hours. 

 Still, here I am hours later, and we are at a lay berth awaiting the discharge of our now better-than-ever quality oil... but the discharge isn't going to happen until the next watch. I have the watch free, which is a fine thing. So this is my entertainment portion of the night, where I can blog, kvetch and while I'm not feeling rested, I have another opportunity to sleep in a few hours. Some days are just like that, where nothing goes quite right except that you're still above ground at the end of it.