Dog days

 Today is the first of two dog watches I'll stand during this tour.  We move to short watches to allow some sleep when we make the switch from nights to days. Normally night watch is quieter than day watch, but that wasn't the case. Oh, there' no phone calls from the office on night watch, which is nice, but workwise the first week was steady busy for me. Luckily we're at anchor today so when we made the watch switch, even with shorter sleep we had a nice easy day. It takes about 5 days for me to get fully adjusted to working nights, where I can get 7+ hours of sleep, so I only get a day or two of good sleep before it's time to upend my circadian rhythm and go back to normal. 

   I'll do the same thing in 2 weeks again, switch back to nights. But the upside of the 2nd dog watch is that it means it's almost time to go home. 

    With the day at anchor, I went out on deck with a grease gun and a couple of tubes and did the monthly lube circuit on all the grease fittings.  It takes about 3 tubes to see everything all slicked up. The big thing is that this gives me a reason to really go over the deck cranes up close and personal, to really eyeball everything, look for wear, etc. And I did find that the brake to stop the #1 hoist from two-blocking 

had slipped a bit- there's a 75lb steel weight that gets moved if the #1 block gets within bad-breath distance of the head of the crane, and on moving, a wire attached to it slacks off, tripping the brake and shutting down the hydraulics to the #1 hoist. And so I saw that the wire holding the weight had slipped a few inches, and I was able to reset it and crank down on it to prevent further adventures... so that's a way of saying I got to spend 45 seconds turning a wrench and prevented an annoyance later in the week, and at any rate, it's good to eye-bang a crane's bits and parts on the reg anyhow, but going over it with a finer scrutiny is not to be despised.