First Thursday in Ordinary Time

 I'm back on board, and things are as they often are, which is to say: thinks are right fucked up. 

      Last night was my first watch on board after a lovely 2 weeks home. As I'm fresh aboard, it's my week to take the back watch, 1800-0600.  Luckily we had ample free time until a load scheduled for 0300. I was looking forward to it. 

          One of our units got a nasty lightning strike before I came back to work, and while the company will have it back in service in short order, there was some scrambling to get a barge assigned for every job.  I got a phone call that because of an outside vendor's semi dick move, we were getting assigned a cargo of high sulfur heavy fuel oil.  Now, the present HQ doesn't carry HSFO, which can contain around 3% sulfur. We carry VLSFO, Very Low Sulfur Fuel Oil (<0.5% sulfur) and ULSFO (Ultra Low Sulfur fuel oil (<.1% sulfur). The less sulfur there is, the more expensive it is, and the cleaner it burns, emissions wise. 

      Thing is, once you put high sulfur in  a tank, the residues after pumping it off remain.  So for us to have to carry high sulfur fuel in our tanks means that we're gonna need to get flushed out but good after, which is not a cheap proposition. Just the way things work. 

  Turns out, while we were filling our cargo tanks last night, the ship our fuel was destined for had a massive fire break out in nearby Newark. 

Fire still blazing on ship at Port Newark where 2 firefighters died. Cause remains unknown.

https://www.nj.com/news/2023/07/fire-still-blazing-on-ship-at-port-newark-where-2-firefighters-died-cause-remains-unknown.html

         From what I understand, the firemen who died were getting overwhelmed working in the confined space but were unable to back out of the area.  

      The ship in question is a Con-Ro ship, the bastard child of a container ship and a car carrier. It's half of each.  This company's ships tend to move used cars from the first world to the 3rd world. Car fires aboard these types of ships do happen from time to time, but obviously something made it worse than normal. 

   So I'm sitting about 3/4 of a mile from the ship right now, in another channel at a different terminal, hanging on with this burning ship's fuel. There's shipping containers between me and this ship, so I can't see anything. I heard a big damn boom about 2 hours ago, though, which makes me think that they're still fighting to save the ship. The 1200 cars aboard are probably mostly fucked, but that's just a guess. 

         I do want to be smart here. The oil company that entrusts us with their oil probably wouldn't want us speculating too much or ripping on their customers, so I won't.  I'll just note that shipboard fires are a fucking nightmare, and while I find these ships to be uglier than a 90 year old's ballsack, the international used car trade is always fraught with risk.