It's quiet

 I hate this. 

          The past two weeks has alternated between Busy and Goddam Busy.  Lots of cargo coming in and out of NY. It's the ramp up to the holidays, where things that aren't part of the Just In Time logistics chain are getting warehoused, plus the usual daily economy of the busiest cargo port in the US. 

      I'm aware of what's going on in the world, more or less. Although I've been away from blue water sailoring for 15 years now, I still like to be semi-disconnected from the broken hearted world we live in, and I still very much enjoy letting my world shrink down. I get all the socializing I need from my coworkers and shipmates, and a daily phone call with Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife. But I have Instagram to look at boats and boobs, which is about all the internet is good for, and some daily news does leak in between the cracks. 

 But yeah, busy.  We're doing a lot of small oil parcel moves between storage terminals and ships, just gassing them up and off they go.  

      Gimme half a million of the regular and a pack of Marlboros will ya? 

          With all these rinky-dink parcels, ships taking 500, 1000 tons of fuel oil at a time, and 100-200 tons of diesel to keep their lights on on top of that, we're not filling anywhere near all our tanks, and then with with the supersize China-bound container ships, they're taking 6000 tons at a time, which is clogging up the storage terminal docks...  and the storage terminals are being reduced in number, as the Biden Admin and the Watermelons at the EPA (green on the outside, red on the inside) makes it impossible for small oil companies to survive by pressuring banks to refuse to lend to companies not favored by Green Inc. 

 So, yeah, lots of scrambling, lots of phone calls to hurry up. 

     I lost both of my generators on board over the weekend. We only have the two. One threw an idler pulley on the serpentine belt- the spring-loaded pulley that controls tension on the belt so it doesn't slip. So that beltless genset went down, and the other generator fired right up, and then promptly died 30 seconds later. Injector pump died. I cannibalized the deadlined gen with no fuel pump, and got a working idler pulley in place on the overheated gen, then proceeded to burn my balls off (and hands,but I mean who gives a shit about hands, my balls were baking from having to lean on the engine block to get at the belt and pulleys). reinstalling everything. 

 It was concerning. I mean, I like my balls. Granted, I'll be 50 in a few months, and not planning on having more kids, so they're mostly just decorative at this point, but still... I want to keep the aesthetic I have going on down there. I'm fond of it.  

   All this while a small chemical tanker was pretty upset that they had to wait while I sorted this out. My gens don't power our oil pumps or hydraulics, which are run off of  other, larger dedicated diesel engines, but they do power the alarm system, computers and the printers that make all that lovely paperwork that the .gov  and the accounting department just loves; it can't happen otherwise. I got us online, got the job done and onto the next only 1 hour late. Which prompted a couple of phone calls and a few of those "This fuckin' guy" whispers from me, with the phone held to the chest instead of against the head. We've all done it. 

            So, finally, today I am free. We burnt the midnight oil yesterday doing all the things that were being delayed- taking on supplies, filling the water tanks, getting trash off and food on, swapping out the dead injector pump and getting the offline gen online, etc. We even took delivery of a bunch of new mooring lines. some of the old ones were getting frayed and just shedding everywhere, like a Portuguese girl in the spring. 

Manhattan, dead ahead.  Statue of Liberty is about 2 points off the port bow

     And today everyone's pretty keyed up. And dammit, that includes me. Apparently every single NY cop has to be at work and in uniform today, because some shitbird is making threats against Christiandom again and it's enough that NY is taking it seriously.  Although I'm at anchor about a mile of so from the foot of the Statue of Liberty, we're getting waked pretty hard (rocked by the waves made by the big harbor ferries which are passing unusually close today), and it was enough to knock some shit off the shelves in the galley. I should know better, being a mariner, but the HQ hasn't hit some spicy seas in years. 

     Looking out the portholes, there's a LOT of flashing blue lights around the harbor. The Coast Guard's rubber ducky boats I've been seeing have a Ma Deuce mounted on the bow.  Everyone's on edge. 

    I'm determined to enjoy my day off, but it's like smelling a jug of milk and knowing from that whiff that it needs to go in the trash tomorrow.  It's OK, and you know it's OK, but you can't stop thinking about how it's almost not OK.  THAT's the feeling here in the harbor. 

     Some happier news, though. We passed the single biggest hurdle, one of the last, on the long-term life-altering project at home. I'll share that on a happier day up ahead.