New Blood, and New Bloodletting (Part 1)

 Good morning, 

          Well, when I went to bed, I had planned on us being nudged and nosed over to a tank farm in Bayonne NJ to load up 4 grades of fuel (two of which would be partially combined together and also partially segregated from each other) in some proportion, for 3 ships over the next few days. 

    When I woke up at 0430, having slept 9 solid hours (I was pretty damn tired), we had been ordered to remain at anchor for the night. So here we are, swinging our dicks in the breeze at 0630, and my ass has already weighed in (I'm trying to lose weight again, and succeeding, 25lbs gone since New Years) and breakfasted (today being 2 slices of bacon and 2 eggs, which makes today a VERY good day so far).   

    We had a gale comes through the last day and a half, which brought some mild cold with it, somewhere 30's and low 40's, but with the breeze I couldn't get warm yesterday despite it being a mostly indoor day for me. I mean 40's used to be long-sleeved t shirt and a flannel shirt weather for me, all day outside. What the hell happened? Florida and anno domini, I guess. Sucks though. I'm a fatass, I shouldn't be getting cold. Not too many years ago, it took single digits and a gale before the cold bothered me. Getting soft and silly in my old age. 

      Some stuff is going on in the background. I have picked up some side work as a scientist, doing, may the good Lord help us, some analysis of testing methods and project planning for a for-once well budgeted study... I'm unfortunately being tapped for the planning stages, not the execution stages which would be fun AF, but what the hell, my services as a quarter-assed (not even halfassed) biologist haven't been in demand for some time, so I'm happy to have a couple of bucks thrown my way in exchange for a little algebra and some redneck CAD. plus the money is more than welcome.

 While my munificent Tankerman pay is adequate, construction in Brazil of my new batcave there is, while on budget for overall target, the money up front parts are coming faster than expected. Materials costs are rising rapidly there, as spendthrift econimic illiterates  are in power there, just as they are here, with similar results, so I'm being pushed hard to cough up the reals to buy stone, mortar and tile, lock in concrete deliveries, and secure rebar and consumables.  Same as 3 months ago, the house looks like present-day Gaza, only moreso. Construction on the 3 meter tall wall surrounding the house and yard came to a halt with the change order from Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, who wants piers sunk in the ground to support expanding the wall to 5 meters in the future and to add a 2nd floor to the annex to the big house, where we're going to reside. 

    What I love about Brazil is that if you want to build, and you own the land, you can build. Construction is  all stone and concrete, with no water table to deal with and stable ground down to 100-130 feet that will always pass a perc test in the arid region where we're building. So adding, say, a second floor is a matter of either prior planning to sink piers and columns now, or adding them later and being more disruptive, either way it's cool. 

    Still, it looks like hell right now, and my savings account is on a diet just like me, but showing much more rapid progress, if you get me. oof. 

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 The breakneck pace that we've been setting the past few months here on the HQ hasn't been confined to just us. The other guys who are also working the Spot market (as in on-the-spot job charters, rather than long-term charters) in my company are also running around like a cat trying to bury a turd under a marble floor.  Perhaps as a result of the uptick in work locally without a commensurate increase in tonnage to perform the work, some of the major players in the oil trade have increased the number of vessels they are chartering on longer-term contracts. What this means is that, if, for example, an oil major picks up another tug and barge unit on charter, there is one less tug and one less barge available locally to work for companies other than that oil major. End result, each time this happens, the workload on moi and guys like moi, increases... and we're running low on tugboats. 

      Thing about a tugboat is that in the oil trade, they're an expense, not a generator of revenue. You spend money on a tug. You don't make money on a tug. And they're not cheap to fuel, man up or maintain... but a barge isn't getting from A to B without one.  Still, barges generate oil money in a more direct fashion, though both tugs and barges are needed as part of the process. The tug crew isn't going to carry oil in their pockets, and the bargemen aren't going to put a tow line between their teeth and start swimming, either. 

            What is happening is that companies often have more barges than tugs. A tug can drop a barge off at a terminal, and go move another barge or three before the barge at the terminal is loaded or discharged. It makes sense to have plenty of barges to work, and enough tugs to move them. But oil companies are fickle. They'll tell you they need oil moved on such a date and at such a time, but they're competing for berths with each other at tank farms and refineries, and the best laid plans etc etc... there are times when tugs and barges are all loafing, and times when everyone gets orders to move at the same time. Like a frigging anthill. 

       What ends up happening is that at times there might be 8-9 barges scattered across 15 miles of harbor and rivers, and at any one time between zero and all barges might get movement orders with no prior warning.   I'll give a more likely scenario, however. 

     Lets say one tugboat has orders to put a barge alongeside a ship at  0600, and also has orders to put another barge at a terminal at 0900, then return to the first barge at 1000, and move that barge to yet another ship.  The two barges are only 30 minutes apart from each other. At 0600, the tug has the barge alongside the ship, but the ship for some reason isn't sending men on deck to catch mooring lines, and so after blowing the whistle, cursing and hammering on the side of the ship with a 20lb sledgehammer, the barge is all fast and the tug breaks down... at 0700. It took an hour to get all fast, instead of the ideal, which is 10 minutes. So the Tug leaves the ship at 0700, steams the 30 minutes to the second barge, and arrives at 0730. Between making up (lashing the tug and barge together) and sailing, the tug leaves the berth at 0800, and arrives on time at the terminal, putting the second barge in on time, and on budget. 

    The expectation is that the first barge will be done at the ship in just 4 hours, so somewhere around 1100 with the delay, as it was a very small 350 ton splash of fuel oil the barge was transferring, which only should take 1 hour... but the ship is old, and the engineer on the ship is afraid that 60psi which is their normal loading max pressure, is too much for the piping, and wanted the barge to pump the fuel slowly. Instead of one hour, it takes 3. Plus the engineer is eastern European, and that means that no matter how much fuel the barge delivers, the engineer will accuse the barge of attempting to shortchange the ship by 40 tons of fuel (It's always 40 tons with the bohunk engineers. Don't know why). The engineer will spend an extra 30 minutes atttempting to browbeat the tankerman to give him 40 more tons of fuel, for free.  The engineer sent a crewman down earlier to measure the volume of fuel in the barge's tanks before they even got started, so he knows exactly what the barge has on board. But the tankerman actually gave him every drop of that grade of fuel on board that he asked for, and it was the correct amount of course, since the barge can not leave the tank farm unless the amount in the barge on loading agrees very closely with the amount that was pumped out of the shore tank.  So the tankerman tells the engineer too get his dishonest ass on the barge and stick his head in the barge's empty cargo tank. But the engineer never does. Instead, he says he will issue a Letter of Protest because the barge is a bunch of filthy liars and children of filthy liars who also practice usury and buggary at the selfsame time.   Now, a Letter of Protest is an official document, which can be used to start a legal process when disputes arise, so once a Letter is issued, it's a punctuation mark on the job. But the letter is never issued. Instead a Letter of Protest is issued, but not for the volume, but because of some minor inane thing (The barge refused to take the ship's mail or the like) and the volume is never mentioned. This document is delivered along with the actual bunker paperwork and the handheld VHF radio the barge lent the ship, and is delivered by one of the sailors, not an engineer, who coincidentally has no idea what is going on but who is vaguely hurt that the tankerman wasn't more polite and friendly. The barge is now about 3 hours behind his schedule as it stood at 0600.  And that means that the second ship of the day, who is waiting for his fuel at the anchorage, is also being  held up. 

 So the tugboat moves the barge, and the tugboat's schedule is fucked too, courtesy of the dirtbag engineer. The barge is 3 hours late, and the tugboat  was supposed to pick up the second barge after finishing the second ship with the first barge... so now the company has to find another tug to move either the first or second barge. Turns out, both are ready to sail at the same time. 

      And so, when my employer runs out of available tugboats, they hire a 3rd party tugboat, whether it's for a single job or for a period of time, 7 or 30 or 90 days.  and at any time, in the past few months we have had 3-5 3rd party tugs helping us out in NY harbor. 

      This means, for me, we have tugs that know the area, but don't know the idiosyncrasies of my barge, or other barges, and we don't know each other...strengths and weaknesses, people skills or lack thereof, communications style, needs, habits... which means there's a learning curve, which can be frustrating for all. But it also can mean new friendships or at least cordial affinities forming too. Positives and negatives. 

   And that is how my partner Big E and I got to know and like one very young, very nice but very volatile  deckhand.. 

(To be continued)