Pop goes the mooring line and other fun games

 I have a watch off again, first one off in a few days, and welcome for the nonstop nature of things recently. Best of all, I did all the chores last time I had a watch off and it isn't yet time to play catch-up.  

   We're still plagued with third-party tugboats assisting us, boats chartered by my employer but not owned by my employer, who don't do what we do day in and day out, which can be a assache, or at least professionally, present an elevated necessity for vigilance and teamwork. 

      The other night, one of the companies that my employer hires regularly sent a new tugboat that doesn't normally do oil barge work inshore. This was a beast of an offshore tug with a big 'north sea bow,' an elevated bow and fo'c'sle, and two monstrous props that pushed a tug that is about twice the weight of our average-sized tugs, developing enormous torque... and inertia too. 

       I learned that the hard way when we sent the first mooring line up to a ship as we were trying to make fast to it, and as the tug drifted slowly as the line came tight, it just kept drifting, didn't slow a bit, and the line parted like a gunshot. Mooring lines will 'sing' as they approach their maximum strain. There will be thudding noises as the line tightens on the bits, and then a higher-pitched groan that says that the line is as tight as it prefers to be.  

       This time, the tug just drifted along slowly, the line came tight and started shrinking in diameter, and seeing what was up, I told the now bug-eyed deckhand 'call for a full stop, right now!' 

       Big tug, heavy tug, and, turns out, slow to respond to the gear clutch tug. Boom. Bye bye expensive synthetic hawser... and as a little eff you, the damn line parted right at the mooring cleat where we made it off, IOW about 80 feet from the end of the line, rendering the 200' line useless. Too small to use. 

    Well, it's a small but annoying thing, and it was just 4-5 minutes' work to drag another lije stored nearby and put it to work. 

       The line broke energetically- we use a low-stretch polymer line, because stretch=snapback when they do break, and snapback can easily cost you a knee or leg or dome you, and I have no interest in waking up 5 weeks later and 50 IQ points lower. 

         So it was a small thing, though one that doesn't happen normally.

    Cleaning the confetti up, the little yarns and strand ends that were dumped on deck, was annoying- the nonskid traps them until a windy day comes and deposits the plastic dust and fragments DIRECTLY in the eyes, over and over again.  It's deeply annoying. 

 Oh well, 1 week to go. 

  

Regular Watches

 The drama llama has apparently gone off to another field this week. 

        I got my wish. A couple of watches where it was just get up, eat, work, eat, shower, sleep, rinse repeat. 

           Getting shit on from upon a great height is like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer- it just feels so good when you stop.   Nobody died, nobody is in danger of dying, it's just me with a job to do. Put the oil in the hole, take the oil out of the hole and don't spill any. 

     As much as the work/life balance here on the HQ is now something that no longer exists, it was just nice to not be getting bad news for a couple of days. To that end, there hasn't been anything particularly notable happening here aboard, and that's great news, for however long it lasts.  I even have most of the watch off today, for values of 'watch off...' by which I caught up on the assorted logbooks, ordered supplies, changed the oil on one of the generators, restrung the anti-twoblock brake on one of the deck cranes (there's a 100-lb weight under the #1 hook on our crane- if something lifts the weight, the hydraulilcs to the wire drum cut off, so we can't jam the #1 hook into the crane head), changed out a dead light bulb on the Christmas Tree ( a large colorful alarm panel mounted about 20' in the air that lights up if a cargo tank is being overfilled), and cleaned up a couple of oil spots on deck.   Yup.   Good watch off. And it's only 0930!   

At the upper edges of Whelmed

 I'm still not overwhelmed. 

   Oh, I'm whelmed. I'm in reaching distance of overwhelmed now, I think, but I'm not sure. So far I haven't started knocking hats off heads when I am mildly vexed, so there's still time, but I am definitely eyeballing hats. 

     I got ONE watch free of existential dread after getting back to work. One. 

 On my second watch back, a phone call from my doctor. Not something I'm going to get into here but truly serious business. Alarming enough and scary on its' own, but following the nonstop bullshit of the past 6 weeks, I'm starting to feel... something. Oppressed?   

   Well, 'starting' is a lie. I'm kinda bummed out. Life and shit both happen, right?  

     It's the timing more than anything. The financial and legal mess that comes from construction in the 3rd world, a passel of dead loved ones, sick loved ones, struggling loved ones, wife's stressed and burning out at her job, I'm throwing money around like Jack Ashore... and a bunch of other whining complaints. 

 I'm not at wit's end. I'm not even overwhelmed... just... whelmed, Really, really whelmed. 

   I look at blogfriends who are dealing with real shit, serious life-limiting, life-threatening and life-altering things, and I feel silly for feeling like God has been pissing in my cornflakes of late.  I'm OK, truly. But I've never been a guy who tolerates a whole lot of OK. Feast or Famine is more my speed. 

       I am enormously grateful for friends and family, truly. While I was home I participated in an online drinking session with 4 of my childhood friends, a circle of constant companions present for almost my entire life. We video chatted and laughed and drank a little too much for 3-4 hours. It was healthy, it was relaxing. It was exactly what I needed.  

                     Along with that, I had a little time with my own blood family, while we were dealing with my sister's hospitalization and release, and I'm grateful for that too... and my wife, my second self, we didn't have enough time together, but we did have time together. 

 I got people. As is my habit, I don't got a lot of people, but the people I got are the best people. I need to remember that.   And even at work, I have Big E and B, two great friends, as close as brothers, and the mutual support there. 

    So, one more shit sandwich has been added to the platter, and the table is starting to groan. My writing here has been less about cool maritime stuff and more a gay-ass Dear Diary, which is not cool. I'll be OK. 

        Last night, when I was in a serious brown study, I had one of the most productive and professional ships' engineering crew I've ever worked with. The container ship "COLUMBO EXPRESS" deserves all the gambling and hookers (currency for sailors), for being so professional, efficient and easy to work with on a day when I was really feeling sorry for myself. They were on the ball, truly, setting a pace and performance that I have rarely seen equaled, especially in that the transfer was moderately complicated. 

 I wish they could all be like that. 

Lemons, lemonade

 OK, well, the larder is still stocked with shit sandwiches here at my house. 

 Oh, yeah, crew change was today. I am still at my house.   Hurricane Milton is coming to deliver clusterfucks and headaches for all the people in my area, you see. 

        I'm not cool with leaving my wife and kid to ride out the weather on their ownsome, so despite the fact that I have missed waaay too much work this past month, I had to stay here. Thankfully my employer is OK with taking care of family, despite the fact that I KNOW they had to do some major crew shuffling in my area last week even before I took myself out of the roster. 

        Me being, well, me, there wasn't much prepping that had to be done. Pull a few things out of storage, top up the inventory of things that are good to eat and drink if we lose power for a bit, etc etc. About the only thing that I was low on was Jamison, and cheap yet reasonably tasty whisky is essential for mental health. 

   So, yeah, I had so much shit to do around the house for maintenance in my scheduled time off, and my wife's work issues requiring my help, and my sister's hospitalization (she is doing well and starting recovery, and cooked us all an insane spaghetti and meatball dinner the other night with my nephew's help), this time off just sucked ass all up and down the block. And then I had to cancel my flight for crew change, only to have the rebooked flight get canceled and rebooked for Saturday rather than Friday. So I have yet another day I'm missing at work, which is a hit to the wallet I didn't want. 

    But you know... I've been running around like a cat trying to bury a turd under a marble floor, and this unplanned time off?   I'm done with my planned chores, and I have a couple of days off.  That's not a bad thing in most senses. I kind of need the break. I came home to rest and didn't get any after all. So maybe this isn't a bad thing. 

    I'm far enough south that if the hurricane sticks to the predicted path, we should be able to ride it out pretty well. 40-60kt winds, some gusts around 70. We'll probably lose power at some point but so be it. 

   I'm more concerned with the guys in the predicted path. The Tampa area looks to be in for a real fucking.  Guys like BCE, Borepatch, Beans and others are there. Gotta remember to say a prayer for them. 

 

The Beatings will continue until morale improves

 Holy shit, I'm getting my ass kicked. 

    I came home for some rest, simply because I wasn't getting better and recovering from the cold/flu bug I had with me for almost all of September. At home I can eat, drink, be merry and loaf... except none of that has happened. 

It's been shit sandwiches all the way down lately. I am feeling like I got a Kick Me sign taped to my back. 

      So, with the decline and death of my mother-in-law culminating in a near-ruinous trip to Brazil, coupled with the cold/flu that would not go away, I was feeling like the ant in the driveway when he sees a kid with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. 

      I don't talk about Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's job here because it's a very serious job and this is not a serious blog, but she's an Alzheimer's nurse, and specifically she's self-employed as a care manager for families dealing with a loved one in need of 24/7 care for Alzheimer's or end-stage dementia, who want their parent or spouse to live and die in their own home.  Her particular gifts are boundless empathy and insane organizational skills. Over the years she has attracted like-minded women who make up the care teams that she manages. 

     I'm very proud of her, and as I have said for the last 20 years, she's just as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside... unfortunately about 24 hours after I got home this time a medical crisis broke out that was both deeply upsetting and stressful, though thankfully that ended happily enough (for values of happy, anyhow), but which turned the week into a 100-hour workweek for her. This coming just 2 weeks after we buried her mother, the timing sucked, and my own complaint, that of having to impotently watch someone I love suffer, continued, which I personally find distressing. 

    But as I said, things resolved well- everyone lived this time and things even went back to the pre-funeral state, more or less, in our lives.    So a few days ago, after the first day of things going back to normal(ish) my wife calls me, and asks to go out for dinner and a glass or two of wine. 

         At the same time I get the check from dinner, which was good, and more importantly, relaxing for her, I get a call from my brother;  my sister's going out in an ambulance, looks like a heart attack or a stroke. So we got... 3 hours free between crises? Perhaps as many as 4.  

   So that was this past week. . My sister's story is her own, and happily here a few days later, things are improving.  But for me, I'm a bit cooked.  My sister's the kind of person who will apologize for inconveniencing everyone by getting sick.  Since I'm pretty sure she reads this occasionally, I'd feel terrible if she felt guilty that she got sick. 

    Still, I'm about ready for a day without something scaring the crap out of me, or something stressing the shit out of my wife and family here. 

  Oh. 

   

   Guess who's got a little sumpin sumpin coming overhead the day he's supposed to be going back to work? 

        I guess I need to be positive here. Yes, we're apparently going to get hit by a hurricane next week. But on the upside, I'm already home. At least I don't have to find a flight to rush here...