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.