The Grind

 Well, I'm in it now. I've been at work for a week and I've got 3 weeks to go. When I get home, the holidays will be starting up, and while I'm not going to be home for Christmas this year, I'll be home for Thanksgiving and New Years, which is pretty good.  So to add to the Honey-Do list for next time I'm home, which is already jam-packed, I need to add losing about 6hrs to ha g the Christmas lights, which I intend to do, as I have not done so in the past 3 years, and frankly I could use the pleasant effect it has, and maybe the neighbors can too.  So that'll be a good project to do a few days before I go back to work. 

       We've been working steady since I got here, right up until yesterday. We've got a little break now, and while I can't go ashore at the lay berth where we're sitting now, we're doing an early crew change today, and Big E is going home, while B is coming in. Big E had surgery 7 months ago and is finally almost recovered, but has been working shorter tours to build up his endurance, but this is the last shortened tour. On his return in 3 weeks, he'll be back to full time. In the meanwhile, B was working overtime elsewhere and I heard they had a major breakdown while he was there, and an awful time, so he'll be relieved, grumpy and hopefully ready to rest when he gets here in a few hours. 

        Dirk the Dutchman, the mayor (and senior captain at this point) of New York Harbor, will be swapping bodies on his prison ship launch (a water taxi) all day today, and in just a few hours that'll happen. I took the launch just last week when I started my tour at HAWSEPIPER'S Afloat Global HQ/ Penal colony, and as always it was great to catch up with Dirk, who at 82 is still spry as hell and while 'retired' keeps his hand as owner of his launch company. 

    As I have been working on boats since age 8, I understand that on a boat something is always broken and in need of repair. That's the nature of boats after all. This past week the head (bathroom) has been playing merry hell, and while the primary culprit was a burned out macerator pump (boat toilets grind down poop and TP to a slurry before pumping it to a holding tank for treatment), the reason the poop pump got smoked was the control/flush switch was damaged. A new switch wasn't available locally in NYC, and is being shipped, so Jimmy, one of our shoreside staff, an electrician, Jimmy-rigged the switch to sort of work in the meanwhile, if pressed REALLY hard... which worked until yesterday, when the whole switch and its' box just fell into the bulkhead (wall) and disappeared after a piece of wall it was screwed to just said Fuck Off and tore out. 

 So yesterday before my morning bidness, I got to rip out a 20-year old, mildewy, crumbling and piss-spray saturated hardboard wall to retreive the control box. Which smelled magical. Fermented ammonia, stagnant water and mildew.

 A blessing in disguise, really, as, unpleasant as it was, nobody had to crap in a bucket, including me, and our port engineer has a replacement panel and some insulation on order. A new panel should improve the smell, as we already removed the insulatuon, sprayed the space between the old bulkhead and the exteral steel house with dilute bleach and then an enzyme deodorizer we keep on hand for when old guys and hoodboogers with bad aim piss on the deck and bulkheads around the toilet. 

 So I was able to have the Morning Seat in peace, if delayed, and thus yesterday was saved.  At 51 it's really hard to have a nice day if it starts with crapping in a bucket, so even with a hole in the head, we're good.

   We also got stores (supplies) yesterday, which included new office chairs. Fancy gaming chairs, even. I assembled one yesterday and we like it, so I'll build the rest today. If God is kind our schedule will hold and I'll be free today to cook a real lunch, help out B and Big E with shifting their dunnage, and get caught up on paperwork, etc. 

 

Still not dead, but closer than

It's a small thing, but I can't remember being this comfortable on a plane before.

 It's the tween season here in FL, where I'll be for the next 5-10 mins until my plane takes off. The snow Jews aren't here yet, and the business Jews and I are not filling up the plane.

 There's some advantage for parts of the year to live in a Jewish-heavy community in FL... The Snow Jews make up an enormously rude, selfish and inconsiderate bloc, and they'll be a plague all winter, but still better than the flying housing projects that hoodboogers infest in discount airlines... but for early AM flights from June-October, me n' the business Jews practice politeness. Not a speakerphone or an arguement with the flight attendants in sight.

     I'm really pleased by how much more comfortable the seating is on my plane with all the weight loss I've managed this year. My ass fits great in the seat now, but sadly my shoulders fit better too. Age and a calorie-limited diet appropriate to someone with a marginally functional thyroid and the resultant metabolic slowdown from that has cost me some strength and muscle mass. From my reading, I am going to have to get into an exercise routine to get some of that back. I've been improving my joint flexibility while waiting for some chronic pain to scale back (tennis elbow, of all things, recently. Not that I play tennis). But it got me into daily stretching and flexibility exercises while waiting and I think I can start picking up weights now, at least lightly, try to get my shit moving.  

      I arrived home 2 weeks ago with an ambitious agenda for catching up on maintenance and projects at home.  Despite combining both the longest voyage away AND the shortest turnaround interval after an extended trip I've done, I was feeling very well- patient, mentally focused, etc. Surprisingly so.

  ...But at home I couldn't get motivated. I felt distracted and my usual pleasure in puttering around outside failed to materialize. Oh, I had a wonderful time with my family, mind, at least my nuclear family- I wanted to hang out with my brother more, but even there I pretty much found myself making excuses and just keeping my wife and kid within handhold distance. 

 Sure, I kept my shit together in those 4 months. Turns out I wasn't entirely unaffected by it, and after a couple of half-assed projects I dragged my ass through, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife set me aside and told me to quit pushing myself and feeling guilty, as I was not making the most of my time off to decompress... and after that I just focused more on trying to enjoy the days... and I semi-succeeded. I never got entirely over not doing much in terms of productivity, but I'm trying to cut myself some slack. 

 And it's a moot point now, as I'm 35,000 ft in the air and headed back north to work. No overtime, though. I'm going home as soon as my time is done. I do have a lot of shit to do. 

      

I'm not dead yet!

 But I am at home. So, turns out that despite being in a good headspace for the 4 months I was at work, being home showed me that I was beat up, metaphorically.

 Better now.  Enjoying my last few days here.  

The longest taxi ride ever

 I'm at the airport. And I am alive. I don't know if it was worth living through what just happened. 

 Taxi from Bayonne New Jersey (The Paris of New Jersey, lol.) to JFK airport, Queens. Across New York. During rush hour.

 It took a while, obviously. But that wasn't the issue.  My driver was an old middle eastern man. And he... his breakfast was not digesting well, shall we say. 

        Yeah, the old guy had the hot death farts. I don't know what he ate but it went down fighting.

  And it was pouring rain so I couldn't open the window much and got immediately soaked for doing so. 

        And he kept doing it!  Like every 6-7 minutes, like a fucking metronome.   I swear, the temperature shot up 10 degrees in the car every time he ripped ass too. I'd feel the desert heat of araby, and then... I don't want to live on this planet anymore. God is not here. 

 For two hours. Two. Hours. TWO HOURS! 

 I got... marinated. God help me. It's in my clothes, probably. 

 Anyhow, I am at the airport and have a glass of whisky.  Washing the taste out of my mouth. Out of my soul. 

 

Last watch

 Halfway through my last watch. Home tomorrow.  Channel Fever finally hit me full on. I'm ready to GTFO. 

Night watch

 Well, I'm on nights now. Thus far it hasn't worked to my advantage-  virtually all of our active moves have followed me, seemingly regardless of which watch I'm standing. 

.   Since we have 2 HMFIC's on here at all times (myself and B, or myself and Big E, and B and Big E when I am at home), we din't have a master/mate hierarchy. Instead, we stand 12 hour watches, Day (0600-1800) and Night (1800 to 0600). Guys just coming aboard or getting ready to go home stand nights), and the day guy gets to be Head MF'er In Charge.  In this way, someone ALWAYS knows what's going on, and oncoming/outgoing guys have time to get caught up on what's going on. Daytime is when the people who wear ties to work generally are scheming and plotting and calling and bothering and business is done. Nights are usually just for things that people who do not wear ties to work get done. We're a 24/7 operation but the ties and suits are not.  Generally at night we have cargo or not but regardless the phone doesn't ring and emails ding near as much. It's a great time to get shit done like maintenance, paperwork, etc. 

    And that's the rub; just dumb luck that what free time there is, by chance, isn't falling on the night watch.   I mean it's fine, I'm not being pressed or overburdened but my own little honey-do list of things I want to get done is not as free as I'd maybe wish in terms of time to devote to the task. 

         Edit: ask and ye shall receive.  Prior to my posting this, the people who wear ties to work (long may they live; long may they continue to shit light on the heads of the damned) corrected an earlier error made on my schedule: turns out I will have half a watch off, which is good, as I need to put together a parts list and service a generator, and will even have time for a proper dinner. 

Channel fever

 Well, I finally am starting to disengage here on the HQ I guess, and thoughts of home are kicking in intrusively in my mind during the day. 

'Channel Fever' is the distemper that causes unrest when a sailor becomes absolutely with child to get ashore.

       I've almost doubled my record for time spent at work since leaving blue water work. The shorter much more intense days of working in-harbor and coastwise don't lend themselves to long hitches... and yet here I am somewhere past 110 days on here. I've lost count. 

     It was done purposefully for more than one reason, which may be why it hasn't been a slog. We're still throwing every spare penny at construction and outfitting now at the house in Brazil. 2 of the 4 buildings are structurally done and at the tail end of the cosmetic finishing stages. 2 to go, then landscaping and furniture. 

Fuck. 

Still, progress. And I can't do more OT this year as the War Department says so. She wants me home, and as I will have been gone for 10 months in 2025, I damn well need to listen. The house will wait. In the meanwhile, home in 9 days. Single digits. Feels good. 

 I find it hard to focus on plans while I am at home. While I need to cater to my wife's well deserved need to go out and be social as a couple, I also will need some days to putter around. 

In 2 days I switch to working nights, to let B get into the practice of being the swinging dick with Kick Me signs written on his forehead and ass.  The night guy is the 40 in the 60/40 leadership we run under as HMF'sIC. 

Say hello to the bad guy

 I caused some serious traffic snarls in Brooklyn the other day and I would hereby like to apologize FOR NOTHING. 

            The other day we took on a half-load of VLSFO (Very Low Sulfur Fuel Oil, a blend of #6 heavy fuel oil and ULS-MGO,  Ultra Low Sulfur Marine Gasoil, basically an ultraclean burning diesel-esque type fuel.  Thick goopy stuff, but the good stuff. 

   We took a half-load because we went waaaaayyy up a navigable but shallow creek near Brooklyn , Manhattan AND Queens. All told between us and our tug we squeaked in with 1 foot of UKC (Under-Keel Clearance) at low tide -we went in at high tide so we had 8 feet of UKC, but we also got to pumping off just 2 hours after tying up, so 12 1/2 hours later we left again at high tide, this time riding high and empty. 

   I'd never been there before, just knew it by name and that the creek is famously narrow, shallow and tricky, our equipment being larger than the tugboats and  oil, rock and scrap steel scows that work the canals and creeks. 

         Getting to the little storage tank farm we were going to, we had to pass under a drawbridge. We went through at night, so it wasn't too disruptive. 

     BUT, to leave, we had to sail, go under a different drawbridge

make a couple of twists and turns through narrow passages, old shitty pleasureboats rafted up, and rock and steel scrap barges rafted up against docks on either side, at times having to pass with just 10-15 feet on a side OR LESS to squeeze through... and after that, finally, a turning basin, a wide area, where we could do a 180, and 30 mins later, go under the SAME drawbridge but heading downstream and make a bunch of turns in narrow spots until the creek widened out where a bunch of derelict boats were stacked

Bro we could do SO MUCH METH on those

        And then go under yet another drawbridge, this one with a lovely view of the mile-long traffic jam we made, it being 10am, ON BOTH SIDES. 

    This bridge connects Brooklyn and Queens. And we fucked traffic all up. 

           Tight squeeze.  The HQ got them birthin' hips. 

      Still, it wasn't but another mile or twomand we were entering the Hudson river.  We passed summat' close abeam of the UN

 and a seaplane took off right next to us, which was something I don't see every day. 

  So,  cool little run. It's been a while since I saw something new here, for which I'm grateful.  We left Manhattan in our wake and went straight  to our usual loading terminal for the next cargo. 

Next

We wrapped up the last cargo the other night. 2 nights ago? 3? Time has lost much of its meaning here for me, but I know I've been aboard for over 100 days and go home pretty soon.  

   On completion at the ship, having transferred the oil successfully, the charterer sent us back to the terminal where we loaded the standard black oil portion of the blend we concocted, and there they filled us up with good normal VLSFO, Very Low Sulfur Fuel Oil, which we then pumped off overnight, right back into the tank we just loaded from, to dilute any residual blended fuel trapped in our pipelines, pumps and the sumps, the low points in each tank.   We flushed them right out.

 Then we did it again. Loaded up again, pumped it all off again. 

            Yesterday I got us all fast at a lay berth in Elizabeth NJ close to Newark airport, fairly early, maybe 11am? I then spent the next few hours on the phone and up to my buttcheeks (is buttcheeks one word or two? I'm a grammar nazi) in paperwork.  Our cargo management software, which is half logbook, half tallybook and half ledger (equaling 150%, yes. Because why not?), didn't like the way the office set up the recordkeeping portion of it, and decided to make up its' own rules, like deleting some pages, or transferring load calculations to discharge records and overwriting the existing discharge records, things like that.  So I got to spend a couple of hours correcting things, chasing numbers, and occasionally having it happen again until I had enough data input for the People Who Wear Ties To Work to work with. 

 

I'm sure I'll get 30 phone calls on Monday, which, I just looked, is tomorrow. No wonder breakfast was so peaceful today.  I only got 1 phone call inturrupting my meal. That's pretty good and the dude on the phone is a bro, we got on and off the phone in under 45 seconds, and that includes pleasantries... and that's because he was a tankerman like me, though younger, and his heart gave out, literally, so he had to go ashore. No BS, dude's got a good heart now, but it's not an OEM. He had to get a reemie. 

       There is one deep truism here I have to share, and everyone who works on boats knows this.   You can't take a crap, eat, or cook without a phone call or an alarm going off.  I don't make the rules, I just live by them.   Every one of these moments, cook, eat, poop, has an intermission where business gets done. 

       Knowing this, if I am waiting on an important phone call, I'll go to the head whether or not I really need to, just to speed things up. 

           Strangely, this doesn't work at home, although it IS true that I can't take a dump without someone, usually my wife, needing something or wanting to talk.  I'm not one of those guys who sits on the can playing with his phone until his legs go numb, either. I grew up in a larger household with one bathroom. I'm programmed to be quick. 

 I'm not sure how that's related but I'm sure it is. 

        

      So we passed a quiet night last night and a tug made all fast to us earlier this morning after breakfast.  In a few minutes we'll cast off for the next cargo... a load of VLSFO  destined for a power plant I think... but a dock-to-dock cargo, not a bunker job. Kind of a treat, no ship to deal with. 

The New Hotness

 Well, today we're taking part in a trial run of a new product being floated by one of the bunker suppliers thst feeds the US East Coast.  A new, more environmentally friendly component is being blended into the fuel.  Big E loaded the base fuel componant last night in 4 of our cargo tanks, leaving them slack, which is to say, partially loaded.

     At the moment we're under way to go load the fancy foofoo cutter stock into the same tanks, at a different terminal, and I will meter and blend the new product into each individual cargo tank, mixing it well, thereby creating magic a blended fuel with pleasing qualities for the delicate and fragile, and also Europeans I suppose.

     It's performative nonsense, a better, more sustainable and socially responsible way to pander to a bunch of screeching scientifically illiterate IMO Luddite autists   be good stewards of the earth, yo. Namaste and shit.  

I could go on but I am after all, the goof they chose to deliver this baby. I'm like a big, hairy, kinda otherwise retarded  savant in this one job... doula. 

Yes.  I am now the bunker doula. You may admire me now

 *scratches testicles*. 

     Ok, semi-serious now.  I'm not flattered that I was chosen to oversee this job but I absolutely am gratified. After all,  we're experienced, competent and really do take the process seriously on here. even when I'm cynical when I play games and assign meanings (that probably aren't there) to the people who actually matter in these things. Also, the HQ was available, and we really are the seniormost bunker crew in my employer's NY fleet now in terms of experience. In that respect I really am aware that I am here to represent the owner's interest in doing a job correctly, safely and efficently. My blog, online sarcasm, that's just my id taking a crap, in the exact same meaning and for the same reason a body does so.  

      As I am fond of saying, I don't give or expect credit for plans, just actions. Best I go be on about it then.

    

Please don't make me give a shit.

 I'd been finding it very peaceful not to engage in soapbox speeches or the online culture war, especially given the horrors of this past week. But I've dipped my toes in this week, which has left me with that same feeling I get when my hands are dirty and covered with grease, and I don't use enough soap to wash them off.  That feeling almost exactly, but the thin dirty grease layer is soul deep. 

    The young deckhands at work are circumspect about it, but want to talk. Many of them weren't alive for the September 11 attacks and this is one of their first encounters with humanity at our worst with a resultant cultural upheaval. 

Zoomers who choose to work on boats are politically tending to be conservative. These are kids who are afraid to speak their minds for fear of getting ostracised. They seem to be in need of fellowship more than anything. Kids who I've already taken the time to break the ice with, to get them talking about themselves so they'll listen if I can say or show them something to make them better seamen. 

Quiet at first. And underneath... so hurt and angry. 

 It's already happened 3 times.  A kid starts to talk topical, and trails off, leaving me to either pass on the elephant in the room or engage.

     Best I can figure, these kids, who live online in a way I do not, saw a mask slip on some people they liked, showing a lot of hate towards a dead guy they agreed with on some things... and then realizing how much the same people of course hate them too. It's not a stretch to see someone blood dancing online over a murder, and to realize that you'reseeing them for once, for who they truly are. Once that mask slipped off, some have not yet put it back on, either... and in a very clear way, a pussy apathetic disclaimer, which is even more common and less respectable, has widened the gap. They saw psychos and the enablers of psychos. 'Murder is wrong but...' 

       Murdering someone over words and ideas. If that's OK, when does it become ok to do so over politics and religion? 

    I've made peace with not speaking my mind. Rule 1 of good seamanship: One hand for you, and one for the boat. Rule 2: No politics and no religion in the galley. 

 I know the benefits of finding and focusing on things other than politics and religion. As a result I have several friends, some quite close, who don't share my politics OR my religion... all are people whom I care about deeply.

No buts are coming here. My point is these young guys have gotten a masterclass on the power of hate this week... and whether they're more scared or hurt? I dunno.  It sucks, to feel a sense of betrayal. It did for me when I realized I really didn't share some of the most important values, ideas and principles with nearly as many people as I thought I did. 

 I have my nuclear family, and my blood family. I have my extended family. I am deeply fortunate to be loved, even beloved. I have my faith, and I have friends, who I love as well, because we know each other, and despite that, they still like me anyways. 

   The hate?  I have hope they'll see they've put up an umbrella that's a hell of a lot bigger than what they maybe thought they were putting up. I'm certainly catching shade from surprising places... despite not being targeted, how can you not be, when realizing the same person would say the same if it was you dead, and they didn't know you? 

     'Murder is bad but I'm not sad he died.' 

     'Murder is bad, but my definition of what a nazi is is anyone who doesn't support the things I support.' 

      Translation: 'Murder is not bad, but I'm not saying it out loud so don't @me.' 

 

        I already retreated as far as I can, to be friendly, to keep friendships without being false. I'm ok with it, but I have a line I won't cross, and my heels are on it. No further, not one step. Not because of this week, but because I have everything in the world already, wouldn't gain by refusing to judge, and I already got enough shit to think about. 

       Not being a dick is a relative matter. I work with some real assholes, and I don't think anyone I work with who I dislike remains unaware of it... and I'm ok with that. I'm ok too with people who dislike me making it known provided we can still all go home at the end of the tour with a paycheck safely.  

     

    I've been sitting on this post all day, and have gone to delete it a few times but stopped. NOBODY comes here to listen to my thoughts. It's the dick and fart jokes and the job, and for some reason I've been picking up some extra hits daily lately. Wonder if I just kilt that off. I broke Rule #2 after all. 

   

I still don't know what to do with the young guys. We've been chosen to be the inaugural guinea pig in a new trial of cargo blend later this week.  I'll have extra tugs, and extra bodies, coming and going all week. You can only talk about the weather for so long. 

Better

 With all the horror this week, and America going mad, a light in the darkness got lit here on the HQ. Big E's home.  

      The HQ is unique in that we have no master aboard, no senior tankerman assigned as being The Big Cheese. We have 3 VERY senior tankermen, instead. B, 27 years in, Big E, 17, and me, 25, 17 of those here. 

   As to the why of that, having a fairly large talent sink, we get odd jobs, and the HQ, while small, can carry more grades of oil simultaneously than most while maintaining cargo segregation.  As such, redundency, utility and maintaining flexibility is one of those 'you can only have 2 of these' exceptions, as the HQ has been heavily modified several times. She's a good girl. 

...and E was out recovering from surgery for a lomg time. More than half a year.  Part of the reason I've been here for over 3 months now, and also why I can go home next month, finally.

 B and I hosted a couple of fill-in guys. It wasn't great. One of them was cool, but only there very briefly. The others? Either much too green or just some absolute short-bus seat warmers. 

But E is back and we're all right here.  Aside from being great shipmates working together, we're also all very good friends.  One of those things, and we all know it's almost impossible to make friends as an adult male... and yet here we are. So the company keeps us together because we keep our shit together. It's not like we're irreplaceable, after all, but why mess up a vessel that gets shit done right? The HQ was already Big E's when B and I arrived 6 years ago.  B and I have worked together for 15+ years, as we got matched originally when my company first established a remote operation in NY and they wanted 2 good guys to work overlapping, so one of us was always on board...and that's been our M.O. since. 

  I'm really happy to have my friend back. The OT was nice but we need rest, and it's good to ve able to sleep soundly, knowing the other guy 100% has your back and knows the job just as well as you. 

I don't need a soapbox

 Sure I have opinions on topical things. 

...and nobody who doesn't share blood or a bathroom with me cares. It took me much too long to figure that out.

     Now, having said that, a wonderful thing tangentially related to the savage and poisonous events that have happened recently has popped up. 

 Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife started shooting with me a couple of years ago. It started basically with her wanting to tweak the noses of her family back in Brazil, some of whom are far, far left and horrified at the thought of her with a gun like some American cowboy, and others who enjoyed the idea, her going full American Stereotype. 

      She's become a decent shot and range days have become fun days for us... plus she knows I'm more likely after to not wail and gnash my teeth if she wants to make a stop 'too queek' to look at a dress or ridiculously priced heels somewhere. 

        So this week my wife asked me to enroll her in a concealed carry class for when I'm home, and I'm just as proud as a hen with a new egg to hear it. 

        Only downside is I gotta find a nice set of Louis Vuitton grips for her Christmas present this year.

 

It happened at the crossroads

 

Grub run

 The larder is pretty bare here on board in terms of everything that isn't protein or caffeine. 

 In other words, I'm fine for now, but it's time to get groceries and stock up. 

  In the nearshore and coastal brown water merchant marine, we use the old school low class term 'grub' for food... because we're old school. And low class. 

    But yeah, grub's pretty light. Oh, we've got about 10 days' worth of chicken, rice, meat and coffee/soda, but we're well into the last bag of frozen vegetables and long since depleted the fresh stuff. 

    Yesterday I emailed the loggie boys and asked them to find us a berth in Red Hook in Brooklyn to get grubbed up in between jobs on Friday (today). We're presently underway for Brooklyn, about an hour away, which works out well, as the foofoo grocery store I like doesn't open until 0700.  

 I don't love the foofoo grocery store's prices, as no bullshit they're DOUBLE what they are at home because New York is awful, but shopping there is more about how bad every other store is moreso than the fancy store being good. 

 By the time you actually buy vegetables and meat and chicken in NY, the stuff's pushing its sell-by date before it even hits the shelves. So 1-2 days after we buy anything, the greens start becoming the browns, beef turns gray and chicken gets that fermented sour smell that we all know and wonder about. 

 No, the foofoo place we get 4-8 days of green, and the chicken/meat can get portioned out and frozen before it starts to smell. 

 People smile when I say New York is now a 3rd world city. But I'm not smiling when I say it. 

     Now, there's a Trader Joes and a Whole Foods not that far away, so I don't have to deal with the white guys with dreadlocks and their blue-haired hairy-legged womeneither at the foofoo grocery store, praise God. They've got their own places to buy their matcha-flavored toilet paper.

 But yeah, so today we'll get all fast, I'll jump on our assist tug to get a ride to our home pier, hop in a taxi, grub up, hop in ANOTHER taxi, do a bag drag down the pier to another tugboat, and get back to the HQ, hoist our grub up on deck, do another bag drag in the house, and stow the grub. All this so we can eat salad. Plays merry hell if you can't get the fiber in middle age and there's no way on God's gray earth thst you can have a nice day after 50 if you can't take a decent shit at some point. 

    

Big Doings in the US Merchant Marine

It's been an exciting month for those of us in the seafaring trade... But first the bad news with a side of digression. 

  

       There's a private equity company that got into the Jones Act shipping (US coastal trade) trade by doing the shell company game the way that Private Equity does, with a twist that this company is just rotten with a layer of beltway insiders on top of it... has failed. No matter how many layers of company titles you have, you still gotta produce, and if the shell company staff don't get along... things implode. 

      Marshals came and turned the lights off for most of the units they bought at auction from Morty the rich asshole. 

    For background, Morty's story is that he's a bad person. A shit born with daddy's checkbook in hand who himself rode his father's tug and barge company into the ground. Morty is a foul human being and is hated by everyone...and is a spoiled little tyrant degenerate who got what he deserved, which is to lose everything... that being said, his former employees, toxic themselves, some of them, but mostly decent people living with PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome from exposure to Morty, are victims. There were plenty of middle aged guys working who had to start over somewhere else very late in life when the company cratered. It's really hard to Rise And Grind to reestablish yourself when you're at the tail end of a career that is enormously wearing, physically.

     

      Strangely enough, my employer, who also runs a multigenerational family-owned shipping company, is doing just fine. Being a decent human being and having a family policy where every son starts out by sweeping floors, cleaning toilets and taking their turn working their way up from deckhand to management has something to do with that.  

       But, sadly, this batch o' bankers and investors is in a bad way at the moment. Infighting and what seems to be a contest in backstsbbing and who can fuck each other over more. At least it looks like that from the outside. As a result there's some skilled mariners headed out hat-in-hand looking for work this week. 

     So, the bad is bad. I hope one of the bigs with actual shipping experience rather than a combo of investing and lobbying experience will either buy some of these big boats or get hired to right the ship. 

    I just don't think it's possible to own a maritime business without longevity being the first or second priority.  If, as the saying goes, the purpose of business is business, than making MORE money over time, vs short-term gains, tortoise v. hare style, isn't antithetical to good business practice.  But good luck explaining that to the scumbag circus out there. 

 

     Now the good.  But first, more bad. 

 US shipyards are in a bad way. Obsolete tech, minimal automation, insane labor costs (a moderately experienced shipyard worker is at least journeyman-level equivalent in 2 or more skilled trades and thus can just work in one of those trades, so they need to be paid!). It costs 3-5x more to build a ship in the US than it does in Asia, but ships that travel between any US ports MUST be American built and American crewed, per the Jones Act, our cabotage laws. 

      This is done because we NEED to know how to build ships as a nation (we currently suck at it, which is a massive gaping nightmare), and we REALLY NEED people who know how to crew them.  We're currently about 100 fleet oilers (ships to run fuel for military use) short of what we'd need in a major war just to keep the lights on and bellies full. The beltway neocons, scumbags like senator Mike Lee, are screaming bloody hell because our present admin was able this year to put 10 civilian tankers on retainer as willing to jump in if ordered to help.  Senator Scumbag wants to import 3rd world foreigners and foreign companies to move all our oil, food and goods, internally and externally, including taking over our military's logistics, and getting the US out of moving things by sea as a trade. 

  Imagine just the 1000+ tugs on the Mississippi and connected rivers, moving oil and goods into the midwest and grain and beef out, all controlled by Europeans and Asians along with ADM and a few big ag companies that want to fly in Indonesians, Indians and Pakistanis, and hand over the keys to our food and energy so they don't have to pay lower- and middle-middle class wages to American mariners, or buy boats from American shipyards. 

 

Yeah. That's not even the least bit exaggerated. It's that fucked up. No security as a nation, whatsoever. No knowledge of how to build a ship.  A bunch of foreigners, some of whom are hostile to our interests, in charge of our oil and our food supply. 

 Globalists, lobbyists for big ag, and scumbag politicians, like that feculent shitbag senator Mike Lee, like and want America to be weakened, because it's profitable for them and their buddies and they LOVE the destabilizing effects. 

     So, that's the bad part of the good part. 

    

Now, the good part: with our shipyards being in a bad way, in conjunction with the present presidential admin's goals of improving our maritime security, one of the Korean megashipyard conglomerates, who can build damn fine ships damn fast, bought the Philadelphia shipyard, one of the only 3 (!) American shipyards that can build merchant ships. 

 Well, for values of 'American.'  It was owned by a billionaire family of Norwegians as one of their several shipyards globally, then spun off with the usual shell games that bankers get all on about... but still owned by Europeans, titles aside. Like most of our shipyards. Newport News is BAE, the Brits. Great Lakes has Fincatieri, Italian. Philly had Norway, now Korea. You get the idea. 

            But, Hanhwa Philly, now, is looking interesting. They're almost done with building 5 schoolships for our maritime academies, which double as disaster relief ships at need. After that I think they've got a couple of containerships on order for the Hawaii/ Alaska and Puerto Rico Jones Act service. 

    Hanhwa, on sealing the deal, is gonna throw 9 figures into modernizing and expanding the yard, which means local jobs and vocational training for Americans, and immediately put orders for over a dozen ships on the books, including building the infrastructure and training to build Liquified Natural Gas carriers, something the US currently can't do. They've already ordered 3 of those, so you're talking about over a billion bucks already. 

 This is huge. 

       Now, I have no idea if any of these ships will enter Jones Act service, although I assume some if not all will. More than anything else, it's the institutional knowledge that is the treasure here. Hanhwa is going to have to fly in experienced people to teach, and I'm ok with that. Aside from the international relations aspect, which has something to do with Korea wanting to cement ties and placate president Trump, it's also a good way to keep America invested in Korea's security too. 

 I hope Japan is watching.  

Anyways I'm much too retarded and willfully ignorant to really discuss such things at length. Still, it's a big step forward, and if we can put a boot on the insanely anti-American neocons' necks and press until our feet touch dirt and enjoy the music they make trying to breathe, perhaps we'll be ok. 

 

 

Father Time Is Not Kind

That's me, age 38 or so. 

 

  Here's me yesterday, at 51. 

Fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.... 

              As I'm elbow deep in the longest tour I've done since I left blue water shipping, and I haven't buzzed my head or shaved since June, I'm really hoping I won't look like a caricature of myself when I get home and 

clean up again. 

   You know what's weird? I was a reddish blonde until 40. Now my hair remaining is brownish. And white, obviously.  Generally I keep the hair on my head at a #2 buzz, as I lost the male pattern baldness and my hairline is more like... ever see a coyote with mange? Yeah, like a mangy coyote's ass. 

 The white beard is a bummer. More smelly homeless guy than Sean Connery in Red October. 

     Also as I age, the gin blossoms I've carried since age 8 look more and more like a garden-variety alkies' face.

       I fell in the water in January when I was a kid and my idiot friend and I decided to walk out about 1/2 mile offshore when Boston Harbor froze over.  Ice broke under me, etc. etc. by the time I got out and walked to my parents' house I was blacked out and my father, to his credit, threw me in a tepid shower fully clothed until I came to, started screaming from the burning water, and spent the rest of the month grounded while my ears and cheeks turned black from the frostbite. 

   My father knew a thing or two about it, which was why, as mad as he was, I never got more than grounded and a talking-to.  He got knocked in the water in Antarctica, as he was on oceanographic ships before he swallowed the anchor, and got flash frozen himself.  As an adult, he told me he was most angry with himself, as I was the son he didn't expect to die dumb, my brothers being somewhat feral as kids. 

           Seeing myself in that picture, maybe I shouldn't be so mad that everything hurts when I get up in the morning now, until I can stretch and then the hurts recede to their homes in a couple of spots to their background susurrus. Ah well. At least the phase at 45 where I looked like Dollar Tree Louis C.K. is passed anyhow. 

Hip deep

 Not much to report. B returned on Wednesday, so I've been able to sleep through the night, which has been good.  It's busy, though for some reason only truly busy during the day, so while.I'm running around like a cat trying to bury a turd under a marble floor, B has been more or less just ballast thus far, standing his watch and, well, watching, as the loading and discharging ops have been smallish parcels of cargo and the moves mostly in daylight. 

 That's the way it goes sometimes. It'll swing the other way in my favor at some point. Always does. We have 3 grades of oil for 2 different ships at thebl moment and if the schedule does not change, B will handle some or most of the 2nd ship tonight and I'll finish it tomorrow morning. 

     The sun's rising noticeably later these days. 0615ish now. Quite a difference. 

    The late sunrises at home (and earlier in the winter I suppose) are always an adustment, as is the much shorter twilight period. The sun always rises somewhere around 7am, year round, as we're further south. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife is a night person, so I'm pretty much stuck in bed in the mornings, my own preference being to rise with the sun, but we try to start and finish our days together, they being so limited. 

Training Day

 I've had a fill-in guy on board the HQ this week, and he's pretty green as a proper tankerman.

    I say 'proper' in that he was an Inland and Mississippi river tankerman... different animal from what we do. 

 So, in inland waterways, oil is moved by barges small enough to fit through the canals and locks, which limits their size. For the most part, filling and pumping off tanks is a matter of sticking your head in a tank and filling it up as you're told by the office, often a matter of filling it up to a rung on a ladder in the ladder nounted inside the tank hatch. It's a job that any idiot can do... but one requiring strength and stamina, as getting large multi-barge tows through small locks is physically demanding in a way that a tsnkerman in ocean service does not have. We don't do multi-barge tows at all. Ocean waves prevent it. 

     So, to contrast, in ocean or coastal service, we have more constraints and considerations, larger and more complex equipment, and more to do... not to say it's a particularly complex job; it's not.  We have more training and more responsibility sure, but I still work with some idiots... just better trained ones, and someone only half-retarded like me can feel superior.  

   At any rate, now that my company is recruiting river rats, men who pride themselves on their experience suddenly find themselves inadequate to the work, which creates a dichotomy; men who are resistant to retraining, and try to justify feeling stupid by being resistant to learning...and those who are not. 

      My fill in guy? He's young, able and learning. Pleasant company.  Of the things he knows he is very particular; but of course of the things he doesn't know, he has to be taught or learn by painful experience. 

 Thankfully he has no problem waking me up to verify, ask questions or seek help. Consequently I'm not sleeping much. It's a quirk of my personality that I don't wake up grumpy when woken up. I WANT him to be careful. But he doesn't know what he doesn't know, and so around midnight last night I woke up to hear a very stressed out mooring line singing out that it was thinking about a divorce from it's other half. 

 I got up, shoe'd up, and went out. I saw the new guy running around and way past the point of task saturation and firmly in the middle of analysis paralysis... Inexperience prevented him from managing the workflow, and the barge was working him, not the other way around.  So I came out and told him to shut down for a few minutes, and we slacked mooring lines, adjusted the fendering between us and the other ship, changed how he was pumping off tanks, had a look at the documents, and took the pressure off him. Since it was a teachable moment, and not a near miss, we talked about managing the workload, being a seaman first and a gas jockey second,  working at a safe pace vs a fast pace, and I was able to pass on I think (I hope) that workflow is something proactive, not reactive. I mean, shit happens to everyone sometimes. Shit mitigation is a part of every job and situational awarness is a learning process. After we unfucked the deck, I hung out for an hour with him while he restarted and worked at a more humane pace, while the guys on the ship, who were pressuring him to hurry up, looked on bitchfaced 

 The kid gives a fuck about his job. That alone puts him on a positive track.  I don't have it in me right now to be a designated trainer, but I'm hoping him sort of getting a trial by fire from the HQ, which AFAIK does the most blending and mixing and small-parcel oil deliveries in the area, so green tankermen suddenly have to juggle more variables and work through informal decision trees to  manage 3rd and 4th order effects, which, on rereading, is just a fancy way of saying we have to account for things that might happen 3 or 4 cargo moves and/,or transfers and gravitations ahead, that just can't be planned in a loading program. 

      Anyhow, he's doing well enough but tomorrow B returns and maybe I can get some damn sleep. 

Yup

 

7/10, would poop there

Things in the ongoing fustercluck that is the house project at my house in Brazil are starting to come together. 

       As I've mentioned, the house is pretty modest. Around 1400 sq ft, with 3 guest bedrooms, 2 with their own bathrooms and then one general bathroom off a hallway. As I think I wrote about, we don't intend to live in the main house, rather we have a little separate outbuilding that will be a master bedroom, sitting room and the head. About 700 sq ft all told between the 3 rooms there. 

     With the civil suit still pending  with the embezzing scumbag builder who stole all my money (well, building materials and money), much of the interior work is a redo of the original efforts... and the sad truth is that the big money we spent on marble, bold Italian tile, etc, was used to buy close-outs and seconds worth about 10% of what we paid for. So we had to demo everything, anyhow. In the end we bought neutral colored granite and tile, as we just didn't have another 100k floating around... It's... very beige. Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife says that with the cabinets, mirrors, brackets, lighting and hardware it'll come to life, but right now it looks like a pleasant if uninspiring place to bark one out... and in the end, they're guest bathrooms, meant to be simple, easy to clean. 

One of the weird things I'll never get used to in Brazil is that they don't have a raised footing for the shower doors. They get bolted right into the tile and subfloor, as bathrooms usually have 2-3 floor drains, one inside the shower, and 1-2 more outside.  Brazilians in general prefer to shower twice a day, morning and night, so bathrooms get used a lot- condensation and water puddles collect mildew and mold, so they don't let standing water stand. Sloping the floors subtly enough to not make you fall on your ass is a bit of an art there. 

Still, giving the utter shitshow of the past 2 years, it's good to see the place finally taking form. 

Nice night.

 I'm in Bayonne NJ tonight, but despite that, it's still really nice out tonight.  We're loading up a couple of grades of oil, slowish, so there isn't the rumble of 60psi oil cavitating in the pipelines and vibrating the shit out of us. 

      Air temp is great. 68? 70? Whatever it is, it's nice and not too humid... it's the first night in a few months that reminds me that the summer won't last forever. 

 Sadly, I gotta switch back to day watch on Wednesday. 

The decline in conscientiousness

   I thought this was interesting, and it tracks from what I can see in general.  People, younger ones especially, are not grinding, not following through, and not maintaining social cohesion. 

 Yeah, so I was introverted long before it was cool, and I don't appreciate all these douchebags trying to copy my style. 

 Look, I view going out in public like a trip to the zoo. I chose my life and lifestyle, and THEN I deliberately cultivated it in such a way that I have to deal with people mostly ONLY when I am in the mood to do so... within limits of course. 

     That being said, I try pretty damn hard to be agreeable when I can. It lubricates the wheels on which I roll, which generally translates to I have a timeline in mind when I want the time to be social to end, and this time is a target for me to try to hit. 

          I think that's part of the reason I enjoy traveling to Brazil so much. The above? Not possible. Life from what I can see down there, revolves around moving people in and out of your circle, like a team-building exercise that doesn't end, and it doesn't matter if the team is trying to win on joy, work, pleasure, what have you. You do it together... and damn, it's something I really enjoy down there. A counterbalance to my ways at home, maybe. I can be very social when the mood is right... but there's something to be said for existing in a condition where your mood doesn't matter much. 

    ... and that sort of dovetails into being able to keep promises, to grind at and finish something that you start... that's a side of conscientiousness that is also being lost.  It's also one of the few things that I considered beating into my kid, as he started out with that same issue, and it wasn't until adulthood that he finally listened and started changing when I explained how much of life depended on him never, ever leaving the right thing undone. By the time this came up, several of his friends were already on a bad path to sucking at life, and I was able to parlay that into a warning message right before he hit the age where it's no longer appropriate to command and the best you can do is to suggest. 

 As for the why behind it, go look it up. Social media, multimedia, ease of avoidance... all that. Smarter more patient minds than I have written think pieces on it already. 

          As far as agreeableness, you know I've never punched anyone in the mouth since I started working at my present job, 17 years ago?  Oh, it very much still happens on occasion on boats. Sometimes people forget that a punch in the mouth is a very valid response to a disagreement.  In many ways I believe that it should perhaps be more common, as awareness of this fact does a great job in preventing escalation of conflict in isolated work environments. Some people just haven't been punched in the mouth in too long.  

      As a result of this, and the line of punch/no punch being a bit subjective but very individual in nature, being polite becomes a survival trait... which is exactly what it has always been. As a result of this unspoken awareness, disputes are settled more amicably, where, if not with smiles and rainbows, the ability to walk away and maybe even resolve something is possible. 

                 One other reason for me not to work in an office, in that I believe in natural justice, the sort where bad actors certainly deserve a beating to reestablish the social hierarchy and proper decorum in social intercourse. That's not cool among the people who wear ties to work, who seem to prefer seething followed by resentment and maybe followed up with some angry masturbation at home. 

       The information on the graph is worrisome to me. I think of modern day Japan when I see those figures. The disaffected, unhappy, disengaged men and aggressive overbearing women who like them... and very, very much vice versa.  I don't want that for us. But I also grew up somewhen else, the past being a different country, as the saying goes. Maybe this is social evolution... and if so, just as I am now, I gravitate to those who gravitate towards the counterculture. 

     Not the sort of dick and fart- related content you've come here to roll your eyes at, sorry. As always, just because I am writing superficially and sillily, which is now a word, that doesn't mean anything except that I don't share my deepest thoughts with anyone online. What you see ain't what you get, is what I'm saying, unless you see I'm retarded and juvenile, which... yeah. Guilty.

          

Night time is the right time

 I'm in the middle of a marathon hitch. Not even in the middle, but getting there. 

         With projects in Brazil ramping up again, it is the right time for overtime, and this will be the longest hitch I've done since I left ships to work on tugs and barges.

    I have the opportunity to stay right on the HQ rather than jump around in the fleet for my OT.  Partner Big E is doing physical therapy after orthopedic surgery and has been out since this spring. So we have shoes to fill aboard. 

 Now I've been baking my balls off daily in the heat for 12+ hours a day, and now it's my time for the next few weeks to stand the night watch, 1800 to 0600, away from the heat of the day. It's better.  Night watch in the winter is brutal, but in the summer it's welcomed. 

   This week in Brazil, it's lamp and lighting buying time. So Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife bought some foofoo overhead lamps and shit for the indoor kitchen, entryway and living room, as well as lighting for the bedrooms and bathrooms.  I haven't seen any of it but then again I don't really give a shit so it works out. The plain truth is that the outdoor living part of the house is what interests me, as for all the drawbacks this city in Brazil has lovely temperate weather.  Low 80's in the winter. Mid 60's in the summer.

    I did take part in the landscape lighting and design of the outdoor areas, though. The future Don Paolo needs good ambiance to sit and smile and try to understand the big words in Portuguese without looking retarded. 

 

Feast or famine

 Hooboy, getting my ass kicked the last couple of days between the heat and the workload.  Today and tomorrow too, looks like. 

 I'm still caffeinating presently, in preparation for the upcoming day. We loaded deep 2 days ago, pumped off about 2/3 of our cargo until about 1am today, and are headed back to load 1000 tons more right now... just a splash, only about 2 hours to load, but 6 hrs with papers, key meetings, swinging hoses and shenanagans. I'll be taking us into Bayonne NJ in about 30 mins, sail with the tide at noon, and alongside a ship about the same size as us nearby shortly after for the afternoon. If all goes right I'll sail us around dinnertime and hand off to B once we're underway to rest this evening. 

 Rinse, repeat tomorrow.    Supposed to be 97 today, 98 tomorrow and much of the work will be out in the sun. 

 Crap. Maybe a little break midweek, as Wednesday I rotate into night watches for a few weeks so I don't put my head in the oven. The guy who seems to get skin cancer awful easy doesn't enjoy working in the sun all day. Imagine.   

Fat Aunt Fatima, RIP.

 So Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife lost another one of the old aunts last night. 

  There was Skinny Aunt Fatima, and Fat Aunt Fatima. Fat Aunt Fatima passed away last night. 

      Seriously, that's how they're separated. 

 Tia Fatima Gorda (fat Aunt Fatima) and Tia Fatima Magra (skinny Aunt Fatima). 

     Subtlety is not a Brazilian trait. 

   Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife is half Italian, half Indio (Brazilian Indian, a native). The indio side... well, Indio women are famous for their looks and also being able to catch pregnant from just a hug... which is why my wife has over 300 cousins.  

      As we discovered after my Mother-In-Law's funeral last fall, my wife will probably be the next matriarch of the extended family, after a fashion, as we plan to not be more than snowbird-style residents even after retirement. 

 But that's a thought for another day. 

   I got the renderings for my outdoor kitchen for the house in Brazil. August will hopefully see the bathrooms completed and the interior kitchen made ready for finishing, but the exterior kitchen will be the social hub, so it's set up for modular cooking, so it won't be difficult to cook for 2, or to cook for 50. Much of that will be hidden, to keep it looking simple when not in use. 

 The builder keeps jamming a car in the renderings. He's really not getting that I'm not using the side yard driveway as a driveway, (as I have driveway space on the far side of the gate behind the car in the photo),  but the pergola above it will be a grape arbor and the driveway an area for tables and seats for family. 

      Progress was scanty the past 2 months. We're entering a busy phase again, thankfully. 

Other People's Idiocy

 From my posts I sound like a hotheaded loudmouth. 

  I'm not really that hotheaded, though. I use this blog as a place for my id to go potty, and I like using sarcasm and snark to antagonize people far more that fists.   I've been punched in the mouth sufficiently to not enjoy the process, from my winters spent as a bouncer when I was a fisherman... but I'd gotten pretty good about knowing when I was close enough to goad someone into taking a swing at me, using words as a weapon. I avoid this point as an older if not particularly wiser person. 

        Last night the fools moored next to us had a very avoidable incident involving a lazy retard not doing the simple fucking job of standing his watch when they were idle and not working. 

       Even in a lay berth there has to always be a watchstander in charge on a manned vessel. And lay time is good time, especially at night. 

 Abyhow, some idiot wasn't doing his job, and a thing happened. 

   So I wake up this morning around 0430, and around 0500 I poke my head outside and walk the deck. I wasn't on watch, B is on nights right now but first light was about 15 mins before, and I'm still waking up.

   The retards from yesterday did it again. 

 I made a couple of phone calls, no answer next door.  I grabbed a 4-inch length of threaded rod with two inch-and-a-quarter nuts on it, about 3lbs, and threw it, full strength, hitting the house and waking somebody up. 

     Now, idiot me is heated at idiot all of them. I'm standing about 5 feet from a vent for my generators and when some fool I don't know comes out, I absolutely blow up. No cursing beyond 'you idiots gotta get your shit together, you're fucking up everything for all of us' repeated a few times. 

        The guy got the point, tried making excuses... I'm not his boss, it's not like I matter. I'm crossing over into busybody territory anyhow. Eventually he gets tired of my yelling at length and addresses the issue that caused all this.

     Looking back, he probably only heard half of what I was saying anyhow w/ the gen noises. 

  I HATE HATE HATE when people don't do their fucking job.  Pet peeve of mine. Anyone can, and does, fuck up.  Doing so twice means deeper issues. Not my problem, but it also is. When you work in a fleet, collective punishment is a thing. Nobody enjoys being punished for things they haven't ever done wrong, you know?

 Anyhow +1 to the list of people who hate me, though I suspect the shithead in question won't be here long. 

Sunrise, 2025

 I've been more positive in general over the past few months. It's a work thing and I think it's carried over into my personal life, which is entirely a good thing, as I pretty much live st work and while I'm on the HQ, which is 8 months out of the year, I'm working. This is very welcome, as there have been challenges, as there always are, but having a more full tank of fucks to give, emotionally, has certainly helped.

 I attribute it to Situational Distress, or more accurately, getting out of situational distress. 

 I wrote about this some time back.  Situational distress is the 'silent accumulation of operational stressors that lead to distress: cognitive fatigue, emotional stress and performance degradation in the moment. These human factors are subtle, dynamic, and often invisible to traditional mental health tools, yet they’re the most common precursors to errors and accidents at sea' 

    Basically being in the shit, with hopelessness and no sign of an end to it. 

         That's how bad it was from last September until March.  Coming back from Brazil after burying my mother-in-law and having realized on the day of her funeral that we'd been fucked out of well over $100,000 bucks by the builder of our dream home in Brazil, the culmination of almost a decade of planning, overtime, etc, that spending 9-10 months a year at work, and my wife working 80-90 hours a week for 7 of those years... for nothing. You know I haven't taken more than 3 days in a row for actual vacation since 2010. 15 years, when I went on a road trip for fun with my family. 

 So I mean that sucked, but I was dealing with it. The problem...the REAL problem, was that work suddenly became awful right as my emotional resilience redlined. Constant maintenance problems leading to terrible living conditions aboard, nonstop work with no rest and the only reward for difficult jobs being carried out correctly was that peers who were fuckups started getting rewarded for being bad sailors by being given easier jobs...just no TIME for self-care, and seemingly no shoreside support as all this was going on, just a lot of sympathy, but no change, as they attempted to manage chaos. Things seem to be better for them too. Some new blood, some new efforts and I dunno, support for them too, maybe. Over my pay grade. I knew they weren't neglecting us, just things were tough for a time. 

 And then, the HQ went to shipyard... and I got some good assignments with free time, cushy spots normally reserved for the retards, losers and fuckups, leaving me with a chance to calm down, to sleep, to work on things beyond work while at work (which is a necessary part of shipboard life lived on a career-long timeline).  Then, being given time in the shipyard with the HQ, where I arrived just... better... I was more productive than ever. I've since been just locked in, getting shit done fast and right. The current HQ, outside and in, hasn't looked this good and run this well since... well, since at least the first time I stepped foot on it about 15 years ago when I filled in for a week on here. 

    That's the shitshow that is Situational Distress. You know things are bad and hope it'll get better, but the hope has to take a backseat to practical things like just getting the fucking day over with w/out sticking your head in the oven.

    I think blogbuddy BCE is having his crisis at that point right now. Signs are positive that he's coming out of that hole. 

 So, yeah. All that popped in my head this morning when I stopped and took a second to admire the skyline here in an otherwise butt-fucking ugly port. 

 It's been a long while since I looked at God's handiwork and was glad in it... which used to be one of my favorite parts of being a sailor.

 I'm glad I noticed today. 

      So, today... today I've got a modest load of heavy fuel oil and a splash of marine diesel to pic up for a Japanese car carrier.   We're moderately busy here on the HQ. I'll work 4-5 days, then get a day or part of a day off to use as I see fit, for maintenance and sometimes just reading a book or actually sitting down to eat. 

 Better. Much better. 

    Things are going better in Brazil too. More on that at some point. 

 Anyhow, time to sail. Tide's almost slack and our tugboat just cranked her engines to warm up. 

Big oof. Poor guy.

 So the cargo surveyor mafia in NY/NJ is run by Egyptians. 

   These are 3rd party contractors that go and double check all of our cargo volumes and calculations, as well as those of the shoreside tanks or ships we load from or discharge to, to give a 2nd opinion and keep everyone honest. ... and they're 95% Egyptians. They're also almost universally gregarious, honest and hard working. 

   Today I'm loading 2 products from shore tanks in Constable Hook NJ. The surveyor is one of the younger guys, maybe 28.   Poor kid is named Osama. 

       This must be what it was like to be named Adolf in the 50's. Poor kid. 

      I really REALLY don't want an Osama in my contact list on my phone, though.  No way that doesn't get me on a list somewhere.  

 Best I could do is put his name down as Usama in my phone.  It's enough I got a lot of Mohammads, Habibs, Beshoys and Ashrafs there.  Granted half of them are Copts, pretty much ancient Catholics, but still. 

       

Ordinary Time continues

     Well, I'm still here, and while it's another unexceptional day workwise, it's been a good chance to walk the HQ's decks in the heat of the day, when the metal is expanded, and look for leaks in the many, many connections, valves and fittings. Hydraulic fittings that are nicely sealed at 80 degrees start weeping oil at 95, in two cases here. Along with the expanded metal, I was able to crank down a touch with one of the cartoonishly long pipe wrenches we keep aboard, which should see that fitting truly sealed now, and possibly forever. I think rather than try to disconnect it now it might just be easier to sink the whole fuckin barge. 

        I've been cooking with a carbon steel pan lately. First time I'm aware of, and while I'm not sold on the whole "you can make it nonstick' schtick, as it seems my breakfast laughs at 3-4 rounds of seasoning the pan the day before, I actually like working with the pan. Even when I get stuff sticking, it ain't much and it comes off with an hour's soak in water, mostly.   Where I no longer have a working thyroid, I'm pretty well limited to about 1500 calories a day unless I actually work out or get my ass kicked on deck, so I gotta make the calories count and cook well. And I have been. I made cilantro-lime chicken w/ carrots, broccoli and a touch of rice yesterday. Today is Steak, beets and a caesar salad w/o croutons. Breakfast, well, I eat well too. But that's pretty much it for  the day, foodwise. No snacks, no 3rd meal.    I'm in a careful calorie deficit at work, as I am too old to be too fat now, and seem to be losing about 1.5 lbs a week this year, so... progress. 

             I didn't get a science job I bid on, which is a bit of a bummer, as it looked like a fun project- creation of an artificial wetland in an office atrium space with a footprint that is too small to concentrate enough surface area to do the work intended (water filtration), but with a limited electrical budget allowing for moving things vertically... making a stackable series of artificial wetlands. 

  Anyhow, my 2-page proposal, with cost and energy budgeting listed, was apparently not enough. Truth be told, artificial wetlands are not my forte, but it did look fun, and it was in Texas, where I'd like to visit sometime, just not in Beaumont or Houston, where I always ended up before, and which always wasn't that much fun. 

    Well, next month there's an RFP going out for another gig, a little more up my alley. 

    I have a friend, now retired,  who made a name for himself as a botanist specializing in using plants to pull heavy metals and other toxins out of otherwise arable soil.  He basically seeded fields with weeds that had an affinity for certain contaminants, and then kept goats and let them eat the weeds. Twice a year the goats would come in, then the soil turned over and reseeded, rinse, repeat . Cost is about 5% of carting off the soil for incineration and interring in a sealed landfill but it takes a couple of years to work. And the goats don't live to a ripe old age, lol. 

   I don't know where it's a matter of no longer having the intellectual chops or just having a shorter attention span, but I like limiting myself to ideas that are helpful, that solve problems, but which can be reduced to fundamental concepts and carried out and expanded upon by anyone with a little time and experience, and not at a technician's level. 

         Well, in the meanwhile, I gots to go put the oil in the hole and turn the round things to make the oil go in the hole or not. Sadly, I am not being paid to wax orgasmic about the ideas people didn't want to pay me for this time. 

Ordinary Time

 Well, I'm on days now. Since B and I are staying aboard until Big E, our other partner, comes back from med leave, we decided to rotate watches every 3 weeks. So for the past 3 weeks, which have been damn hot, I've at least been out of the sun and working in the cooler parts of the day... until now. 

       Today we're on standby with no time yet fixed for the upcoming cargo sitting on our books... which means it will either be in 48 hours or a case of 'surprise, losers!' and 30 minutes from now. 

        In the meanwhile, we took on stores this morning and I was able to grub up (get groceries) on Monday so we've got what we need to work.  Among the boxes and the like, the company sent us 2 new mooring lines, as UV, wear and age did for several aboard here. We use synthetic lines, which break down into little fibers over time, and shed like a Portuguese girl in the springtime. Stuff gets EVERYWHERE, including in our eyes, which is a cast-iron whore to get out. 

 In the olden days on the oil tanker I worked on, I could consult with the 1st mate, get some eyeball anesthetic drops, and fish out any crap in my eye. These days, if eyewash and a little probing don't do the job, we gotta go ashore, which means a NY clinic or hospital, so you get to spend 8hrs to get seen while 600 illegal aliens are in line before you, getting everything for free. And nobody wants to go to the NY doc-in-the-box and get cholera or smallpox from some foreign mong in the waiting room. 

     But, at any rate, we're deep in the grind here and the days sure all seem the same. 

Happy Birfday America!

 Got a nice view of the NY  fireworks from the HQ tonight, as we were moored on the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park. 

 For 25 minutes it didn't suck to be in New York. 

 It being a holiday I celebrated with a steak. I have 3 good picanhas in the deep freezer (sirloin cap, or culotte to the French). My metabolism being disordered, sadly it was only 4oz but on the upside it was delicious.  The new reality is that if I wish to see retirement, I should be eating very lightly, so cooked up broccoli and diced a zucchini. 

 And it's been great to have the night off. Back to it tomorrow. Got a pumpoff of some leftover oil, amd then loading more of two different grades.

balances and compromises

 I had a long couple of days but we're off for the night here at the HQ.  

      When nothing goes right, not a single thing beyond that you didn't fall down or crap your pants? No, I guess it wasn't that bad, but there was an unusual aggregation of shit going south this week. 

          The HQ has been modified several times to change how and what it can load and pump off. Originally it was designed to carry two separate grades of oil that didn't need to come in contact with each other- each with it's own pipelines, manifold and  multiple block valves, so that all the tanks *Can* be made common and can be used to carry just one product, or we can subdivide, and where the pipelines meet, we have multiple block valves so there is never less than 2 block valves keeping for example, gasoline and diesel fuel, so if one fails they still can't shake hands. 

 The HQ had a 3rd manifold and pipeline  added so we can carry 3 grades separately.  Loading or emptying the tanks pushes the hull deeper in the water or more shallow, and which tanks we use, and on which side (every tank has a number and the side designation- the bow tanks, called the #1's. have port and starboard sides, divided at the hull's centerline. So filling one and not the other rolls the hull over some. As we move aft, we pass the number 2's, 3's, 4's, etc.  This is important because we usually load two products at a time and often in unequal volumes... and sometimes we load such small volumes that we have to just use one tank, because we need a minimum volume of fuel in the tank in order for the cargo pumps to catch prime. 

  So we have to load our oil with a mind towards list (port and starboard tipping), trim (forward and aft tipping) and hull stress too.

    Tankships are made of steel, which is quite a bit more flexible than you'd think when you're loading tremendous mass on it. Ships MUST be flexible, as the enormous amount of energy the hull is dealing with- gravity, buoyancy, not to mention that the loads aren't static- they change as the hull bobs around, the metal MUST bend a bit to bleed off the forces involved, or it will shatter like a dry stick. So I also gotta load with a mind to not overstress the hull too. It has a limit on how much it wants to bend. If I load, say the aftmost port tank and the forewardmost starboard tank... have you ever snapped a Kitkat bar in half? 

Same reason trees are made to sway in the wind. Good one, God. 

For maximum versatility,  some of our tanks are dedicated to one type of fuel or another. #1's are for ultra low sulfur, #2's, are for low sulfur, 3's are for diesel, etc... each pair of tanks is reserved for one grade of fuel.  This is done because sulfur content is critically important. Plenty of companies have had 7-figure fines for burning the wrong fuel in the wrong place... yeah, the ocean has emissions control schemes. Some countries have more strict regulations than others, and there's a global limit on how high a sulfur content you can burn at all. Sulfur provides lubricity to the parts of the engine that are exposed to the fuel, but it's also a deeply noxious gas in terms of emissions. There's a balancing act there. We don't lump all the like product tanks together because sometimes we load just one product, and we have to distribute that weight evenly for trim, list and stress, too, especially because the other tanks that carry other products will stay empty.  There are plenty of times I will, for example, load tanks towards the midships and fill just one tank on each side- for example, I will fill #2 starboard and #5 port.    Ballast is often used to even out hull stresses, tankers being double hulled, the space between the outer hull and the cargo tanks can be flooded with water to weigh the ship down or even out stress... but the HQ is the right combination of built heavy and built for non-oceangoing service, so we don't need water ballast while bunkering in protected bays, lakes or sounds.  Keeps things simple. 

 Now, next thing is ensuring I can empty the tanks. Each tank has a sump, a low point, where the suction pipe is.  The sumps are located in an aft corner of the tanks, and closest to the centerline. The tanks have a flat bottom, so the higher the difference between bow and stern draft of the hull, the more that the oil flows 'downhill' so the dregs come off faster... but it's black oil, thick stuff, and it clings to surfaces, so it's impossible to get rid of the last little bit. In winter, when the hull is cold, the cold steel makes the oil solidify, so any sort of downhill difference becomes even more important so as not to end up with 'heavy bottoms,' or a deep sludge of solidified fuel.  By end of February, this is almost inevitable to greater or lesser degrees. 

    Now, we have loading programs that help us calculate hull stress and predict trim and list to help us load and discharge safely... It can also be done by hand using a calculator, pen and paper and some charts the builder gave us when the hull was new, but the truth is that the programs are a backstop against experience and understanding. Now, we MUST use all tools in our toolbox to do our job right- that is, if you have two ways of measuring something, two is one and one is none- that is, you are obligated to use every tool appropriate to the situation... and the present HQ is almost an identical hull to my last HQ, so I have 15 years of experience with this hull and its' idiosyncrasies. I know what load plans work well and what doesn't, off the top of my head... but more important, I know that when I am NOT dealing with a gimme of a cargo load, which is about 15-20% of the time,  I know the process and the parameters that keep things bulletproof in terms of safety...There's still an experience factor though, a point where the computer can tell you stress levels on the hull but it can't tell you if you'll be able to do a job if the volumes change and a ship decides they don't want all the fuel they ordered and now you have, say, 400 more tons of fuel than you had expected, causing a port list, when you had loaded based on the presumption that you'd have an even keel and that tank empty when you started pumping off another tank. 

   Just an example.    Just like my post from last week, my poo writing skills make this sound much more interesting than it is. Ever try to cook in a skillet but you went a little light on the oil and you have to tilt the pan to get some more from the edge of the pan?   Same same.