...and then he rested

After getting off the HQ, I had to go up north to start the probate process for my mom's estate. I spent a couple of days between getting things organized and visiting family and friends. It was actually a pretty decent way to cap off the visits I've been making this past year. Much less stress. Along the way I got to shoot a couple of rounds of skeet at a rod and gun club located south of Boston, which was a load of fun. I've shot trap before, but never skeet. Harder than expected, but just as fun as I'd hoped.

       When all was done, I made my way home, and I've been here for a little under 48 hours. It's SO good to be home. I'm having my first real quiet morning right now- family is still sleeping, and I overindulged last night on sriracha chicken and spinach dip,  not to mention the couple of glasses of whisky I downed over the course of the evening, so my guts had me up before the sun, but so it goes. By 7am I had breakfasted and recovered, and I'm currently sitting on my patio in shorts and a tshirt watching the bass jump. It's a clear, cool 68 degrees here in God's country. I won't have as much time here as I'd like, but then again, I never do.

 The past months being particularly onerous, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife went all out with decorating and knocking out most of the honey-do list herself, but today seems like a good day to break out the pressure washer and tidy up the concrete outside.

 Funny thing about Florida- you don't have to shovel snow, but twice a year you do have to pressure wash your driveways and walkways. The humidity leads to a superfine coat of mildew, and sometimes not too super fine.

This week I had had a license upgrade prep class set up for myself, to start preparing to knock the dust off my captain's license and up the tonnage. I've never, ever ever been a person to let personal issues get in the way of a job to do or a responsibility to uphold, but this time I made an exception and delayed the class. I *could* have done it, and not had time with my family or simply time to myself... but in good conscience my family needs me more than I need that class this week, and the truth is, I'm tired in a way that is entirely new to me. Fatigued is probably a better word. I'm fatigued. I've never felt this way for more than a few hours, but since my mom passed away, I've had nothing but obligations to attend to, and with rare exception, I haven't slept more than 5 hours in a given day. I feel... not myself, I guess.
 I'm not having a pity party here. I'm grateful that I now have the opportunity to re-center myself, and I'm surrounded by people who love me even despite knowing me pretty well. I have many things to be grateful for, but I haven't been feeling grateful recently, and that should change too, starting with this quiet house, a full belly and a pretty morning.
 I can work on my career after Christmas. For now I have a little time to sit back and enjoy the holiday.
  

Shipping slowdown- my 2 cents (Part 1)

 Please bear with me. I don't write as much about this stuff as I used to, and minds, like machines, do gather rust. My ability to articulate thoughts has gone way downhill since I started just being a tankerman and not doing side work as a scientist. I'm more used to speaking bunker barge pidgen English, these days. Trying to explain this stuff is like trying to speak the King's English after 20 years of speaking only in Ebonics.  
-Paul

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The world of shipping and ocean trading is getting some publicity this week, mostly because it really, really sucks to own a ship right now.

Here's a great thumbnail sketch, with, more importantly, many supportive links that connect some dots for you. I'm going to refer to matters covered therein, so I feel that it's worth reading and following up on those links. The reporting is solid.


/https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/so-whats-happening-in-the-shipping-reports/


The tankers are piling up outside Galveston.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-12/something-very-strange-taking-place-coast-Galveston

Yes. It's been warm, oil is cheap and plentiful, and Galveston bar is the gateway to the largest source of refining capacity in the US. There's a backlog in other places too, if you look at real-time ship tracking sites like  http://www.marinetraffic.com/

 There's a lag between when oil gets ordered and when it arrives, and contracts for oil delivery don't always run concurrent with terminal and refinery capacity. If there's no demand for home heating oil, there's no place to PUT the home heating oil already made, and the feedstock storage fills up, and ships already underway carrying feedstocks become very, very expensive floating storage.

        This also is an issue because we don't have anywhere near enough storage for oil in the US. Like Wal-Mart, oil production is pretty close to just-in-time delivery thanks to profitability and permitting issues courtesy of a perfect storm of overregulation and an increasing reluctance of major players to invest in multiple parts of the supply chain. If you've noticed, the blue-chip oil majors have shrunk their footprint in the infrastructure significantly. More and more, companies owned by investment trusts handle more and more of the supply chain, and the former blue-chip major players sell off their more diverse portions of the market share. Sunoco used to own everything from the oil field to the gas station, and could manage Every. Single. Second. From the well to the gas station, all over the world, they had the wells, the pipelines, the refineries, the ships, the trucks and the gas stations. Exxon did too. Mobil, Shell, BP... none of them do that anymore. Some still have some terminals, some still have refineries, I believe that none have ships, and most divested themselves of assets to reduce their footprint and exposure in the supply chain. The new owners of these assets are banks and investment trusts and other partnerships, which means that they ride the wave economically, and expansion in infrastructure is often not part of their business model. Why spend money when you're going to have to sell everything the moment that some investors get nervous? Plus, Jesus Christ, have you ever had to buy land near any sort of body of water? It's a nightmare just dealing with small-town legalities. Now add a billion times more regulation, a professional cadre of overseers and permitters and bottleneck their efficiency by only allowing government employees to do these jobs. It takes more effort and oversight to expand the parking lot of an oil terminal than it did to build a new World Trade Center in New York. Who the fuck wants that kind of headache just to build some oil tanks so that the price of gas doesn't quadruple every time there's a storm?

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    Mind the hyperbole, but you get the idea, I hope. There's obviously money to be made, but pimpin' ain't easy, anymore. The return on investment in oil is nowhere near as good as most dildos in the public might think.
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 After writing the world's most boring treatise, I once traveled around  to several universities in the US and EU to cure insomnia by lecturing on the impact of regulation on international trade in gene lines and broodstock for commercially grown foodstocks.
       This wasn't what I actually was supposed to focus on, but my focus evolved from labor force issues to policy. This was in 1998, so we're talking ancient history, when it comes to genetics, but the regulation hasn't changed as much as you might think. Biosecurity protocols have evolved, but are constantly behind the times, creating a massive drag even today in these commodities markets... BECAUSE... government works at the speed of government. Half of the time I was meeting with government employees who lamented this very fact. I'm still in touch with some great guys in Scotland doing the same job they did 18 years ago with the same complaints.I made it about 3 years, talking about this shit, and by then it was a matter of either shooting myself in the head or turning my back on it.

      Unfortunately, the oil trade has many of the same issues and their analogues specific to the oil trade.

 Now, I wandered far afield of where I started, but you hopefully see where I'm going here. There are many issues that affect the oil trade, and the lack of robust stability (and long-term ownership of assets in the supply chain) makes it a fairly decent barometer of the governing economics behind everything I can see. When you combine this with conditions in dry bulk shipping (absolutely beyond the worst you can imagine) and containerized shipping (bad, probably getting worse and a classic chickens-coming-home-to-roost story), you get a more in-depth, nuanced view, but one that is pretty frigging consistent across the board.

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 Part 2 will discuss the amplifying and delaying effects of current management practices in dry bulk and containerized shipping economics, and why the increasingly horrific outlook is both their own damn fault and must be viewed through a lens rather than being taken as a snapshot of global economic conditions. And also probably some dick and fart jokes. You know... for the people.
   And finally, I've got to remind everyone that while I'm using solid facts to form my opinions, they are MY opinions, and I'm neither an economist nor a scientist anymore, just a dude with some time and some

busy!

Damn, we're working right steady this tour.


This has been the longest month of my sea time since I left deep draught shipping last year... it's not that I've been remarkably busy, though we have been busy; it's not that the weather's been rotten, or I'm bored. I just miss my wife really, really badly this tour, for some reason.
Everyone's got their coping mechanisms. One big pleasure for me is that working inland and near coastal as we do, I get to talk to Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife twice a day. Morning and night, which makes me feel like I'm still participating in family activities. We don't talk for long- maybe 10 minutes a day, but those 10 minutes are the high point of my day, for certain, and that's how it should be, of course.
It used to bother me that one officer that I sailed with before would talk to his wife and 4 kids maybe once a month or so when we were in port at least once a week, sometimes more. I was fearful that I'd fall into that sort of living situation when and if the time came that I got married. I'm not a big phone person. I can see the potential in our living situation for a husband and wife to grow apart, with the greater independence required in our living situations. So far, though, I seem to be having a 1-week mini honeymoon every time I come home. I hope that in 10 years this will still be the situation.
In the meanwhile, work continues. We are loading a parcel of black oil destined to fuel up a reefer ship in Philly tomorrow evening, and after that, this tour will be done. Amen.



I can't help but wonder how other sailors handle checking in with the fam... international voyages, of course, change things, but