back at it

SO, WHAT DID YOU DO TODAY?

 Oh, if you're wondering, that big red tank is a diesel wash tank. The tanker on my starboard side sometimes uses diesel oil as a solvent to wash down noxious crap that sticks to the walls of their cargo tanks. Imagine paying $4 a gallon for a car wash, if your car was 500 feet long. 

soaking in the warmth

Last day at home. Kind of a zoo. Usual.

      Back to NY and the shitty weather tomorrow. Right now it's sunny and 78. All is well for another 18 hours...

the best laid plans...Bend over,

Wait! You're going the worng $#*#$*&ing way!

    Dammit I should have kept my idiot mouth shut.

  Well, we were in Bay Ridge anchorage in New York harbor, cleaning the house up, tidying and doing final laundry.  Four. FOUR fucking hours before crew change, the tugboat mated to the barge I'm babysitting calls us up. 'We need to get on the hip. We just got ordered to Baltimore, sailing immediately. "

 30 minutes later the anchor's up, the tugboat is stretching out the tow wire, and we're on our way out under the Verrezano Narrows bridge, bound for Ambrose channel. I'm typing this in my bunk, as I'll be standing watch and eating the last of my salad here at midnight.
      I was met with silence when I delivered the news to Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife. She and I are both spoiled by my unusually regular schedule. It's been a few years since I got diverted and crew change got screwed up. Comes with the job, but I've been lucky.
    Apparently my wife had a nice romantic day all planned out for tomorrow. Her first words to me were "Ohhh-kay. Eye neeed fight wit' chu now." She wasn't serious, as she's a good 'un, but spent the next few minutes reassuring herself that I wasn't going to go run for a high vantage point and a high-powered rifle. I had had 30 minutes to get the tug made up on the wire and the anchor up, so I was ok by then.

 Well, semi-OK. I'm not riding all the way to Baltimore. I'll get off in Wilmington, DE on a crew boat, there to get to the airport in Philly. All goes to plan, I'll lose 12 hours with the fam and have a quiet evening tomorrow night with them. I told my wife to break out a magnum of Moet & Chandon, 'cus daddy's thirsty and it's a school night, which makes lounging on my patio sound pretty good.

Still, this is better than having to bust my balls over cargo ops. I'm riding a barge and standing watch. Tomorrow I'll be home at some point, hopefully before midnight... and hey, they have these wonderful places at the Philadelphia airport where you can sit and they bring you beer.

Last day

If all goes well, 24 hours from now I'll be at the airport and in line for a little probulation and a walk through the rape-o-matic. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor getting fingered by a 400-lb high-school dropout who chews his nails will stop me.

Listen up, Bobby!

 Well, President Empty Chair got put in the corner, briefly, and the Keystone XL pipeline expansion legislation was passed... and, in the same week that over 10,000 Americans employed in the oil exploration trade lost their jobs, Dear Leader sensitively responded to his recent loss of face by stomping on the nuts of the oil industry, slapping massive new restrictions on oil and gas drilling... that'll show those evil oil companies not to fuck with The One. Only Barrack Hussein Obama can decimate the middle class! So, the guys who survived Round One of layoffs are about to get bent over without the benefit of a little EVOO or Kentucky Jelly.

John C. Wright tells it like it is

This is today's assignment- read this and think. Right or left of the aisle, you'll find John C. Wright's musings will make you sit back and contemplate. Reading the guy's work is like a shot of Gamma Globulin for your brain.

 Today's post is a little dark and contemplative, and unusually aggressive for Mr. Wright, but all the more powerful for it. He's one of the few religious writers I know who can't be shouted down. Dude's just thoughtful. 

http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/02/dinosaur-sized-bigotry


"They used to be in favor of free love and the sexual liberation; now they object to rocket scientists wearing shirts with cartoon women printed on them, they object to science fiction magazines showing a scantily clad warrior princess slaying a monster, and they call all sex rape, and demand strict segregation of women and men. On the same day as these protests, they appear in front of the Pope, writhing on the ground naked with crosses and crucifixes inserted into their vaginas. So the Puritan rules apply arbitrarily, without sense or order, to anyone or no one."

You hear things...

When scrolling through online posts from mariners going back and forth talking about jobs, headaches, people and the business, sometimes I bristle at how absolutely foul and vitriolic the opinions can get as to tugboaters' opinions on tankermen in general.

 It's a matter of differing goals and a bar that is set at two different heights. Personally, I find tugboaters to vary widely in terms of skill and personality. My employer has a low number of real assholes in their tugs' wheelhouses, which is something to be admired... there's a certain dearth of very good boathandlers, as well, though, as shipping in general is a business where skill counts far more than people skills. Plenty of d-bags are great boat handlers. So long as it doesn't drive too many folks away from crewing a vessel, companies don't care that a boathandler is a failure as a human being. So long as everyone goes home safe, that's not necessarily a terrible thing.

       I got a pretty stark reminder of just why tankermen have a varied reputation during a conversation yesterday. There are a lot of prospective tankermen who are looking to get their foot in the door simply because it looks like less work than other jobs, and it pays relatively well... which was another point I saw in some BBS posts- complaints of tankermen being overpaid. Well, there's no explaining the basic rules of economics to someone with an inflated view of their own value. The market pays what it does for a reason, so I simply skim on, and note that there's some damn petty people out there. Why do I give a good goddamn what other people make? It's motivation to move into another position, if I'm jealous. Hell, if tugboating paid twice what I make and came with some qualitative improvements to my life, I'd shift over that way and be a tugboater. It doesn't, and I don't want to.

 But, yeah, there's some real bums out there for tankermen... something I'm aware of, of course, but something I don't see normally, as I'm focused on the dirtiest, most complex and miserable of the non-niche oil markets. I do bunker work, carrying fuel to ships... sort of the Swiss Army Knife of oil tanking jobs, and it's more labor and risk-intensive than other forms of oil carriage, so there aren't a lot of bums out there, at least in my company. In our core NY bunker group, there's 8-9 really good guys, twice that in competent and marginally competent guys, and a number of short bus seat warmers who can sign a Declaration of Inspection and must be watched over, the kinds of folks who can do a job for 20 years and still not know how to do it well.
   Being a company whore, I get to meet a lot of folks. I got put in an oddball place for me, this week. I'm on a 50,000bbl black oil barge which is chartered to an oil major, which means that we have a dedicated tugboat that is always nearby, and the workload is nowhere near as brutal as I'm used to. The barge itself is awkward for me to operate, but the other guy on here is nice, knows his job and is particular about it, a quality I appreciate greatly.
 Anyhow, I've got 5 more watches to stand, maybe part of a 6th, and I can go home. It's the dead of winter back in Heaven's Waiting Room, so it's only in the mid-70's every day. Only. I was outside a little while ago and it was 9 degrees.