Wow, we've been hopping.
I head home tomorrow, but we've been doing a lot of small cargo parcels here on the HQ, at least 1-2 moves a day. I've been running around like a cat trying to bury a turd under a marble floor.
Tonight's watch will get busy with a load that should be starting in about 30 mins when our assist tug shows up. I had free time to do my organizing for heading out tomorrow. Really, nothing spectacular, just more work.
Yesterday was one of those days that made me grateful for the date to click over at midnight to a new one.
Now, I woke up at 1am for watch, as today is our day to switch watches and my partner B takes over wearing the big boy pants during the daytime, which has been my role these past few weeks. So today we run dog watches, (called because they're cur-tailed, as Patrick O'Brien once wrote) to ease the pain, essentially working shorter watches until our watch schedule is 12 hours offset from what it had been before. So even though I had trouble falling asleep and only got a 4 hour nap before my next watch, I am grateful for it, because that means that yesterday is over.
So we knew going in that one of the 3 grades of oil we had loaded the night before was off spec- that is, it wasn't chemically exactly as the customer wanted it to be. This happens now and again for various reasons, and can be fixed by either diluting the oil with fresh stuff that is on spec, adding an ultra-clean but pricey oil like diesel (we deal in residual oils, which are less expensive than 'clean oils', so think of it as adding 93 octane gasoline to a tank full of 87 octane because on testing the tank had been showing 86.9 octane. Sometimes we just send it back ashore and load oil from another shore tank so the shoreside folks can address the issue, too. As it happens, we chose the former path, and so we would cut the oil in question with some diesel oil to make it come up to snuff, but first we had to make room in the one tank where it was sitting. This was done by opening up an empty tank and the pipelines between the full tank and the empty one, and letting gravity drain off a particular volume, which when time allowed, the newly empty space would be replaced by diesel, and the newly filled tank can be pumped ashore on a later date. Easy, standard. But we had to wait for the paperwork, the OK's, and all that hoopla.
In the meanwhile, the diesel-engine driven cargo pump I rely on to pump our most in-demand grade of oil (which has it's own designated tanks, pumps and pipelines aboard) decided to get in a fight with the coolant pump, and so on a nice hot July day the water pump on the cargo engine shit the bed. My company moved us to a pier with shore access for a mechanic to come and take care of that while I was pecking away at my calculator and the HQ's computer to run intial numbers, email with the parties involved in the oil issue, and eventually go outside to gravitate the oil to the new compartment... while I was waiting for the mechanic, and before the office staff was in the office, I swapped generators, bringing a new one online so I could change the oil on the old one. I did the oil change but managed to knock over the waste oil container as it was draining out of the engine pan, and so I had to clean up a big splash of still-hot used engine oil off the gen house floor, which is always a good time. I got the gen house all tidied up just as the mechanic dug into my unhappy cargo pump's engine. He started by dumping the radiator's coolant directly on deck rather than in buckets, so now I have 10 gallons or so of used coolant running down deck and for the scuppers, which I had to stop and clean up. I was a bit pissed, but what price a properly cooled cargo pump? I spent a nice 20-30 min stretch on my hands and knees, which is awesome when you're fat and also have a very heavily nonskid coat on your deck. In the meanwhile, I'm still going back and forth on the off-spec oil, making plans and running numbers and messing with questions of trim and list on my barge, and how these things change as oil moves about, all pretty light math but requiring a calculator and the laptop to shift numbers around.
At this time the generator which has only been running for a few hours is on the verge of overheating. I had smelled hot diesel engine (if you know you know), and so there was a bit of coolant there that had boiled over but merely increasing ventilation by opening a hatch took care of that, but while I was cleaning up the pint or so of coolant that ended up on deck I dislodged the collection bucket for the crankcase vent, and so I dumped a pint or so of waste crankcase oil directly into the top of my boot and filled up my shoe while my foot was still in it. So I again had to clean the deck, this time with one boot on and one boot off before cleaning my oily boot and switching to my winter boots, my spares, a set of insulated Red Wing logger boots that each weigh about 7 lbs. Good fun on a 90 degree day.
By the time this is all done and the messes are cleaned up and the permissions to do what we need to do to get the wayward oil back on spec are all achieved and everyone's on the same page, it's time to sit in the AC with the laptop and run the numbers and do the blending calculations and trim predictions and such... this is good because my socks are already 100% saturated with sweat, as is my shirt. This is when the blue screen of death visits the office computer. Seriously. At this place, at this time, the computer. Just. Died. Now.
I'm old enough to be able to do the calculations I need to do with a pen and paper and a calculator, the old ways. At least I think I can. It's been 10 years since I had to do that. But I can't email and I have no paper record at the moment of the oil we loaded, and no legal paperwork printed out yet... I need a computer and mine is now an expensive paperweight, beyond repair. I pull a spare out of storage and spend the next hour with an IT guru on the phone getting it updated and getting permissions and such to allow it to connect to our network, which wasn't assured as the spare is rather aged. But the guy makes it work, eventually, and while he's at the tail end of this, and I'm stressing out, hungry by this time as breakfast and lunch time have long since passed, I feel the bump of our tugboat arriving to move us to the tank farm to get our replacement oil and the mechanic heads ashore, finished. The usual rigamarole of unmooring and departure happens... but I haven't worn my clunky winter boots in 4 months, and distracted, I trip and fall, thankfully merely landing on my face and knees with slight involvement of my hands, tearing my jeans at the knee and also the knee beneath. Long time since I skinned a knee. I'm thankful I didn't hurt my hands, which are a lot more valuable to me than my face is. Shamefaced, and slightly road-rashed, I am up and moving quickly.
The rest of my watch goes about the same. On the way to the oil terminal I hunt and peck and input the data from the prior loading of oil we did based on a paper copy of the details, as my computer can't yet access the full network drive ashore that has my records and numbers from past work. I get that done just as we arrive to moor. We get all fast at the tank farm, and the cargo surveyor who comes aboard (the same 3rd party guy who signed off on our papers at the first loading) declares that we can't load until he has load orders from the charterer... but not the load orders the charterer gave me to give to him, the ones we spent hours on getting everyone into agreement. He wants different orders, something I haven't ever heard of. He then decides on different volumes to load than the ones I, my office and the charterer all agreed on. By this time I am out of patience, my knee hurts, my foot is sweaty and oily and I am hangry. After going over the numbers to justify our needs, again, I call my office and ask the dispatcher to please unfuck things because my ability to even is about out. I can't even, by this point... and right then, when I am ready to either fall on my sword or go all ham on the surveyor, in comes B, because it's watch change time, and I am saved.
A shower cures most of my ills, turns out. Cleaning my scrapes and scraping oil out from under my toenails is a pretty zen activity when you was 30 seconds from going nuclear just 15 minutes before. I have the leisure now to handle the 3 S's and make a BLT, the perfect food for a hot July day. Just enough time after to read a book and start to unwind, but surprisingly sleep evaded me for a few hours.
Still, here I am hours later, and we are at a lay berth awaiting the discharge of our now better-than-ever quality oil... but the discharge isn't going to happen until the next watch. I have the watch free, which is a fine thing. So this is my entertainment portion of the night, where I can blog, kvetch and while I'm not feeling rested, I have another opportunity to sleep in a few hours. Some days are just like that, where nothing goes quite right except that you're still above ground at the end of it.
I like to think of myself as a pragmatic environmentalist. Yes I work for an oil company in the oil industry, and have for over 20 years. I also have roots as a biologist and have been active as a commercial fisherman, hunter, hiker and general nature enthusiast for most of my life. I was good enough to work as a teaching assistant in a field botany class as an undergrad, based on my knowledge of plants and trees of New England, because field guides made good presents to a nerdy teenager who liked walking in the woods more than going to a mall.
Thing is, I tended to butt heads with environmentalists a lot because so many idealistic kids have a religious rather than scientific understanding of ecology, human behavior and economics, all things critical to environmentalism. Hell, I can have a far greater positive impact as an oil company employee than I ever could as a shitty low-level student and scientist. I get to influence people's decisions and I get to see how people who depend on harvest of natural resources interact with the environment. I get a louder voice by being able to contribute at the tip of the spear when it comes to things like, say, keeping oil out of the water. The fundamentals.
Human ecology and human ethology is a critical component to understanding conservation science and environmentalism. You can't expect people to be interested in qualitative concepts like carbon footprints when survival is their main focus. You reserve that for people who aren't 3 missed meals away from having a dead kid and you protect the vulnerable among US to effect change in qualitative concepts like environmentalism. This is simple game theory stuff- the rising tide that lifts all boats concept, that making improvements that foster sustainability can't come at a cost beyond what people are willing AND able to pay. As an example, new, green power-generating technology tends to be expensive and impractical as sole-sources of energy. Solar panels aren't awesome at 2am. Wind generators kill birds and don't work well in low or high winds. Batteries are... sensitive, dirty AF to make, and shitty at storing power in some circumstances. Only through testing, thoughtful design and proof of concept does sustainable energy become more useful and practical, which is a perquisite for it becoming acceptable for wide use. Green energy must contribute to making people THRIVE more than survive, or, like those automatic seat belts on cars in the 90's, they become things that that the rest of us laugh at WASP's for using. Practicality is key.
As of right this moment, nobody has yet to be able to circumnavigate the world using only green energy generating technology. Boats are a brutal testing platform for sustainable energy products, and that makes them arguably the best testing platform there is. Green energy generation is hard, expensive and impractical just at the moment. But it's improving, and it improves through testing, trial, and trial and error. The power requirements to propel a boat hull through the water using electricity generated and stored only by wind, sail and regenerative current (basically the propellers turning as they're dragged through the water while under sail), are beyond what that of a battery bank can easily store, let alone to have enough surplus to say, power a GPS, cook and leave the navigation lights on at night.
A professional sailboater named Jimmy Cornell tried to do this on a sailboat called the ELCANO, a boat designed to be self-sufficient enough and rugged enough to be used in a circumnavigation using green power generation. He failed after just a few weeks, finding his very carefully designed boat to be too flawed for what he wanted to do, namely to be a demonstration platform that could both keep the lights on and faithfully follow in Joshua Slocum's footsteps.
Enter my friend Peter Lukursky. Peter is a former mechanical engineer (and reformed attorney) who has been living a minimalist lifestyle very well on a sailboat for the past 8 or so years. He's a Youtube star with over 100,000 subscribers. People tune in to his channel to see him living on pennies per day sailing around the uncharted and unpopulated coast of the hellish part of Australia as well as through the eastern Caribbean, having a great time and basically being the unofficial spokesman of simple and sustainable living on almost a zero budget. Guy's the real deal, someone who catches his own food and supplements it with dry goods purchased sparingly every few months.
I surprised myself by getting on board with his idea. First off, I like the guy. He's the right mix of crazy and crazy smart, and he's a human punching bag that doesn't give up. No BS, guy's been sunk, starved, spent 70-some days exiled and chased out of every country that he tried to seek refuge in during covid. (including Haiti and Cuba; things were that desperate). In the past year he's been hit by lightning at sea, which blew a hole in his boat and damaged everything, then got a raging case of month-long covid, then hit by lightning again (frying the little bit of electronic gear he had been able to purchase to replace the stuff bricked by the first strike), and then got covid again for a month.
I've mentioned him before here. I enjoy his channel. It's funny and fun, despite the serious challenges life has thrown at him, and he's about as close to living in harmony with nature. as it comes. Perhaps the best testament to his character is that he is very accepted by the very poor native Guna indio people, who allow him to fish and anchor and visit their islands because he will always stop what he is doing to help them as needed. When a family owns only a dugout canoe with a sail made of found rags and tarp pieces, the clothes on their back, one spearfishing gun and one dive mask, and nothing else in the world, having someone who will fix their dive mask or spearfishing gun using spare parts ( that they can't acquire and he can barely afford to replace), that person becomes a lifeline. So that's Peter.
So, using his knowledge of engineering, sailing and sustainable living, Peter Lukursky is setting out to succeed where Jimmy Cornell failed. He will modify an existing boat design that is in the public domain, build it in aluminum, equip it with only the absolute minimum of utilities and furniture, and power the boat only with electricity derived from wind and sail using existing technology that has, thus far, never been implemented in such a way as to be sustainable over time.
There are sailboats with electric drive. Some have sailed modest distances too, between stops to charge the batteries with diesel generators or shore power at a marina. To date electricity has yet to be demonstrated as a viable method of powering long-distance cruising. The aim of Peter taking up the Elcano challenge is for him to be the first, and to document every step of the way in his entertaining style, such that it can become repeatable.
I really wish I were a better non-technical writer. I'm likely far too retarded after 20 years of oil vapors to be able to write creatively enough to describe how interesting this all is. Just go check out his channel, "Sailing Into Freedom"
I promise you'll like it.
Now, my whole reason for writing is that Peter, at the urging of some friends, has started a Kickstarter to help underwrite the boat build. Normally I'm far, far too cheap a prick to give anyone a penny of my money, but I put a chunk of change in myself to help support the project. One, because I have about a 1000 hours of viewing enjoyment of his channel over the past few years because it's better than TV, and Two, because we actually NEED technology demonstrators that bridge the gap between tech and practical use while being easier on the environment too. Green energy is a great idea, if it can be made to actually be fuckin' useful for once. It has to be just as worth it to field this technology as it is to deal with the positives and negatives of a diesel engine with an alternator slapped on it. I believe that it can be, eventually, but the only way to get there is through creative projects that have both practicality and demonstrated utility. This is a major step in that direction, to turn concepts into workable components.
We've got the morning off here at HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HQ/ Home for the mentally constipated.
When I'm on days, I usually roll out of bed at 0430 to start my day before I start my day. I'm one of those annoying people who wakes up happy and has to wait for my day to ruin that, but I also don't like to speak much when I'm just out of the rack. We're all like that on here, in fact, which makes it comfortable. Generally, beyond a 'good morning' you wait for the guy getting up to start conversation, not the other way around. And that's how we like it.
During the quiet time before taking on the business of the day I check my personal emails and whatnot. And today I got an email from a childhood friend who told our group that he was getting divorced.
Damn, that bummed me out. Of course you want your friends to be happy. I'm extremely fortunate in that I'm still on speaking terms and keep in touch more or less with my childhood friends. I'm 48 and have been friends with these guys since Kindergarten or primary school.
I look at the lives of so many friends and acquaintances, and I sometimes feel very fortunate, very lucky. Sometimes I question if I really have it that easy, compared to them, and sometimes the answer is yes. By 'them' I don't mean anyone in particular, but I see the challenges that people in my life face, and I am grateful that I am not dealing with these things too.
Last week we were coming into a berth in Bayonne NJ while I was off watch and out on deck, and I threw a line to the dock that was an absolute Hail Mary . Line throwing on a boat is a learned skill and I am only average at it, but I am more accurate when I am at the upper limit of distance for me. Basically you throw a heavy mooring line such that the eye opens and drops onto a bitt on the dock some distance away. The heavier the line the shorter the max distance you can throw. And this was a 100% throw, the kind that I'm not supposed to do at age 48 but the mood was right and I didn't blow out my rotator cuff, so all's well, and I hit that bitt.
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| I'm not on a tugboat but you get the idea. |
I lassoo'd that mooring bitt as we started drifting off away from the dock, and it was the best throw I've made in a few years. As I handed off the line to the young deckhand, I said "See, it's better to be lucky than smaht anyday." I said smaht because though I am a southerner, I still have the accent that makes me Boston Paul at work. Seriously, nobody knows my last name here, and of the few who do, it's not like they'll pronounce it right anyhow.
And maybe there's some truth to the value of luck here. Despite my best efforts, I guess I'd still be classed as 'smaht' given my past and what happens between my ears at times. But being smart hasn't brought me near as much as being relatively lucky and generally a fairly nice person.
I don't normally think of myself as being lucky. I never win shit on lotteries or scratch tickets, and I can't speed in a car without getting pulled over, and luck of the draw almost never favors me. But in life? Yeah, I can't explain many of the good things I have as being things I've merely earned. My marriage? Lots of work put in to make it so successful, sure, but it was just dumb luck and probably my wife's poor eyesight that got the foundation put down there. And given my nature I'm VERY fortunate. I mean, I'm more Lenny than George most days, and I can't see further through a brick wall than the next guy. The early years where communication had to be simple and direct because of the language barrier got us both attuned to the importance of communication, I guess, and as our vocabulary in each other's language expanded, we were both very lucky to find that we liked each other even more as our thought processes became known to each other.
Again, luck. OK, luck coupled with focus and hard work, but without that luck? I'd still be kicking rocks.
My job? I'm only here because of a lucky interaction with a classmate in a Terrestrial and Coastal Navigation class I was taking. I was on my off time from the oil tanker I had a permanent slot on, and one of my classmates is part of the family that owns this company and they needed tankerman badly enough that my friend put a good word in for me. All this happened just as my former employer went tits up in a big way. Again, luck. Well, luck and good networking.
That seems to be the pattern with me. Dumb luck and... some minor contribution on my part. Hell, even before all this, when I was a 100% thoroughly unhappy and miserable grad student who hated his school, hated his professors and hated his career prospects, it was just dumb luck and a visit to my old high school teacher/captain at his lobsterboat in my hometown that made me realize how much I preferred being on a boat to being a goddam government administrator, which was my most likely career path at the time.
And the day it all came to a head for me, much later, the last day of the last class in grad school, when I couldn't take the prospect of living my life as it was for just one more second, it was dumb luck that in moving back to my home town in Massachusetts, I stopped at the town pier because I bought a sandwich and wanted to eat in peace and look at the boats before going to see my parents, and 10 minutes later I had a full time job on a boat. Again, just luck. I'm grateful that I have been blessed in so many ways, and that my challenges in life aren't more than I'm capable of handling.
Really, I only get 5 days off when I come home for just a week. I roll in after dark on (s)crew change day, and leave in the AM the day before crew change in order to get to the Weed Palace (The drug- and whore-friendly hotel where my employer puts us up to 'rest' the night before crew change, and by rest I mean listen to people scream over rap beats, police knocking on doors and hookers performing their trade all night).
So perhaps unsurprisingly I leave for work not with the excited anticipation of yesteryear, but a sense of duty and a pocketful of melatonin pills and earplugs.
This trip home, 5 whole days, was incredibly healing. Seriously, I did very little but enjoy time with my family and make a trip to my doctor, who said I was doing well but in his professional opinion, he diagnosed me as being fat. Like I didn't know. Anyhow, after the usual indignities, I was able to get a guffaw out of him when after pulling up my drawers I said "Geez, you know Father Porter used to at least give me a candy bar after." I have a fun doctor.
Beyond the fact of my doctor getting to 3rd base without buying me dinner first, I have little to complain about my 5 days here. I spent part of every day in the pool with my wife, whether daytime or no, and while I did get a mild sunburn it was nothing to complain about, and I actually look healthy, rather than my usual mix of dead corpse white and brick red, and Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife baked her brown buns to a lovely golden hue. She took a few days off from work and so we slept late, ate too much and killed off half a case of champagne and a half bottle of good scotch.
You know if I worked at Burger King I could sleep in my own bed more. The choices we make...
Well shit fire and save on matches, I am beat up.
I got off the HQ last week, 7 days ago to be precise, and instead of going home, I was offered a cushy job as watchman on a hot-stacked tugboat. That is to say that it was an uncrewed tugboat that still had the generator on, and was ready to work once enough bodies showed up. And I got a dream gig to get a week's OT just to babysit. That was nice, as I had planned to go home but OT is sometimes welcome, and OT for watching TV and reading books is doubly so.
My trip to tugboat Shangri-La lasted 4 hours. Port captain called and said that one of the tugs had a deckhand couldn't keep awake on watch who was sent ashore in infamy and shame, and given that we're always short on bodies in my place of employ, I got called up to be deckhand.
I am much too old and sedentary to be a tugboat deckhand by choice. First off, while I was once a damn good AB (Able-Bodied seaman) that was 15 years ago last time I had any practice, and that practice had never taken place on a tugboat. I was a ship AB, a different animal.
Oh, there's no real difficulty there, an AB is supposed to be an AB, much of a muchness. But the past is a whole different country, and we tend to view it with a rosy tint. I knew enough to leave my ego at home, but it takes a bit of a bite down to have to admit that you need direction when it comes to doing some truly basic shit. Coiling lines, splicing, anyone can do that. Throwing lines, making up, making off, tugboat linehandling, something I watched our tugboat crews do without truly seeing what they did or the effort involved... whole other thing.
So, turns out that the bulwarks on a tugboat up forward, at least the one I am on while waiting for my relief today, come up to about halfway up my ribcage. Linehandling, almost all of it, has to take place above that height.
Turns out, prior to this past week, the heavy part of linehandling has been something I've done from a height below the waist. This is pertinent in that it means I use my core muscles to help drag and handle heavy stuff... and really, the labor part of my job on the HQ involves hauling VERY heavy weights, like say the last 12 feet of a 6" black oil hose end, which is around 300-400lbs, very short distances, mostly by dragging them. And on tugs I am handling hawsers, which are lighter but actually fairly heavy, passing them and wrapping them around bitts and such that are at eye height. This shifts strain from my core to my shoulders, something I am not used to. I was damn sore the first 3 days aboard, and there's a twinge at the base of my neck that still ain't gone away yet.
Aside from seamanship tasks, I had housekeeping chores that took up an hour a day. Emptying the dishwasher, cleaning up after dinner, taking out trash, disinfecting and dusting surfaces and tidying up the wheelhouse, shining stuff. Domestic, not a problem.
I had much more fun than expected with the crew. The captain is someone I knew a bit, and proved to have a good sense of humor, thank God, choosing to laugh at me rather than fuss when I turned up a bit of linehandling into a cat's cradle situation, and the other deckhand is a workhorse with a great sense of humor, who had no problem whatsoever with helping me and also doing some remedial teaching. Also, a great cook. We all ate well.
The accommodations are tugboat standard, which is to say I shared a room with the other deckhand since one of us must be awake and on watch at all times, so I had the room to myself. I had the top bunk, and it was a bit tight, my nose being about 16 inches from the overhead when I was lying in bed. Still, not terrible.
A tugboat being engines with a small steel shell built around them, it's noisy. I was amazed, truly, that I could sleep after a couple of days. I guess you can really get used to anything, and turns out when the engines are running, you can't hear the other people or the annoyingly ever-on galley TV, so I actually slept better after day 4 with the engines running.
And now here I am, waiting for my relief to show up so I can go back to the office, take a shower and go to the airport and go home... for 6 days. Back to the HQ then.
The past week has given me new appreciation for the tugboaters I work with for sure. It was nice to be part of a crew in many ways, rather than being the guy who signs the papers and swings valves. It was a mental break in that my tasks were elemental and there was less higher brain function. Not that there's tons of mental heavy lifting in my regular job, but there are more opportunities and responsibilities than what I had this past week. So that was nice.
It was hard on the ego, though. I don't like that I wasn't a really good deckhand and needed extra supervision. Still, I improved as the week went on. I hope that the impression I left isn't "Oh Jesus, thank you that that guy's gone."
It'll be nice to return to my more familiar job next week. But I have no regrets about this past week, beyond that I didn't get to sit on my ass and get paid and had to work up some sweat.
My kid approached me months ago and asked if he could repaint his room. His room was painted a bland tan color that we never redid when we bought the house, so I was OK. I have a big collection of paint in my garage, as I do woodworking and we had repainted the exterior of the house last year, and he likes to paint artistically so he can blend colors far better than I did.
I didn't put 2 and 2 together until he had me come look the next day and he had painted a mural across 2 walls. He finds painting to be relaxing and peaceful.
I find painting relaxing too, though. Which is good I suppose since I work on a big piece of floating steel that is, if not long in the tooth, approaching late middle age. And so with this weekend being gloriously between jobs, I've been unleashing my inner artist and painting too.
Little different though. I'm cracking open a 5 gallon bucket and rolling paint en masse. Still, I find painting, especially painting the deck, to be a very zen activity. I tend to tune out the problems and worries of the day and just be one with the roller, taking the pink and rust-streaked old paint and covering it with a dark red that has just enough gloss to get through the summer before UV kills it and starts the 2 year process of bleaching it out again.
Anyways, we're using a new type of paint, called polysiloxane, that is an epoxy (a polymer) paint, but chemically different enough that I no longer am able to see into the future and navigate starships when I am mixing the stuff. It's far less toxic apparently and easier on VOC's.
I dunno, I'm kind of disappointed. It's still relaxing, though.
