Lie down with dogs... etc.

 So, Iran is at it again. 

       Iran's non retarded unit, the Revolutionary Guard, has a habit of harassing western-owned ship traffic in the Persian Gulf.    

              Chevron Oil seems to be a pretty consistant target for them. Chevron operates in every oil-laden shithole there is, though. They're like McDonalds or Mattress Firm.  A Chevron-chartered ship got seized earlier this year, and there have been a few harassment incidents. Since Uncle Sugar's World Police Navy is active in that part of the world too, every time the haji's act up, the navy has to dispatch a ship off patrol to shoo the Iranians out... although sometimes there's nobody close by.   In the most recent case, the tanker RICHMOND VOYAGER which, despite the name, is a foreign flag (foreign registered and foreign crewed) ship, but it's owned by one of the largest oil companies in the world, who outright owns a few senators, so obviously they were getting helped when they called for it. 

 The Iranians took a few potshots at the ship as a fuck you for calling for Big Brother. 

 So we can add that to the dumpster fire that it our world in the present day too. 

Thank God for high blood pressure meds

  So, it's a nice quiet night. Now. 

      I got to run to the store to get grub today, as we're in a lay berth alongside the Brooklyn Bridge.   With heavy rain forecast for tonight, which is now here as I write, I walked the mile and a half or so to the store, a big chain grocery across the street from the Barclay Center, where the Nets play.  It's in a busy commerce area. 

 It's also your friendly neighborhood hoodbooger grocery store. 

         When I told Big E on here that I was headed up, E (who is black) said "Oh, man, no way I'm going to that place, bro. It's the hood in there."  And it is. I usually avoid it, but I wanted to load up while I could, get a walk in, and get back before the rain. 

 And, I mean, I did, but it was super unpleasant.  Stop & Shop is a very large grocery chain, not a bodega or a low-price shop, but solidly middle of the road but with stores that tend to be large and well-stocked. 

 Except this place. First off, they don't have enough grocery carts. I had to wait 10 minutes to get a cart. Also, the carts can't go outside the store. It's a busy main drag in NY, and there's no parking lot. You have to hump your shit to the local parking garage that feeds the mall and stadium or one of the 30 gypsy cabs driven by African illegal immigrants will help you. 

             So, yeah, I get my cart and inside the door is the vegetable section. And it reeks of weed, because of course it does. Also, everything's disorganized, there's no bags for your vegetables, and the staff... well, the girl who was at bakery section was yelling at another girl who was restocking the cut fruit. An agitated 300lb hood rat with nails the size of 12 penny spikes yelling 'You's a stupid fuckin' ho, ho! like 8 times. 

 Welcome to Erf. 

            I got my shit, anyhow. Surprisingly, most of it, anyhow, but it took a while to find, as nothing was in stock, and nothing was in the bin with the labels as to what it was, but if you looked, you could find it where it wasn't likely to be found.  

   And then I was #4 in my chosen checkout line, and there I stayed for one hour. One entire hour. 

     It seems there's no check day for EBT this week. So everyone in front of me was getting their stuff rung, up, and then their cards rejected. So they'd pick one or two things out, the manager would come to delete this from the list, and try again. By the time the card was rejected again, the manager was already elsewhere doing THE EXACT SAME FRIGGING THING.  

      Place made my local Wal Mart look like Whole Foods. 

              Turns out I got the slow cashier. Her nails were a good 3 inches long, filed to points, and must have been freshly glued on, because she moved them only very carefully and very slowly. She could maybe scan 5-10 items a minute, and when a bulk pack of chicken couldn't be read, didn't I get the stink eye. 

      How the hell can she wipe her ass like that?

 So, yeah, I got out of there for just $300 for about 10 days of healthy meat, chicken and vegetables for just me. Because it's New York and I can buy a trash can sized bag of pork rinds for 99 cents but a pack of lettuce is fuckin' $7.  Anyhow, a cheerful Sudanese guy was birddogging me as soon as my cart locked up the wheels near the front door, and we were off back to the terminal gate. Honestly, the guy was 10x nicer than anyone I met at the grocery store. He was the high point of my trip ashore and $20 for a  quick cab ride was good for him too. 

 I got my shit aboard and stowed it, then sat in the chair and just...existed a while.  

      I think I'm well suited for an isolated work environment.  The rain came in before dark, and with it came a whole lot of aching shoulders and back. I knew that those days would come eventually. Apparently it's now Eventually. 

          BUT, less you think I'm ONLY here to bitch (I'm only MOSTLY here to bitch), I had good fresh food, and since I'm on nights, breakfast was a couple of medium tomatoes with the guts scooped out with an ice cream scoop, then I dropped a tablespoon of basil pesto and cracked an egg in the hole and baked em for half an hour.  Little salt and pepper, you should try 'em.    Only downside is I'm sitting here in the semi-dark in the deckhouse, and every 20 minutes or so I'm farting out the first 7 notes of the opening from "Smoke On The Water." And I mean I'm the only one up. Is it really a downside if you're cracking yourself up? 

______________________________

            With only about 3 weeks to go before our next trip to Brazil, and the now 300ish person family reunion we're throwing for her family (Tribe, really. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife is half Italian, half Brazilian Indian (feathers, not dots), I'm getting photos from past and present with said wife in various outfits for my comment as she winnows her wardrobe down to about 5 suitcases for 2 weeks.  

 Today's Yes/No was a yes from me.   

     I know.  I'm actually a discerning sort when it comes to women's high heels at this point. How the F that happened to a man who has like 4 shirts, I can't say. The picture doesn't show them, but they're a pair of wedge heels from Chanel. Christmas present from me year before last. Wedge heels are good for wallking and do fun firming things to women's backsides the whole while. In that respect it was also a Christmas present for me too. 

 Tomorrow is Bikini Try-Outs when I get up for watch, so I'm excited about that. Fuckers are expensive for what is essentially 2 lengths of shoelace, 2 postage stamps and an eyepatch's worth of material. I am told she's gone more demure, with Brazilian "Mom" bikinis (which are about as risque as most American women will go), suitable for a more mature crowd.  

 See? Not all negative bitchery here. 

First Thursday in Ordinary Time

 I'm back on board, and things are as they often are, which is to say: thinks are right fucked up. 

      Last night was my first watch on board after a lovely 2 weeks home. As I'm fresh aboard, it's my week to take the back watch, 1800-0600.  Luckily we had ample free time until a load scheduled for 0300. I was looking forward to it. 

          One of our units got a nasty lightning strike before I came back to work, and while the company will have it back in service in short order, there was some scrambling to get a barge assigned for every job.  I got a phone call that because of an outside vendor's semi dick move, we were getting assigned a cargo of high sulfur heavy fuel oil.  Now, the present HQ doesn't carry HSFO, which can contain around 3% sulfur. We carry VLSFO, Very Low Sulfur Fuel Oil (<0.5% sulfur) and ULSFO (Ultra Low Sulfur fuel oil (<.1% sulfur). The less sulfur there is, the more expensive it is, and the cleaner it burns, emissions wise. 

      Thing is, once you put high sulfur in  a tank, the residues after pumping it off remain.  So for us to have to carry high sulfur fuel in our tanks means that we're gonna need to get flushed out but good after, which is not a cheap proposition. Just the way things work. 

  Turns out, while we were filling our cargo tanks last night, the ship our fuel was destined for had a massive fire break out in nearby Newark. 

Fire still blazing on ship at Port Newark where 2 firefighters died. Cause remains unknown.

https://www.nj.com/news/2023/07/fire-still-blazing-on-ship-at-port-newark-where-2-firefighters-died-cause-remains-unknown.html

         From what I understand, the firemen who died were getting overwhelmed working in the confined space but were unable to back out of the area.  

      The ship in question is a Con-Ro ship, the bastard child of a container ship and a car carrier. It's half of each.  This company's ships tend to move used cars from the first world to the 3rd world. Car fires aboard these types of ships do happen from time to time, but obviously something made it worse than normal. 

   So I'm sitting about 3/4 of a mile from the ship right now, in another channel at a different terminal, hanging on with this burning ship's fuel. There's shipping containers between me and this ship, so I can't see anything. I heard a big damn boom about 2 hours ago, though, which makes me think that they're still fighting to save the ship. The 1200 cars aboard are probably mostly fucked, but that's just a guess. 

         I do want to be smart here. The oil company that entrusts us with their oil probably wouldn't want us speculating too much or ripping on their customers, so I won't.  I'll just note that shipboard fires are a fucking nightmare, and while I find these ships to be uglier than a 90 year old's ballsack, the international used car trade is always fraught with risk. 

Tuning the world out

One of the big appeals of working on an oil tanker that I wrote about years ago is that by necessity we needed to tune the world out and focus on getting through the voyage. The world for those of us not in management-level positions shrinks to become just a matter of what can be seen horizon to horizon, or, at most, what we see with our eyes plus a little beyond the horizon which were just dots on the radar screen. 

   This is a joy. Life simplified. The most important things become doing the task you're assigned, and wondering about what is for dinner later. Having a talented steward on board makes such days close to joyful. A day of working hard outside on deck, doing tasks that leave tangible results, with the prospect of an excellent meal when the work day is done. Plus, if the next port was a good place, we could all take time to go ashore even if it was for just 7-8 hours, eat, drink, be social, meet a girl etc etc. 

   Those were fine days. 

     

 The world has intruded. Emails require constant contact with the world. Mandates, updates, connectivity have made it easier to stay in touch, which I don't view as a good thing. The wholesome positives are there, whereby it's possible to stay in touch with loved ones, but 1), the companies discourage this because they don't want to have to pay an extra couple hundred dollars a month to allow crew to talk to loved ones, and 2), the company employs people who interfere and stay in constant touch with the ship. In that vein, senior management on the ship bear the brunt. 

 Staying in constant contact is usually reserved for the office to control what the slobs on board are doing, not for the unshaved proles to talk to their families. 

    There are negatives, too. When you're on a long passage, finding out right away that nana kicked the bucket isn't going to make things any better for you as you live with the knowledge of death of a loved one, while surrounded not by your family but at best a friend or two and no family whatsoever.  

         The quality of life of seafarers is decreasing with time as externalities intrude, pay stagnates and intangible benefits like shore leave are eliminated. 

      It's often said that as you progress in a career, you will have less and less opportunity to do the things that attracted you to that career until it becomes merely a job. 

 I thought of seafaring as an exception. It once was. I transitioned from blue water sailing to brown water sailing because perversely, a ship that travels long distance now allows almost no agency when it comes to decision-making by its crew, including the captain. 20 years ago I witnessed some office nudnik who had never been on ship before, who was not an executive, and who wasn't even a full-time company employee, harangue the captain at length for the crime of  printing documents on both sides of copy paper, thereby halving the amount of paper used. The guy went on and on. My captain, an elderly, grumpy soul who looked exactly like Santa Claus down to the twinkle in the eye behind his gold-rimmed glasses, was both an amazingly experienced and GOOD captain, and turned a particular shade of purple at the disrespectful nature of someone less than half his age scolding him like a bad dog. 

 Sadly the guy escaped the beating he so richly deserved, but this is how things were 20 years ago and I think it's gotten worse since. 

       As I progressed into my stolidly middling maritime career, I reached a point of homeostasis when it comes to being left the hell alone as a bunker tankerman, where I have a certain limited amount of agency on board, a fair bit of responsibility, and a shoreside office staff who know full well that the only reason I stay in my position is because I absolutely love to be left the hell alone to do my job, and when that can be arranged, I'm pretty good at it.  Obviously I have a very good relationship with the powers that be in my company. And I guess I'm ok at the job, too, because they put up with my antisocial ass. 

        Tuning the world out is STILL one of the intangible benefits of my job as a sailor. It's being chipped away at, of course, as the interconnectedness of all things increases and contributes mightily to the decline in civilization, but I still have my moments where my horizon shrinks. As my horizon sadly has to include the shoreline now, given the brown-water nature of my work, I prefer to allow it to shrink down to just my deck area, where the space inside the hull becomes my center of attention, and the world can wait until I'm done with what I'm doing before I'll turn my mind towards things past the handrails. 

Titanic: Still killing rich people a century later

Of all the ways to get killed at sea, being in an implosion at 13,000 feet underwater is probably not a bad way to go. Chances are it was faster than the speed of nerve conduction. 

 The internet is a place for idiots to force people to listen to their stupid opinions. I am absolutely not convinced it is a net good for humanity. 

 So obviously I'm going to talk about the submarine accident at the Titanic wreck site. 

 I am not an expert. My dad was. His first job out of the navy was as as a ship's electrician for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, aboard their oceanographic ships. Along the way, WHOI built their research submarine ALVIN and as my father was the electrician on the mother ship they also built for Alvin, he became an engineering tech on the ALVIN as well. He was there for the first dives, the recovery of the h-bombs lost in a B52 wreck, and for the Alvin's sinking, loss (for a year and a half), and recovery when it slipped out of the recovery cradle. 

   Even so, he wouldn't call himself an expert at anything but the things he worked on. And they worked on a lot of things. 

    ALVIN used life-cycle maintenance techniques where every bolt, nut and washer has a measured life span and is not used one day longer than that span.  I remember my father saying that they needed at least 100 man hours of maintenance and testing for every hour of use of the sub. 

   The story of the habitation sphere, where the people are, involves tens of thousands of hours alone just to pass inspection for acceptance for use, including mandatory destructive testing of copies of the sphere. 

 The Alvin's first sphere when built was pressure tested to over 9000 feet in a testing tank, which was the most powerful pressure chamber of sufficient size at the time. The destructive testing was a failure at first, when the pressure chamber door blew off, causing the multi-ton door to go airborne. The sphere passed. It was stronger than the test tank. A new test tank had to be built, and I'm not sure if they were ever able to test to failure for that first class of spheres. 

       Point being, deep submersible design is intense and the testing and maintenance is continuous and extensive and expensive. 

      I have no idea what the lost sub underwent for testing. It was revolutionary in many ways, and until this week, pretty damn successful. Obviously the company expected it to work. 

 I don't expect that there will be much in the way of human remains. The flash fire from the air compression, then the shock wave from the collapse... not nice. In theory it should have been fast enough to exceed nerve impulse transmission rate, so hopefully the poor pricks had no idea what happened. 

    Now, the only real thing I gotta say is that I'm pretty soggy and hard to light when it comes to seeing a few people's reaction over this. There seems to be a camp, mostly among the cultural marxists (read: unemployable class-conscious losers) of course, where the sentiment is that they're happy  a bunch of ultra rich strangers are dead. 

    If that's how you think, you're a giant sloppy gaping asshole. Just because someone has more money than you doesn't make them less human and worthy of pity- it makes you a jealous loser who sucks at being human and also at making money apparently. Sure you can smugly say that they had no business being there. And it's a weird adventure trip, granted, at a quarter-million a seat, but how much of an amoral cocksucker do you have to be to take pleasure in someone's death simply because they or their parents were good at a job? 

 Anyhow, I've barely got enough brain cells to get through the day after 25 years of smelling bulk oil vapors for 8 months a year. I don't really have much opinion beyond the above, except that I'll be interested in what this means for materials science in the medium term. The busted sub was an experiment. Perhaps the next one will be better, whoever builds it. The early history of the airplane was a lot messier than this. 

Oh, also I'm at home. Not at work. And it's whisky o'clock. 

Radio etiquette

 I believe it is very important to conduct oneself properly when using the VHF radio in NY harbor. Proper protocol, channel selection for the task, and radio discipline are vital practices. Minimal communication, sparing use of words, keep that channel clear in case someone needs to use it more than you do. That's the spirit of  properVHF radio use. 

    But then summer comes and I'm yelling at some guy on the radio "Hey, sh*thead! We're trying to work here on this channel, you f*cking shoemaker! Shut the f*ck up and stick your boyfriend's d*ck back in your mouth!" 

 I'm not a fan of pleasureboaters. Truly.   Like the fuedal era Japanese, disturbing my wa is deserving of death, or at the very least being held down and given a papercut. Vertically, the entire length of the 'taint.  Grab a piece of copy paper, hold his feet at 10 and 2, and swipe that sheet like a credit card.

Bad enough they're running around like children, and cut across our bows, utterly ignorant of how close they come to Meeting Jesus when they do so, scaring our tugboaters half to death. Some of them get VHF radios, and they got to talk about every single thought that enters their scrambled brains. 

"Hey, did you watch that  (soy-based TV drama) last night?" 

 "No, was it good?"

(Proceeds to spend 30 minutes describing a 21 minute tv show's plot). 

   Then there's some sailboater doing half a knot backwards in the current, screaming "I'm a sailboater! I've got right of way!"   Rule 9, you wind-assisted asshole. No you don't, and even if you did, congratulations on dying for your beliefs. If only you could do so silently. 

Do you know that good mariners  don't even use the VHF radio for personal messages if we're within sight of each other?   a Tugboat Hello will work just fine instead. 

 If you're not familiar, a Tugboat Hello is giving someone the finger with both hands. 

      I like winter, when it's quiet on the radio. 

 "Hey, you there?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Stay there." 

The air is ass here and looking ahead

 So the big news here is that Canada's not very good at fighting forest fires.  New York got slowed down considerable-like yesterday when the smoke from said Canay-jian forest fires made the dirty air here in NY even worse than normal. 

 Seriously, when the wind stops blowing, finally, in May/June in the NY waterfront, the air quality goes in the toilet because NY is a gross, nasty place. June-November, we'll be coughing and hawking up big green and brown lung clams every few hours. But yesterday was pretty exceptional. Visibility was down under a mile. The sky was yellow. Never saw the like before. The container terminals were all closed because of the smoke. And it definitely smelled like a wood fire outside. Eyes were burning, coughing a bit, etc etc. 

   I have worked in dirty air before. No big deal. Just annoying as hell.  I remember too well the nasty air while painting the boilers in my first ship on my first trip to sea, being unable to breathe deeper than halfway because of the coughing fits.  Funny how we laughed it off, being young and 8 foot 12 and bulletproof at the time, inside our minds at least. 

Today, more of the same, looks like. BUT, we are between cargoes and at anchor. The air is currently a foggy white although there is no fog, viz is about 1.5 miles.  And my ass is staying indoors as much as is practical. 

        With 2 weeks to go on this trip and a pretty expensive trip to Brazil coming up (there is now a birthday party for my wife with 200 people invited on the itinerary), I was leaning towards staying a week longer and working some OT, but Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife stamped her high heels and demanded I come home and spend my off time with her. I'd be a dumbass to refuse that. And I mean, I AM a dumbass, but not that dumb. 

She ages like fine wine. I age like dollar store milk.

I also realized at this point that my son will be coming back to work the day I come home, which means that we'll have the house to ourselves for 2 weeks and it's pool season, which means tan lines for her and SPF 2 million for me. 

 Screw the OT. I'm going home.