Fireman

Tomorrow marks the end-day of the three weeks of training that I've been taking at my union school. Cargo Handling, SAR, and, in 24 hours, firefighting, are hereby knocked off of my to-do list. saturday morning I'll take a leisurely 430-odd mile drive home.
Today was our day to go get heated up on the fire grounds. Lots of good stuff to do- exercises, smoke, fire, and water=fun. Plus the weather, which was idyllic- cool, sunny, and a gentle breeze- perfect for firefighting.

One real tragedy in the American maritime world is that the diversity and level of available live-fire training has declined substantially for mariners. Originally, I had to take a Basic safety Training course which included three excellent days of firefighting exercises. I did this out on Cape Cod, and it is required of every prospective oceangoing mariner before he can get his first job on a ship.
Up until about 2 years ago, in order to advance in licensure, a mariner would have to take an Advanced fire fighting course, which includes classwork on pre-fire planning, tactical training, and some train-the-trainer practice to prepare the participant to take a leadership role on board ship.

I've been told that the maritime schools began to compress these courses into a combined basic/advanced class, which is chock full of information, sort of, and short on time. Further, I've been told that my school had to switch to this format to remain competitive. So it goes.

The class has been excellent, in my opinion. We have a world-class author and experienced firefighter as the instructor, and our one day at the fire ground was a nice refresher. STILL, though, I think a disservice has been done to the mariner by compressing this training. Something had to give, and the stakeholder is the one to suffer for it.

Oh, before I go on, have a look for yerself, then:















































































Cool, huh?


For those of you who have been there, these pictures are pretty familiar, as the training is standard at most of these classes. It's really neat to sit in the engine room as it heats up from a fire, and to learn that the air is around 400 degrees.... good insulation in those turnout coats and pants!

Anyhow, to recap on what I said earlier, the whole point and purpose of this training is to give us a little lifeline should the need arise to save our own asses at some point, whether by putting out a small fire, or simply in buying enough time to get out of a bad situation... either way, the onus should be on the curriculum design, in terms of giving us the best value for our money, coupled with satisfying the training requirments set down under law. In this specific case, the one-week class just doesn't feel like enough for some of the guys I trained with today- and for myself, too. We lost too much time in reviewing the basics, and didn't get the time to really get much depth in tactics and such. The maritime schools have satisfied the US coast guard and the IMO in terms of satisfying the training requirements, but the need to dumb down the course in order to make it inclusive and able to fit into one week has really made a bit of a hash out of the situation. It's an important subject, and worthy of being expounded upon. I think it's great that the schools are happy with what they've done, but I'm certainly not going to pat anyone on the back for cutting my training requirements in this case.

two things

Cat out of the bag:

I'm trying to keep my accent under control, so that people here will understand me, or at the very least, not goof on me. Of course, before the caffeine kicks in, lapses will happen, as they did this morning, when I referred to my having had too much to drink last friday as "I got wicked retahded." Cue the wisecracks.


The other thing:

I'm going to start a weekly picture posing of these Brazilian women that I'm coming across in my planning sessions as I look over my wife's country, in preparation for spending some time there myself once school is done, I've been looking all over the country's touristy spots. What I appreciate is that the Brazilian women I've met here are every bit as lovely as the girls I've seen online. I shudder at the thought that some of you poor single mugs are having to deal with American women under the age of 30.


Today's Braziliera:

Perfect timing

So I've got this nasty cold, and I'm not the only one. WonderJohannes, the cyborg/student/ friend who is impervious to hangovers, apparently, is not impervious to the common cold, either. Dt's got the squints, too. Tough week.

Anyhow, thought I'd share a highlight from my day. 1045, and I am giving the last presentation in my Emergency Procedures class. I had to create a procedural checklist for fighting a fire/explosion for an oil tanker alongside the dock, from ringing the general alarm to calling it quits.
I did well. I did my homework, and lord knows, there's plenty of info out there on the web. Well, that and I've lived through hundreds of Fire and Boat Drills on board.
I'm giving my presentation, and my sinuses, which were struggling to stay open all morning, give a lurch as I'm really settling into the podium, 5 minutes into my scenario. I sneeze.

uh oh.

It's like ice-out day on the scene at "Ice Road Truckers." My sinus cavity is about to divest itself of 5-to-10 liters of snot, and nothing is going to stop it except for a full-court press.

So, It's on. While I'm talking, I tense up my whole body like a fist, breathing carefully out of my mouth. You know how hard it is to talk in front of an audience when you have to talk and breathe out of the same cavity? I sounded like an extra from the set of The Sopranos. You know; "Ay, an den you wanda debloy ya hose teems from da staging area, but one team hasda stand by, 'cus Ay! You neveh know. Bada Boom!

OK, it wasn't that bad, but it was enough to make me sweat. I swear, blowing my nose in the privacy of the bathroom a few minutes later? It was like 72 virgins all giving up the goods at once, just for me. So good.

But not so awesome was my medical visit this afternoon. I thought I was getting a little blood drawn. Well, yeah, I did that. Then I had a full Human Performance Evaluation.
If you haven't heard about it, be glad. It's a physical exam, complete with hernia evaluation. (Cough!) Then a sadist with a stopwatch and a heart monitor runs you across an exercise floor modeled after the Westminster Dog Show. Step up on this box, 5 times. Balance on one foot for a minute, then the other. Step on this plastic board that we put over a hockey ball. Now balance on the ball/board for 3 seconds, no edges touching the floor. Now go up this ladder 6 times. Drag this sled full of weights across the carpet 10 times. Crawl, you vermin, 30 feet, and God damn you if your heart rate rises above 158!
I passed. I sweated, I'll say that. I've been worried about my hearing for some time. With the exception of one small range of sounds in my right ear, my hearing is actually pretty damn good. I have only 10% damage to one ear, and 15% in the other, which is good for a 34-year old. What wasn't so good was the damn box they put me in to take the hearing test. Fucking thing was 100 degrees, and the box was so small that I couldn't fit my shoulders between the walls without hunching. You wannna talk claustrophobia? 10 years ago, I would have burned down the neighborhood before getting in there. My first trip to sea took care of that. 120 days in a ships' double bottoms, needle gunning for 10 hours a day. That's confined, baby.
So, feeling happy and healthy, I proceeded to come back to school and drink too much. So I spent the next 4 hours rehydrating so I won't be all headachy for the morning. Awesome.

Next week is Advanced Fire Fighting. I'm looking forward to it.



















Probably healthier for the liver than the beer I drank.


Oh, and also, take a look at this:

















And you wondered why I'm begging the Mrs. to take me to Brazil?

Good week

Firmly entrenched at the ass end of the second week of classes, I am satisfied with what's gone on so far. Search & Rescue and Cargo Handling & Stowage are finished, and tomorrow will see the end of Emergency Procedures. I've got a quick visit to a doc-in-the-box tomorrow for a benzene screen, one of the chinks in the armor of a tankerman like myself. I have to have blood drawn at least once a year, but I usually seem to go twice, as a nod to the fact that cancer runs through my family like grease through a goose. First, though, is the exam tomorrow to mark the end of the class.

I want to share a really interesting moment that I had in the SAR class. The lecturer was a professional Coast Guard SAR expert with 28 years' experience. He brought us through the whole process, and at the end of his 30-minute talk, when he was describing the real meat of the search process, the actual time spent running the pattern and looking out, there was one moment where he made a comment that proviked a very powerful emotional reaction.

If we arrive on scene at night, and we have to search, we put a spotlight up into the sky, and leave the blue light flashing on the roof. The truth is, it doesn't help us at all, and the blue light is probably a distraction. The fact is, we aren't going to see anything useful until first light, but to a man in the water, the difference between life and death, between giving up and stuggling to stay alive through the night, can come from hope alone. Just seeing that someone wants to find you, that we're there, and we're looking for you, that hope saves lives.




What a thing that is.


On a lighter note, some dink gave me a wicked cold. I look like a wino. With my ruddy complexion, my nose glows in the dark when I get a cold. Also, my nose will peel and get all scaly too. Handsome, huh? I put some moisturizer on my schnozz after dinner tonight, and it stung so bad that my eyes were watering. Honest, my vision got blurry it was so painful.
I miss my ship. In 6 years, I only got a cold one time. Every year when I come to school, I get something.

Propaganda and good/bad science

OK, well, check this out. It'll only take a minute

Now, I wasn't planning on writing any more today, but this totally frosted my radiator.

This research study is great. Right up my alley. In fact, this gives me wood. Lignum Vitae style wood. This is cool science.

But the reporting totally puckers up my nethers.

This article calls 10,000 year old coral bed remains "Ancient," but 10,000 years is barely a blip. 10,000 years ago, the last ice age was long gone. The world was much as it is today. In fact, I can go get 15,000 year old plant and animal remains at home with just a 3 hour boat ride, 100-feet of fishing line and a little mud grab. No big deal. We can go offshore and look at the salt marsh remains that are buried just under the mud off of Stellwagen bank, 30 miles from the shore today. No big deal. The ocean moved 30 miles inland after the ice age ended. So it goes.

So, an older band of dead deep-sea coral isn't newsworthy in itself, and as much as it's cool that the group classified a couple of new marine species, it wouldn't have made even the less-than-prestigious Yahoo! News. So, throw in some political footballs fellas, 'cus it's almost grant-writing time again to pay for the next research cruise.

Read the article's incredibly lame attempted tie-in to global warming. Ocean Acidification. Puh-leeze. This has been an interesting research avenue, no doubt, despite the fact that it runs contrary to what is taught in week 2 in Introduction to Marine Biology. Calcium cycle stuff. Pffft. Chemistry is still for nerds apparently, and nerds don't do news.
Anyhow, what pissed me off is that the team leader, a scientist who should know better, spoke using the language of the media, and not science. He used scientifically meaningless numbers, numbers that aren't supportable in any meaningful way, as a hook to grab attention. 50-year projections, when we can't figure out what's 6 months ahead of us. Deep vs. shallow water-ecosystem comparisons, when the two are literally night and day, with only a tenuous interconnection caused by incedental energy transfer, which is like comparing New York City with Bozeman, Montana, because the two are cities in which one could move goods from one to the other in a limited fashion.

No, no, no. This isn't what we are supposed to be doing by researching the natural world around us. This is the kind of shit that let to evolutionary theory being used to justify social darwinism, which, if one considers eugenics, led directly to Nazism. That's the road that the politicalization of science leads down to.

So, I have to offer a big F-You to the team leader of this expedition. You are the reason that people complain about giving money to non-medical scientific research. Fuckhead. Thanks for ruining that.

I lied

OK, so I'm not reconciled to being unable to knock out all the classes I need to advance beyond my job. I'm bummed out. I'm a patient guy, sometimes. This isn't one of those times.

Being at my union school, taking these license advancement classes; well, it's addictive and it makes me enthusiastic about furthering my career. It's a supportive environment for an oddball like myself. So, understanding that I don't have the dough saved up to sit on my ass for an extra month or two really bums me out, because that's all I need to get the last classes in. As it is, I'm trying like hell to get a month's work in before early March, when I have to be home to attend to some family legal matters, in which, unfortunately, my presence will be required. It's all bullshit, like my captain likes to say. Anyhow, but for that one morning's work, I could do this thing.

Anyhow, I guess I'm saying that it's hard to be patient on matters of money and career. So it goes. Some times I kick myself for having pushed so hard on education when I was a kid. $700 a month later and I've got a wonderful education that allows me to transcend the poop and fart jokes around which my world is made, but existing in such rare air doesn't particularly pay that well anyhow, and more fool I, I focused on the wrong aspects of marine industry relative to my business today. Had I been more comfortable with myself in my yoot, perhaps I'd be in a different place these days. In the meanwhile, the only true value in my education these days comes from my ability to push back on the people who attempt to interfere with business as usual.

Ah, speculation. In the meanwhile, here I am in my hotel room, anxiously awaiting Sunday Brunch and the cast of characters who will welcome me to the table so I don't have to sit alone, surrounded by the clergy who are attending a multi-faith coalition conference here this week. I've no desire to be 'saved' whilst attempting to remember which fork goes with the salad. I'm more comfortable with my own faith's priests, who will probably be in the bar, anyhow.

So, today will be spent organizing for next week, and of course, football and beer. Last week I became a certified expert on matters of cargo handling and stowage, and this week I will become the new king of Search And Rescue/ Emergency Procedures.
Two down, Seven weeks to go. If I can play my cards right, I'll be here for Advanced Fire Fighting next week, which will leave me with only 6 weeks of classes left; Electronic Nav, Celestial Nav, Watchkeeping/Bridge Resource Management, and Basic Weather, and that'll be it. Hopefully I can bust out at least another three classes later this year, or, dare to dream, finish 'em all.
In the meanwhile, I'm enjoying the second true day off I've had in 6 months. Feels good.

fruition

Well, it's been a good week. I got some things done, I knocked out one of the STCW modules required for me to sit for the 3rd mate's exam (cargo handling and stowage, if you're interested), and met some damn decent people. Two things of note happened, which I'll mention in passing, as I have to be the bus driver for some guys at my school who have no wheels, and us about to be turned loose on Baltimore for the weekend:

1). Meeting with union officials. I attended a seminar that allowed me to learn more about my union, bylaws, and rights and responsibilities thereof, for the job above mine. It won't be soon enough, but I'll be changing divisions in my union after I get my license, and the officer's side is a lot different than the unlicensed. This way, I won't be ignorant, and also, I can put faces to names and get questions answered... this was good for me, I think, as I have been thinking that it isn't worth staying in my union once I get the license... I have reconsidered.

2). Company stuff. I touched base with my employer, which left me, strangely, with a warm fuzzy. When I walked off of my ship, I was ready to light myself on fire, or at the very least light someone nearby up. Discouragement, a low moment, whatever. I am reconciled to the fact that I have to work more in my current position, which I didn't want to do, but which will be necessary to pay the bills. So it goes. Another chance to learn more about the job above mine, whilst having none of the responsibilities thereof anyhow.