On the upside, my prostate is doing well

 It's been a busy few days here on the HQ.    We worked, then we had a day free to prep for our annual Coast Guard inspection, but then the free day was filled with a quick job running a splash of diesel out to a little bitty ship, and that sucked up 18 hours, so we pulled into the company dock about 15 minutes before Uncle Sugar's Sea Scouts showed up, where we were thoroughly probed. 

    We did very well. My employer sent the Scupper Police to go aboard before the Coasties got to us. The Scupper Police are the 3 guys in the company who do health & safety checks, making sure we're sanitary and in compliance with environmental and safety regs. On tank vessels, the scuppers (drains for rainwater and sea spray on deck) have to be in at all times, and opened only to let rain out while you're standing watching the water go overboard.   Leaving the scuppers out is a bad habit that makes perfect sense but not on an oil tanker. It's better to have a a couple hundred tons of water sloshing around on deck (oh, our decks have a raised edge, about 8 inches tall, to contain water or spilled oil) than a couple of gallons of oil going over the side while nobody's looking. Uncle Sugar gets real soggy and hard to light when the water around your boat looks like a frigging pride flag. 

   At any rate, the Scupper Police were welcomed aboard (not really but I can't say no), and we chatted and he looked things over, checked the logbooks and asked some smart questions about things of mutual concern, upcoming issues, and things to watch out for, as well as it being a perfect opportunity for me to complain about Things The Office Isn't Doing The Way I Would Do It, as if the poor guy didn't already have enough on his plate, lol.  Our local Scupper Cop is actually a good shit. One of those guys who on finding an issue, will physically help you solve it rather than run off and Go Tell Daddy. 

    By then, it was time to get Inspected, and there were 6 inspectors aboard, plus two of our own office people.  What followed was a bunch of  looing at things, pulling out the survival suits and testing the water activated lights that hang on them, etc, etc, plus a lightning round of drill questions; what would you do if... etc etc. 

     We did well. The Coast Guard will always find at least ONE thing wrong, to round out their report. They never allow an inspection to have an All Is Well conclusion. So usually, I move an empty cardboard box in front of the emergency escape hatch in the generator room, and eventually one of them will be all "ah HAH!" and we have our one ding on what is usually an otherwise perfect report. 

    I mean, these are the guys who are trying to be sure we don't die of stupidity or terminally cheap owner shenanigans... to make sure we don't end up in the hands of the Search-And-Rescue people. It behooves us to be cooperative. But there are patterns. 

     Anyhow, second annual inspection in a row where they missed the empty box. Instead our ding was a silly one, a missing item that isn't required on the class of vessel that is our HQ, and one that would have been resolved today, the day after the exam, over the phone. 

   The NY Coasties are a funny bunch. Every year, they pressure me to produce a type of logbook that isn't required of us. Every year I point out "We're not required to have that in our vessel class." and every year the answer is "Well, you should have it anyhow."    In no other US port do they ask for this book, and they didn't ask for it here either, up until 3 years ago. And of course it isn't required, but it's an argument every time now. Asking one of the port managers of my company down in Philadelphia, the answer is not just no but "Fuck no. Why make extra work for you, me, and themselves?"   But I guess never the twain shall meet. When people become worshipfull of Flypaper reports inventorying things that are not required, they worship the process and not the operation. 

 I have enough to do. I'm not a fan of wasting my time when there is no benefit to it but stiffening the erection of someone who really really likes reports. 

            So, not for the lack of looking, but we were probed, questioned and drilled, and we were found worthy.  And best of all, we have a full day off today so I got groceries and went for  a long, long walk this morning to spend a little time away from the HQ and smell the garbage water and urine and weed smell that covers 90% of Brooklyn. 

Forces at work

 I've been on the HQ again for a week now, and while the bloom is off the rose, I find myself more open to appreciating the things we have and the things we don't have on here than I did when I was on The Loaner last week. This is because the things that The Loaner has are mostly mold and assorted fungi, filth and poorly-maintained and designed shit on deck, while the things that the Loaner doesn't have (hygienic living conditions, clean water and a safe work environment) remind me that our has/doesn't have matrix is quite heavily weighted in my favor).  My partner B is on there now, but he's having a jolly good time as The Loaner is presently Out Of Service. There's structural welding to be done, and a tank vessel must be Gas Free (contain no explosive vapors in the area or adjacent areas to compartments where welding is occurring, so no cargoes to load. 

     Smaller tank barges are built such that sometimes a point-load  (say a tugboat bumps us a little too hard on the side one night for example, knocking me out of my bunk and all the dishes out of the cabinets in the galley)  will cause a hairline crack in the framing inside the hull. There are multiple reinforced frames in a small area in the double hull of a tank barge, so a single crack won't actually cause trouble at all, but they're inevitable with use, and periodically any cracks will be rewelded by a specially certified welder, generally speaking once every few years. The HQ's I've had have had anywhere from 4 to over 50 cracks found and repaired in the span between 5-year mandatory shipyard visits in their life cycle

     Every time you load or discharge a tank vessel, you deform it temporarily. Steel must bend if it is not to break, and even very heavy steel gets fatigued if you bend it enough times. 

           A ship or tank barge uses a combination of structural forces to combat loading stresses. Like most vessels there is web-frame construction, where frames, ribs, stringers, beams, etc distribute loading stresses. Think of the framing of a traditional wood sailing ship- frames and planks, with heavy beams that run between the frames at various points to connect them- it's not that different from that. Tank vessels also have stressed-skin construction, where some of the load stresses are passed around and through the hull plating too. Think about a sheet of plate steel. It's not that hard to bend it when it's flat, right? Well, try to stretch it like taffy. The steel is going to resist. It's strong in that direction, if you try to yank it laterally. Steel has a grain to it, almost like wood. Bend it in two different planes at once, in a complex curve, and it is going to resist bending in any direction after, unlike flat sheet steel. 

   So, tank vessels are surprisingly strong and supple, too. You can bend the shit out of them.  I mentioned this before when I talked about Happy Bananas and Sad Bananas a few posts ago.    Now, granted, you can break a tank vessel, by loading or discharging it in an extremely stupid way, set up the hull for failure, and stress it beyond what  the steel is capable of doing, but you're going to have a VERY sad banana for quite a while before it finally calls it a day and you have partial Tanker Mitosis happen. 

You made the banana too sad, friend. 

    So, all that stress and strain is well and good when you keep the forces in between the goalposts, within your design stress limits. 

         The next time you see an oceangoing oil tanker, notice the markings on the hull. 

 

     You'll see the Plimsoll line: 

 Oh, those letters are short  for this: 

   Because water density varies a LOT with salinity and temperature, if you were to put the max safe load on a ship, as the ship sits deeper in the water, the final draft of the ship is affected by the salinity and density of the water you're sitting in.  As a quick example, with a  medium sized ship with a max 40,000 ton cargo capacity, you can expect your maximum safe load to put the water's edge on those marks.   The other side of this coin is that you need to have some buoyancy and you WANT to have some freeboard (the height of the deck above water)  to help you preserve your buoyancy. Between fuel, cargo and the ship itself, if a little water gets inside where you don't want it to be, it's really cool and neato if you don't immediately sink. So, if you, say, overload your ship in Santa Catarina in Brazil, a popular port with almost fresh water at most  terminals, you're going to be coming close to impersonating a submarine by the time you get to Copenhagen in February. 

       If you go over your mark and put it underwater, your insurance agent is going to be very happy if you break your ship, because that's your problem now and not his, but that's only if the local Port State Control doesn't see you doing it, at some point because they have every right to stop you and try to save the poor bastards on board who didn't know you were trying to get them killed.  Yes, this is a regularly occurring problem. The marks exists because greed has killed more sailors than storms. 

   Now, ships also have external markers noting where internal bulkheads and reinforced areas are. This is because tugboats will be used to nudge the ship into position at almost every dock it will ever land alongside, and sometimes the tugboat will need to use a LOT of force across a very small area of hull to shove the entire ship sideways through the water.  As a result, ships are either built with special reinforcing at certain areas in the hull, or more likely the builder will just mark where the heavy transverse bulkheads (framing) that connect one side of the ship to the other are. These stronger areas in the hull will be made pretty obvious if someone values their ship and don't want it caved in.  

see if you can spot a good place to put a tugboat to shove you sideways

         Now, smaller oil barges, on the other hand, have a special niche in transportation. They get into smaller places and shallower water, usually, than ships.   The HQ, for example, at 300'x50'  won't exceed 13' of draft, which is about the same draft as the 3000 and 4200hp tugboats that are designed to move us about.  One corollary to this, is that sometimes our tugboat operators have to put us in places that are pretty tight- in the corners and niches where ships won't fit. As a result, sometimes the tugs move us by getting 'in the notch,' in a specially reinforced divot in our stern that fits the tugboat's bow nicely, and from which the tug can push us forward

this is actually much deeper than the HQ's notch, but you get the idea

Or push us "On the hip" 

Or even backwards, which we call, unoriginally enough "Heads to tails"

 All depends on where we're going, how we can fit in the berth, and if we can get our cargo hoses to meet the berth's oil pipelines.  BUT, in all those cases, the tugs have to get their lines made fast to push or tow us in a particular way.  On the hip or heads/tails, the tug has a stern line that runs to us which has to be super tight, tight enough to stretch the tug's bow line by pulling the bow outwards as the stern line gets tighter, until both lines are tight enough that the barge and tug move almost as a single unt, where the tug can shift their rudders over and shove the barge, and the relative positions to each other of the two vessels moves less than a few inches. This puts ENORMOUS force on the sides of the barge where the tug is pressing up against the barge... a point load, in other words. Point loads sometimes cause nearby welded surfaces to pop apart, and with  a sound like a shotgun being fired, a hairline crack will form at a weld somewhere between the outer and inner hull. 

 Shit happens, in other words.  cracked steel bracing and weld failures are designed to be accounted for. They're almost inevitable, and the hull design must be rugged enough to shrug off a bunch of them. 

 So, while I am experiencing nirvana in the form of my first watch completely off in a dog's age, B is sitting while the ABS (American Bureau of Shipping) welders are giving some TLC to The Loaner.  B will be back aboard a week from today, in fact, which will also mark the midway point of this tour on the HQ, and the start of week 9 since I've been out here. Oof. 

The end of the exile, and my first Youtube appearance.

 I don't think I have ever appreciated the HQ, including HQ #1, 2 AND 3 as much as I did this past Wednesday. 

       I spent 2 weeks on the rental bunker barge, and I returned 'home' to the HQ  with fresh eyes and a surprisingly uncynical view, here on week 7 of this trip. 

     Lord, the HQ looked good. Gleaming decks in gloss black, the cabinets with gray trim, the clean and wide galley table with proper fiddles for keeping food off the deck... all of it. And my room, with it's homey smell of not mildew and the particular white noise of my fan...   yeah.   

       Anyhow, it was good to see the HQ with fresh eyes. I remember how upset I was when B and I were reassigned here and the existing crew kicked off, with the exception of Big E, who is one of the OG's, having been on this, HQ #3, for over 10 years. 

      Speaking of, HQ #'1, 2, 3 AND this one, #4 are all turning 20 next year. They're at the end of their expected service life. That's a whole post in and of itself. Thanks to good builders, a great naval architect, and an owner who believes in proper maintenance, all 3 of my existing assigned homes here have more life in them and startlingly low metal loss rates in the hull plating, meaning that the hull plates are damn near as thick as they were when launched. Next spring's shipyard will see that remeasured, although I wouldn't be surprised if thickness loss was just  another 1% after the last 5 years. But yeah, another post. 

       When I got back aboard, after putting away my stuff, I just sat and caught up with big E, in the way we normally do, but this time instead of him downloading all the news, gossip and necessary business my way, I shared my experience with the rental barge, and then almost made E throw up when I took off my socks and showed him my raw hamburgered feet.   As I mentioned in the last post, the rental barge had a serious shower pan leak, and standing water was trapped under the tiles on deck, and would seep up above deck when you stepped on the deck tiles.   So we had a neverending supply of stagnant water, constantly refreshed, which smelled like a bible story and formed a conferva soup of animalculae and fungi. 

   Anyhow, that's the story of how I got raging athletes foot all the way from the tips of my toesies to my 'taint. 

       My first night back on the HQ, I had just enough time for a 2 hour nap and then it was time for watch, and I jumped in hard, as we were busy. I was still waxing orgasmic for the seamanlike and well-cared for layout of our equipment and such, and just so happy to be back on a familiar deck that was mine that I didn't even bitch when it started to rain it's ass off. 

        Despite the fact that I've always chosen work that keeps me outdoors, I have a particular hatred for working in the rain. I just hate it. Except for Wednesday night, when the heavens opened, and I gave exactly no shits whatsoever. Me, clumping around in my winter weight Grundens foul weather gear that weighs no shit about 15 lbs in the insane boiling heat. I was sweating so much that it was competition for the rain as to which could get me wetter, and after a time I just hung up the rain gear and got rained on and cooled down. I'm tired of heat syncope and other delights and not being able to piss but a couple of ammonia smelling drops after waking up, despite sucking down 3-5 gallons of water a day. 

   But Wednesday night? I didn't care. I was just buoyed up. And when my watch was ended, I crashed into bed, waking up in the weird position I fell asleep in 7 hours later, with my kindle still on my chest. 

   So here I am on Friday night now, well in the mix, and it's been almost nonstop, with just tonight's 90 minute break between finishing loading and the next tide, when the current slows enough for us to sail. 

  I'm happy, anyhow. 

____________________________________________________

    So my good friend and shipmate Tim, a very talented tugboat captain, has a very popular youtube channel that you should check out. 

      www.youtube.com/@TimBatSea

         Go check him out. Tim's a hellaciously good tugboat handler, and in one of his more recent videos of him rafting up a loaded bunker barge to an empty oil tanker swinging at anchor in high current, you'll hear an annoying voice on his VHF radio, and Tim says nice things about the retarded tankerman stumping around proving that he's much too nice a person, and then you realize that the sexy looking and seamanlike bunker barge is the HQ and the annoying disembodied voice and dumpy tankerman is myself. 

   I truly have a face made for radio and a voice made for silent movies. 

 But seriously, check out Tim's channel. He's a great guy, and the little life lessons he imparts while working his tugboat are always worth listening to. I'm happy that my first appearance on his channel involves a good talk on how being politically polarized should never be a bar to friendship. 

 

One week down.

 Halfway day today here in OT exile.  I am still on the floating shitbox tetanus factory leased barge we're using. It's still awful here. I usually can find one nice thing to say about any boat or barge I work on. Oh, she's old but solid. Yes, it's got problems but she's safe and clean. 

    This place has nothing. But so be it. As I discovered last week, if I dwell on the negatives, I'll just start screaming and possibly not stop.   So far, still got 10 fingers, 10 toes although of course I immediately got   a magnificent case of athlete's foot despite putting enough bleach on the decks to sear my eyes and lungs to well done. 

    In the intervening days, it's been daily work parties to improve sanitary conditions and livability commensurate with the knowledge that I don't have to come back here except on a volunteer basis, and other than the stagnant standing water that seeps up between the deck tiles nonstop (the shower and I suspect the overhead (roof) are not what they could be), it's as clean as soap, scrubbing and ritual bleaching can make it. 

    Honestly, it's not pleasant, and the deck machinery is much of a muchness with the rest of this turd, but I'm getting by.  The OT is nice anyhow, and it's been busy as hell, so I am not being left to marinate in my own shitty mood.  Knowing what I agreed to and why and where I am, a positive attitude is really helping out. I'd be exhausted if I was this much of a ray of fucking sunshine every day though. Sure as shit, I'm burning, if not calories than mental... something, to do this. Spiritual mana?   I dunno. I guess I can do what my nature suggests and just wallow in all the negatives, or I can do what I'm doing one more week and cash the next check with a smile. 

Doing OT on the pride of the fleet/ Please Admire My Hole

  OK, crew change day was yesterday, but as planned, like a fool I did not go home. I am 'working over,' doing some overtime on another bunker barge for 2 weeks and then going back to the HQ for my regular 4 week hitch. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, OTOH, is keeping the home front down, and by keeping it down, I mean working 85 hour weeks while I'm away. 

        The barge I'm on? It is the single worst maintained and poorly made vessel I have ever had the extreme misfortune to ever step aboard, without exaggeration. Oh, it won't sink or roll over, it's sound as  a pound in the hull. Same hull as the HQ, in fact and those shipwrights at that yard really knew their shit. No, the hull is fine. Everything else sucks, though, it's an absolute dog to operate and the living quarters are both filthy and a crime against humanity. 

 I can say that because we don't own it. It's a rental. 

 You know what, though? I'm only here for 2 weeks and I can hack it and then make subtle cruel and snide comments to my superiors every time I see them for the rest of the year. 

 I'm a glass half full kind of guy.  

        My shipmate on here (there's just a crew of 2) had what I think might have been a panic attack when he saw what this is. Apparently he was offered this turd as a home, a permanent berth for him, an experienced and reliable tankerman.  I can read faces. I'm not autistic. The poor guy stepped aboard and there it was.

God is not here.

      The poor guy really was deeply upset that he had gotten the equivalent of a box of dogshit in the mail after being told a present was coming. So upset in fact, that it pushed my own cynical loathing through a full rotation, 360 degrees, and I arrived back where I started determined to make the most of it and be of good cheer myself. I'd never suggest to the guy that everything is not so bad, because it is, but I spent 3 hours cleaning the galley after my watch, and another 5 this morning cleaning the working area (there being no galley table, as there is a small table for two that is both the galley table and the office, lol. And all covered with grime, oil residue, mold and filthy stagnant water underfoot on the crumbling galley deck. 

Whatever. It's temporary and I'm getting overtime. I'll survive probably, until the mold gives me black lung. 

__________________________________ 

   On the upside, I got some new pictures of the still-looks-like-present-day-Gaza  construction project on my home in Brazil.  And, as always, I got, for some reason, lot's of pictures of The Hole in the yard. 

           I have no idea why, but the builder is inordinately proud of one in particular of the deep buried columns I had poured before they lay the slab of the annex to the house. I don't know why, but the guy loves to send me updates on this one of 6 footings.  The annex will eventually be 2 stories, but we're just building the first floor now to get it done in time to visit this year or early next. Nonetheless I had them pour the foundations and supports for a much larger, heavier building.  The corner column, however, is in an awkward spot, close to a very tall unfinished wall between my neighbor and I, and there's no easy way to get a small excavator there, the footings for the pool, a separate water fountain and bamboo  garden already having been laid for some reason. So one of the columns is being laid by hand using concrete and rebar and a shovel rather than an excavator and forms.   

 So, in the back yard, as you walk out the back door of the house, there's a covered  outdoor kitchen with gas burners, a large wood burning brick oven with a steel rotisserie unit in it, plus a smoker and sink, cabinets, etc etc all built to entertain 20-30 people easily, and 50+ in a pinch, my wife's close immediate family numbering in the 300's or so.  On the far side of the outdoor kitchen is the annex, a bathroom and bedroom and sitting room, all moderately sized. The annex is where Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I will stay, the big house being mostly for her mom and her caregivers (my mother in law is a character. Blind as a bat and something of a black widow), my nephew who's a long-haul trucker in Brazil and will act as caretaker for the property, and my kid and assorted guests, when visiting.  

the annex, once complete. roof of the outdoor kitchen to the right. 

  I have no idea why the builder sends me updates with a description of the work done that week, but the pictures ALWAYS include the current state of The Hole. 

   The Hole must be looked at an admired before the weekly update is complete. Every week. 

Magnificent. Just look at it. 

And a week later

Admire it. Love it. The Hole is Everything.

 And anan

Yeah, you fill that hole. 

  4 weeks. In the meanwhile, construction continues apace, but if I want to see any of it,  I have to ask for the photos of it.  The builder, though, sends me pictures of The Hole on the reg, unasked. He wants me to see it and can't wait for me to see it I think.    

   I know it's the last of the sunk columns, and it had to be dug by hand, but I think it's odd that my updates are more like 

  Builder: "Here you can see the progress we made on the last and hand- laid deep footing, may the angels sing God's praises and I took Golden Hour photos so you could see the glory of the masterly craftsmanship in this blessed magnum opus and also we finished the master bathroom but I'm sure you don't care about that here's another picture of this glorious hole. " 

Me:  OK, looks very good but please send me photos of the master bathroom also when you can. 

Builder.  OK. Here is a picture of the bathroom that I took while looking out the window at the Hole. Enclosed please find a picture of the bathroom as well as 8 more photos of the Hole as seen from the bathroom window. And also one more picture of the Hole. From Space. 

 Me:   The bathroom looks fantastic! Your tile guy does beautiful work. 

 Builder:  yes yes. He's adequate. What did you think of The Hole?   

It's not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

 Now I don't do much social media. I got out of Facebook after one of my nieces blew up at me online over a comment I made over the abortion issue about two years ago.  Now, I am pro-life without exception and without reservation. I'm even anti-death penalty, because nobody with an net worth over a certain amount ever gets to ride the lightning or take a hotshot in the antecubital. Until we have parity between rich and poor when it comes to putting the lights out on assholes, I'm for not giving the government power over life or death.  And this is not to say that I'm opposed to individuals doing what is needed to preserve life and property. Good fences make good neighbors, but as Vlad Tepes showed, Bad Neighbors can make  Good Fences. 

 But yeah, after damn near losing my niece, who I love, believe to be honestly wrong, and do not wish to lose, I deleted my facebook account. Social media is just social masturbation, a shitty substitute for having relationships with people.   I did keep Instagram, though, because it's mostly just pictures and video clips and the algorithm knows what you want. In my case, boobs, guns, and boats, and nothing else. 

     ... or it did. The coprophiliacs at Meta have realized that negative reactions create more clicks than positive. Somewhere along the way Instagram started steering me towards things I don't like, am not interested in, or don't tolerate and don't want. Around 6 months ago, I started seeing videos of people dying, LGBT issues, things for sale, or vapid retarded ugly and wealthy white people with weird colored hair saying the most foul, vile and absolutely stupid shit.  Less boobs, less guns, less boats. But when I did see those things, it was posts that were negative on the subject.  I am a boobs-positive person at my core. And to a lesser extent, I am a gun nut and boat nut too I guess. Either way, Instagram has become an exercese in Doom-Scrolling, where every interaction made me less and less happy. 

     I started saying things that were less polite about the things I was seeing. I started getting my comments deleted as a result. And that's fine. Life is hard enough without me getting my jollies being shitty to some stranger just because they were shitty first.  But it just kept getting worse. More and more egregious shit.  Within 2 minutes, while scrolling the gram doing my morning business  (I like to pump bilges on the seat of ease on waking up, start the day off positive), I would see somebody die or some 16 year old in a $200 shirt go on about why capitalism is bad. 

      I took it too far last month and used many of the new no-no words , any one of which trigger an instant automatic post removal. Using too many of them at once flags your account, turns out. Well, I got creative and used all of them at once (to be fair, on a morning where my morning poop was disappointing, it was raining and the first thing I saw was some fat hideous landwhale singing about how sexually stimulating her abortion was), and my account got deleted about an hour after I got the notice that my post was removed. 

   Well, that was a bummer.  But maybe I had it coming. And it was nice to have a few days where I wasn't doomscrolling and dealing with the overwhelming negativity. 

        2 weeks ago I started a new account on Instagram, and recontacted family. Keeping it light, not engaging in anything political, and going more or less boob-free, too. Nothing risque in the least.  Barely even PG, honest. Within 2 days I got a post saying my account has a 7-day ban for sharing my account with a service that farms likes and subscribers for you.  What the hell is even that? 

 Turns out, shallow terrible garbage people can share their account with foreign companies that bump up your subscribers using thousands of fake accounts so you look more popular. What kind of retarded guttermuppet trashbag even does that? I didn't know it was a thing. 

    Well, there's no way to say "hey, that's wrong, I didn't do that shit." so I took my ban, and a few days ago it passed. By then another dozen or so relatives and coworkers wanted to follow me. Great, now I could say yes. The algorithm can't feed you negative shit if you don't respond to anything, after all.  

 Except the next day, the ban came back for another week. Same reason. 

    I'm pretty sure I'm on a blacklist for thoughtcrime. 

   Well, jokes on them.  Turns out, by remembering to bring my reading glasses with me as soon as I get out of bed, I can read a quick page of whatever book I'm reading while on the Morning Seat.  I tend to read fiction almost exclusively, and I'm not into tragedies, so I'm back to being a big fucking ray of sunshine even before the caffeine hits.  Honest to God, I actually do feel a bit sunnier. I mean, I knew that social media is a cancer on the soul, but this is hard data here.  And when launching the Brown October of a morning, I am more apt to have a positive experience.     'Nuff said. 

Saturday and the Happy Banana

 Well, it's Saturday, God turned the heat on, and we're loaded deep here at the HQ. 

       Today was not looking like a good day. The first heat wave of the season is here in Satan's Anus 

 New York, and the weather is actually more moderate by far at my house in South FL. Sadly, I am not at my house in South FL, I'm here in Sodom New York. 

 The original plan was for back-to-back cargo discharges to two different ships, both getting a modest sup of heavy oil and diesel oil, which would take up my entire day, and given the volumes in question, requiring me to be out on deck broiling in the sun and stop-gauging the tanks for much of that time. 

       It's a funny thing about oil tank vessels. Electronic gauging systems are not that accurate. Not accurate enough, anyhow, in dealing with a high-value commodity like oil.  Oh, we're no paragons of accuracy in the trade, mind; nobody raises an eyebrow at a couple of barrels difference or a few tons here and there. What's 10 grand USD between friends, right?  Fun fact, after completely sucking the tanks dry when I was carrying gasoline or diesel 15 years ago when homeported in Philly,  we used to be able to fill up everyone's vehicles with leftover gasoline from the pipelines and sumps in the tanks. Just siphon it out with a whiz-bang pump (a Wilden pneumatic diaphragm pump).  This ended of course when some greedy shithead started filling up barrels in the back of his truck to take home, and got hisself pulled over carrying explosive hazmat in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge tunnel, which frowns upon things that go bang on their property.   I bet that guy is probably just getting off probation now,but for a time it was nice. Whoever happened to be at the dock that day got topped off. The oil left in the pump sumps in the tank and in the pipelines is either written off if it's not something that can be measured, or vacuumed out and removed forcibly by a tank cleaning barge if the next cargo going in that tank is not compatible with the one before.  You can ignore a barrel or two of diesel in 50,000 barrels of gasoline, but you can't ignore a barrel or two of gasoline in 50,000 barrels of diesel. In one case, the engine will run smoother. In the other, the engine will blow up, and has been known to blow ships in half in fact, when gasoline gets in to heavy fuel oil. burnt by the ship's engine. 

      So yeah, tank depth gauging is not accurate enough for what we need, and requires constant recalibration just to be a rough guide. We use multiple redundant systems to be sure we have what we want for oil, but all boils down to the Mark 1 Eyeball being the most accurate arbiter of volume. Every 1/8 inch in every tank has a corresponding volume associated with it, and as pipelines, internal framing, pumps and the shape of the hull vary, every tank has different values at a given height off the bottom. This is measured accurately enough that it's not unusual to find 1/4 or 1/2 inch difference of the total height of the tank itself, from bottom to top between port and starboard tanks next to each other. Tank vessels are built in blocks, and the blocks are assembled level, not plumb I think .I always was satisfied with a 1/8 inch plus or minus error in measurements for the few skiffs I've built, but model ships which tend to be about 4 feet long, of which I've built a few, they've got to be within a 1/16 where it doesn't matter and a 1/32 where it does. So I guess, when dealing with 300 feet of hull, a quarter or half inch of warp in the steel is what they have to deal with over long runs of welded material distorting. At any rate, hand measuring oil depth in the tank using a measuring tape with a weighted bob on it, or a sealed gauging gun (with a window for you to see the tape and  a hand crank to lift or drop it so you don't let vapors out) still means the eyes make the final measurement. 

           There are flowmeters that, when calibrated and adjusted for density of the oil, are now quite accurate. This was not the case in the past. In places in the world where fueling is a matter of lying, negotiating, bribing and fighting and the numbers don't matter as much as the skill of the parties involved in lying and negotiating, a not-super-accurate flowmeter isn't a big deal.  Here, we care, and accusing someone of being the scion of a long proud lineage of lying whores,  well, I will likely consider knocking such a man over and stomping on his head until it either changes shape or he apologizes politely with my size 12's testing the load bearing capacity of his temple. 

 So no, my employer did not see fit to outfit us with flowmeters and a criminal defense lawyer on retainer.  It would be nice, though, set up the job and sit in a cool cargo office and watch numbers tick by. But no, instead we hover over tanks, and with a gauging tape and bob, chase the surface of the oil down and shut the valves when we achieve the proper depth to take a certain volume out of that tank. Then repeat in other tanks, the volume being dictated by the total amount desired, and the tanks chosen based on keeping hull stress down (leaving some tanks full, some empty and some partially full puts strain on the keel. The hull will flex based on the weight of the oil in the tanks. We want a "Happy Banana" with the keel midships no more than a foot deeper in the water than the keel at the bow and stern. When empty, the keel is a "sad banana' with the bow and stern about 6 inches lower in the water than the midships. What we don't want is a VERY happy or sad banana, because then you break the keel.