Friday, March 15, 2024

Good evening?

 Crew change went pretty easy this time. For the first time since we started loading the absolute cold dogshit oil that one customer started giving us this past fall, on our second cargo since I got back, we loaded a blistering hot, thin, high-quality fuel oil from another customer, one of the oil majors, and the stuff was so wholesome that it scoured a full inch of old, crusty resudue off of the 18 inches or so of unpumpable filth that is glued to the bottom of our tanks. 


 I wish we could load that stuff 17 more times.  Sadly, tomorrow morning we're back to load a big parcel of nastiness again. 

 But that's for tomorrow. Tonight we're free and at anchor, Glory Be and long may the bunker gods squat down and grunt to shit light on the heads of we the damned. 


       I slept this morning. Some delays last night caused by an awkwardly-placed support beam on the large container ship we were pumping off to caused the ship's crew to not be able to connect our main fueling hose before we reached 0530, my watch change where Big E takes over. As I am still much too calm and stable after having a week at home, the newly arrived has to work night watch. After a week of night watch I will be sufficiently unhappy to take over as the day man, the guy who is the face of the HQ when it comes to interacting with the office drones, engineers, bosses, etc.  Heaven forfend that I give the wrong idea and say hello with a smile when outsiders interact with us. They need to know exactly how much we hate life while dealing with this oil on board which acts like gelled lukewarm diarheaa. . 

            So yeah, back to normal. I'm still armored by the "If you don't give a fuck why should I' mentality as we complete cargoes poorly given the nature of the cargo.  I guess that's what makes today's discharge so special to us. I was still asleep when Big E finished the job, but where this was the first time where we actually pumped off all the oil we were given in... 4 months I think? Big E was in tearing high spirits. 

          One thing about E and I, we've discovered that we tend to absorb the other's emotional state. E had cautioned me several times back in January that after talking to me he wanted to put his head in the oven, back when we were finishing each job with the HQ sitting an inch deeper than it was the job before. I apologized profusely for it and last month made a point to not look at the HQ through shit-colored glasses, which actually put both of us in a better place, as he did the same.  So today I let myself bask in his inner glow and we celebrated after I drank a quart of energy drink by pulling a couple of our mooring lines out of service and dragging some replacement lines in.  300 feet of hawser is heavy and our to-go-ashore storage for old running rigging is a long walk from some of the lines. The weather being downright pretty helped- long-t-shirt weather and sunny, which is ideal. Just cool enough to prevent a sweat at the workload involved. 

    Really, the old mooring lines are just a couple of hundred pounds each, so we grab and end and pull it until it's a strain, then go grab another part of the same line 100 feet further down and pull that until the whole line is close enough that it can be faked down (stowed neatly where it will feed out neatly when moved) out of the way in its' temporary home. So we put 3 lines out of service, and put 3 new lines in. The new lines are heavier than the old, as the old lines generally wear out at the eyes, the terminal ends, and when they break, which happens as they age, we resplice new eyes, which costs 15-20 feet of line, shortening it... so if we resplice a line twice at each end... 60-80 feet is lost. 


 Anyhow, tonight is quite lovely. The sunset was really nice. I missed my wife something fierce. She's one of the only non-sailors I know who is a true sunrise/sunset aficionado.  I may demand cash on the barrel in exchange for my work, but part of my pay is all the sunrises and sunsets I can stand. 'S always been that way, too. I LOVED watching the sunrise when I was 8-9 and loading 5 gallon buckets of bait on the lobsterboat- the old timer who taught me to fish poured out the barrels into buckets so we could tote them in manageable lots. Child labor is the best labor.  Later I learned in high school to roll Irish barrels (42 gallon barrels by partially tipping them about 20 degrees an-end and steering while I rolled. At age 18, I would just hug and lug the barrels.  As an actual adult after my first pulled back muscles that caused me to miss fishing for 4 days, I went back to rolling them. 

   I've still got the core strength from all that. It's just that my joints don't like it no more. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is flabby and aches. 


 Anyhow, tonight I crack open the books and fire up my desk to get paperwork up to date and then I should have time to made a decent stir-fry for night lunch.  I'll be working all night tomorrow, but there's a possibility that the evening of the 17th, the highest of high holy days of those born in Boston, Irish Christmas itself, the feast of St. Patrick, we might have a break between jobs.  As I'm on nights, I will be able to catch the Irish music on the Boston radio stations online I hope. The corned beef will be defrosting starting tomorrow. 



Monday, March 11, 2024

Much much too fast

 I'm sitting at my kitchen table, putting together travel arrangements to go back to NY tomorrow for work. It was a fine, FAST 6 days at home, but all in all it was a good run ashore. It's sunny and warm, around 80 with light breezes outside, my wife has some kind of focaccia bread and cheese and tomato thing in the oven cooking and the whole house smells like garlic and olive oil.  Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife has been cooking up a storm, and being half Italian, the girl can COOK.   


   I made a few mistakes, attributable to enthusiasm. I drank too much on my first night home, and got up early the next morning and did a bunch of heavy labor, and by 8 am I had sweated through a couple of shirts and was dehydrated. And hung over. Because I am an idiot, that's why.  At any rate, I spent the rest of the day more or less on the couch nauseous, but by that evening I was good to go again and my wife had taken a couple of days off so we got to spend about 4 days joined at the hip, which was exactly what I needed given that I've been home for a total of 3 weeks I think since October and only had 6 days at home this time... I won't be doing any overtime this trip and will have a more normal run ashore in April, and time enough to be social.  


        This time other than one night out with my wife and another with my wife and son (who is home from sea too), we spent most of the time cooped up in the house, which I think we all needed. 


 I'm not going back to work relaxed, I didn't have enough time for that... but I am going back to work feeling better than I did, and that's all to the good. February was a good month aboard HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HQ/ Center for involuntary celibacy, but I was still reeling from January, which sucked massive camel wang. I was telling my wife over the weekend about how badly January at work fucked me all up emotionally by making me doubt my career choices, this being my 42nd year of working on the water coming up (I started at age 8 for the princely sum of $10 a day baiting lobster pots), but thankfully February had enough days where things went OK enough for me to get back on an even keel, and hopefully March will continue that trend. 



Anyhow, lunch is ready, gotta go. One last day before crew change. 


Sunday, March 3, 2024

3 watches and a wake-up to go.

 Wow, OK, thank you very much to the good people who left a comment on my last post. Tonight's another quiet night aboard (thank you God), and I was able to go for a walk ashore this afternoon, too. Good day. I go home in a few days, though just for a week. 

     All of New York decided to go for a walk around Brooklyn Bridge Park, which shares an entrance with the container terminal/lay berth piers where the HQ is docked while we wait for a berth to open up at the tank farm where our next job will start. This meant that on my walk, the sidewalks were so congested that it wasn't possible to stay in step for more than 15 seconds at a time (not exaggerating) and I spent much of my walk winding my way around people. The smell of weed and foreigners (B.O.) lay thick enough that it wasn't possible to forget about it... and the side streets were little better, so my walk wasn't all that enjoyable, but all the same, it's still better than walking in circles around deck ad nauseum, so there's that. 

   The past 5 weeks have been pretty good overall. We're still dealing with  solidified oil in our tanks that will not pump off, and more building with every job, and it now takes compressed air being blasted into the pipelines to clear a path for oil to flow within our pipelines... the problems of ow temperatures and oil that is stupid to use in cold locales, oil with very high pour points (the temperature below which the oil stops flowing) haven't been addressed, but I have finally stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb, as my spirit animal Dr. Strangelove recommended. The office folks don't care. Should I? 

 It's been hard, detaching my ego, sense of pride, the desire to do things well and correctly and my work ethic, too, from how I do my job. If nobody gives a fuck that the oil we're carrying is a nightmare, that the receivers hate it and hate us because of it, and every job leaves less and less room in our tanks as residues build,  why should I? So long as I can keep it out of the water and go home with 10 fingers and 10 toes, I'm still doing the job to the best of my ability. Agonizing over the fact that no matter what I do I can't do my job correctly  enough to have the satisfaction of a cargo completed is exhausting, so I try not to dwell on it, and I have stopped apologizing to the victims receivers. Ships that are regular visitors to NY are already avoiding the supplier of the problem oil, so I figure that this problem solves itself. 

   And it has been slower. Thank God for that. With time in between jobs, since everything takes longer than it should, and since part of the time we have to return oil to the supplier because we literally can't get our pumps to pump it  (which means returning the oil by loading MORE of it, heated higher, then pumping it off and reloading it, which leaves an inch or three of new cold oil bottoms on top of the oil that was already there), and try to get it to the next ship before it turns solid again. 

    So, yeah, the pace is more reasonable than it has been. it's like things were up until COVID. We have free time every week, sometimes just a half-day, sometimes more, but I have been at this company for 15 years, and for the first 12 years THIS was the pace. Optimum for sustainability in terms of our equipment, mental health and well-being too. Going non-stop is hard on the metal and hard on the meat. Actually its made me realize how much I hate my job now compared to just 3 years ago, because this past month I actually enjoyed the work a couple of times. Splicing a damaged mooring line the other night, it was cold and quiet and the ocean was calm enough to reflect the Manhattan skyline in the distance. Really pretty moment. Shit like that is worth it's weight in gold. 

   I'm still trying to figure out what happened, in that I've been working on the water for, wow, 42 years. I started at age 8, and I've always loved it, and then I didn't, and then I was trying to avoid thinking about it because I hated it so much that I stopped looking out at the ocean, stopped taking enjoyment of the little things that made shoreside work so unpalatable in comparison... I'm hopeful that I have again found a place to hang my hat in terms of justifying being a mariner. Time will tell I guess. This past month has shown me that there's still a lot of good things attached to my work for me. I hope it keeps going. 



Tuesday, February 27, 2024

dear diary

 More and more I am thinking that this blog has run its' course.  It's certainly been a number of years.  I am at a point career-wise where things are on autopilot and I just work to keep my credentials current. I have the connections. credentials and the pull at my company to switch to being tug crew if I want and make more money... but I don't' want it. In less than 3 months I'll be 50.  I haven't grown MORE tolerant of being in close proximity to coworkers over time, so being hotboxed with 4-5 other grown men in a rolly-assed tugboat for weeks at a time sounds like punishment at this point.  I'm good where I am. 

Instead of a story, I offer you these fine things:  







Monday, February 19, 2024

That's better

 Thank God for small favors we have returned to a sane pace here on the HQ. 

     It's actually been on the slow side. I hate even writing that lest it come to an end, but we've been working at an age-appropriate rate lately. It's been great. I feel a lot better, even moreso than I did 2 weeks ago when I said I was feeling good.  Not that I'm running around shining sunshine out my ass or anything but I am not living with regret for my career choices at every meal, which was unpleasant. 


         So, construction in Brazil continues but slowly. Outside contractor REALLY tried to fuck us on the pool. Guys wanted 130,000 local bucks, about 30 grand for the pool, start to finish. Our architect/builder, who married into the family a few years ago, said absolutely not to take the deal. He agreed to dig the hole with his excavator for gas money, about $100, as he could use the fill elsewhere, and offered less than half of what the bidders were suggesting, until someone took it, who turned out to be a franchise pool builder with a good rep.  The demolition, with the exception of some excavating, is about done.  The main house is about ready to be closed up again, as right now there aren't any windows and it's just bare cement walls, a roof and window holes ready for windows to be installed.

       Since I don't plan on owning a car in Brazil, I am putting a big pergola over the side yard where the driveway used to be.  

     I decided to have columns sunk to support a 2nd floor if we ever go that route. I already have a big walled yard, and won't be able to expand OUT without buying the 3-house compound next door that belongs to one of Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's cousins. I ain't giving up my backyard to add to the big house. 

    My wife and I will be staying in a detached master bedroom with en-suite shithouse in the side yard. It'll have a decent sitting room attached, and the outdoor covered kitchen we'll be using to host get-togethers outside that. There's a cabana/pool bathroom/laundry room on the other side of the pool so the fam doesn't have to track shit on my floors in the big house or mine. 


       I'm one of those people who doesn't like anyone in my bedroom, pretty much ever. I pretty much even trained my kid not to go in there without there being a pressing emergency. So my little bedroom area will be locked up tighter than a bulls ass during blackfly season when I'm not in it. 

My part of the house on the left. The gray wall in the background is an error






outdoor kitchen with wood-fired oven, gas oven, gas range and bar

pool cabana/head//laundry on left, fountain on the right is now 7 feet up. 


       I don't have renderings of the main house or the side yard and such. My wife might. I pretty much only care about the parts where I can hang my hat. the main house is more or less where the ladies are. I want to stay close to the bar. 


Thursday, February 8, 2024

I crack myself up

 The other day a 3rd party tugboat was charioteering us for a job, and one of the deckhands was pretty green and had some attitude. 

     Welp, here I go again. 


       This kid, he was a worker, and seemed pretty quick to pick things up... but the attitude... naw.  18-19, black kid, urban accent, you know, generic.  Hell, good for him, kid's working hard and making good money out of the box. We need 50 more like him... but we were approaching a PCTC, a car carrier, those retarded-looking but VERY useful ugly ass mofos. 



These things are awkward AF to deal with. Good ships, apparently, to work on and to sail on, surprisingly enough.  They're floating parking lots with multiple decks inside that you drive stuff onto and park... but to make more room, some of the decks are mounted on hydraulics, so you can lift or lower a whole deck if you've got compact cars, say, and can make room for more rather than leaving an air gap between the roof of the car and the next deck above. 


    At any rate, these things are awkward to tie to for us.   That main deck, 100 or so feet in the air? We don't tie up to there. Instead, the ships have Panama Chocks- mooring bitts mounted INTO the hull in recesses, to which bunker barges (or Panama Canal railroad engines to drag you through) can moor. 

   In the ship above, down low towards the stern, you'll see a ling rectangular recessed area under the Y and the K. That's the Accommodation Ladder, the ship's gangway, more or less. Also in the recessed area is a Crucifix Bitt, a cross-shaped bitt ideal for bunker barges to moor with.  But under the N there's another recess, about 8 feet on a side, and that's the bunker station, an area with pipe connections for heavy fuel, diesel fuel, and various grades of lube oils for the engine and generators.  

    So for me, I like to have the HQ lie head-to-tail with the ship, where my bow is at his stern. Our mooring fenders, three each side, each able to withstand multiple tons of crushing force, I try to land at least two of them and a portable fender (small rubberized solid fenders, about 3' across, weighing about 100lbs, and slightly compressible that I hang wherever two men can muscle it.  In PCTC's my forward fender usually ends up not being able to contact the side of the ship (the flat, also called the parallel midbody), and so we end up resting on a portable fender and two of our fixed fenders.  The issue there is that it's possible to wedge part of my barge under the non-flat parts of the ship's bow and stern if we don't land exactly flat to the ship. This causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and possibly a hole in the ship, or more often, it simply flattens things like our light masts used for flood lighting and such. Either way it's a nightmare, and so everyone is vigilant for the least sign that we're getting 'out of shape' and might not be square to the ship's side and therefore able to touch up safely. 


   Anyways, that's a long setup for a 5 second joke for sure.   So we're coming alongside this ship somewhere around 2am, and I'm talking and walking around with a walkie-talkie, talking to the deckhands and the tug operator. The experienced deckhand is calling out distances and relative motion to the tug operator, the new kid is handling lines and we're all trying to work together to be sure the tug operator knows what is happening, since much of his view is obscured by my barge's houses and the deck itself. This is where an experienced team of tug operator and lookout are absolutely worth their weight in gold. Imagine having a kid 30 years younger than you, who can't even drive a boat, telling you what you need to do in terms of throttle and movement, giving advice or simply asking you to make us move one way or another... there's a lot of trust involved. 

   So the new kid is my hands, pretty much, and the deckhand is the tug operator's eyes AND hands on deck.  I have to split my time and attention between what the tug is doing, what the people are doing, and what I need to be able to do in terms of mooring safely and being able to do my job. It sounds harder than it is. It's not a difficult thing at all, but important of course. 

    At any rate, I have a habit, maybe good or maybe bad, of not wanting to get involved with the mooring lines while I'm still trying to figure out the best way to tie us up and get us into position. And so when we get the all-important first line made fast to the ship, the tug now has good control of the whole operation. He can clutch the throttles in and out of  gear to come into the first line and keep the barge snug against the ship, using the force of his engines to push the barge ahead, and the now-tight first line will cause us to spring ahead and alongside the ship. 

         I try not to be rude to the deckhands, but I'm rushing, we're all rushing. And so, thoughtlessly because these guys are strangers, once we have the first line made fast to the ship but not made fast to one of our bitts or cleats, I think I just said. "Here, take this and make it fast. After we're snug alongside he'll tell you to let it go again, just let the line pay out when the mate tells you and I'll call out distances to the Spot I want. '  and I think I said this abruptly and I sort of thrust the bight of line in my hand into his. 

     So yeah, the kid was nonplussed.  I guess what I said and did could be interpreted as rude, to a landsman. I didn't cuss or say anything bad, and I don't think I had a snotty tone of voice or anything, but it rubbed him the wrong way, which rubbed me the wrong way, you know?  It's marine work. No place for your precious fee-fees to get hurt.  It's true, though, I didn't say please or thank you. I often do. 

 Either way, I could tell that the kid's feeling real soggy and hard to light. As we work our way through the other 5 mooring lines I used for that job, I'm now annoyed he's annoyed, and so I'm still not saying please or thank you. I'm not antagonizing, either, though.  When the last line was secure, I said "OK, all fast. You guys did great. Thank you both,"  which is both recognition and a dismissal, and  we wandered off. The experienced deckhand  gave me a friendly pro-forma  'no worries, thank you too,: and the men went back on their tugboat. As the tugboat is casting off (they have 4 lines made up to the barge, so it takes a few minutes) I ask about their next job, as the same tug is due back in 6-8 hours to take us off the ship when we finish pumping, and they tell me they've got a quick job and will be back in a few hours to wait for me to finish. I said,  "OK, good enough. See you in a couple of hours. Go. Go Make Daddy Proud."  The experienced deckhand  laughed at that, but the new kid, boy howdy he didn't like that. But what the hell, if you can't take a joke, you have no business working on the water, I figure. 

   Eh, the kid will learn. He doesn't seem a bad sort. Maybe he was King Shit back home, but here he's just another dancing bear at our Retard Circus. Joking is a pressure relief valve, and jokes that don't single out anyone are the best kind. 



Monday, February 5, 2024

Centered

 Well, damn, I feel a lot better. 


      I've been trying to articulate why it is that I've had constipation of the soul for the past few weeks after a particularly trying tour on the HQ over the holidays... and I still can't quite explain it, except that I note that I feel fine now. Back to what I laughingly call normal. 

             My job was making me look bad and making me feel incompetent, through no fault of my own and my ego wasn't having it. I'm a pretty fart smeller, I can make things better even when the job isn't going to go right. I can make it go less wrong. 

    Oh the hubris. We had bad oil. Nobody gives a shit in the office. Why the fuck should I?  Sure I look like an incompetent, along with all the other retards in this circus who have to hump this difficult to pump oil to suckers  the charterer's customers. 

   Anyhow, couple of days off meant that I had a couple of days to cook, clean, and lose myself in some tankerman Arts N' Crafts projects- organize some storage lockers, stack boxes of supplies, test the coolant's specific gravity in the gens and cargo pumps, have a suck at the bottom of the hydraulic tank sumps and look for metal filings, water or other contaminants... I even got to lube all the zerks on board early this month. Wintertime is hell on the machinery.  Plus, with the new year, there's dumb shit that we sometimes don't give much thought to, like swapping out the batteries on the life ring emergency lights, and the water-activated lights on our gumby suits, the survival suits we have to wear if we want to survive going in the water. I'd be a bit put out if I got woken up from a dead sleep and told that we had to ditch, only to find that the Here I am light on my Jolly Green (the suit is red, the bag it comes in is green, signaling that the suit is size Fatass) isn't working.  

 So, yeah, the HQ's stocked up and later today we've got a small batch of cargo fixed for a car carrier who's coming in late tonight.  


     To go back to what I was bitching about earlier, I was pretty stressed in Jan. Shit going wrong in Brazil at our house under construction, work/life balance getting a bit fucked, etc etc. We all have things bothering us.  Sometimes I feel like I have too low of a bar set where I start to get stressed.  Still, I had a particularly relaxing time home that soothed the burn and coming back to work has been startlingly enough, a return to normalcy for values of normal, anyhow. 

    

     While I was home we spent some time in Miami- I had to get a Brazilian CPF, their equivalent of a social security number, and so having knocked that out at the consul, and anticipating that it might be a classic Brazilian Government interaction (turning a 5 minute process into a 2 day affair), I reserved a hotel room, so we had the rest of the day to ourselves, and so among other things, we wandered around the market around pier 5 and had a blast, day drinking and playing tourist. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I sucked down a bunch of mojitos and ate local seafood, and after, the feeling of decompression was palpable to me, as my stress levels ratcheted down. My wife got hit on by a Cuban bartender, but only once, and was feeling a little down as a result. But she ate an ice cream cone and attracted a bit of an audience in the process, to which I later pointed out, her being oblivious, and she turned as red as her blouse. Anyhow, ego restored.  I'm kind of used to it. 



 




      I was already a lot better by the time I came back to work, and now my liver is resting comfortably too, as it got a bit of a workout at home. 




Unfortunately, it's not all sunshine and roses outside of my little sphere of influence. Blog buddy BCE learned recently that his Mrs. has breast cancer. This is at the tail end of a nightmare year where he had to leave home to try to gain custody of his grandchild out of state against a startlingly corrupt DCS system which meant heroic efforts that affected his mental health and damn near bankrupted him. Guys' a machine, and a good egg to boot, another reformed Masshole like me, too,  and his wife getting cancer of the cans is a real fuck you from above, IMO.  Now, BCE has reason to be stressed. I feel like a cunt crying that my job is hard lately, waah.  I mean, couple of months, I turn 50. We're not kids anymore, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I. The trials of old age are coming, of course they are. I hope i can keep my shit together as well as some of the people I have met when they come. I wonder at it, at me. I hope I conduct myself as well as the people I've met who have real stress to deal with.