It has its moments

 I'm home, I'm warm, I'm sleeping better.

     All good.  Renovations at my house have started, which is disruptive. New kitchen countertops and new floors on most of my first floor meant that  after arriving home I had to disconnect the bathroom vanity's water connections, pull fhe vanity, the washer and dryer, the furniture, lamps and sundries and the refrigerator and stow them elsewhere. And then I could go to bed.  So we're camping out in my house for the next week. 

  Of course it wasn't withiut some hiccups. Oneof the shut off valves for the washing machine was leaking by, as was one of the ones for the laundry sink. No matter what I did I couldn't get them to not leak by, so we did without water overnight and I had to make a couple of trips to Home Depot because of course one was a friction fit and the other was threaded. 

    Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife had never heard a jackhammer before, so having one working 10 feet away behind some plastic sheeting to keep the dust down was a bit of a shock. Luckily we all have good earpro, being a house of shooters, so going about our business in the mostly-empty kitchen as best we can at 150dB is workable. 

 Anyhow, I have some family visiting Disney a couple of hours to the north so it's a great time to go say hi. 

 In the meanwhile we went to a waterfront bar laat night and had fried shrimp and mahi mahi and a couple of drinks, which is bad for the waistline but good for the soul. 

   It's good to not be at work even if I have to go in the living room to see what's in the fridge. 

Winter

 Well, the cold is back. 

 It's presently a relatively balmy 10 degrees F. Gonna be 1 tonight, but it's blowing 40kts, gusting close to 60. Frostbite risk tonight for sure. 

   Unfortunately we also have a complex discharge tonight that will require me to spend a lot of time outside on deck... We loaded three different feedstocks to make a Very Low Sulfur heavy Fuel Oil  (VLSFO, a clean burning residual (#6) fuel oil)  destined for a powerplant in the Bronx tonight. The first feedstock was ultra dense and viscous, and the terminal we loaded from, in their great wisdom, kept the oil in a tank with a tiny pipeline that is uninsulated in parts... this is an oil (HAFO, Highly Aromatic Fuel Oil, basically an oil that has a nasty habit of shedding nasty (mostly nonflammable under normal conditions)) molecules into gas form. Stinky stuff. Smells like sulfur and really cheap shitty perfume... But energy dense like you wouldn't believe.  So, we laid down a thin layer of that stuff in our tanks, which should hsve tanken an hour but took 24,  and by the time it got to us it had partially resolidified into a molasses-in-the-refrigerator texture... then we used two types of 'cutter stock,' oils similar to clean diesel, thst will dilute and thin the heavy crap... but the terminal's pumps are ridiculously slow. 40 hours to load what would take just 4 hours elsewhere. The bummer being that in order to blend products of wildly different densities and/or temperatures, you need mechanical agitation, otherwise the oils just stratify and don't blend... and the little transfer pumps the terminal is using, well, the oil moves, but not fast enough to agitate anything. Just a slow, smooth movement. 

 I bitch but I have a point... now, this stuff is destined for a standby power plant's fuel tank. It will get pumped into that one big, empty tank and when we're done the oil will be heated and recirculated in the tank, blending it nicely.

 The idea is to blend it in my tanks first, so the heavy stuff doesn't turn solid in my tanks and become unpumpable, which heavy oil does at low temps.  The HQ doesn't have steam lines or volcanic cargo heaters, as we don't do long voyages, but in winter, oil needs to go in hot and not be in our tanks longer than 3 days. 

  Well, small, slow pumps, cold uninsulated pipelines, the oil's only a little above 90 degrees in the middle of my heavy oil tanks, so it's substantially cooler at the bottom.  Luckily we should be starting to pump it off less than 10 hours from when we finished loading.

    My point here is that there will be oil of a marshmallow-like consistancy to deal with in the bottom of my tanks. Ever try sucking a really thick chocolate shake through a soda straw?  I have to be on the scene to make sure I don't bake the pump impellers, overload the cargo engines and blow out the stuffing boxes (packing glands) of the pump shafts... and it's the damn stuffing boxes that are the ones to watch. 

      Pulling massive vacuum suction to get viscous oil to flow, means we'll be at a huge vacuum on the suction side of the pump, but on the discharge side we'll be pushing 100psi of force to get the oil into my discharge piping and to the cargo hoses going ashore.  All that force will be exerted on the seals of the pump shafts, and viscous oil at 100psi puts ENORMOUS force on the seals, which absolutely will leak by slightly so as not to blow out... so there will be solid oil oozing out over the pump well sides and making an enormous mess that is almost impossible to clean up between November and April... so I want zero mess, obviously, and I don't want to barbecue all my pump equipment in the process, so I'll be there watching, putting my hands on things (gauges freeze sometimes, so I can't trust 'em) and generally trying to be a good do-bee. 

 Which would be fine except for it being 3 degrees and blowing a gale. 

  Still, every winter has to have a 'coldest night of the year' in it.  So not a big deal, just has to be dealt with. 

Edit:  Too much wind, not enough cargo. As we're lightly loaded and the wind is just retarded strong, the office made the call to delay our sailing. We're only lightly loaded, so the HQ's hull presents a LOT of sail area for the wind to bite on, and we'd be brawling trying to tie up and maneuver at low speeds. 

 Good call, IMO. Had we been fully loaded with more hull underwater, we could deal with the wind grabbing our topsides and superstructure, maybe crabbing us a bit. But I am happy the People In Ties chose to let me live to fight another day. 

An Anal-ogy

 Going on Instagram and X is like looking in the hole of a porta-potty. 

 God damn the mob. I may not go back on land. Ever. 

Fun by the bucketload

 Well... shit.

     Still got running water. We're iced in pretty good at the moment here close to Brooklyn Bridge Park. A tugboat will be able to get us out of here with a little throttle I'm sure but man, it's been YEARS since we had this much ice screwing with us. 

 I'm grateful we have running water, but sadly the black water piping and the MSD (ye olde poop tank) froze up yesterday so we got a 2 ton shitcicle downstairs... so, while we can still wash and such, peeing over the side is called for, as is pooping in a bucket once again. 

 And with all the ice around us, there's no hiding exactly where the buckets' contents go over the side. 

     If you're a Patrick O'Brien fan, you'll know what I mean when I say Admiral Brown is close by. 

 I'm getting too old for this shit.

My everything is sore

 

     Well. 

            It's been unpleasant.  Single digit temps at night, everything is frozen, and 2 days of shoveling followed by 2 days of constantly slipping on deck and catching myself has my back screaming. 

    We're busy. Yesterday was nonstop and a crewing snafu led to me being mostly on deck from 5 am to midnight. The warm oil we were carrying melted some of the snow on deck, which refroze into ice rink- grade smooth ice on the bare patches that have appeared where shoveling was really aggressive.

    My feet hurt like hell too, from being cold for so long and my boots being uninsulated, as those boots have the best treads for ice. 

        I did put on a pair of slip on steel cleats on my boots when we were making up to the assist tug.  Their push cables are heavy, usually put about 100-150lbs of force on us to drag onto a bitt, and standing close to a deck edge coated in ice... no. I want a good grip. Those cleats are uncomfortable too, but for 10 minutes at a time they're fine. 

Panic!

 So it's gonna snow I guess. 

 It's snow.   Calm down. Worst case, stay home a little extra. Oh My God! 

 Now, guys in Texas and the gulf coast have a reason to panic. They're not set up for a big storm. Here in the northeast, it's been 10-12 years since we got a serious snowstorm.  10-12 years since we got a REGULAR WEATHER EVENT. 

      Granted, all the many, many new foreigners and some of the youngest of the young idiots behind the wheel are absolutely going to kill themselves and those around them this weekend as they drive like fucking idiots on a good day, and there won't be good days for the next week or so. 

       For most of the rest of us?  Inconvenience.  The media's flipping out over inconvenience.

 Well, even so, I hear that Bread and Milk are sold out. Snow's coming, gotta get the bread and milk. Don't ask why, just get it. Bring a knife, gun or a baseball bat. Might need it.

   Now, I come from New England and the only difference between a large snow storm and a cold day without snow is whether or not you put on the regular winter Coat or your Big Coat.          Maybe I'm biased. I'm on the water and with Condition Whisky declared (ports remain open, gales expected, vessels must be prepared for heavy weather and  high winds, and must declare intent to the Coast Guard to arrive or leave port) after 12 days of nonstop work locally, we're starting a 2-lull coincidentally, and lashed up at a lay berth in Brooklyn Bridge Park. No shore access, which is sad, but we're rafted up against a big ATB (Articulated Tug-barge) twice our size, which means we don't have to contend with tides, and just need to tend our mooring lines and hopefully keep 'em static. 

         Stay warm out there.  I got like an acre or more of deck to shovel.  Gotta limber up. 

One week in: Report

 Week two begins with dog watches, where over the course of 24 hours we work shorter watches until we are switched, so I went from nights to days. 

    It's busy, as Winter is here. Nonstop more or less, but I got enough time off and a berth yesterday to get groceries, and armed with what I need my morale is reasonable despite working mostly nonstop. 

        It's cold. Approached zero a couple of times, we had snow and 2 ice storms, two days in a row that made trouble. Soaking rain gets between pipe flanges, where 2 pipes are bolted together, freezes into ice, and expands, opening up the pipe join, causing a leak. 

 That, and the damn rain got into the hydraulic valve for the boom (arm up/arm down) control for my port deck crane and it freezes periodically, locking the control and requiring a hammer to break loose, which isn't good for the lever... 

   ...but we're holding

. My teeth are wiped and my ass is minty clean as the fresh water hasn't frozen, which makes a *huge* difference in morale aboard. 

    It's cold. Uncomfortable, and I slip on the ice on deck at times, but we're holding.  Work gets done, maintenance too, though the occasional annoying non-routine task now becomes something arduous given the temps.

 But we're holding. 

     We're between gales today. Days where tye wind is under 25kts are a treat. Gales twice a week minimum. 

But we're holding.