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. 

tough week and second thoughts about OT

 Everything's OK. 

   Well, everything's ok FOR ME. 

     I passed Halfway Day yesterday, so I'm on the downward slope of this tour already. Week 1 purely sucked with all the fill-in crew who were... how to put this diplomatically? Far too unskilled and unknowledgeable to be doing the job they are paid for, which consists of breath-having, heartbeat-having and being my backstop.  Week 2?   Like when you hit yourself with a hammer over and over, the best thing is the feeling when you stop. Week 2 was a pleasure because it was OK.  Big E is not my backstop. He's my equal. We're both capable of doing the same job, which means we have twice the minimum skillset on board. Good reset on my outlook. 

    And here we are. I have a spot lined up in Philadelphia/Baltimore when I get off here, so rather than going home I am going to get back to hitting myself with the hammer for profit before coming back to the HQ for another tour. 

    The house in Brazil is sucking up money like a $2 whore on dollar day. So it goes. 

        But seriously, this week around many of the blogs everyone's neck deep in the shit, and I'm not. I'm just fine.  Seriously.  

 Borepatch had some nasty skin cancer removed. 

BCE  continues with The Only Way Out Is Through. 

CedarQ had a mini-stroke. 

Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man, who is in the running for The World's Nicest Guy, had THREE kidney surgeries and has to frigging wait to heal before they give him back the on/off switch to his bladder. 

           And me? I'm OK.  A little bummed that I'm working 10 weeks straight away from home and then going home for just 2 weeks, but I mean, I ASKED to stay. Gotta get a mirror if I want to yell at the guy responsible. 

______________________________________

         When I pull a stunt like I am doing now, overstaying my time at work, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife will at times try to change my mind, or barring that, punish me in a mild way and remind me of my stupid decisions without creating a conflict over it. 

    After a serious talk last night where we talked about construction on the house in Brazil, the cost being borne (she's working 70-80 hours a week herself), and my need to pull a 10-weeker to throw some extra cash on the burn pile, she agreed that I made the right call but she still didn't like it. 

 Anyhow she sent me a picture this morning when she got up, one of those See What You're Missing Dummy pictures.

I'm gonna catch hell for posting her fresh out of bed without makeup. The cleavage thing, she doesn't care. She's a Brazilian indio;  getting clothes on them is like trying to baptize a cat. 

            Ugh. gonna be a long 10 weeks. 

A walk in Brooklyn

 The stars came in alignment and we've had 2 days' run ashore in Brooklyn around the Brooklyn Heights/Dumbo neighborhood. 

 The last two days I have gone ashore at 0630, to walk the Brooklyn piers, which they call Brooklyn Bridge Park, and then uphill through Dumbo, back to the Heights, and then downhill again to the Brooklyn piers and our lay berth. 5 miles. It's warming up here in the northeast, so I have been leaving early but not too early to get drinks at a couple of the stores along the way in the 2nd half of my walk. 

        When I was a kid, it was not unusual for us to walk a mile and a half to get a bottle of soda. As a teen we'd do a 5 mile circuit of my section of town, which passed by several convenience stores in the landward part before getting to the waterfront where there are no commercial businesses. 

 So it goes. Old habits I guess. These days I'm buying seltzer water on my walks to keep the blood pressure between the goalposts. I still take in way too much caffeine but I have limits. 

      Yesterday's walk was actually very pleasant. There were not many people out and I had moments to myself while I was around Brooklyn Bridge park. Just me and  some joggers going past. Mostly people younger than me, so likely these were upwardly mobile professionals trying to keep fit.

      I look down on the locals, for their choice to live in poverty conditions once they step outside their massively overpriced apartments. There's a shit ton of money in the area, but it's a massive dump on the streets.  The park, which is 95% concrete and steel with some pretty nice tree stands here and there that give you a momentary illusion of privacy... well, that's all they have.  I go a half mile west of my house, I have the Everglades, and the next paved road is 40-50 miles away.   Granted, immediately to my south and east is one of the most densely populated regions of the US, but leave me my illusions. 

   But yeah, after walking under the Brooklyn bridge I cross into Dumbo, which is White Brooklyn, and it still looks like a steaming turd, but there is slightly less dogshit and homeless to step over, which is pleasant. There's also the on and offramps around both the Brooklyn and Midtown bridges, so it's back to full cityscape and honking cars, but I can get a drink from one of the stores, and the stores are stores, not bodegas reselling obviously stolen merchandise. It's also a vaguely uphill part of the walk, and drops me at Brooklyn Heights or maybe downtown Brooklyn, I dunno. By then I'm back in the hellscape and I just march through and back towards the familiar neighborhood uphill from the lay berths. 

       The Last Store was a non-bodega bodega, a little latin-owned store with a deli-counter that is the last (or first) place to get a drink or hot food before you hit Brooklyn Bridge park and out lay berth. I liked the store- It was obviously family owned, and always spotless with wide aisles and open space, and smelled good, like familiar food smells, kinda homey. Place you could get a sandwich and bring it back to the HQ and not spend the next 3 hours with painful spicy diarrhea.    

        Recently, as arab-owned smoke shops move in, literally 3 to a block, and middle easterners buy out all the stores that are starting to struggle as the neighborhood starts to go to shit (I defy anyone to identify a smoke shop that does not destroy local property values), I came to value The Last Store more. In general I don't like bodegas- they're dirty, claustrophobic, and generally promote petty theft, as many or maybe most of them receive stolen goods taken by douchebag smurfs who steal from other stores on a professional basis. The Last Store wasn't like that. 

    I say 'wasn't' because I walked in there yesterday, there's middle eastern music playing, the deli menu overhead was painted over, and it smelled unclean. The 3 aisles had been increased to 5, with not enough room for me to walk without hitting shit with my shoulders. I'm fairly broadshouldered, but not exceptionally so... and of course, theress the disorganized, dusty stained packages of OTC meds, boner pills, weird foreign potato chips and all the other shit that I've come to identify as a likely mix of stolen and low class bullshit. 

   Still, with the low density of people, yesterday was a good day. Did me well I think, and I got back on board mildly sweaty but relaxed.      Today's walk on the same paths and roads had a LOT more people, which was a bummer, but  still more satisfying than they've been in a long while.  I think that after so many years of associating a daily walk with the same racetrack patters on a 300x50 foot deck perimeter, I have come to resent it. With opportunities to go ashore being so much less than they used to, the quality of life at my work has really gone to shit... and so days like yesterday and today, having an unusual and pleasant component, take on new meaning, perhaps more positive than they'd be otherwise to a guy who normally views interacting with locals here as punishment. 

That's better

 Big E came home yesterday. 

      It's hard to remember that I had free time this past weekend. Just a few days ago, but a couple of hard days really undoes the good ones, and I think being sleep-deprived along with nothing memorable happening last weekend probably has something to do with my poor recall of it. 

         So, I was right and also I was wrong. Dollar Tree Big E was very nice as I had thought. He was not, though, good at the job, which to be fair I wasn't holding out much hope for, as he was new to working on the ocean.  I mean, there were signs. I was up for about 6 hours during the 8 hours I had wanted to sleep on both Monday and Tuesday. I mean, pretty big sign right there, right?    I really tried to just let him work and figure things out, but for example, after 90 minutes of him unsuccessfully sending the end of a cargo hose ashore for the oil terminal's workers to connect to their dock pipe manifold after I had left him WRITTEN instructions ("When sending the low sulfur fuel oil hose ashore, put the sling for the crane's #1 hook 5 feet behind the hose flange, and put the #2 hook 15-20 feet behind the #1") in my night orders as he was new, I knew I wasn't going to be sleeping. In faact, the 2 page list of tips that we give out as part of familiarization training was completely ignored, which is why the 3-hour pumpoff that he was supposed to do that night... well I finished it the next day. 

           Us old guys, of course we're more efficient and fast. We know the vessels, we know the terminal, we know the terminal staff, we know. The new and younger guys we make allowances for. Or we're supposed to, at least. 

        I had told my company a couple of years ago that I wasn't willing to train new men, as I don't have the patience and I rely on the quiet, solitary part of my job to maintain some sort of inner harmony. At times I think that passing on what I know would be the right thing to do, regardless of what I'm feeling... but then I look at my paycheck and think "No."  The solitary quiet part is THE last thing that allows me to stay here I think. If getting up in the morning makes me want to stick a gun in my mouth, it's time to do something else. 

     I actually like teaching, but teaching on board a boat or barge means the trainee lives with you and sleeps in the spare bunk in my room too, waking when I wake, sleeping when I sleep, eating when I eat. 

  Dollar Tree Big E is a 30-something single guy.   Bachelors as shipmates always require behavior modification unless they've worked on oceangoing tugboats.  Tugboats are normally (in my experience and with my company) surprisingly clean and hygienic inside. Decks are swept twice a day, surfaces are wiped at least once a day minimum, and the galley would pass a board of health inspection easily. Going to sea also means everything is stowed, lashed, bolted or organized so as not to take to the air on a shitty day. The coffee in the coffee pot might lift off and fly up into the air when falling down the back of a wave,  but the coffeemaker is lag bolted to the counter and the pot has fiddles that keep it on the burner. There is no trash lying around.  One corollary to this  is that tugboaters can make good roommates.  Since the HQ is a manned barge, we have our quarters, a small but homey place, shabby and tidy (the HQ is about 3/4 through her service life and was never particularly luxe).  and, in the case of the HQ, organized and laid out for comfort, cleanliness and utility.  We spend more time here than we do in our real homes, after all. 

       Bachelors who don't come from oceangoing tugs... they're messy. I can't speak for other married men, but Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife makes it very clear that by her standards I am a mess-maker when I'm home. And I probably am. Every day at home is a celebration when you don't get many days at home.  As such I try not to be to keep the wa in my house when I'm home.  Bachelors, whether at home or at work, leave shit lying around, trip hazards on deck, crumbs everywhere. 

      And the bleach. Oh, fuck me the bleach. 

       Bleach is a real pandora's box on a boat.  So, we have 2 very separate water treatment systems. Gray water, and Black water. 

     Black water is our septic system. It JUST runs from the toilets to the tank. No sinks or showers run there. The black water tank is the shit tank. We call it the MSD, the Marine Sanitation Device, and it's a storage tank for poop, shit paper, bacteria and pee. Marine toilets have an electric macerator, a blender-like grinder that makes a crap frappe out of the toilet contents before it goes in the pipes. We add some aggressive bacteria to the tanks once every 2 weeks to help digest the solids and convert the ammonia in the pee to nitrate and nitrite, which are harmless and inoffensive.  The MSD has a chlorination station at the exit pipe that sterilizes anything that leaves the MSD. Now, the exiting cloudy water goes into our gray water tank. 

    The gray water tank is a large tank that collects the water from the sinks, washing machine and showers. It's not really a harmful water, just that it's got soap residue and food bits in it. 

    Thing is, the gray water tank, while not dependent on bacteria to keep it clean, does have bacteria in it, which we like because it keeps the food bits from collecting and clumping and clogging pipes. So we NEVER have non-septic safe cleaners and such on board, with the exception of bleach, which we use sparingly on paper towels to sterilize surfaces as needed. If, for example, my partner B, a retired navy corpsman, is going to remove a bunch of stitches from me at the galley table 10 minutes before dinner, or one of us gets the flu, bleach is mighty handy to have on hand. 

    Dollar Tree Big E discovered our bleach stash and decided to use it to clean things because he didn't like the smell of the septic-safe cleaners and the bubble-gum soap we use to clean the heads (it smells like woodsmoke and bubble gum and is not pleasant, but it works great). Thank Christ almighty I caught him.   Killing off the bacteria means that the MSD will fill up with shit until it bursts. The resultant shitsplosion ("GOD DAMMIT, CODE BROWN IN THE AFTER PEAK") paints our after peak void space, our underdeck storeroom where we keep spares, coats, suitcases, tools and supplies, and which also houses the MSD and gray water tanks. The after peak is 50' x 20' and runs the full depth from the deck to the keel. It's a big room, but a code brown has about a 50' kill radius, where the resultant crapnel (like shrapnel, but, you know, made of feces and TP bits) is airborne. Picture a paint grenade in a porta-potty. 

    Yeah, like a mother with a little kid who finds the draino bottle, I gently disengaged Dollar Tree Big E from the Clorox. 

    So, anyhow, long story short, about 1400 yesterday, a tugboat dropped Big E, the real Big E, off here.  He was about ready to keel over he was so beat.  I'm bitching about the week I spent without him, here, on home ground. Big E had the same personnel issues, on an unfamiliar oil barge that is utterly different in design and with the absolute WORST ergonomics in any galley at sea I've ever seen. Laid out for maximum discomfort AND all fill-in, inexperienced crew.  He passed out smiling at the galley table, shortly thereafter, sleeping 3 hours while I puttered about and came in and out while we were pumping off oil to a ship. He woke up to take the watch, finishing the last parts of the job we were doing, and I went to bed, where I slept 10 hours straight, waking this morning to find that I have 3 hours free to eat a breakfast sitting down and write a bit. 

 But now it's time to go back to work. 

BOHICA

 If you know what BOHICA means, you know what's coming. 

           So, when last I checked in, I had lost Big E, the World's Nicest Man, for the week here on the HQ. The guy they sent, call him Great Value Big E, was pleasant company and while it's not fair to judge someone new to bunkering based on my shipmates (big E being the least experienced here on the HQ,  with 15 years under his belt, and he's one of the bunker Old Guys like me. I guess I'm at 25 years as a tankerman PIC (Person In Charge), a fancy way of saying Certified Less Retarded Than Usual now. lol. Our talent pool on the HQ is DEEP). 

     So, yeah, Great Value Big E got ganked this morning. Ironically, he's been ganked away from me to work with Big E on the unit where he's been stuck.

   So I've gone from Certified Angus Big E, to Great Value Big E, and now I have a Brand New, still smells like the dining room at MITAGS (the big east coast training school for people who are too weird to have land jobs (I have been going there for almost 30 years) Dollar Tree Big E. 

    Dollar Tree Big E seems nice himself, but he has a grand total of I think 3 weeks experience as an East Coast bunker tankerman. 

    It's truly not fair to call him Dollar Tree Big E, either. He might be as good or better than me, who knows? I got Shit On from A Great Height  when I joined this company 15 years ago, because I was promoted after I think 3-4 weeks, having never worked on barges before prior to that. My past experience was far more complex than my first job here. The same might be true of the new guy. I just don't know, as we don't have any jobs this weekend. 

     At any rate, the new new guy seems nice too. I'm sure I made an AWESOME first impression with the poor guy, too. 

    I haven't slept much since I came aboard. Prudence dictates that I not say more than that.  With Great Value Big E, yesterday, I was up and down, as he has not yet cemented in all the policies and procedures that dictate our actions and decisions here. So every time the pump throttle changed, I woke up. So when an East Indian Pump Jockey (an engineer that micromanages our cargo pumping rate, calling for minute rate changes into his ship and preventing us from doing anything but masturbating the pump throttles) is causing us to be distracted from managing the workflow on our end, Great Value Big E doesn't yet know enough to firmly tell a Pump Jockey that we will be pumping at the lowest rate he calls out for, as we are not able to safely monitor the transfer exclusively from the vicinity of the cargo pumps... and this is not to suggest that rudeness or brusqueness is a job requirement. Diplomacy is something I am coming to value as anno domini sinks its' teeth in my ass.  It simply takes time and experience to know when to speak up and use a restraining means to rebalance the decision cycle. 

      So... yeah, I slept 6 hours this morning. I am switching watches, so I want to be able to sleep the night through tonight, which means not sleeping to my heart's content. When I woke up, about 30 seconds away from losing control of my bladder (I swear I could have half-filled one of those blue office water cooler jugs), blind from the daylight in the galley, staggering from an asleep foot, and in my drawers to boot, I think I said "sup, man" and then I started coughing for some reason, which made me fart and sounded like a shotgun went off, and then I was in the head, where I have a change of clothes I put on, after which I could go out in the galley and greet Dollar Tree Big E like a Christian. 

    Anyhow, by the time I woke up, he had been aboard for a while, and Great Value Big E had started his crew orientation for me (we have to do a walkthrough, safety briefing and familiarization training when new crew come aboard), so once I was appropriately caffeinated, we did the do, and the new guy went to nap in preparation for the night watch tonight. 

 And me? Once the rigamarole was done and the Blessed Sacred caffeine had done its' thing, I went for a walk, as we're lying to over by Brooklyn bridge. 

Stuck In

 Well now, I'm back at work, and this is watch #2. Watch #1 was busy with  nice block of free time in the last 4 hours so I got to eat a hot meal and sit down and read a little bit of "The Wine Dark Sea." one of the books at the tail end of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series ("Master and Commander" being the most famous), which is my favorite book series, and at 21 volumes, one I've read through three times already. Even after 20 years and multiple reads, I can still find new subtle aspects of the story to enjoy, things I didn't catch the last few go-rounds. 

       Tonight is the opposite of last night- I have the first part of the night free, and the last 6 hours of watch will be busy. 

            This tour, the Office People, for reasons known but to them, ganked Big E off of here and put a fill-in as my 2nd man for a week. The 2nd man is a guy I only know by reputation, but he seems nice, and while he's not an experienced bunker tankerman, he's got the essentials down, and is a systemic learner. It's nice to see a guy with his notepad in hand, writing down details about everything and interested in learning for knowledge's sake. And he's polite and quiet, which is a massive relief to me. 

 Of course they lied to Big E and told him he was only shifting his dunnage for 2 days, so he's got a spare set of drawers and socks and his poopie suit, and that's about it for clothes. I suppose if they were honest and told him he was staying for a week, they might have to observe his displeasure at it so pretending it was not a planned thing made the whole thing less unpleasant (for them). 

            Still,I'm back in the mix, anyhow, and up to speed again. 

               I don't know if it made the news for regular people, but there was ANOTHER maritime incident the other day. A third-world flagged container ship in Charleston had a fuckup whereby the throttles jammed and the ship took off like a rocket while departing the port, moving too fast for tugboats to catch up to it, in fact. The pilot and officers decided to ride the ride and simply steer the big fuckin' beast out to sea. It's wake caused some mayhem and possibly a couple of injuries. A 1000+ foot ship moving at 15 knots in a little harbor will throw some lumpy ass water around. 

You can read about it HERE

           I have yet to hear any truly juicy conspiracy theories yet on this mundane sort of mishap but it sounds like it went about as well as it could. Now that regular douchebags are now marine engineering experts after the Key Bridge collapse, we should be getting a fine crop of unlikely scenarios cropping up.   Now, I'm not saying that this wasn't a case of a floating FEMA camp suffering EMP damage from a Jewish Space Laser after the Salvation Army secret invasion... but if this is indeed what happened, please remember that you heard it here first.   

At the tail end

It's been a hell of a time home the past two weeks. Busy, productive at times, but frustrating too. Some medical stuff interfered with my good time.  

       I have an old jacuzzi I bought for a song a couple of years ago. Thing still works like a champ, although it's indoor season here in South Florida now, and nobody wants to be in a hot jacuzzi when it's 96 degrees at 95% humidity... so it wasn't the most well-thought out idea to do a big construction project at this time of year, but I got a load of 2x10's and 5/4x6 pressure treated wood and built a multileveled set of stairs to the jacuzzi. It took me about a week of working 2-4 hours a day because I'm not a framer, and certainly not an expert, and while it came out well in the end, it sucked up a bunch of time, along with me dealing with some age-related health BS and related testing (I officially have arthritis, go me), there's been some downs along with all the ups... but thankfully there are more positives than negatives, between visiting with family, spending time with my own nuclear family, and some world-class swimming afternoons spent in the pool with a bucket of beers... well, lots of good, and like all good times at home, passing too fast. Tomorrow I pack my bags, and Tuesday I'm back on the plane, headed to NY and to work again. 

Benefits include pissing over the side

 Sometimes after a shitty week, the only positive part on reflection was the one time the sun came out for 10 minutes and you got to watch it rise or set while taking a leak over the side and into the ocean.  This past week was that exactly. It being Sunday, I am happy that I was able to have a nice sunset experience There weren't many other highlights, but it was nice to see the sun finally, and also nice to fill the ocean back up to its' proper level.  And I'm not the only one to take a small pleasure from being able to hang the wang pointed at a place I do not love. 

Because New York is the third goddamn world, It took 15 minutes to successfully upload this tiny picture.  This place really can eat a dick.  

    In this respect, peeing at the place I abhor and letting the salty stream of my ennui marinate their vista,  I feel bad for female mariners, who already have it rough out here for  a variety of reasons and also can't just take a leak over the side and feel the gentle breeze on the bits to try to turn a crappy day around. The only way they get to do this requires a HELL of a lot more risk, and a much higher chance of getting wet feet out of all that effort.  

 Anyhow, this week was a 3 on the 1-10 scale, but it was a 2 up until 15 minutes ago. Nice to see the sun for a minute too, finally. 

   

raining again (and then more rain)

 Well, today could be the day. Granted that today is less than an hour old, but it looks like possibly, maybe, there's a chance I won't get my ass rained on today, because the first half of this watch was day 11 I think, of me getting rained on at some point 

             A few months ago we hit one of these spells. Last summer or fall I think. like 2 1/2 weeks of it?  I can't quite remember, but I was absolutely apeshit by the end of it. I'm doing OK with this spell, mostly because I'm trying really hard to focus on next week, which should be a good week, once I leave here and go home. 

I started doing my new 2nd job, too, the other night. About 5 hours of work to do what used to take me about 45 minutes. Collating data, and organizing it to be analyzed in a consistent and accurate way. 

      I had this poetic picture in mind when it came to truly flexing my mental muscle and actually working as a scientist again. Like rust falling off a previously-frozen metal fixture, and squeaking and squealing as stiff joints flex. 

    It was nothing like that. It was more like... picture the smell of burnt hair and an anxious wet dog. You know that fear stink that dogs get?  Picture that, and a middle aged dumpy guy slightly frightened at how hard it was to understand the things he was looking at. Alarmed. That's the word. I was alarmed. 

         And with a little help, and a LOT of hesitation, I did what I set out to do. I now know I'm capable of actually doing what I said I could do. Oddball analytics. 

 So that is how I got paid to set some unknown nerd's agenda for next week. testing someone else's testing methods 

 Anyhow, it was all pretty mundane, except that it's the first time in damn near 20 years since I got paid to use the education I worked hard to acquire and mostly set aside not long after. 

    Well, whatever. I'm down to like 5 more watches after tonight. 

Oh FFS (Part XXXIV)

 Well, I'm 50. How the F did that happen? 

 Celebrated by waking up 3 hours early when the online generator took a shit at 0130, plunging the HQ into darkness while in the middle of a cargo discharge rafted up to a ship at anchor. 

 Darker than 3 feet up a well digger's ass when that happens. The silence is eerie, as we were just transferring diesel, which uses an electric pump the size of a 55 gal drum but is whisper quiet. Our heavy fuel pumps are run by big diesel engines, but the MGO (Marine Gas Oil, which is fancy talk for diesel) pump is pure golden silence... and even more silent when it's not on. 

    Gen threw off the serpentine belt when the idler pulley broke. I had the same thing happen to another gen just 3-4 months ago, so swapping out and rereeving the belt was a quick job. My partner B had already fired up the standby gen and put it online, so we were back in action in 5 minutes, but I wasn't falling back asleep after that wake up call so I went ahead and unfucked things on the dead gen. She fired up shortly after. 

   But it was kind of nice to hear the waves slapping off the hull, a nearby bell buoy dinging nearby, things like that.  I forget how much the constant background noise masks. 

 And yeah, I'm 50. Still trying to figure that one out. 

Maintenance

 Yesterday was Halfway Day for me here on the HQ. 2 weeks down, 2 to go.  The first week was pretty busy, while last week wasn't so much, but had an unusually high amount of planned moves for us which were later changed or deleted.  One thing that I don't think the office drones care about is that scheduling a move for us and then moving the time or cancelling it later eats into our productivity heavily, as our daily and periodic tasks like maintenance and even our free time (when we have it) is all built around the almighty move schedule, and our free time, which is when we do things like go ashore to buy groceries or do maintenance, exercise, cook and eat, handle logistics and administrative tasks, etc.... when there is a move planned, we are constrained and plan accordingly. It's neither smart (or legal) to walk off deck during a cargo operation to fiddle with the parts ordering system and tackle the supply list. 

      So, when we have moves planned, and then the plan is eliminated, we lose massive amounts of productivity. You can't tackle a 4-hour task 3 hours before a move, and frankly, given the liberal interpretation of 'schedule' that our tugboaters  have, it's not unusual for a tugboat to crash into us at an inappropriate speed 2 hours earlier than expected because  we didn't answer the radio, not being in the house at tie time, andthe tug captain likes to take his morning shit at 0700, and we were supposed to be docking at 0700, which will not do and so we're going to leave early and struggle and look like assholes tying up with wind and tide against us and no dockman to catch lines because they expected us at 0700... and you get the idea. 

     THE PLAN is sacred to me, personally. I really like sticking to The Plan, whenever possible, and don't like changing The Plan on a whim or without good fucking reason. And in expressing my frustration with The Plan changing more often than normal this past week, I am not being fully fair to the office drones. They do what they do based on the quality of the information received. But that doesn't change that for some reason last week the planning was not anything close to accurate, ever. And that's unusual. And it's fine, really. Things get done, one way or another. Perhaps not to my taste, but I am a small cog in a big wheel, and in the scheme of things, I am but one more mushroom, if you know the expression. 

      So, anyways, for some reason yesterday and today we've been sitting at pole position in our lay berth (not the one with shore access, one of the other ones, but with a good cell signal, which is NOT something taken for granted), counting down the hours for upcoming jobs that keep changing and being pushed back. The engineering department has taken advantage of our being just a short boat ride from the office, and has been tinkering with my more troublesome generator, one that has never really been reliable or smooth running (It shakes so much when running that we call it Michael J. Fox instead of  "#1 Gen", which is unkind).  So, while we're unable to tackle bigger jobs, little tasks are getting knocked out of the park the past 2 days, which is not to be despised at all.  It's a rainy week this week, with *something* predicted pretty much every day, so between that and the insane amount of pollen in the air this week, the whole HQ is a startling dusty yellow where the rain evaporates off. 

         Today, after breakfast, which I am about to cook, I am doing the annual oil changes in our two right angle drives, the transmissions that connect the main cargo engines (big diesels) to the 15' screw pumps mounted in the cargo sump shafts that run vertically from the deck to the keel, connecting our underdeck pipelines to the above deck piping. After that, I may break out the stencil kit and do some tankerman arts and crafts if the weather is kind and nothing pops up last minute for work. If the office is kind to us, I will be able to eat lunch sitting down. 

Hell Hath No Fury

I've seen Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's rage at it's full flood  just a few times. The other day I got to see it directed at someone else for once. As I should expect of her, she's capable of great acts of kindness interspersed with going at it hammer and tongs when her ire is well and truly up. 

    Construction on The Compound , the house we're building in Brazil, was negligible in April. The builder warned us that he was having some issues, but we had no idea that things were at a standstill, until earlier in the week, a relative who lives down the road from the house stepped on by. She found one worker, a mason, sleeping in an alcoholic coma in the middle of what will eventually be the living room floor in the the main house.  Kicking the man in the legs and ribs failed to rouse him, so she stepped over his smelly ass and had a look-see, taking video the while. 

            I found out about all this while my wife was warming up to hand out clusterfucks and pink slips over the phone.  

         The builder is still the builder. He got a good tongue-lashing about minimizing the depth of the shit he's in labor-wise, and then a coaching session about American plainspoken-ness, which she now embraces on at least a half-time basis, and then she and he, after commiserating, conference called me, who played the stern and disappointed foreign patriarch very well, thank you. It helps that the builder speaks no English, and frowns are translated universally in every language. Plus, the reserve and coolness of a New Englander being known even in the US, a stern but reserved demeanor is understood in Brazil to be barely-tolerant disapproval, which was the look I was going for.  

      My wife then proceeded to fire the architect, who failed twice to deliver documents on time to the builder, saying that she felt no need to accept his excuses, as he was easily replaced, and in failing to keep his deadlines, he was untrustworthy and dishonorable, and will see no further business from us. She didn't say anything about the man's mother, but she sure leaned heavy on his probable upbringing. 

         The drunk in my living room? She has a soft spot for alcoholics, her father having struggled with the issue, and asked the builder to have a come-to-Jesus talk with the man, explain who exactly saved his job, and ask him to keep it in check while he's on his last shot. Thus far, the past two days the guy's been active at least. 

     So, construction being mostly halted, we're actually ahead on materials on hand, which is not a given in Brazil, so the mason has all he needs to complete the rough work on the main house and the annex, which is where we'll stay. The walls are at a standstill- about 10' high, but untopped until an electrician pulls cable and wires them up for lighting and cameras and shit.  That's supposed to happen this month. 

      The Compound is supposed to be habitable by Thanksgiving. The builder says he can still make it. I hope so. 

Oh FFS

  So last month I wrote the first half of a 2-part blog post about a young guy on another company's tugboat who we all took an immediate liking to here on the HQ. You can read that here. 

The 2nd half of that post was going to be more about the young guy  in question, and the process of turning a tugboat Able Seaman into a tankerman, which I thought would be pretty good blog fodder.  It's rare for Big E, B, and myself to like anyone, let alone all 3 of us making note of it.  I myself thought the stars were in alignment. The kid had signed up for tankerman school, had the sea time sufficient to get a tankerman's ticket, asked questions and was a hard working AB... which is about all the qualifications the Coast Guard cares about. Beyond that... there are tankermen who are assholes, tankermen who are idiots, and tankerman who are pretty good at it....  It's a broad brush as far as qualifications go.  2 of the 3 groups being negative, there are also a lot of sailors who don't like tankermen. In truth, to be good at it, it takes a pedantic mind, a certain comfort with math and seamanship, and a knowledge of the complex rules and regulations governing hazardous cargo storage, care and movements... But another truth is that you don't have to be good at the job to be adequate at the job.  There are plenty of slow tankerman whose lips move when they read. They're the labor force, the helpers, the 2nd men, able to function and follow orders by making the job a series of repetitive tasks to be carried out sequentially. 

         I call it 'The Retard Circus" because that's what it resembles. Me? I guess I'm a ringmaster. I'm certainly not above the circus. I'm right there in it. 

     But yeah, the kid... sigh. Boy... that didn't work out. 

     The kid is young, high energy, likeable and volatile.   Full of piss and vinegar, and eager to learn, a new tankerman being paid about double what an AB gets paid. The kid was already spending those checks to build his grown up life in his mind. Motivated. 

    We had his tugboat the other day, first time I've seen him in 5-6 weeks,and I know he went home in that time, so when he came aboard, I asked him if his application to my company was submitted. 

     The dumb fuck put an application in, and like half the fucking idiots under 30 do now, he failed the goddam piss test. 

It's one thing to get nailed in a random, another to willingly take a VOLUNTARY piss test, KNOWING you should wait a month because you're dirty.

    I hate weed, and most weed smokers, not because I am particularly tight-laced, but because I have yet to be around someone high who isn't so fucking stupified to deal with that it make me want to drown them in a toilet rather than listen to them or pretend I'm not bored out of my fucking gourd by dealing with their idiot asses. 

     I learned as a younger man to keep that opinion to myself, especially around high people. I guess it's unsettling for baked individuals to find out that I'm not really listening to them so much as fantasizing about harming them when they talk at me.  Oddly enough, I'm OK with drunks. I was a bouncer for a while; I speak the lingo and can usually manage to make an unruly drunk affable and compliant using bonhomie and goodwill rather than bumrushing them. 

   But yeah, I'm wicked disappointed in the kid. Yes, there is a terrible tankerman shortage, but among out ranks, there's no shortage of retarded tankermen, the short-bus seat warmers valued for their heartbeat and ability to turn groceries into feces.  The shortage we're facing is that of people who can say no to themselves and follow the fucking rules... and really, if two of the rules are  " 1) Don't do drugs. and 2) Don't do anything to blow us up because we can blow up" , a man who won't follow one rule can't be expected to follow the other rule. 

That's a good example of what happens when you don't follow the rules.   I have no urge to be sleeping in my bunk and being woken up by St. Peter telling me it's time to talk. I am grateful that none of us on the HQ  vouched for Cheech and Chong here. 

  

I have met the King

 Something extraordinary happened at crew change a couple of days ago. I met a living legend. I met Meow Man at the grocery store. 

       If you're a mariner who either works in or visits America, you have seen Meow Man's graffiti tag.  Virtually every New York based TV show at some point shows one of Meow Man's tags in the background when they show the city off, especially the waterfront. 

 For over 40 years, Meow Man has spray painted or chalked his tag at every dock, pier and piling between Maine and Texas, and including some select spots in other countries nearby. 

 A select number of people know who he is. I, until yesterday, was not one of those people. People who know who he is do not tell people who he is. So I was shocked to learn that the captain from another company who I was talking to in line at the grocery store (unkempt older guys, homeless looking but with about $1500 in groceries = tugboater, so we both knew what each other was doing for a living. Game Recognize Game) was the man himself. 

    I've been seeing Meow Man tags since I was 9-10 I think, at least that was the first time I wondered who the hell would make that their graffiti tag and how the hell it got 50 feet in the air at a railroad bridge over a waterway.    I've personally seen Meow Man tags (saying either "Meow Man was here" or Meow man, suk my bag" or both) between Portland Maine and Brownsville TX, and probably 100 or so docks and bridges in between. Spotted it in the Caribbean somewhere too, though I forget where. Borco, Bahamas? Campeche? Rio Haina? Gitmo? St. Maartin?  I can't remember, but I do remember seeing it. Dude gets around. 

    Anyhow, in telling the story to the dozen other guys on the launch bring us to prison work yesterday, I said that I've met two celebrities in my life. Mother Theresa, and Meow Man.  The launch operator, Dirk the Dutchman, himself a retired tug captain, being in the club and having had Meow Man himself as a deckhand decades ago, was tickled by the celebrity status of his friend, because when I said I met him, it was like a bomb got dropped. I was a nine-days' wonder, and all talk of who got fired for pissing dirty and who died while we were all home all ceased. I may as well have said I had met Jesus and for a few minutes, reflected glory shone upon me.    It was a good way to soothe the ache of going back to work.