Stay Gold, Ponyboy!

 Well, this has been nice. 

    We had yesterday off, and today off too, so far at least. 

   It being Monday, the Office People (Long may they shit light on the heads of the damned) like to play "Surprise, asshole!" and throw last-minute cargoes and other clusterfucks on us, so I'm not sold on the idea of having a second day off in a row, but we're approaching noon, and a day-and-a-half is pretty nice and pretty rare these days, so I ain't bitchin.'   At any rate, yesterday and today I went for long sunrise walks through Brooklyn around Brooklyn Bridge park and Dumbo, about 5 miles both mornings I guess. It's getting easier on my feet and joints as I lose weight. I no longer waddle.  Today was a trash day, though, so as I walked through part of Brooklyn Heights, I damn near threw up at the putrid garbage and piss smell that some areas were giving off.  Ah well. 

        With the time off, Big E and I got caught up on our maintenance and even ahead a bit on some things as far as stocking shelves and the like. I lose Big E this Wednesday, he's going home for 2 weeks. Normally, B comes back at this point for his month of joy and glory here, but B was working over on The Loaner, and the company offered him a bribe to stay on there for an extra week and suffer, and they're sending me some fill-in guy for a week. I haven't had the best luck with fill-in guys recently, but there's always a chance it'll be one of the old bunkering hands around here, racking up some OT.  Have to see.  

  It's also week 9 for me here since I was home last, which is only possible thanks to the friendship and support of Big E and B, after said fill-in guys and such made me want to make sweet mouth love to a .45. Regardless, Wednesday is halfway day of this 4 week tour on the HQ, which means that I am on the downhill slope, and there's a certain amount of inertia that carries me through at this point. Barring any surprises, I'll be headed home in 2 weeks. Already have my plane tickets sorted. 

   Speaking of plane tickets, yesterday I also bought the fam's tickets to Brazil for our next trip.  I went to a lot of trouble to organize time off over the holidays, made promises signed in blood, auctioned off my precious Seed, all the usual, to get holiday time off... and then I went to book tickets. Holy-O-dogshit, $9000 for round trip tickets!  And not good tickets. Steerage class, the cheapest ones, where you sit with the cattle, and the Irish. So, no, no holiday travel. Instead I will go in January, where tickets were only $3,000. Pretty good deal considering I'm going from Miami to Sao Paolo to the teeny little 2 gate airport in my new home a couple hours' flight back north from Sao Paolo.  The builder promises that our new house there will be finished. I hope so, because paying his ass, springing for a decent hotel for a couple of weeks would be a bear. 

         

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?