Surrrrvey says....

  It's a bit of a bummer when 3rd party workers badmouth your coworkers and past shipmates, and you know they're in the right.  On one hand, there's the company rep. Nobody likes being thought of as being on Team Loser, and you want to defend the name; not because you're a company man so much as the tendency of splattered shit to get on your shoes from even a distance. 

        Oil tankers and oil barges use 3rd party surveyors to verify our numbers...  easier to give an example than to explain offhand, so...

       Incedentally, blogfriend BCE at Big Country Expat has a kid who's a cargo surveyor back home in FL. 

   Let's say an oil company has an order for 2,500 metric tons of fuel oil to bunker a ship (to fill their own fuel tanks to run their engines and generators, not to fill cargo tanks).  That's about 700,000 gallons, btb. Before we start loading, I drop a measuring tape into all my cargo tanks and write down the height of any liquid in my tanks, as measured from the oil surface to the rim of that tank's measuring port (called the ullage port). Every 1/8 inch of the tank height corresponds to a certain volume in thst tank. A specialized company calculates that officially before the vessel enters service- this is called 'strapping' the tanks, and a strapping company must be recognized officially as being impeccably honest.  The density and temperature of the liquid to go in the tank is measured before the transfer, as these things affect the mass of the oil consoderably, and oil is sold by mass, not volume. Yea, at your gas station too. A gallon sold is (supposed to be) a net gallon, and adjusted for temperature and density; a net gallon is corrected for density and temperature based on what that density would be if the temperature was 60 degrees, not a gross gallon, which is a unit of volume.  

 At any rate before we load, I calculate the volume of oil in my tanks, if any, and given the temperature and density of the oil to be loaded, I calculate what the height would be in each of my tanks if we loaded oil and corrected the volume for temperature and density. 

   So I now have my 'stops,' the target height I want the oil to be at in my tanks.  In the meanwhile. The owner of the oil hires a 3rd party cargo inspector to remeasure my tanks and sign to verify the numbers are correct. The surveyor also measures the volume in the tanks that contain the oil that I am to load.

        On completion of loading, the cargo surveyor will AGAIN measure the tanks ashore, and then he and I will together measure my cargo tanks for volume and temperature, witnessing each other input the figures in our computers. Our numbers must agree. If they do not, we have to seek out any discrepancies until they do.   The surveyor will do the exact same thing with the tanks ashore. There will always be a small difference between shore tank figures and my tank figures. There will be tiny errors in the calculated volume of the pipelines between the shore tank and the dock where my hoses connect, air bubbles can be in the pipelines, a little oil might be left in my cargo hoses (which hold about 3/4 ton each when full) etc etc.  Point being, I can't be given clearance to leave until our numbers between my tanks and the shoreside tanks agree very closely- and by very closely I mean within a few tons. Yes, our rounding errors are enough for you to drive your car for a year or more. 

      So that is a 3rd party cargo surveyor's role; to be an impartial verifier of the numbers.

   The oil company has a surveyor on loading up the HQ.

     The ship that ordered their fuel will have ANOTHER cargo surveyor usually from another company, to do the same process between my tanks and the ship's tanks. Sometimes there is no surveyor, in which case one of the ship's engineers will come aboard the HQ and he and I will remeasure the volumes together, before and after the transfer.

     Now, I wrote all that and threw in some of the process not to be pedantic but to illustrate that it is not a complex process but it IS a process. 

        And a cargo surveyor I know was bitching to my partner B that a tankerman on another oil barge, a guy we all know is an utter fucking retard and a shit magnet of a God-damned Jonah besides, who somehow the company loves, fucked the surveyor over and lied to him, creating not a crisis, but some serious ill will sufficient that the surveyor's employer now looks at all of us from my company with a jaundiced eye. And that shit is a bummer to me because most of my old fart coworkers are honest and good boy scouts... but this guy's such a fucking soup sandwich that he drove a superior into a full on psychotic break one time. Not even exaggerating a little. 

   Anyways I'm aware that I'm playing with fire, bad mouthing a co-worker online. I'm a wee bit protective of my company's rep because I really like money and they give it to me sometimes, and I really enjoy when they do so I'd like it to continue and increase. Amen. 

     I have the same surveyor coming to my next ship. At least he and I have a couple dozen good loads under our belts. have a good history working together. 

Post-Thanksgiving food and work

 Well now, Thanksgiving was pretty decent here on HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HW/ Center for practical Gule and Gluttony. 

    We were in between jobs during most of my watch yesterday, so I was able to cook a small turkey, along with making mashed brotatoes (spuds being my genetic birthright, I look upon them with love), stuffing, roasted carrots and green beans, gravy, cranberry sauce and pies.  As in plural pies. I made an apple crumb pie, and B, through a comms snafu, brought store bought pumpkin AND coconut cream pie. 

      All in all it was a great dinner, went together well, and as is tradition, the guy who cooks doesn't take part in cleaning, so that was nice. And now I shouldn't need to cook for the next 2 days, and Sunday will be turkey soup if I remember to boil the bones tomorrow night.  The timing worked out well. Our assist tug nosed up to us to move us to the next job about 45 minutes after I finished dessert, and I waddled out on deck to get the job started, and then it was back to work for us. 

             Altogether, this year was a bit disparate for the Florida branch of the B clan I think, which isn't how we like doing things, but so it goes some years.  Christmas I'll be home, and  I'll host for us, while my oldest brother will likely rinse and repeat with his massive get-togethers up in Boston. I'm pretty excited at the prospect of being home. My last scheduled Christmas home (I only get it off once every 3 years) got fucked up by bad weather, and I missed it. I'm thinking about trying my hand at a prime rib. My last one came out a little rare, which was AMAZING for me, but the rest of the fam are savages and like theirs medium.  For me, I like my cow just a few degrees off from still mooing. 

    I am grateful for many things, though I'm aware that this blog tends to be the toilet into which I crap out my negativity, and I may not appear a grateful person here... but I am, I think. If it weren't for that, the things that haven't gone right this past year, which were more numerous than on average, would be that much harder to tolerate. 

   The fiasco in Brazil comes to mind. We have a lawyer who appears to be thorough, and has taken the egregious nature of our case as something of an insult on the national reputation of Brazil, me being a dumb foreigner and all, and things are progressing. The local sheriff (a court officer there, I think, and who is somehow the investigative arm of both civil and criminal complainants, if I understand correctly) is now involved, and it is my hope to get the civil portion of the case moved to arbitration. There's a criminal aspect of well, of fraud, as my home builder has apparently spent money specifically presented to me as bills for administrative and municipal fees, licensing, permitting and tax... none of which got paid.  

   Whatever, I took it in the seat for sure, and maybe I'll get some of my money back, but I'm grateful that as much of a clusterfuck as this is, it isn't going to  threaten my household here in the US. Pisses me off, though.  To be honest, not having to dwell on this day in and day out has been kind of nice this past week.  Another thing to be grateful for. 

 So, 3 weeks to go before my Christmas break, and the weather is changing here now.  We had a gloriously temperate autumn, up until this past week, when the wind began to blow.    

         I still view working in NY/NJ through the lens of having grown up working outdoors around coastal Massachusetts. Though it's just 200 miles north, it might as well be further, considering how much more moderate the weather can be here in NY in comparison. 

     Boston has the US's most wind. True story. It has the highest average daily wind. 

   NY, though... the air is absolutely dead when it's warm out. I sweat my balls off in the stagnant hot air of summer. But, come November, the wind starts to blow here.  And son of a bitch if it doesn't stop blowing until May.  Shit gets tiresome after a while, the daily wind and the twice-a-week gales. 

    Anyhow, the wind brought the cold finally. I'm not even sure if they had a hard frost here yet, and here it is end of November... but it's coming this weekend and there's no more going outside without layers on already.  That time of year I guess. 

 On the upside, jacuzzi season is starting up back home. Shocking, I know, but I'm ok with being parboiled while upping my blood alcohol content for a couple of hours once or twice a week. 

 That's coming in 3 weeks too. 

    In the meanwhile, we loaded just 2 of our 10 cargo tanks last night while I was sleeping, and later today we'll give a couple hundred tons each of gogo juice  to some Frenchmen who're pulling into town. 

         

Captain Obvious Figures It Out

 Sigh. 

     Well, I'm back on board the HQ, and after a week of tugboating, it was good to be home. I got to catch up with Big E, and we went right to work in 2 days of heavy freezing rain and stiff gales, which was unpleasant, but as I was still riding the high of being back where I belong, I was in fair but wet spirits. A Bohunk-flavored chief engineer from a shitbox containership had an absolute shitfit at me in the middle of all the weather, and oddly enough his temper tantrum and screaming (it always boils down to foreign engineers lying and saying we gave them either 20 or 40 tons of oil less than is on the paperwork) just rolled off me same as the rain. I'm not normally one of those cool people who just sit calmly while being fussed at, which I admire.  Normally I go nuclear rather early on, which is a character flaw, and will speculate graphically about a person's mother upon being tut-tutted.  I ain't proud of that.  For whatever reason though, I stayed calm, standing there damply in 20lbs of foul weather gear with that annoying cold-weather snot-drip you get, which made the engineer more and more upset (my calmness. Not the snot drip). It was wonderful. Bro was incandescent.  After the job was done, even better, we got to go to a lay berth and have a day off. 

         So I'm all back to normal(ish) here for now. And that's a good thing, because all hell broke loose at the comstruction site of our house in Brazil. 

          So the Brazil house has been under renovation for 1 year now and it looks horrid. Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife and I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the builder... and out of the blue a few weeks ago the pool builder, a subcontractor, told a friend, a cousin of my wife, thst the builder stiffed him about 10k and the pool guy was about to swear out a complaint. This started a cascade effect, where we discovered that the builder has built himself a nice new farmouse out of town, and putting together the lack of progress at  my house against the substantial building materials manifest... yeah, the materials got used, but not on MY house.  Best guess is that I just got fucked for somewhere between 50-100k US. Oh, and apparently he lied about filing the engineering drawings with the city. There may be no engineering drawings. WTF? 

       Thankfully we are not without options. 

   Now, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife many years ago was the law clerk for a judge who is still in power today in the city where this is all happening. The law firm we have hired to go up the builder's ass? Owned by a cousin. The local Federal Police office is run by a colonel, who is also a cousin.  So the builder is about to have a bad week next week with civil and criminal referrals coming in. I might get some money back.  

      I spent last week kicking myself for not seeing the delays in construction for what they were.  I Dunning-Krugered myself. I assumed I was much too bright to get utterly suckered. 

   Well, I have moved past saying things about the builder's momma, and into my wife asking the city sherriff to go full Spaghetti Test in throwing civil and criminal charges at the guy. 

 The money's gone. And though I might get some of it back, I've got enough of a thick veiny pulsing hate boner for that trashbag that a pyrrhic victory will be 100% fine by me. 

  I hate that I can't make the guy pay.  But I can pay lawyers to lay the hate. 

   Anyhow, that was my week.  Oddly, now that we had our crisis, I'm feeling at peace. Ain't shit I can do, having paid a sucker tax. At least I have some answers now, and don't have to keep throwing money at the guy. We did our part and will now see if the guy pulls an auto da fe or what. 

One more and a wake up

 It sucks posting with my phone. I can type like a mad motherfucker on my laptop. 100 words a minute I think. Texting?  My thumbs are assholes and I don't use autocorrect because autocorrect doesn't like no-no words and onomatopoeia so I spend half my texting time correcting typos as it is. 

         Still, I have this watch, a nap and part of the next watch to go before I am relieved, at which point I will go to a hotel for the night, get some sleep and be up early to get groceries and head to the floating HQ, there to take up where left off  2 weeks ago. 

        I'm glad I did this. It's a good reminder of why I don't work on tugboats full-time. Oh, it's been cool, no complaints, but I like the HQ. My friends are there, I can sleep more than 4 hours at a time, and I'm good at the work. Really good at it, in fact. Being on here, I'm no longer good at simple tasks, some aspects of plain sailoring that simply require practice, and it's a little hard on the ego. Plus, the food... the guys on here eat like college students. I haven't had this much processed food since 1998. When the F did I become a healthy eater? I actually miss salad and vegetables. Lol. 

 

Passageway between two of the fuel tanks,  The deck plates are 2-3 feet up from the bilge and tank bottoms. This boat holds just few weeks worth of fuel, like 50,000 gals. 

         

One of the main engines. My enormous fucking head for scale. 

Middle of the engine room, looking aft. A generator in the foreground, starboard main engine in the background. The deck plates are elevated a couple of feet above the bilge, but we're only about 10' under water here at deck height.  

Daddy will be home tomorrow, baby. 

Can do

Lots of stuff happening.  My medical blitz 1.0 is done and I am pre-tested for the shit going on, plus new developments in the house in Brazil are really frosting my ass...  which is how I found myself mid-vacation going back to work. 

     But with the recent uptick in me finding things to complain about, I'm happy to report that I'm not sniffimg oil fumes for fun and profit. I'm on a tugboat for a week. In fact, I'm on my employer's  brandie-newiest tugboat, and she's a Cadillac. Granite countertops, stainless appliances, poured epoxy-coated decks and incredible soundproofing.  I'm chief cook and bottle washer for the week, lol.   It's the work they had, and I'm getting time and a half. I'm not complaining for sure. 

   I'm on the back watch, working 0000-0600 and also 1200-1800.   Tugboats generally work 6 hours on/6 off.   It's  awful but easy enough to go do for a week.   It makes me feel for these guys, though.  It's a little after 2am as I write and as we're between jobs I washed and wiped down and mopped the galley while watching a documentary on the battle of Iwo Jima. 

    These guys live well but the silence and being the only guy awake on board is wonderful.  Fire watch, basically, at least for another hour when we leave for the next job. 

         

    Seriously, while you may not know what a tugboat galley normally looks like, it normally doesn't look this good: 

  My room, while small, is also nice and I don't need to share. 

  

   So yeah, my first official act one the familiarity training was done, was to make dinner.   Not my choice, but pork chops, to which I put a rub and added baked potatoes, green beans and biscuits.  They were meh, to be honest.  I don't like pork chops.   I've got chicken breasts cued up for tonight. I *may* attempt a cordon bleu, if the giant ass fridge and freezers are found to contain ham and reasonably good cheeses.  We're headed for New Haven CT, later this morning.  I'll hopefully be asleep for half of the ride.  

Bad news

 I'm sorry to report that not only did my wife disrespect the Witch of November, but today, when we remember the loss of the EDMUND FITZGERALD, she made fun of the repetitive nature of Gordon Lightfoot's song while I was communing with the infinite in the kitchen while washing dishes. 

    This shall not stand. I have replaced her 0600 wake up call tomorrow with a replay of this song. 

 I pray we will recover as a couple from this 

Make them laugh

 So you'd think a gastroenterologist who cranks through colonoscopies has heard every nervous butt joke there is.  Being a sailor and a somewhat articulate person, I pride myself on being a bit of an artist with foul and off-color humor. So it was with great pride that I got a laugh out of the doctor, the nurse-anesthetist and the nurse when I got knocked out to take a spin on the Black Stallion yesterday. 

    They gave me propofol and something else I think, something to induce amnesia, as not only did I not feel anything, I don't rememeber feeling asleep or waking up, and was fully lucid on my lights being turned on as well. 

   My first words on waking were 'Is it already done?'  When I was told it was all done, I said "Wow, I don't remember anything at all. Reminds me of sleepovers at Michael Jackson's house when I was a kid." 

 I got a good laugh out of that one. I hope, and believe, that it was genuine. Hopefully it was  a novel enough riff on an old theme. 

   Anyhow, that was hurdle one here  on my week off.  Apparently I have the ass of a champion, as my bung was pristine, requiring no sanding and spackling to keep it silky smooth.  Sure my eyes are going, my joints ache, hair is falling out and I have tits now, but my Windward Passage is in its prime. 

 Today was a more serious appointment, and to be continued. More testing required. Still, I'm glad that's done. Bloodwork is next on Monday and back to work on Tuesday.  At some point I'll sit down for more than 30 minutes and actually have a nice time, but it's been butts to nuts with appointments and obligations thus far. 

A confluence of events

 Well, I'm home for a few days. Woke up in my bed and everything. 

       The homecoming was not what it could have been. In about 3 hours I have a colonoscopy scheduled, so yesterday, along with a serious lack of sleep (more on that) I also had to fast, and get home as well. 

          For some reason, although I had been standing a 1730-0530 watch for the past week, I never adjusted to the sleep schedule, and have been getting 5-6 hours sleep a day at best. So last night after getting home I got to take the pre-colonoscopy laxative and that whole uncomfortable process having been awake for somewhere around 36 hours.  My sense of humor did not survive intact. 

    Anyways, I'm up this morning still gurgling but oddly not very hungry, as I've been fasting for about 30 hours now. I'm glad I got my appointment scheduled for this morning. As I'm only home for 6 days, it's a bit of a bummer (no pun intended) that I have medical bs to handle for 2 of them. I've got other appointments tomorrow. 

    There's so much going on behind the scenes, things not relevant here, that tensions are high. In all that, it was so nice to just sit on the couch with my wife in between jogging trips to the can last night. 

    The state of the hole formerly known as The Hole, at my house in Brazil, is not what it could be. That's a big stressor, a cherry on top of a bullshit sundae. The Hole is now a poured column under the foundation to the annex at my house, now about a year behind on construction and about 100% over budget.  So that's happening. 

    Normally, when life stops using its' inside voice, going to work for me has been a chance to compartmentalize, to let me set aside those problems and get on with the business of sailoring... mariner...ing . and carry on. 

   I've been bitching here for a bit that my job is not what it was. That there is little enjoyment to it and no work-life balance in between... which is a tough complaint to parse, as... I mean, it's a job, it's not supposed to be fun and games, I'm there to do a task and generate value... but to do so sustainably in a way that allows for peak productivity, a paycheck isn't enough- I can make the same money ashore being unhappy, and have a shorter commute and the ability to actually hug my family on the daily. So why the fuck, in the name of St. Steven's blessed bunghole, am I there? 

 These are the things I am thinking about when I am constantly on the verge of shitting myself.  The turbo laxative is still doing it's thing I guess, though I seem to be about empty finally. 

 So, yeah, work is not a refuge. If it wasn't for my close friendship with B and Big E, I'd be moving on I believe. 

 I feel as though something's either about to give or about to change. I don't know how or why yet.  I cashed the last check for the side gig I did down here too, which was bittersweet. I thoroughly enjoyed being a paid scientist again, but sadly there isn't work for me to continue, the job being done.  That's something to think about too I suppose. 

    Well, let me get on the far side of today and regroup, let my ass rest. Literally. 6 hours sleep after a week of slowly accumulating sleep debt isn't nearly enough I think. 

I was up anyhow

 Last watch tonight. I head home in a few hours. 

         I was gratified to see Trump won. When one side offers nothing but stupid and insane ideas, they're going to eat shit eventually.  

         I got the news first from Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife who was absolutely giddy. So much so thst she sent me a 3am picture of her with no makeup and a t-shirt on, of all things.  She is not a t-shirt girl. 

     

     The picture was a not-so-subtle F-you to certain relatives who called her at 3am four years ago, waking her up to tell her that their guy won the election and who will now be getting this photo texted to them 10 times by accident, to ensure they're all up and sad. 

    I'll be home in about 16 hours to listen to who she was petty to.  Looking forward to it. 

Hold on to your nuts

     

     

For Peanut