Code Brown on board

We had a Code Brown emergency on board the HQ last weekend. It's been  a busy week, and between our schedule and the recovery time needed, today was my first real chance to write about it.

    Hiding behind technobabble, we had an explosive loss of containment in the Marine Sanitation device. Put simply, the shit tank blew up REALLY energetically in a confined space.

 How bad was it? There was shrapnel (crapnel? Heh.) out to about 25 ft, and as the MSD is located in a void space underdeck, and that space runs the full width and full depth of the HQ. So, it's 50 by 20 by 20, with closely spaced framing running across all surfaces. Framing that traps liquids and solids to a depth of about 6 inches.

 So, the shit tank blew out, unfortunately more or less straight up, and put simply, it contaminated the entire compartment.

 I won't lie. I considered sealing the compartment, putting in my notice and finding new employment, but there wasn't much to do but fix the problem.  We had to wait 24 hours to get time and space and the equipment necessary to handle it.  When it was time, we docked at company HQ on a sunny, hot and humid day.
      The technical part, causing the failure, was that an air regulator (MSD's are made to break down the poop a bit using bacterial colonies, so they need air, like a really really awful aquarium) failed, so the tank got...impacted. a Blivvy, in other words.
  Before the engineers could come at the problem, though, we had to set up ventilation, using big air horns under compressed air to blow out the space and test the air. After just an hour, the compartment registered perfectly safe.

 So, me being unwilling to pass such an awful task to anyone else, I took a solo adventure into the compartment with a high-pressure garden hose and fresh water. No fire hoses for this sort of work. Too much risk of blowback. I put on a Tyvek suit, rubber boots and rubber gloves duct taped to the suit, a bandanna over my head, goggles and a respirator.
 

 And I went down into that 100+ degree dark and drippy hell to the first platform, 10 feet down, opened up the MSD fully, (protip, don't look in the tank. Pretty sure my hair is gonna come in all white now), and fired up the hose, flushing down everything from overhead, the bulkheads, and the grating, down to the bilge. While I was doing this  a vacuum truck came in, with a septic tank crew, and put a hose in the bottom of the compartment.
 
 I then lifted the planks separating the platform deck from the tank tops at the bottom and crawled down another 10 feet below into the darkness.

Dodging the water droplets still falling from above, I cleaned up that space, and it took an hour. By the end I was overheated and gasping for air, and just as I finished, the air meter clipped to my suit zipper went off- stirring the shit displaced enough oxygen that it was time to go anyhow. So I headed up, and felt poorly for a while, with minor heat exhaustion and having been breathing mephitic, slightly oxygen poor air for so long.
 After about 30 minutes, a half-gallon of water and pouring the sweat out of my boots, I went down with a case of bleach, and sanitized the compartment, then rinsed and vacuumed it out with the hose from the honey wagon on the dock. Took about 45 minutes. Then repeat with a 5 gallon bucket of powerful concentrated soap. And rinse. Only THEN could I approach the MSD and vacuum out the... contents, then rinse, sanitize and rinse again. At that point the engineers came in and fixed the actual problem, and I was so overheated and ill that I jumped in the shower and sat in a chair for an hour, feeling poorly, drinking water slowly.

 It was hell. But OTOH, we have a shiny happy crapper tank, so we can do our business in a businesslike manner again, I guess.
 I threw away everything I was wearing, right down to my socks and drawers. It all went into a bucket, and after my shower, I put on gloves, closed the bucket, put it into a heavy plastic bag, and that went to the dumpster. At that point I was done. Our shoreside staff didn't ask any more out of me, which is good, as I was done in a literal sense. It took almost 2 days before I felt 100%. Getting older, getting heat-sick is not so easy to snap back from.

slips and falls

There have been two fatalities recently on American ships.

http://www.professionalmariner.com/Web-Bulletin-2019/Two-civilian-mariners-die-in-accidents-on-MSC-ships/

          These were falls related to work performed on military-contracted cargo ships. The Military Sealift Command are the folks who move beans, bombs and bullets for the US military, and they're ships crewed by civilians.

   I've never worked for MSC. I have never heard anything positive about working for MSC beyond that any mariner in need of sea time to qualify to test in order to advance in rank can do so quickly. In other words, you're away a lot.

          From what I've been told, MSC employment consists of a lot of sitting at docks in places like Norfolk, and even more sitting at docks in places like Guam, with trips to sea feeding and following naval ships.

     I've also been told that there is no going home as scheduled when your time is up. The MSC 4-month contract often enough ends up taking 4-8 months to see you relieved after your time is done, so that's up to a year at sea in a single voyage. And this I actually have seen.

 I was taking the Medical Person-In-Charge (MED-PIC) course years ago at MITAGS, a maritime school in Maryland. Week one was MED-PRO, or Medical First Aid Provider, basically how to put on bandaids and ace bandages. After that was the fun stuff, stitching, injections and IV's, intro to diagnostics, etc.  Well, we had one MSC guy, a cargo mate, who had been working 10-months or so a year for the last 15 years. He hadn't been home in, sure enough, over a year, and had to take this course, poor guy. He'd been divorced, of course, and hadn't seen his teenage daughter in a couple of years and was so excited about that. Well, week one gets done, we all finish MED-PRO, and on like Wednesday of week 2, he gets recalled to his ship after 10 FUCKING DAYS for another cruise out in the ass end of the Pacific. Guy never got to see his house, let alone his daughter. 10 days off in 2 years. That's insane.

 So that's what I know about MSC, that and they have a higher accident rate than most if not all other sectors of maritime trade. I doubt it's a single-source issue, in terms of root causes, I mean, MSC does UNREPS and other dangerous tasks... but I've also heard complaints about competence among unlicensed crew, and high rates of theft, violence and even a little light prostitution, although I have a hard time buying that last one. So my take is that there are probably more links in the causality chains that lead to accidents on MSC ships than dingleberries like me are likely to face, which at the end of the day means statistically higher potential rates for accidents.
  I'm perhaps not doing service by not exploring this subject further, in that it would be really interesting to actually identify if MSC has a weaker safety culture at operational level than other companies do, or if there are other factors involved, or if it's just a matter of risk management in higher-risk work. But, truth be told, I don't actually care enough to do the work involved. I have my own problems and my own little floating hot dog cart to worry about.
         The safety guys in my employer's HSE department probably spend a lot of time grinding their teeth. Lots of guys, myself included, at times, are resistant to certain safety practices that appear to offer less benefit than cost, at least until something happens, anyhow. Cost, to me at the operational end, means getting my own ass hurt or killed. For the HSE guys, it means paying out a shit ton of cash times something like 600 guys. So I do see the point pretty clearly. My old attitude of  'hey, it's my ass and my decision to ignore the safety nannies and not wear a condom when out on deck, and just raw dog the shit out of that cargo discharge in comfort' doesn't work when you have 600 guys doing higher-risk stuff and probabilities being a thing. Plus, times being what they are, the retards who want to wear fucking flip-flops out on deck are the first ones calling the lawyers when they lose a toe.

 With TWO exceptions, I understand these things. My disagreement with PPE standards comes on clothing and hard hats for tankermen. Most shipping companies require mariners who are potentially exposed to fuel oils to wear coveralls. I think I still have my nomex-and-cotton coveralls from when I worked for American Heavy Lift.
 Here is where I am at odds with HSE standards for clothing,  and pretty much always have been. Full suits in hot weather, to me, is not necessarily the best idea, unless you have an unlimited supply of coveralls available. Myself, I was issued 2 pairs per 120-day voyage in my tanker days, and if they were ruined, needle and thread and rags to make up the missing material. Carrying residual fuel cargoes (bunkers and diesel), let's say an ounce of oil gets on my sleeve. After I notice it, and who knows how long that will take, I curse, and wipe it off, maybe even throw some soap on it, but I'm going to still wear that garment, and the whole while, petroleum residue is going to be contacting my skin, and even if 90% of it comes out in the wash (it won't) I'm going to be exposed for an extended period. Distillates flash off. Residual fuels do not.
 OTOH, lets' say I'm in a t-shirt, and an ounce of oil gets on my arm. I'm going to curse. Then wipe off  95+% of whatever doesn't run off my arm and hit the deck. Within a moment, I am going to hit that oil spot with soap or other cleaner... and then its' gone. Time-weighted average for exposure is in favor of the man in shirtsleeves.
 But, truth be told, this ignores other factors, like potential for burns, cuts, scratches, things like that that coveralls would have prevented. OTOH, I have fried enough brain cells after one summer in the southern Gulf of Mexico, to know that I'd rather deal with the consequences of being out of uniform than to get heatstroke twice in a 10-day period again. You don't bounce back from that quickly, and even less quickly when it happens twice. I had headaches and nausea on and off for over a month, and after that experience, I learned quickly that however much the safety nannies may wish that you operate safely, the job will need to get done in a timely manner, and if if is not done in a timely manner, you will be, at best, resented. I have never found saying no to work to not have consequences, myself.
 
 The other disagreement I have with maritime PPE standards is the wearing of hard hats outdoors. This I don't really care about that much, except that it's kabuki at best, in exchange for mild discomfort, which, end of the day, is no big deal, except that I hate kabuki policy for its' inherent dishonesty. The protection hard hats offer from overhead impacts is not an issue when there's nothing overhead, and I  personally have never experienced something falling on deck where a hard hat would have saved a life. Obviously they have their place. I wouldn't want to work on a supply boat or an oil rig without one, for sure! For my own part, most anything that goes up high is on my crane, or a crane, and will kill anyone under it if it lets go, regardless of what they're wearing. The smallest dangerous overhead objects I have to worry about falling on me are turnbuckle parts and twist locks from a shipping container, neither of which are going to be stopped by a hard hat. Getting hit by either means a closed casket funeral regardless of what's on one's head. For that reason, we never work under a shipping container that is being lashed or unlashed, and certainly, we never work under a container that is being lifted, and in the case of being adjacent to a container being moved, we're eye-banging that thing nonstop. It's been a few years since a container dropped on a bunker barge, but it happened not that long ago, and I've twice been there when a container was knocked into the water close to us by a crane operator who was smoking his lunch. Wearing a hard hat in those situations is like when Wile E. Coyote opens the dainty little umbrella as the giant rock falls on him.
 I suppose there is always the possibility of vertically flying objects, things thrown from a collision or a chain snapping, or whatever. When required, I do wear one  because it isn't a big deal and it makes the office happy, not because I believe I am more safe with one on. A certain amount of cynicism applies.

  I rarely work aloft, but I do take it pretty serious when I do. I don't mind heights at all, but I do mind that my ass is at the higher end of the weight limit for the harnesses I have aboard. THAT makes me more nervous than not relying on a harness at all. My own approach is never to use the harness to take up weight, in effect, acting as though it is not there, while it's there. I find this works pretty well, although other than light bulb changing, I am not working aloft much at all these days, which is fine by me.

 Slips and falls, OTOH, happen to us a lot, and preventing them is a big deal here on the HQ. I absolutely am a nazi when it comes to no slick spots on deck, applying nonskid and keeping tripping hazards (of which there are many) to a minimum. Even so, I fall down every few months, I'll admit. I am very aware of what my ankles and wrists will be doing when I step over things I can't go around. We do have some on-deck piping that would snap an ankle if you got a foot stuck and then did a pratfall. As such I like my deck looking like 30-grit sandpaper, and even so, I still end up on my ass here and there. Shit happens, so I want to be sure that when shit happens,  it as as mild as possible. More graceful people than I would probably never fall, but I am no ballerina. With the exception of eye protection, proper footwear is probably the single largest safety item one can wear in my situation.

back to the bunker mines

I'm back at work already, and although time passes by much too fast when I'm home, I just got a whole shit-ton of stuff done while I was there. Along the way we celebrated Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's birthday a few days early, as it's actually tomorrow, and, well, here I am at work and not with her where I should be. So we went out to a Palm Beach gem of a hotel bar, a place called the Leopard Lounge , which, turns out, is a restaurant/nightclub  for exceptionally wealthy people... of a certain age. At early-stage middle age, we were by far the youngest couple there, until some WASPy couple came in and stared at their phones and ignored each other, anyhow, but they didn't stay. 

 We stayed. Diner was exceptional- Chilean sea bass for my wife, a shrimp stroganoff for me, along with a couple of drinks. The crowd ranged from 55 to 80 for the most part, and very wealthy and very white, which made Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife stand out like a fly in a bowl of milk. But, turns out everyone was super nice. And, amazingly, enough, they were mostly there to dance.  Seriously, at that age, folks were out there, and the live band playing 70's numbers (it was a 70's night) was fantastic. And some of those folks were really moving well, for slow numbers and fast. 

 Now, I have to be pretty well shitfaced to get out there and dance. Well, I used to. Turns out, in a welcoming atmosphere, I only had to be half in the wrapper to be comfortable enough to dance. But bearing in mind that Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife is from Brazil, the woman can dance. Following her was hard at times. Doing some real samba dancing made us look good, and I didn't even fuck it up or anything. 

Plus, um... my wife looked good, and anyone dancing flawlessly in stiletto heels is going to be worth watching. For me the highlight was seeing a couple, 80'ish years old, who danced every single slow song all night, and just radiated having been being happily married for ages. A departing group even said 'good night you kids' to us, which is funny in that we're knocking on middle-age at this point.

beauty and the beast.

 After the band said goodnight, we decided to head over to HMF, the club at the Breakers hotel, also in Palm Beach, for a glass of champagne before heading home. This is one of our favorite spots, as we always see celebrities or sports figures there, and it's a gorgeous, elegant place, but again, also hideously expensive, so we maybe go twice a year.
Anyhow, end result was a memorable and fun night, I pulled another memorable birthday off, and just a few days later, I am back on the HQ to let my liver and checking account have a little rest.

I made a thing on the thing I made

DIY stuff continues on my time off.

     So, with my rolling assembly table now finished, I wanted to actually make something on it, see how it felt and what needed to be changed.

 I haven't attacked the side of my garage with the widows and orphans boxes left over from moving into my new place, and that side of my garage also holds my larger tools and saws and such, so until I work up the energy to organize and set up that half of the garage, I will still be lugging things like my drill press and chop saw around when I need them. Tough on the back, but I don't feel like making a chop saw station since it's still in the mid-90's here, and humid.

 But, with the wood scraps that a cheap prick like me accumulates, I could still make something even with the extra steps of lugging stuff around.

 So I grabbed my chop saw, screwed it to the table, screwed some 2x4's together to make temporary guides, and cut down a couple of scrap 1x2's that I used to keep my nicer wood off the floor.

 I then planed the 1x2's lightly to give them one semi-finished surface. 

I lined them up and ran a torch over them to toast the wood a bit. 

 I then stained the wood with a blue water-based stain and cut some bright red paint 50/50 with water to make a wash, which comes out brighter than a red color stain would. 

 I then started freehand carving. This was a ballbuster for many reasons:

1) I have minimal talent.
2) I have limited dexterity for fine work after too many accidents, infections and injuries involving my hands.
3) Low quality cheap pine strapping is fibrous and doesn't cut nicely.
4) I had never done that before. 

  In the end, after just 2 hours from start to finish it came out pretty well. The street number of my house is 1776, so this sign is headed out front I think. It took longer for the coat of polyurethane to harden up than it did to make the whole thing.

home again

Great to be back. Lots to do, lots to enjoy. The first few days were a blur of doing things that needed doing. Today, Sunday, was my first half-day to myself, so I took advantage and built a big assembly table for my shop.

 It's 4x8, although the base is actually 1 1/2" smaller all around, so I can clamp with small clamps when doing fine work. I put drop-down casters on the bottom, so I can roll the table to wherever, and kick out the casters to drop the table onto the legs for stable and heavy work.

    Only took about 3 hours to make- should have taken 2, but it's July in south FL, and I had to stop to change clothes and drink water. I literally had a sweat trail around the shop.

 So I spent a couple hours on and in my pool after spending 3 hours yesterday shocking it, servicing the filter and scrubbing the shit out of the concrete. I got the thing absolutely pristine today... and then 2 minutes after I get out, a palm tree in my back yard drops a branch, and an absolute cloud of pollen, this .5mm powder, settles onto the surface of the pool, making it look like someone dumped a sack full of flour into the damn water. So now that the sun is down, it's time to go out there again and start skimming with the hand net. Ergh.

Check out 'Sailing Into Freedom.'

Well, it's another Saturday night, and the last one aboard HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HQ/ Prison on Planet Bullshit.

            We're loaded up with enough oil to fuel two cruise ships, which is our work for the weekend. Between the 140-degree oil and the 98 degree temps, it's frigging hot on board. BUT, the countdown begins, and in a few days I can go home to Florida, and be hot there, which is way better.


      The past months I have been watching the Youtube channel "SAILING INTO FREEDOM" (click on text for link), which has quickly become one of my favorite boating channels, and if you read my BS and come back here, go and check it out, I bet you'll like it too. 

 Peter is an Australian who likes to sail. His dream was of being a boat bum, sailing around Australia's uninhabited and almost-uninhabited coasts and islands, living mostly on seafood and enjoying the company of pretty women who also like to sail. His goal was to share videos of the Outback and the area around the Great Barrier Reef, while having fun.  And this he did.  The guy's all personality. At first I was unsure of how to take him- acting like a ham, making dumb faces at the camera- and you realize with time, he's not acting, he's just a big entertaining goofball, with a wickedly sharp sense of humor disguised in an Australian version of a boat bum redneck.  

 The channel isn't all shits'n'gigs, either. While being very experienced and seamanlike, some real drama happened when his boat got holed in a sea and sunk, in the ass end of nowhere, days from help. Whole thing on film. At the time it was just him and one of his traveling ladies. Guy stays cool as a cucumber, to keep the panicked girl calm, which was impressive to see. His candid after-action report- what he did right, what went wrong, the error chain, was very honest for a guy who just lost his entire means of making a living and was homeless. 

 Well, check it out, anyhow. The story has a happy ending, and they (he and the girl are now married and running the boat and channel together) are rebuilding their lives on a new sailboat they're running on a total shoestring budget in the Caribbean. 

 Anyhow, the channel is lots of fun, there's plenty of eye candy, (his wife is lovely and shares my wife's foreign preference for teeny tiny bathing suits, for which I am grateful) and the videos are beautiful- they go to some amazing places, living on the sea,  and lots of fun.  I throw a couple bucks their way every now and again, and I hope you'll consider the same- it's absolutely worth the entertainment value I get out of it. Plus, the guy's my spirit animal. He does amazing stuff with tape and epoxy, fixing his boat when distance and budget are against him.   Check him out, and maybe throw some money in the pot as they save up to go through the Panama Canal this fall or winter, slowly head back to Peter's home waters. 

 Website-    https://sailingintofreedom.com


 

Mark Patey and the Disease of Entitlement

 So, with week three behind me, and week four starting on my next watch after this one, It's already time to start looking ahead.


      For the past year or so, I've been instituting little changes in my life, making plans, trying things, some with success, some with failure. I've taken up woodworking when I'm home to try to slow the loss of dexterity that time and past abuse has inflicted on my hands. It's working. I still can't really write with a pen, but OTOH, I can cut on a curve without my woodwork looking like I'm having ministrokes every time I sit at the bench. So, success, mostly.  I tried looking into a radical change of employment- it failed, this time, although in the process, it gave me greater appreciation for my current job, so that's positive. Failure, but I'm fortunate enough not to be afraid to fall on my face. Better to try and fail than to fail to try, right?

 Bought my dream home. Major positive. 5 years of planning and preparation for that one.
     I've been working within the sphere of my existing competences. Doing things that I know I can do, mostly. And that's good, and safe, but barring that moment I turned the key in the door of my new house, there hasn't been the thrill of accomplishment lately. I am stretching my very limited talent slowly, I guess, instead of making an inspired leap of faith and taking a generational leap in acquiring new skills.  Playing it a little too safe, basically. For a guy who can work a 100-hour week, and often does, having more skills to utilize in the course of those hours is a massive positive.


 I've also been backing off of social media. Sure, I still just get vicious as hell for shits' n' gigs at times, but there's little point to it. Even here, I'm backing off. My career didn't arc the way I expected. I'm reaching the limit of my core competencies until I make a massive leap forward, whether that's at my workbench or at my desk or out on deck. Oh, I still shoot my mouth off, and can still use sarcasm like a scythe, but I don't have the skills to form an experience-based opinion on many cutting-edge issues anymore, and that makes for poor blog fodder.

 So, with a couple of projects lined up at home, like building a rolling torsion-box table for myself, and a little woodcarving idea I want to try, I've been looking ahead at some of the work I want to do, and that is going to mean some composite work. I can fiberglass, but the project I have in mind, I need to use carbon fiber, which is a different animal. I've been watching Youtube videos to pick up some tips, and got into seeing people make carbon fiber parts for airplanes, which is how I learned who Mark Patey is.

 If you don't know him, Mark Patey is an entrepreneur who grew up in the middle of 10 siblings, dirt poor, and is now a multimillionaire and among other things, a motivational speaker. I got to know who is was through his hobby- he and his twin brother engineer, design and build custom airplanes for fun, and carry a few world records. They own a pharmaceutical company, a couple of factories, and an engineering firm. Both have just a high-school education, having started as carpenters at age 15 and picking up the gearhead bug in high school, tinkering with shitbox cars, and moving into racing cars, boats and planes as their business grew.

 Inspirational guy, and I am NOT someone who frigging watches motivational speeches, which I avoid, as I have no shortage of motivation. I ALWAYS have shit to do, shit I want to do, and shit I dream of doing. But, after watching these guys work, and seeing the energy and happiness they bring through the door, I watched one of Mark's speeches, and it was awesome. Here it is.

 He looks funny to me in a suit. After watching probably 20 hours of him and his brother covered in dirt and dust making stuff, I forgot that he's a CEO on top of being a Maker, one of those guys who is a master of most of the trades. 
I feel that he hit the nail on the head, and articulated a great point about the devastation caused by entitlement. I am certainly someone who believes more in working hard and earning my own rewards than waiting to be awarded them. The criticisms here in the video apply to me as well, in part. There have certainly been times where I felt that my presence and availability was sufficient to earn my paycheck. The fact that down deep, I know that this is not so was easier to stifle with time. However, that attitude was also responsible for a certain amount of stagnation in my life, too, and last year when I decided to push out a little and see if the world had anything new for me again, I realized that the entitlement attitude wasn't fair or healthy... but I wasn't able to articulate the thought anywhere near as clear as Mark Patey does.  Check the video out.