Lead-Foot Ahmoud Delivers

So I am at JFK airport in NY, and it's time to go home. 

       I'm crew changing out a day early, as I have a minor diagnostic medical procedure tomorrow. It was my only chance for an appointment... and honestly this is something that has been hanging over my head for a while, and tomorrow was the only opening left this year. So I get an extra day at home this time, which is nice. 

       Thursday was *supposed* to be the day I left for Brazil, there to spend 3 weeks with Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's family all the while the good ladies of the fam spend my money and wait on me hand and foot in my new fuckin' house...

       Instead my wife's mom is dead, the house is less than half- finished and I have a lawyer about to commit lawfare on the builder of my house  because instead of building it, he stole much of the building materials and no shit, built a house for himself WITH MY MATERIALS. 

    Yeah, so I'm not bitter or anything. 

       In the meanwhile, though, I may have set a new record for door-to-door time between the company office in Brooklyn and JFK airport out on the edge of Long Island. 

    Mahmoud my driver, in his Toyota minivan, got me there like his ass was on fire and his hair was catching. I never heard a minivan roar before. We didn't drift or anything, but thr dude's mommobile car had some ass today. We did at least a half dozen hole shots, going from 0-60 at Wide Open Throttle, which was surprisingly sporty... and Mahmoud, a short, portly amd swarthy fella, was channeling Mario Frigging Andretti. 

       It was a great drive. 

    There was a shit ton of disorganized yelling latinos at the poor people's security line. People of all ages, loud, generally rude. Absolute chaos. Maybe the tides of humanity are going home prior to the next inauguration? 

         Eh, I can dream.   

  The Precheck line was a breeze. Maybe 45 seconds of delay max, vs. what looked like 45 mins for the hoi polloi. 

     I'm ready to go home. 

Di-Reckly in the feels

 

    Well, one week to go before I head home for Christmas. Tonight was my night to get up early (at oh-oh-forty five in fact) as we go on dog watches for the day to switch from days to nights, as B takes over the role of first among equals here on the HQ- the day guy generally calls more of the shots, since he has to answer the phone and emails, leaving him more in tune with The Office. 

    So I am on nights for my last week- not as much fun this time of year, where nights are cold and more often than not annoyingly windy. 

 But, my point here is that in a week I go home for Christmas, and I'm pretty excited and grateful for that. 

       Yesterday, I bunkered a Pure Car/Truck Carrier anchored up in NY harbor with her sister ship- the two vessels have some work for a bit moving cars from Mexico to New Jersey. 

 The crew? Filipino unlicensed, Ukrainian officers. 

 As sometimes happens, the crew has been working hard and VERY busy for the past week, and time at anchor, even with bunkering operations, represents a slower pace for them, a chance to relax a bit, especially for guys off watch.  This made them gregarious, and as we were about eye to eye for much of the operation, I spoke to them just as much as they spoke to me. 

         Their stories are not easy stories. These are guys who can't go home. All of them are working to support their extended families, paying in some cases for them to relocate, to find new homes, or to access the black and gray markets for purchasing necessities.   When their contracts are up, they fly to Romania or Germany, there to take a weekend off and start finding another ship. Most have been working relatively nonstop for 2 1/2 years, with a week or two at most between ships.  The chief engineer, a hearty old timer, one of those guys who speaks with great authority but obviously well-liked by his crew and enormously skilled, has family missing and assumed dead.  He isn't the only one. 

               One of those things that hits home. I feel for these guys. I absolutely, Thank God, can't relate. Still, it was good I think for them to talk to a foreigner who was sympathetic, and it was pretty obvious that the 3rd and 4th assistant engineer, young kids in their early 20's, had a father-figure thing going on with the chief. 

    I didn't get one of those 'there but for the grace of God' moments, but sure as hell I was deeply moved by what they shared, which wasn't much. I wasn't going to push either, to draw them out, as their lives are not good at the moment, but hopefully it did them  individually some kind of good to find a willing ear.  I can't empathize. I am blessed not to have shared experience, and I am extremely grateful for that. 

            Makes me even more grateful that in a week I'll be with my family. 

         

Halfway day

 Wedbesday was halfway day, the halfway point of the present hitch on the HQ for me.  I came in a week early to get some pre-holidays OT but that don't count. 

          Presently we're loaded and waiting on slack water in about 3 more hours to sail from the terminal where we gassed up the HQ. 

 Halfway day is usually my day to wash out my fart sack (linens) and bath towel and start planning things to do when I go home. That's about it. Nothing special. 

   It's been an average week, though windy and cold. I'm mostly writing because I am anxious as I wait to hear from folks in Brazil and time is dragging ass at the moment. 

      Today is the 2nd of 2 arbitration sessions between our lawyer, our engineer, and the builder of my house in Brazil, who it seems has defrauded the ever-loving shit out of us. There's an insane story there, but today, right now in fact,  is the last shot at settling things without a civil trial and a criminal complaint being issued for fraud.  

         Whatever.  I took it in the seat from this trashbag. I will accept his head on my mantle in trade if he doesn't have a Come To Jesus moment.  I made it clear that I was willing to look on this as a tax that I paid for being a gullible dumbfuck and walk away at anything more than x cents on the dollar, x being a lot less than I want but which could be resolved in a matter of weeks. 

 If not... well I already got fucked.  I am perfectly willing to aacept a Pyrrhic victory if the guy wants a battle of attrition or tries to run the clock down. 

     But I will leave Brazil in Brazil for now. I've still got shit to do here. 

True story

 Taxed from the International Maritime Meme Organization on instagram.   Worth checking out. 

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.