last day

Well, tomorrow I fly out to work again. This has been the most mellow time off I've had in a long, long time. One one hand, I got a bunch of things knocked out on my punch list of things to do at my house. On the other, I took at least two days and did almost nothing productive at all, which surprisingly didn't make me all grumpy with the guilt of not doing something.

 Last night we tried out a Mexican restaurant in my area. The food was excellent, great atmosphere, price was even OK. We hadn't had Mexican food in a couple of years.
 Today, however, I am suffering. I guess I can add Mexican food to the list of foods I should no longer eat. Luckily I am home alone this morning. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the bathroom. Probably crying.

home

I've been home almost for a week, and it's been excellent if busy. One of my oldest friends flew in for the weekend, and we had a lot of fun, ate too much, drank too much and caught up. Pretty much exactly what I needed.

       Today, 6 days in, is my first real day to myself. Headed out to start working on the house, of course.

Welcome to the party

 Well, my new guy had his first really bad night.

 Yesterday... yesterday was a dumpster fire. This last load we carried was trouble from even before it started. It'd be comic if I wasn't there. Some jobs are like that.


     We were 4 hours late to our berth because someone was in it, and the terminal where we were picking up fuel is perpetually late on everything. The place is so bad that there's an internationally known acronym made up of the letters in their name regarding how they always make you miss work.

 Well, so it goes. The funny part is that the guy in our berth was heading to the same ship we would be, with a different grade of fuel. So they did their job, arriving 4 hours late.

  I was asleep by the time we got to the berth, 4 hours late as I said... once we were at the berth, checked in, paperwork signed and cargo hose connected, they didn't start pumping fuel to us for 5 hours. No reason was given. I don't know if they were using the pipeline, or the tank was being pumped to someone else, whatever. Either way, 5 hours.

 This was a triple hand blended oil... that is to say, we were taking three different parcels of oil of differing qualities from 3 shoreside tanks, and blending them in 8 of mine. Fine. A couple of extra steps, some more math on my part to figure out blend ratios for all my tanks, and the computer does some of that for me, which helps.  The bitch of it was, the third parcel was cutter stock- clean high-quality diesel, and only like 900 barrels, which, when divided into my 8 tanks, means that It would take 30 seconds per tank to load this stuff on top. Which is great except that you can't pinch down the flow rate of the fuel much, or the back pressure could blow out something. It takes a few seconds to open and close valves, and even at running speed, it takes time to get around deck. So even with an extra man outside, there's a level of coordination that is normally not required, and multiple opportunities to make mistakes.
    A diesel cut into heavy fuel generally means they need to improve its' quality, that is, they want lower sulfur content (heavy fuel being 2-4% sulfur, generally), or lower viscosity, or to change the density, specific gravity or lubricity, or mineral content, as this stuff also has trace mineral content that they may want diluted too. So, by the time we actually got started loading fuel, 5 hours after we signaled the terminal we were ready, we were now 9 hours behind schedule. By the time we got to the diesel cut, it was into the next day, yesterday, in fact, and I oversaw the diesel cut.

   So, the terminal made us about 12 hours late, by the time their delays ended. Then, the cargo survey.

   For some reason, the three men who were handling the third-party cargo survey (a way to verify volume transferred, and also to take samples, in this case, 3 liters per tank, one each from the bottom, middle, and top of the oil level in each tank. So, 24 samples, and the guy doing the paperwork with me, where we actually measure the height of oil in each tank, temperature, and density, and then come to independent calculations of final volume (which we then compare and which must agree)... well, this should take about 30-40 minutes. I know most of the guys and they're pretty good. I didn't know these guys yesterday. It took over 2 hours. So... another 90 minutes lost.

 Anyhow, around the time I was *supposed to be* finishing this whole job, we were coming alongside a massive containership to start pumping it off. 12 hours late.

 The chief engineer is pissed off. A young, kind of pissy Russian (rare to find one pleasant, to be honest) starts bitching at me as soon as we're all fast. I invite the guy in, and he's borderline rude, and whiny to boot. I let the guy go on. He's right to be upset, and he's not being insulting or anything, just kinda cunty. Eventually, as we work through each other's paperwork pile, and he's still bitching, I get to drop the first bomb. The cargo surveyors have yet to send me an analysis of the oil samples. No sane engineer is going to accept fuel that hasn't been tested. Engines have been ruined, guys have gone to jail over it Seriously. If the sulfur content alone is .01% higher than allowed, someone's gonna pay.
    It normally takes 3 hours for sample results to get back to me, that is, from the moment the surveyor's sample man steps off the gangway to an email being sent to me, 3 hours. It's been 3 hours by the time I finish being yelled at by the engineer. So we get to wait.
 Oh, he drops a bomb on me: They're leaving in about 7 hours. It will take me 7 hours to pump off this modestly-sized fuel order.
 ... and it takes 2 more hours for me to get the sample results back.

       By this time the engineer has come down twice to vent his spleen at me, and on the second one, I, being someone who doesn't do well with being yelled at when I haven't actually done anything wrong, yell back. I have some information in my back pocket. His company leasesthe oil tanks we were loading out of. The bunker supplier who owns the oil is also a division of his company. THEY hired the surveyors, not me. The little fella never once accused us of  anything negative, just was angry, but it was his people dropping the ball.

 Not long after I got loud at the guy, the sample results came in. There was a point somewhere where the job had just gone so far south that I was not all that upset anymore. We hit ludicrous speed, I guess. Anyhow, we got the pumps engaged and by this time I'd been up and about for well over 12 hours, so I handed off the job to my 2nd man, who, being green, was still pretty upset over how things had gone so badly when we were doing everything right on our end.
 I took a shower and went to bed. We'd only be able to pump off about 60% of the fuel we had for this ship in the time we had, so it was all over but for the pumping and closing paperwork.

 I hadn't slept well the day before, so I just crashed when I went to sleep. I never heard the pumps wind down, never heard the engineer yelling again at my second man, and never felt us sail off the ship. I woke up about 0430 to us rocking gently at anchor. Peaceful. On getting up, my second man, who had had time to wind down by this point, was still pretty upset. Apparently the engineer had not felt the need to be restrained and impersonal at the end of the discharge. My guy is super nice but his response to ugly situations like this is to be polite and perhaps a bit retiring and I know the guy finds it hugely stressful. That's sort of the opposite of my tendency to get aggressive and mean... and I know I could use a bit more being polite, though in this case it seemed only to encourage the engineer to be petty. Thankfully, the ship had to sail, so the guy ran out of time before he ran out of vitriol. 
  So, all said and done, it's over, and while for me  this was merely the most recent job that didn't go off well, and is at worst annoying and forgettable, it was a lot more than that for my right hand man, and I think he saw that there's a need to watch for certain personality types that  don't respect men who are respectful. Good training.

dirty deeds done dirt cheap

Well, courtesy of what I think was a paper towel thrown in a toilet here on the HQ we had a blowout again in the holding tank, so we lost half a day getting cleaned out, which was mostly done by me with the help of a couple of guys and a honey wagon. This being the second time in two months that this has happened pretty much makes it hard to have a nice day after something like that.

 Marine toilets are delicate. You can put pee, poop and single-ply toilet paper in them, and anything else but that will destroy the system causing things like last month's energetic loss of containment, the Shitsplosion, or this month, when the system just got clogged and we had a Crapalanche.

 Either way, I got to clean a couple hundred gallons of ghosts of meals past, which (I looked) isn't in my job normal job description. So it goes, though. They give me my munificent salary and expect me to care for the HQ, so care I must.

         Since then, it's been really busy with straightforward work, no really crazy jobs like we've had in the past few weeks, just a lot of work. Some go really well, like the last job, where I was working with great folks, and the enormous Ukrainian engineer took a liking to me because one of us on here has an NRA cap, and the guy's an avid hunter, so we got to bond over stories of things we've killed and eaten. That made a blustery rainy wet day go by nice. The job last night OTOH was an exercise in patience, where the all-Chinese crew was more interested in arguing with each other and it literally took two hours to connect my cargo hose, which I can do in 10 minutes, and then they disappeared for another two hours before someone remembered that they were supposed to take on fuel. There are days like that too.

      Either way, I kinda got my ass handed to me today, physically it was a pretty demanding day, but tonight we get to sit out in the anchorage. I'll be asleep and there's a job when I wake up for watch again tomorrow morning, but I guess if they're gonna pay me I'm OK with that.

 ah well. One week to go.

rainy

    It's a shitty day outside. Thankfully, we're at anchor, so I'm doing my best to not be outstide.

Boom goes the chemical ship

  Over the weekend, the chemical ship "Stolt Groenland" suffered a massive explosion in the port of Ulsan, Korea.

 Yeah, that's no joke, and amazingly, despite 10 injuries, mostly among the terminal staff, nobody was killed! Very lucky there. Less lucky was the ship next to it, the "Bow Dalien" who suffered as a result.

 It's believed that the Stolt Groenland was carrying styrene, which may be the cargo that blew up.


          Both Stolt Carriers and Odfjell Seachem, the owners of these vessels, have lost ships to explosions in the past. There's a certain amount of fatalism in dealing with casualties in the chemical trade. In speaking of this disaster with the dockman at a local fuel terminal that also tends to chemical ships, the man's response was along the lines of 'Well, that's what chemical ships do; they explode.'
           There's some interesting video at the following link. I've got a shitty signal connection today so I can't embed better video here, because I am in New York, and it's apparently a savage wasteland where 4g is taboo.

https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/world/shocking-moment-a-huge-explosion-on-a-25000-tonne-oil-tanker-in-south-korea-sends-a-mushroom-cloud-of-fire-shooting-into-the-sky-leaving-10-injured/ar-AAI0kwF?li=BBr8RiH


            The first video shown is from the perspective of the crew of the Bow Dalian, who were abandoning ship, a reasonable reaction to having the ship  next to you blow up, when you're on a godamned floating bomb yourself.

 I remember the "Bow Mariner" incident off of Virginia about 15 years ago. I was in the Gulf of Mexico at the time working.  That one was deeply upsetting to me because I was just learning tanker operations like tank cleaning, improper performance of which caused that particular ship to explode.

 The cause of the Stolt Groenland explosion is as yet unknown.  Styrene is extremely volatile, and accidents have happened before.

stencil day

For some reason, my newish tankerman mate here on the HQ decided to go nuts with a white paint pen out on deck and mark off the pipelines, ullage ports and hatches.  He never thought to break out a stencil kit, as is actually required, and  for a bit there, the HQ looked like a goddamned train station in a bad neighborhood. I've since unfucked the HQ and repainted this week.

 I like this guy a lot. He's an interesting dude, from Argentina originally, who grew up in Miami, but is now a Texan. Thing is, he's not a sailor qua sailor as I think of it.  By that I mean he's never been to sea, but rather spent a few years on deck on the Mississippi, building tow and not standing watches,  a job I know only a little about, save that it's brutal on the back. Somewhere along the way he acquired a Tankerman PIC certificate and went to a tug and barge company that is famous for being a repository for criminals and the lowest of the low, and where working safe gets one fired. Sadly, given that he has an accent and came into the tankerman's position without the seamanship skills that you find in an Able-Bodied seaman, that company chose not to train him, and instead used him for scut work and heavy lifting. As such, the few habits he had, were mostly bad. He was smart enough to change jobs, and landed with us. We've been training him in the ancient art of being honest while appearing to be shifty ever since.

   The HQ doesn't need AB's, and while I have trained my share, the HQ is not a suitable place to teach and AB. Given that I stay in my job because I get to stay the hell away from people in the first place, that's not good either.  As such, we've ended up with a tankerman who doesn't know shit about seamanship and has no experience as a sailor, but who is a fully qualified tankerman by legal standards. The poor guy fell through the cracks, and didn't even know it.

           Legally, it's all good in the neighborhood. Socially, the guy has been shit upon from A Great Height by other guys in my company, who have been merciless in their interactions with him. We all assume that to be here, one must have a common background in a professional capacity. This isn't true, of course, but that's the state of the zeitgeist here, and people hate it when there's a nailhead standing proud.I sympathize, which is why we've kept him on. He learns very fast and unfortunately has never been in a maritime environment where people were nice to him before. I mean what the hell is that about?  Granted, I've met some assholes on boats, but overall, I like most people out here a lot more than any John Q. Dingus out on the street. I can't help but think that oceangoing mariners might be a more welcoming bunch than river rats. Maybe because the environment is so much more dangerous? I dunno.


 I'm one of the few tankermen in my company who cut his teeth on Product tankers, ships carrying multiple products, what used to be called 'floating pharmacies' at least in the textbooks. Before I had anything to do with what was in the tanks, however, I had an Able Seaman Unlimited, having spent 1080 days at sea, presumably learning something along the way. 3 damn years at sea, if you don't learn how to be at least a semi-competent sailor,there's something terribly wrong. In reality I had a couple thousand more days at sea, having grown up around fishing boats, but whatever. My point is that I already had had a sea-daddy to teach me the language and bearing needed  in basic seamanship, and how to communicate effectively, as well as Basic Seamanship. There was structure, and learning was an incremental process. I learned basic seamanship on small boats, then on ships, how to be a tankerman, and later how to be a bunker tankerman. My second man has had no such structure.
    Well, he's becoming a pretty decent tankerman. There's not much I can teach him about being an AB, beyond some of the ancillary skills. Really, the guy needs to spend some time offshore, to be immersed in the gestalt of being a mariner, rather than being a floating gas station attendant.

 I can't quite capture the right tone here. I am not complaining. I pity the guy and see some potential there. We're keeping him on here. The principal part of his job he can do fine now, especially now that he is being treated like a human being.  I still foresee him getting a fair bit of grief from others, but he's a known quantity to us on board.