Sorta kinda bonus day

 So, crew change tomorrow. I was supposed to be in the air right now. Apparently New York finally got snow, and of course, it's on the day I fly in. Or was supposed to fly in. My flight was cancelled then rebooked for tomorrow 6am. So I get a bonus day today at home. Add to that, today is the first hot day here in Florida, and so I get to experience that, and then tomorrow I can go freeze my balls off. 

      So today is a nice bonus day. My wife is working, sadly, which means I won't see much of her today, but tonight we'll have a surprise quiet night at home, God willing. 

     So, my original plan was to fly in to JFK airport, which is quite a hike from the office in Brooklyn, but has a BJ's on the way into the city, which would have been nice. From there I would have dropped off my groceries at the office warehouse (it being cold, no need for a fridge), and headed to the new, nicer hotel we now use for crew change eve.  Tomorrow I would have been up early and gone right to the office and on to the HQ wherever that may be.  Instead, I will fly into Newark, get stuck in traffic in Manhattan and then go to the local bodega to get half-wilted greenstuff and sundries at twice the price of BJ's.   So it goes. 

 Still, the sun's out and it's already 85 degrees here in America. Time enough to be unhappy tomorrow, so I am off to enjoy the day. 

Dad moment

 Gotta stand on the fencepost and crow today. 

          The US Coast Guard's merchant marine licensing and documentation work has been mostly farmed out to federal contractors, and specifically to Morpho Trust, from what I understand, who is McDonnell-Douglas IIRC,  who already handles ID programs for the Homeland Security dinguses, and whose early incompetence once earned me a phone call from a Morpho Trust executive who read my blog (poor soul) in which I invited each and every employee to dine upon the most choice cuts of a penis. "Eat a dick" was how I put it in my poetic parlance at the time. Getting a phone call over that, and the fact that they were able to identify me and call my goddamn cell was a pretty powerful message. Morpho Trust don't take no shit. 

 Anyhow, I would appreciate not being stalked this time, but it seems Morpho Trust, or maybe just the Miami Regional Exam Center of the US Post Toasties, once again managed to serve up a year's worth of soup sandwiches.  BUT, my kid was undeterred. Despite losing his application 3 times, asking for things that aren't required, and then just going radio silent... until my kid showed up at the REC with a half a ream's worth of papers and a refusal to leave until his application was filed... which then took 2 months to process, which is pretty good for the .gov. 

 Anyhow, long story short, it was far more of an ordeal than I've ever seen, but my kid received his Merchant Marine Credential yesterday.  Rather than going straight to college, he's going to sea for a time, and see what there is to see before decides whether or not a career at sea is for him. 

      I can't tell you how proud I am. I couldn't tell him how proud I was, as I don't want him to be doing this for me, or for the family legacy, we B men having been sending someone to sea for multiple generations now. But he knows now. And whether or not he stays, or even likes it, he'll always have been able to say that he worked as a merchant mariner, which is a nice feather in the cap. 

Sweet vacation

 I had planned on working a week of overtime. Instead, a scheduling snafu gave me the opportunity to go home. There is nothing quite like the feeling of a surprise vacation- Instead of living out of a seabag for a week and trying to fit in in a strange place, I am sitting in my house, waiting (of course) for my wife to finish getting ready so we can go out for the day. 

A near-run thing and a minty fresh booty

 Dear Diary, 

   Today I  We dodged a bullet here on the HQ. 

    Yesterday's cargo had sat in our unheated tanks a little too long after a ship dragged their feet and lingered in port for 2 days longer than expected .This coincided with a VERY nasty cold snap that saw our mild winter temps from from the 30's and 40's to 5 damn degrees, along with hard gales that gave a -40 windchill supposedly. 

 Whatever it was, it sucked hard. 

 So I was all bundled up, and miserable; hell we all were. But the oil in the tanks was losing heat much faster than normal- the volume was split between two tanks, and since the volume in each tank was very low, the oil was exposed to cold across a wide area. It took me 20 minutes to catch prime in the cargo pump, because the fuel in the pipelines had gelled into a molasses-like consistency. Churning the semi-solid oil in the pump heated it up through friction, and so after about 10 mintues the pressure built on the 150-foot Tootsie Roll in the pipeline, and I let the pump run up to 100psi before the gelled oil started moving. Even so, once I had gotten the liquid fuel moving, it was only slightly above the pour point (the temp at which it turns solid), so what should have been a 1-hour pumpoff took 6. Once the heavy old was done, I had a large batch of diesel oil to transfer, but since the pour point of that particular diesel is well below -30, that went off well. 

 Naturally we had no running water during all this. The HQ, for all her qualities, does not have working insulation around her potable water system. There is a bunch of cladding and old insulation, but it is so supersaturated with water from over the years, it turns into a block of ice, and acts to chill our water down. And also the heating coil in the tank died a month ago and the parts haven't arrived apparently. 

 So, yeah, no running water for me. We were camping out for about 36 hours. Luckily, this cold snap, intense as it was, was incredibly short lived. 

 The whole thing was intense and short. When we got to the ship where we had that cold oil, it was blowing 40 steady, gusting higher as we got the first lines over. By the time we got the last line on, just 15 minutes later, the wind had dropped to almost nothing and the sun was peeking out. I've never seen the weather change so fast outside of a thundersquall. 20 minutes after I was miserable and suffering, I had my winter hat and coat off and was in a heavy sweatshirt out on deck. 

 We got the water running today. It was really nice to have a hot shower. I smell much better. 

 

Not as good a day

 It's been a bit downhill since Monday. Work has been characterized by things not going as smoothly as they ought, and there's a cold snap with a northerly wind coming that is sure to mean we lose the water pumps here on board the HQ again. So I get to look forward to being the proud possessor of an unwashed ass for a day or two. 

     BUT, could be worse. Nobody's been ganked off of here this week. That is a relief. We were starting to feel picked upon. 

It was a good day

 Yesterday was a good day. 

Things have been stressful on the HQ for the past few months, not gonna lie. We've got a deep talent pool aboard, and my company is  short of what they need in terms of good tankermen, so unfortunately, we've been Shanghaied a lot lately, and it's got all of us stressed. Getting ganked and put on an unfamiliar barge where we know the job but don't have the vessel or the souls aboard truly integrated in our minds elevates the risk profile to one degree or another in every job we do, of course. Given the nature of the job, that risk can be minimal. Or not. I realize that right around at my age, mental flexibility becomes less easy to achieve. The concepts we drill green tankermen on,  situational awareness, positive control, stop work authority, and the negatives too- analysis paralysis, tunnel vision, stress-induced insomnia, all those things... it becomes more difficult. As does the job itself. We have some of the largest bunker barges in the US.  Shit starts to hurt at a certain point as you fossilize, and after a number of years on the water, nobody escapes anno domoni without some permanent aches and pains.  The important thing becomes maintaining the 'it's a marathon, not a sprint' mentality, which is critical when you were sprinting for 10-15 years.  

          Years ago, I brought one of my very good friends out lobstering with me. We were going to do the usual workload for 2 men despite having 3 aboard- haul 400 pots over about 10-11 hours. The weather was fine, and we had good bait that day for the bait bags- salmon heads and herring, very fast to stuff in between 25 pot strings. 

   So, we fished shorter 3-foot pots, not the 4-foot 'coffins' that ruin the back but fish a little better. BUT, the Notorious BOB and I built the 3-footers heavy, with extra heavy gauge wire, extra reinforcement, and an extra 5lb brick, 4 bricks per pot, so each of the 400 pots weighed somewhere around 50-60 lbs. We'd sling the pots FAST aboard- with 15 fathoms (90 feet) between pots, we usually pulled each 25 pot string in 15 minutes before setting it back out. Setting out the half mile string took 5+ minutes, when we'd be rebaiting bait bags and sorting and banding lobsters. And then the steam to the next buoy, anywhere from 1-15 minutes, but usually somewhere around 5.   Every other string we'd take a minute to take a drink and get situated. It's VERY fast paced most of the time. 

     My friend was in great shape- lean, athletic, and a daily exerciser. Me, I was fishing. I'm overweight, don't jog or do cardio.  I've got the ruck hump back shape from working bent over 5-6 days a week as a teen and adult, and I knew how to balance the pots on their center of gravity to more easily pivot and sling them using momentum and my legs rather than my back, but I also had the hard pad on my upper quads from the motion of sliding the pot on edge down the gunwale of the boat, then lifting the pot and quickly pivoting, taking enough steps to get to where I could toss the pot in the stack properly, and then shifting the pot's weight onto one thigh and bounce the pot using my thigh like a springboard. 400 times a day every 45 seconds or so at a jogging pace. 

   My healthy in-shape friend was dead on his feet 200 pots in, when we have a snack and are in the zone.  Before the end of the day I had him sit on a water barrel and resting. He was done. He did well. Very well, for someone new.  

    Thing is, my friend knew about my job, in good detail. We talked about it, and had years and stories so he knows quite a bit about a job he didn't regularly practice. But the doing of the job, no. He learned, though. He respected me a fair bit more after.  The things he didn't get, the fatigue, the repetitive motion, the discomfort, the mental game that gets you through discomfort and mind-numbing repetition... he didn't get that, until he did. And even then, of course he'd never understand the mental game from a day with me, not for a job I'd been doing more or less since I was 8. But what was so positive for me is that he now knew he didn't know, and couldn't. It made me feel that he appreciated the challenges of my unimpressive little job at that point in my life. 

 I miss that feeling. 

 BUT, yesterday. It was a good day. I had a good day. Mental Health Day. I cooked, I did things I enjoyed, and I didn't do too much that I didn't enjoy.  Provided I don't get pulled off of the HQ to go elsewhere, I feel like we got our batteries recharged. 

Sunday at sea

 We're at anchor today here at HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HQ/Center for Culinary Experimentation.

      Today is Sunday. Next cargo is fixed for lunchtime tomorrow. In theory, there's free time today. 

    Yesterday was a productive day for me. We anchored the night before, and yesterday I spent about 3 hours at my desk hammering out paperwork and getting caught up on the logbooks and recordkeeping, ran through some scheduled maintenance checklists and the safety inspection and walkaround for the tour, pulled out the tools to cut and resplice a worn out eye on one of the mooring lines, and pulled up a bunch of consumables from the storage area to replenish assorted filters, bottles, notions and potions. I also mixed together a quart bag full of rub for making pulled pork. By then it was afternoon, and I got a ride ashore and bought grub- meat, chicken, a big ass pork shoulder and a shit ton of greenstuff.  By the time I got back aboard and got the pork shoulder rubbed down and set in the fridge to dry brine overnight. it was dark and I was ready for a shower and bed. 

  So, Sundays at Sea are a sailor's delight when all works out well.  It's a day where, needs permitting, free time is allowed to the crew.  20 years ago, for me as an able seaman on a tanker, it meant getting up for breakfast, having the morning meeting with the bosun and the mate, and then loading up buckets of soapy water and the brooms, and sweeping and mopping all the passageways and common areas of the house, except for the bridge (which was swept and mopped by the 4-to-8 watch every single day except when we were in port, since oil tankers don't keep a bridge watch when pumping cargo). Point being, if nothing pressing was happening, Sundays at sea meant we were finished with daywork by 10am, and could read, loaf, critique the steward, watch movies, exercise, whatever. Have fun, basically. 

 I'm on days for a few weeks, so I rolled out of the bunk at 0445, relieved a sleepy but grateful B, and once he was out of the scene, I got the pork in the slow cooker, swept and mopped the HQ, which is a one man job, the HQ being very modest in scale, and sat down, done in an hour.  My plan today? Cook my pork, play a video game, finish my current book, go walk in circles for an hour around the perimeter of the deck, and at some point get out of the sweatpants I'm wearing and put actual pants on. Eventually. 

 Some days are good days. I'm optimistic for today.