MadProf's
Workshop

We’ve just arrived in Pohang, South Korea! These last few days have been very hectic for me, and kind of typify my whole life at present:

23:45 - 04:00am sea-watch.
07.30 - 08:30am study groups.
09:00 - 11:45am Korea country orientation. (basic history lessons, culture, language, etc)
11:45 - 16:00pm sea-watch
19:30 - 22:00pm a-team meeting
23:45 - 04:00am sea-watch…

And so on! Quite busy, as you can see. In my “free time” I’ve also been working on the ship’s video edit suite editing 2 video projects. Tomorrow I’m going out with a group of people for ten days to work with a local church.

Here are two photos of me taken in Japan, where we’ve been for the past month:

Greetings, Gentle reader, and welcome to the latest episode of brummie@sea.

Before we get much further, here is a photo of yours truly:

We’re now actually in Kanazawa, which is further north.

I’ve been quite busy this port, as the second waterman has been on a team staying and working off the ship for the whole port. I was also learning a lot about the audio-visual stuff on board the ship, how to use Final Cut Pro, sound balancing, and so on. Fun stuff. We had some of the people from our company’s technical/production side out for a week or so, and doing some training for us.

Since then I’ve been working on the ship’s edit suite making a couple of video projects (a Taiwan report video, and a video about the work the ship did in Philippines to show in Korea).. Final Cut Pro is very very nice software.

Especially once you get rid of the silly one button mac mouse, and put a proper 2 button+scrollwheel on the beast.

I’ve also been working quite a lot on just refilling up the ship with water. We had to pretty much replace all our water with Japanese water, due to strange regulations here, and that was all a bit complex.

I stayed up quite late one night running around the ship with the I.T. guys, when they re-built the network system, rebooting and reconnecting the DHCP client sessions on every computer… We now have internet web access on every ship-computer (not personal laptops). That is really cool.

I am probably going to be changing jobs fairly soon, I don’t know where yet. Possibly into I.T and Videographer, or something like that. Maybe working with the Audio-Visual team running the sound and stuff programmes on board. I’ve been working as a waterman for almost a year now. On Doulos that’s a long time. I just looked in our logbook the other day, which I started us keeping. The first entries are from August last year. Amazing.

I applied for the job of Technical Administrator. It would be quite interesting, and a big challenge too. A more technical ship work, and I could learn a lot of administration skills that would be useful in whatever job I end up doing in the future.

Doing all the video and all that these last two weeks, and hanging around with the IT guys a bit, I know that that is where I enjoy working most. I love doing video editing, and IT configuring and installing and all that work is so much more satisfying than water stuff. I miss programming a lot.

I miss linux, actually. Now THAT’s a geeky comment.

But whatever job I end up doing here, it’ll be useful, and also a good change. I’m really tired of the waterman’s job. It’s a great job, you can learn sooo much. And it’s very interesting, very much responsibility, very much independence. More independence than any other job on the ship, probably. Still. It’s time for a change. I’m tired of the midnight phone calls, of thinking about the ship’s water and list and draft 24/7. Of being “on call” whenever I’m on the ship. Of working alone, truely alone. Even working with the other waterman, I still miss being part of a team. I don’t much enjoy being a leader. I prefer to be a team player. Able to relax with others who know as much or more than I do, and able to pass the ball around, rather than just holding it myself, or watch my partner/assistant run with it the whole time.

This has been a fun week… most of it. Exciting, and all, anyway. We had a damage control drill, in which the fire attack team had a chance to play with our big emergency submersible pump (big blue thing, about the size of a child and the weight of a man) which had to be carried down to the engine room, and dropped into a tank of water, and then they had the fun of emptying a few tons out of the porthole, and then the rest we transferred into another tank. Great fun for them, very good that they finally get a chance to work with that pump (it’s a monster!). And the tanks, of course, mean work for the watermen! :-)

We had two tanks which were on schedule for being worked in (we emptied out one of them a month or so ago, and had deck teams in there scraping off the old dead cement, and we last week got the new cement on all the walls.

So we had to open up this empty tank again, and open up the other tank, and get everything ready for that. This meant the usual sitting for a few hours in a bilge/tanktop covered in slime and grease and oil with various sizes of wrenches/spanners getting the manhole open.. This one also created a few more problems though, as some of the nuts were really old and totally seized up.

I had to find out how to get them off. I tried everything I knew how to do (various lubricants, hammers, spanners with extensions, and so on). My next and final option was to grind the thing off. As this is in a bilge, with oil and all about, it’s quite dangerous to do grinding, as you have sparks all over the place. So you need “Hot Work permits” which are paperwork to make sure you follow all safety procedures, have another guy on firewatch while you work, have fire extinguishers ready, etc… The chief mate suggested I try using just a oil burner/torch and heating up the nut around the edges, to try and expand it and so free it up. This would also require Hot Work permits, but would be safer, and also a lot easier, if it worked.

As I was getting ready for this (with the deadline being the drill the day after), the chief engineer suggested just using a “Nut splitter”, a really cool tool I’d never seen before. Basically it’s a chisel with a threaded end, a bolt on the end, and a case to drive it through the nut, as you tighten the bolt. Very cool indeed. So I found this device, and amazingly, it worked! Very nice indeed. I was chatting with the Engine Foreman afterwards, and he suggested a few other ideas involving chisels (and hitting the bolt in the right places to expand the right parts). So I have lots of new stuff learned. Cool. I’ll put it all in the “Waterman’s Bible.”

This is Sabbath week, we’re supposed to have rest from most of our work.

Unfortunately there are only two watermen.

I did some maths. The water at this port is REALLY slow to load: like 10 tons an hour. If we use 40 tons a day, then in Sabbath week we must load roughly 300 tons of water, which is 30 hours of loading.

It’s not too hard work, really, as most of the time we can rest while it is loading. But there are also about four hours of sounding to do (over the whole week), plus another five or six hours moving water ready for the voyage, and so on.

It’s quite OK - not too bad, really. If it were a normal port, then no worries. But it’s still roughly 20 hours work each - kind of annoying when we’re supposed to rest. Normally it’s no problem - like last year, there was virtually no work for the watermen, because it was the beginning of a port. So they just loaded the ship totally full - so full she could not sail - and then basically did nothing the whole week.

But we arrived here after a two-hour voyage from the last berth (which still counts as a voyage, so we cannot load above the limit). The water connection only arrived during Sabbath week. It’s a slow connection… AND, we sail right at the end of the week so we have to have all the tanks in order for sailing (some full, some empty, etc).

We slightly overloaded the ship with water last week, because of the sheer relief of a quayside connection again. The ship was totally low in fuel, so we loaded her to the max of water, with little effect on the trim. Ok, huge effect on the trim, on the draft, little effect. All the water tanks are at the back, so we ended up with a 2.5 meter trim then they bunkered fuel 4 days ago, and we haven’t loaded since.

When they loaded the fuel, the ship was below her loadline. Its quite colder weather, so all the doors are acting a bit odd. The c/m told me that he knew we must be light on water, since his door was not shutting as normal. I told him we had enough, but he said “load her up! The ship must be almost flat right now!” So I loaded her up. It was quite fun. My bathroom was almost diagonal, and the toilet outside the engine room was tilted both ways, and very weird to use.

Anyway. we will load another 50 tons or so the day we sail. (Tuesday)

So today, we started work after lunch (its Sunday) and then did basic soundings, made a few keys and I went up to the mates office. I found a really really dirty tarnished old brass ship’s wheel (with wood outer spokes) in the office. The deck secretary told me that the 2nd officer had found it in an antique store, and that it was going to be attached to the bridge of Doulos.

There were Brasso tubs around the floor, and so i asked “surely you weren’t trying to Brasso this?”

And she said no, but some others were trying to no avail. They had also tried toothpaste, and were going to try paint remover. I laughed, and said how silly. I then stole the wheel,

I phoned the store keeper, and he came to the keyshop. I borrowed some de-liming liquid from accomotation, and some wire wool and leather gloves. In half an hour of our work, it was shiny and brassy, so then then we Brasso’d it for another half hour or so, called the mates, and told them to come, and bring some Coke with them. On the way they told me on the phone that Coke has had it’s recepe changed, and probably wouldnt work. I just told him to bring it. They turned up, saw the wheel and were VERY impressed.

I did my PR thing: I told them all, “if you need to know anything, or if you need something difficult done, just ask the Watermen how! they know everything!

They kept chuckling and saying well done boys, and how happy the captain will be and we will (hopefully) get a *real* wheel on Doulos again!

The Coke actually tasted quite nice….

Warning: this post contains a word which may under certain circumstances be considered less than 100% socially acceptable in the context of the readers current culture and/or position. If this is the case, the blog author accepts no responsibility whatsoever.

Dealing with the baggage locker isn’t one of the most complex jobs, but it’s kind of annoying and adds stress to the work: having request forms to do every day, extra responsibility and all. It only takes a few minutes a day, normally(up to half an hour or so) but it’s just another thing to worry about.

Anyway. The firemen don’t have so much work, unless they really want it (ie, go and look for things in a not-ideal state, and then fix them). But they don’t do that (at least, not the current firemen).

So one day, I was carrying boxes up from the locker with the boatswain, who is Dutch, and mentioned to him an idea I’d had. Maybe the firemen should take over the baggage locker… ?

He stopped, put down the box he was holding and stared at me.

“That,” he said, “is a bloody brilliant idea!”

So now the firemen do the baggage locker.

Delegation is so much fun when it works!!!

Yesterday the trucks started coming at 6am, and I was finished by 5pm. Prayer night was the night before, and ended late (11.30pm) so I was really tired. I went to bed last night at 7, and got up at 7 today (even though I only slept about 7 hours, as usual… *sigh*). Tonight is i-night. So I have until lunch time to get ready. I’m in 3 items in this i-night, and it was going to be 4, but I didn’t have time for all those extra practices this week.

The waterman job is so tiring for me at the moment. I enjoy it, it’s interesting and fun, but so tiring, and such long, unpredictable hours. I don’t even know the day before what hours I will be working on the tomorrow. I guess that’s mostly because of the trucks, and once they are done, it may go back to normal again, I dunno.

The new group is settling in well… Even less guys than with ours. The ship is really short of guys! We have more girls in the deck dept, which I quite like, it kind of smoothes off the rougher edges of some of the guys.

The February group of people just joined, like I did last year. Feels very strange. Anyway, the new deck crew have just completed their deck department orientation and basic fire fighting training, so I took the opportunity to steal some of their photos for the purpose of writing a new entry. Applause is not mandatory, as I am too far away from you to hear it anyway. So, without further ado, the photos:

Quote for the day:

For no worldly thing, nor for the love of any man, is any evil to be done (Matt 18:8); but yet for the profit of one who stands in need, a good work is sometimes without any scruple to be left undone, or rather changed for a better. For by doing this, a good work is not lost, but changed into a better.

- Thomas à Kempis “The Imitation of Christ” Ch. 15

Long day yesterday…

I did 4 school visits, as a puppet, interacting with the MC for the whole 45 minute programme. So I had my arm up in the air for 3 whole hours. Very tiring.

Then After dinner I started work with loading water, we had 20 water trucks arrive, and so finished around 1.30am the next morning.

This morning I was up at 7am for music practice before the Sunday service, playing bass again… This is the second time this week I’ve played bass, and the second time ever I’ve performed with it. I feel so bad at it, I have no technique at all, and can “hear” in my head what the bassline should do, riffs, changes, and so on, but lack the practice and skill to play them yet… I need to find a “learn to play bass” book and spend a few hours practicing.

It’s kinda fun though!