This is the archive of my blogging about my time working with GBA Ships - the M/V Doulos and the M/V Logos hope.
Posts in chronological order for easier reading.
I’m typing this from the dry food store, miles and miles down in the depthful belly of the ship. I don’t know if depthful is a real word, but if not, I have just coined it. Please pay all royalties to me, chocolate is the preferred currency.
OK, so what am I doing in this previously mentioned food store…? Well, we’ve been having a few problems on the job.
Over the last few months we’ve been emptying out ballast tanks, (the water tanks down at the bottom of the ship which keep her stable) one at a time, and then sending a deck team in there to do routine maintenance (routine, as in, once every 4 years or so per tank).
Anyway. We just got to the last tank in the series, and so needed to fill it up with water. For some reason though, every time we tried to use the pipe to send water to the tank, the pump would get very hot and trip the electrics. We could see a very high pressure build up in the pipe by the pump, so it looked as if there was some kind of blockage in the pipe, which was not allowing water through it. We went into the tank last week or so, and looked around for any obvious problems, feeling inside the pipes as far as fingers would go to make sure they had not got cemeted over in the maintenance. No problems found though…
So we asked the engine room guys to have a look at it, and they sent a very professional welder/plumber. He took a “snake” (high pressure hose with a thing on the end which bounces around and smashes to bits any kind of blockage or rust.
Anyway… it got stuck in the pipe. So he called me, and then he went into the tank to take the pipe off and look for his snake. BUT… forgot to check which pipe. The wrong pipe got taken off…. So he took off the other one. Not his fault, he didn’t know the tank had two pipes leading into it. We couldn’t see any problems, so he put them back.
Presumably the problem was further up the pipe, closer to the engine room.
Presumably so was his ‘snake’.
So, we opened up the other tank, brought a HUGE emergency submersible pump and attached it up to transfer between the two tanks. This pump is a very serious pump. It’s designed to be hooked up, and chucked down a staircase into a flooded hold to pump it out, kind of thing. It took 3 of us to carry down to the food store here where the tank manholes are to put the pump into. We had to use all kinds of ropes and stuff to hoist the thing down. We attached it, and set it going. It was a bit complicated, as we had to have one guy at the suction end of the pump, to make sure it was OK, one guy at the discharge end to make sure it didn’t swing around and kill someone, one guy running between to make sure the hose was OK and didn’t explode, and one guy 3 decks up with a radio to switch the electricity for the pump on and off (there are only 3 connection points on the whole ship for this creature).
So… First when we switched it on, we found a hole in the hose. We found it as it started shooting water the pressure of a fire-hose all over the place in the book-hold where the discharge tank manhole is. So we stopped the pump, pushed more of the hose into the tank so the leak was inside the tank, and tried again. This time, the pressure of the pump pushed the hose into a crack under the flange of two pipes, and then ripped the whole hose open as the pressure was too high for the squashed position. I got totally soaked by this.
So we stopped the pump, got a new hose, and tried again. This time was OK… for about 4 minutes. But the pressure of the pump started pushing the discharge end of the hose back out of the tank! So we stopped the pump, tied the hose down, and started again. 2 hours later, nothing more had gone wrong, and 60 tons of water had been moved. That is, 30 tons an hour. 500 litres a minute, in other words. Quite fast.
So in went our bold intrepid welder/plumber guy to the now empty tank, and he took off the pipes and all, found the ‘snake’ in a “omega” shaped bend in the pipe (the chief mate says this is to allow for expansion and contraction of in the ship’s shape… if he had asked the C/M before sending his ‘snake’ in, it would have saved a lot of problems…) anyway. He got his snake out, closed up the pipes again, and declared the pipes probably useable… at least, no problems found in them. (These are probably original 1914 pipes, brass (I think) and still in amazingly good condition…)
Yesterday was spent with myself and another guy (possibly the next waterman? Who knows…) down here with a smaller more sociable submersible pump moving the last of the water across. (When they had opened up the pipes, about 20 tons of water drained back across to the other tank we had just moved it from.)
So. Now what…
The tank we are moving from (where the snake was stuck) is smaller than the tank we are moving the water into.
By about 10 tons.
So I still have 10 or so tons of water to move across. I tried this morning using the probably OK pipe system, and the engine room pump. I did this very slowly, checking everything, slowly allowing pressure to build up, etc, so as not to overflow anything, or trip the electricity on the pump, or any of that. Strangely, although water was leaving the pump, the water level didn’t go up in the tank. I checked after lunch, and the level was exactly the same…. So I stopped the whole thing, and started checking my tank levels, sounding everything I could think of. About 40 tons of water had left the freshwater tank I was pumping from, and 0 had arrived in the ballast tanks. And it had not arrived anywhere else either.
About this time, I was expecting my name on the paging system any second, to find 40 tons of water had turned up in someone’s cabin…
Luckily it didn’t
Unluckily (or possibly not) It didn’t turn up anywhere else, either.
Anyway. We sail tomorrow, and this tank must be full when we leave. So I decided to ignore the whole missing water problem, and spent the last part of this afternoon moving water from the engine room into the empty small tank, (these pipes still work…) and then am myself down here in the dry food store, miles and miles down in the depthful belly of the ship moving the water from the small tank into the big one with the sociable submersible pump. It’s very slow.
And quite scary too. Last time the other waterman did something like this, he managed to flood the book-hold, and it caused some huge amount of damage, something in the thousands of euros range. So that’s why this entry is so disjointed, I keep running off to check everything. Yesterday I started at 6.30am, and finished at 10pm, and today I started at the more reasonable hour of 9.30am, and hope to be finished before the same numbers reappear with another suffix (or the same. That would be worse…). We shall see.
The reason it is so much work for just me, is that the other senior waterman is leaving, and changing jobs (I may have mentioned this before). And is doing training all this week. It’s all really tiring, anyway.
This is a photo of the inside of one of the tanks, including the “omega” bends. The tank is 1 metre 33 cm high.
For the first time in ages… a post from fingers directly, rather than via Cyprus! I’m right now in Singapore, on break for 3 days or so with my parents and brother who are out to visit. Very very good. Singapore is beautiful, clean, and friendly. We’re staying in “Little India”, which is (apparently) the least clean and organised part. Which is fine by me! Amazing lovely Indian food really quite cheap here, and of course, being with my family is even more amazing. Apparently I should be making more frequent and shorter posts… with more photos. Well, no photos today, no camera link available. But as to the shorter and more frequent posts, this is the first of (who knows!) many. I hope to post more, but I’m not very good at this whole sticking with good ideas thing, lah.
The chief mate and bosun went briefly into the tank this morning, looked around and said it should be a quick job to do the whole thing. At lunch time, the bosun asked the team leader how it was going, and said, “oh well, at least if you get the tank empty of water by this evening it’ll be good.”
This evening, there’s no noticeable progress made at all.
I went and crawled though the whole length of the tank, found two old rust scrapers from last time the tank was opened (2 and a half years ago). It’s going to be a really big job. Loads of the bits of the tank in the forward end have all the cement fallen off, and rust and all kinds, so it’s not just a one day job. Once it’s dried (which may take 2 or 3 or more days) it may then take another week or so of work chipping all the cement and stuff and putting in new cement. It’s down in the bottom of the engine room, below generator 2, so the deckies feel really uneasy and keep coming to me for help all the time.
Luckily once it’s dried, all the rest should be done by deckies, not us. But still it’s kind of annoying.
Our grease gun (device for putting grease inside deck equipment) is moderately dead. It’s horrible. We don’t have grease cartridges, but have to fill it by sticking the end in a bucket of grease and pulling the spring back. Kind of like re-loading a cross-bow, just messier.
So, still in drydock mode. But here is a blog update I wanted to write about 2 months ago, but never got around to. I’m really tired, so this may not be as interesting as I kind of imagined it originally.
During the leadership training thing I did a few months ago, we had a day doing work at a school, making their football pitch ready. Filling in holes and such. So I spent a few hours carrying buckets of dirt and filling holes. Nice day, didn’t have to think too much. Another guy was there, who was making the buckets of dirt ready for carrying, scraping it out of the big piles of dirt dumped on the stands.
Anyway. I thanked him slightly ironically for the dirt he gave me one time, and he said something like, “Only the best for our customers” or something like that. Anyway, so we developed a whole routine about the dirt, talking about the moisture content, worms, and so on. We formed our own company:
DARN: Dirt And Rain eNterprises.
While walking back and forth so many times I slowly developed one stage at a time our mission statement, basically stating our belief and trust in giving dry dirt, so as to allow the rain to add the correct moisture levels, without the burdensome weight of pre-added moisture:
“We believe in a holistic customer-empowering service effectiveness paradigm which utilises the undeniable precepts of positive precipitation to innovativly implement a beneficial weight/content transportation ratio. "
Kind of rolls off the tongue, I think.
Yesterday was my first day as duty fireman. Once every few weeks I’ll spend a day on duty running the firestation. We had a control team page at 8pm - the laundry girls saw steam coming from one of the machines doing a 95 degree wash, and thought it was smoke! It was quite dramatic. On Christmas Day, I got paged about 20 times… insane! About the 18th time I phoned info, and asked if I could get a prize. We were loading water; the quayside is weird here, and the officers wanted to ask about water several times. Also the shipping agent wanted photocopies of receipts, and the purser…
Today was kind of a strange day. I taught puppets this morning to all the port volunteers. Now they’re all shouting, ‘Hello Daniel!’ every time they see me. Then I played guitar for deck devotions, did my soundings and water rounds (quickly), then fixed the director’s cabin door. Then I replaced a broken porthole with one of the carpenters, and then took a valve apart in the engine room, and put it back together again, stopping it leaking. All random jobs. It’s not a “normal” day for watermen; it’s kind of weird, but it’s because all our normal jobs were done already. The monthly ones in dry-dock, there are no bags needing to go up or down, and no-one has lost any keys recently.
This port is quite stressful for me. Strange loading, and Stephane has moved to another job. So I’m training/leading Tomas, the new waterman. Because it’s a strange port there is no way I can give him routine jobs (like loading water) to do every day for a bit, and I couldn’t do the random jobs today with him as he was out with a team!
There was a small leak in my bathroom ceiling about 2 months ago.
I wrote a request form for the plumbers to come and have a look. They came a week ago, pulled the ceiling apart, ripped out some pipes, splashed water everywhere, left pipes pouring out for about 3 days, dropped a pipe through the sink and smashed a hole big enough for my arm to go through!
There is a step-ladder in my shower, welding rods in my sink (whats left of it) and dirt everywhere, and it still drips from the ceiling over the toilet.
They also pulled the light out of the wall, smashing the wood of the fixture, and I’m currently waiting with great interest to see what happens next!
Now the most cool thing in the whole epic is as follows:
That bathroom has needed re-painting for about 6 months. The floor is quite bad. So I was going to repaint it, getting ideas, browsing “dynamic interior design for incredibly small bathrooms” at bookstores, and so on.
The day I was going to paint it, I got distracted by work and stuff, and so didn’t manage to start.
That day, the plumbers came and smashed the whole place up! If God hadn’t distracted me and kept me from going ahead, it would all have been in vain! God is nice like that.
I think I may have mentioned I’m quite busy, and a bit tired. Here is a summary of my week, so far.
Tuesday 23 January 2007:
07:30-07:55 - breakfast.
08:00-08:55 - Associate director’s devotion, and community announcments
09:00-15:30 - final transferring of water, sounding tanks etc to prepare ship stability for sailing.
16:00-17:00 - stand-by for mooring stations
17:00-18:30 - mooring stations, leaving the port, preparing the anchor, and dinner squeezed in while others were on anchor watch.
18:30-19:00 - Dutch dance “dress rehearsal” to check dance quality for the programmes
organiser
19:30-20:30 - “Port report”, community meeting to see what happened in Manilla, exchange news, stories, etc.
20:30-22:00 - Lying awake in bed with the light off.
22:05-23:45 - Sleep is a lost cause. Drinking coffee, chatting on yahoo, and getting dressed and ready for sea-watch
23:45-…
Wednesday 24 January 2007:
…-04:20 - Sea watch on the bridge. Training 2 new helmsmen while supervising lookouts, keeping watch, steering the ship, etc.
04:30-05:00 - Getting ready for bed, I still have no bathroom, and so have to use one down by the engine room.
05:00-07:00 - Sleep (2 hours)
07:00-07:30 - Breakfast
07:30-08:45 - Bible Study groups
08:45-11:30 - Lifeboat Drills. More about this later.
11:30-11:45 - Grabbing an apple for lunch, showering, and getting dressed for sea-watch 11:45-16:20 - Sea watch on the bridge. Continued training of one of the new helmsmen, while
keeping lookout, etc.
16:20-17:30 - Sitting in the mess, eating carrots, waiting for dinner.
17:30-18:00 - Dinner.
18:00-18:20 - Preparing for bed.
18:20-23:00 - Sleep (4 and a half hours)
23:00-23:45 - Preparing for sea-watch, drinking coffee, etc.
23:45-…
Thursday 25 January 2007:
-…04:20 - Sea watch on the bridge, you know the story.
04:30-05:00 - Getting ready for bed.
05:00-07:30 - Sleep (2 and a half hours)
07:30-07:55 - Breakfast
08:00-08:45 - Teaching session on Galatians.
08:45-10:30 - Mooring stations, arriving in Cebu. Most experienced people just left, and we have a new deck officer who doesn’t speak English perfectly yet (although he knows everything completely in Korean).
10:30-11:30 - Soundings, getting water checked out, and filling log books.
11:30-12:00 - Lunch.
12:00-13:30 - Check emails, write new Job Description for watermen, prepare other jobs, find out whats happening with the water this port.
13:30-14:30 - Help with packing down the lifeboats, and settling down to wait for the first water truck to arrive.
14:30-15:30 - Find out that the water trucks (about 20 of them) will arrive at 19:00 tonight, so decide to write a few emails then sleep til 17:30 for dinner…
15:30 - Now.
So. We’ll be loading water from 19:00 or so until midnight or around then. Probably later. 200 tons. It’s free, though, which is nice.
Dear Steven Covey - Thanks buddy! Sectoring my time is really helping me be efficient (and facetious - right now.)
About the lifeboat drills, I’ve just been reassigned, I found out at breakfast, to coxswain of life-boat 1. Very cool. Very nice lifeboat. But I’ve not actually been in boat 1 in the water before. Nor have I ever been coxswain before, outside of the training a few months ago, in a totally calm harbour, after all the theory and going through all the procedures with everyone about 10 times.
Today, we had a man-overboard drill, so not only do we decide to use boat 1 (the smallest fasted lifeboat), but also a man-overboard, which is more complicated. AND, for man-overboard we don’t use the normal crew of boat 1 (not that I’d ever worked with most of them on the boat before anyway), but all of the other much more experienced coxswains are the crew!
So I had to assign them to various jobs (bowman, sternman, ladderman, starting the engine, etc, tricing-in lines, and so on), then have pretty much of the whole of ALL the lifeboat crews of ALL the boats watching me and standing around getting slightly in the way, and doing stuff ONLY when I told them to, rather than when they saw it needing doing (which in a way is good, I guess???), then we went to the water, I was at the helm, with as well as the normal man over board rescue stuff, a photographer and video-cameraman in the boat to get extra footage for projects, in calm (but nevertheless ocean) waves, picking up the man-overboard-dummy, and bringing back along-side to be picked up, with all the other coxswains giving lots of helpful advice (ahem.) for this lifeboat I’d never been in before.
Anyway. It wasn’t a complete disaster. At least it was a drill, not for real. I learned a lot. I’m more humble now than before, I think. I hope. The captain, chief mate, and second mate all said well done to me, for my first drill as coxswain. (in reality, I “ran over” the dummy, because I turned the tiller wrong way into the wind, with the motor still going a bit too late), a boat-hook broke (not my fault), the exhaust pipe fell off (also not my fault), I had to come in along side twice (my first time in this boat, with a motor (also first time in ages), first time at the helm of a lifeboat while at sea, with currents and waves and all that too, so no surprise, but a bit embarressing with all the crews watching me, and all the experienced coxswains giving “advice”, two passengers taking photos and videos and all, a nurse worrying about the health of the man-overboard dummy, and the man-overboard dummy, who just grinned at me the whole time in a most disturbing way.
So yeah. That added to the fun of the day.
Anyway, I’m going to sleep now, or at least rest. Start work again at 18:00.
Goodnight.
Got back to the ship, noticed the water hose had half fallen off the deck into the water (YUK!)
So I’ve had to go and rinse it out and start de-contaminating it. blah. Sea water here is revolting, around the port area.
busy.