How To Keep Idiots Busy For Hours. Bok!

The voyage from the Far East has been entertaining.

I've taken my rubber chicken with me wherever I go on deck during overtime.  I put it in my pocket and it accents my every motion with a partial "bok," and a loud squwak on its squeezed exhale and inhale when I squat.

I take it on my fire rounds and play it like an instrument in the cavernous cargo holds in the early hours of the morning.

One day I was sorting, labelling, and marking centerlines on cargo slings for afternoon overtime, my chicken sounding off like punctuation to my every move, when a crew member came to the rail above and said, "My window is open, you know..."

I also give it a healthy squeeze into the radio every day at 1300... Kind of like the noon bell, only spicier.

The mates had a prank war on the bridge which was fairly entertaining. 

My watch partner hid all the binoculars.

The CM gathered up all the pens on the bridge except one horrible, scratchy thing that barely writes, and the third mate took the cup full of them at the end of our watch in concert with the CM, but openly told the 2nd Mate that the CM took them - allowing the bus to stop and then back over the CM's corpse.  The 2nd Mate has a "pen thing," and he lost his mind - which was absolutely hysterical to everyone but him.

I told the steward it was the CM's birthday one day and the 3rd Mate agreed with me when she sought clarification.

She made a birthday cake and everyone was wishing him happy birthday all day.  His birthday is in October but I feel like the sentiment was honest. 

I took his cake up to the bridge and sang him happy birthday, of course.

Everyone has been wishing everyone else happy birthday ever since.

The 2nd Mate laminated amusing photos of things like Kermit the frog with dentures and pasted them into every overhead hatch on the bridge.  He pasted a dog's butt in the binacle, and weird AI-distorted eyes in the washdown valve door.

And I left a calling card all over the ship in the cargo areas in the form of the word "BOK" in 1 inch high stencilled letters in hard to reach, out of the way areas, that only the CM or 3rd Mate will see (near cargo switches, fire stations, etc.).  These won't be noticed until cargo is offloading, so it's more of a gift to posterity, really.

Dim light bulbs were changed to bright ones, displays were changed from true wind to apparent wind, gps speed to doppler speed, or true north to magnetic north... All of which was done without the Captain ever catching on (he probably knew but had the grace to pretend he didn't).

One minute all the navigation math made sense, then none of it did and they were forced to figure out why and redo it.

But the fun all ran out of steam as we progressed eastward and everyone became more and more exhausted.

I'm getting back to the west coast of the US just in time for daylight savings to cause the clocks to advance an hour.

I'll see all kinds of memes and comments about it on social media, but I'm too tired to have any sympathy for my shoreside peeps - we've advanced clocks almost nightly all the way across the Pacific, even when we repeated last Friday crossing back over the International Date Line.

It can be challenging enough to get sufficient sleep when working a split watch - I sleep in the afternoon and after my 0100 fire round, and while I'm getting 7-8 hours of sleep total, I'm not getting that at once, which makes a significant difference in how rested I feel.

Reduce the day by an hour and my circadian rhythm goes a little haywire.  Reduce the sleep time in the remaining time available and the recipe for blithering stupidity is complete.

So I am arriving at the dock tomorrow exhausted and unable to string coherent words together.  My give-a-fuck meter stopped working days ago.  Writing this blog post has left me winded. 

But we make arrival tomorrow, and then I catch a plane home two days later. 

By the middle of the week this will all be nothing but dim recollections of an overtaxed brain after the fever dream has fled.

Water! Water Everywhere! But Not A Drop To Drink...

Two weeks of cargo were uneventful. No parted lines, no more frozen plumbing. The 27-foot tide came in, the 27-foot tide went out. The ramp went down, the ramp came back up. In rolled the cargo. On went the lashings. Tallies were taken. Drafts were recorded. 

My ambivalence toward going ashore was, in part, due to scheduling: I worked overtime from noon to 1600, then stood a gangway watch from 1600 to 2000, and then tended lines and supervised cargo from 2000 until midnight. 

It didn't leave much opportunity for going ashore. 

I did get one day off. The chief mate had watchstanders take a day off one day and day workers the next, so on my day off, I went with the captain, the chief engineer, the second mate, and the third mate to the local military base.

The entire process to get there required 5 taxis, two forms of ID, photos, fingerprints, and time.

Why? Why did I go to a military base PX and commissary? 

For coconut oil. And baking soda.

The coconut oil is to soothe the irritation caused by my wool base layers when the temperature was below zero (before the anchorage), which, as of this writing, is still irritated.

And the baking soda is for the plants on the bridge, which have a mild fungal infection that my plant app diagnosed as brown spot, to be treated with a mild solution of baking soda once a week.

I also splurged and bought a rechargeable flashlight for use on the deck - my tiny bridge light is simply too weak for use in spotting the anchor at night or seeing in a dark hold.

The apprentice came aboard after a day ashore with a gift for me: a noisy, foot-long, rubber chicken.

I promptly stuck it in my jacket and began playing it everywhere I went, quoting "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" to any and all.  To disabuse you of thinking I'm more cultured than I am, I was quoting the song by Iron Maiden, not the poem by Samuel Coleridge.

When cargo was finally finished and we had the green light to depart, we departed, exhausted and with relieved urgency. 

It felt overdue to be off.

I took the tug line on the stern, brought in our mooring lines, and stowed the big soft-line we'd added to our standard mooring lines as insurance in case the tides had bested us, then I relieved the helmsman and drove us the rest of the way out of Peyongtek.

I arrived on watch that first night to find us adrift. The engineers were rebuilding 3 fuel injectors. We were dead in the water.

The problem? They didn't actually know, but there was an unacceptable temperature differential between cylinders. 

In the most basic sense: The mass of engine metal will warp and crack if the temperature within it varies too greatly from one spot to the next.

Mid-watch, we were back underway. The temperatures still didn't look good, but seemingly good enough.

Mid-watch that first night out, the fire alarm went off, too. Thankfully, it was a false alarm set off by an engineer opening a steam valve that shouldn't be opened... But all the sleeping watchstanders were rudely awakened and mustered at fire stations before being dismissed.

Our watch was relieved by groggy and unhappy people, people whose only solace was knowing someone's head was rolling down in the engine room.

The next morning, we started washing off the grime of Chinese pollution that blankets all of SE Asia and coated the ship from stem to stern. I spent 8 hours of my day with a hose, a squeegee, a brush, or a broom in my hand trying to remove the filth.

I played my rubber chicken as I walked fore and aft, once into my handheld radio, but mostly in the echoing vastness of the cargo spaces or ladder wells.

I arrived on watch tonight to find the ship adrift, again. 

The engineers are rebuilding the exhaust valves... 10 hours of downtime.

The calculus is to do it now, while we're off the coast of Japan where this ship was birthed, in case we need hard-to-get engine parts; it won't do us any good to suffer catastrophic engine failure 2000 miles from anywhere.

There was much speculation about our next cargo run - the winner was looking like a route through the Panama Canal, one of the last items on a personal list of checked-off sea-going experiences and accomplishments still left unchecked (it's right alongside Antarctica).

When asked, I opted to stay aboard one more port... Just in case.

Sadly, that no longer looks likely, so today I had the captain make arrangements to find my relief at the next port when we arrive stateside. It prompted an immediate case of Channel Fever - the restlessness that afflicts "short-timers" who know their time aboard is coming to an end.

The engine issues are but one thing that could delay us (hell... ARE delaying us)... Weather is another very real concern. The route planners have us taking a southern route again, south of Hawaii, thankfully. 

I'm curious if we'll be treated to the strange lights in the sky on our eastward transit, or not. On the way over, they were always in the vicinity of Saturn... But with Saturn on our stern, if we're to see them, will they be astern of us?

And will I have to wear my rubber chicken around my neck like an albatross to stave off curses and bad luck? For penance to some esoteric violation of sea lore committed unknowingly, the details of a crime against Neptunus Rex and the kingdom of The Raging Main, lost to time?

"How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the [...] Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country."*

I guess we're going to find out. 

*The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Cold Weather Floater In Paradise

Korea is cold.

How cold is it?

Well, all the potable water pipes on the ship froze. The burst pipes spilled water all over the deck, which then froze into sheets of ice, many of which are in hard-to-see places or invisible in the dark. We salted them, but walking still required care, and more than one of us has gone down.

The sewer pipes also froze - with little or no notice. For the last five days, we have just two working toilets on the ship, one in the engine room and one in the cargo office, both of which are more than 7 floors below and all the way aft.

I was awakened from deep sleep by engineers below the house with hammers pounding on frozen pipes on day one, a rude awakening that repeated randomly throughout our port stay as they tried, and failed, to alleviate our toilet-induced misery.

I called the trek to the only working toilets "the walk of shame" if the sailor was too preoccupied to make eye contact when enroute, or "walking penguin" due to the stiff-legged way the concerned ambled aftward if they answered nature's call without respectful haste.

I was also awakened by fire alarms on several occasions when diesel exhaust from cargo overloaded the smoke detection system and set off the general alarm. Yes, one of them was during my deepest sleep.

Standing an 8-hour watch when it's 11 below 0 is a special kind of tedium. Every motion requires effort due to the many layers. Gloves must be removed for anything requiring dexterity, then put back on to keep from freezing. Breathing too hard can give you an icecream headache.

The battery-powered vest Stu recommended to me has proven its worth. The chemical hand warmers have made life much more bearable, as well... There is no part of me that likes the cold, but at least I came fully prepared.

Sadly, I think I've developed some type of allergy to my expensive wool baselayers. Have I continued to wear them despite breaking out in a rash?  Of course. It was 9 degrees Fahrenheit out there... I'm no fool.

I know there are some cold weather dwellers out there saying that this is not that cold - but add force 10 winds into the mix (that's 55 mile an hour, you filthy, bloodless landlubber), and the inability to leave your post or do anything besides observe, demand ID, and perform the occasional search will make even the frostiest of snowmen bitch in abject discomfort.

At one point, the wind snatched a cargo strap out of the ordinary seaman's hands. The strap and the dumpster lid he was trying to secure with it simultaneously struck him in the face, landing him in the dubious care of the chief medical officer, aka the second mate. He's a great navigator, but he is the medical officer by necessity and default, not because he's any good at it.

Thankfully, the ordinary's teeth survived unharmed despite being busted in the kisser, and he took it without complaint.

The tide at this port is almost 30 feet, so cargo ops can only take place when the tide is high enough for our stern ramp to reach the dock- if it's too low the ramp gets damaged, if it's too high then the ramp is too steep. The window of opportunity is two four-hour blocks of time per day.

Because the mooring lines need constant adjustment due to the tides, the chief mate made all sailors watch standers. My 8-hour gangway watch (as in Tacoma) was split up between me and one of the day workers - and the task of tending lines and moving lashing gear all over the ship for the longshoremen was divided up between us. 

I stood the first 4 hours as security watch and the second 4 hours doing cargo and lines. I also made new heaving lines because the Korean line-handlers stole our heaving line when we tied up.

I also was on standby from noon to 1600, but never got called out to do anything. I listened to the handheld radio as the sailors on watch worked while I drafted house designs in AutoCAD - designs I'll hand over to a professional (Paul) at some point.

After 5 long, hard, miserable days in port, we departed at 0500 for the anchorage where I am writing this.

We expect to be here for only 2 days, then return to the dock to take on cargo to replace that which we just offloaded.

How long should that take? I'm told 2 weeks. 

Sometimes it's easy to disparage the people out here doing this job. For the most part, they're misfits. In large part, they're unemployable in standard shoreside workplaces. 

But if just anybody could do this job, then I want to see them try, because the one thing all these people have in common is a psychological toughness and resiliency that can handle pipes clogged with turdcicles. When working long, uncomfortable, and dangerous hours. While locked inside a cage with other maladjusts. For extended and protracted periods of time.

And laugh about it.

I guess we'll see how much we're laughing after two more weeks of this kind of cargo op... Just 5 days of it definitely kicked the shit out of us. 

Between A Flat Rock And A Weird Place

I arrived on the bridge the other night for my watch.

The helmsman I relieve was in an animated discussion with the third mate, so I didn't interrupt to assume the watch, but instead settled down with my coffee over on the bridge wing.

The ordinary seaman was on the bridge for some reason, and he migrated over to where I was nursing my life-giving nectar and began talking at the side of my head.

Through the haze of freshly cast-off sleep and the bouquet of steam from that bean-juice cradled under my nose, I became aware of three distinct things at once:

First, the strange lights in the sky were back, and they were - once again - operating relative to Saturn; they were visible 5-degrees above the horizon, 2 points to port. 

Next, the ordinary seaman was on the bridge to see these UFO's for himself (everyone aboard has heard about them), and he began explaining his understanding of them in relationship to the Simulation Theory.

An finally, to my other side, the helmsman was arguing with the third mate - attempting to convince him that the world was, in fact, flat.

I must ardently defend myself from the people who know me best - I had not prodded, poked, nor precipitated in any way the discussion about the Simulation Theory with the ordinary. It was entirely unprovoked.

I share Taco Tuesday dinners with many of these people, dinners which typically conclude at about the time I bring up the Simulation Theory.

But the flat-earther?

Not height-of-eye calculations, great circles in navigation, nor the observable phenomenon of a ship visibly coming up over the horizon were sufficiently persuasive arguments from the third mate to sway the mind of the guy who is paid to watch ships actually come over the horizon, while transiting the globe on a great circle, from a perch granting him a vantage point 138 meters up in the air.

It was a moment of sheer madness in all directions all at once, the least mad of which were the UFO’s tracing strange patterns in the dark sky.

Lights and Boobies in Blue Skies

Welp. Saw more UFO's... Or, as the kids call them, "UAPs," or "unidentified aerial phenomena."

We were an hour or two to homeward of the IDL and the night was as clear as they come... If not for the curvature of the earth, we could've seen the lights of Japan.

Instead, we saw weird lights moving erratically in the sky about 5 degrees above the horizon. It is difficult to say how far away they were because it was so unbelievably clear, but by our best guess (my watch partner and I discussed it at length afterward), they might have been 40-60 miles away.

I could see starlink constellations moving in the sky alongside these UAP so no... It was definitely not satellites... They were about half to a third as bright as squid boats, and they had the variety of colors that some blue giant stars have (i.e., Sirius).

The light show continued for almost an hour, and we decided not to call the captain... It's just too easy to imagine "WTF!? You're waking me up for WHAT!?"

He wasn't pleased that the Third Mate and I didn't call him, though, so, should we see them again, we will most certainly call him. I mean... 

When we did tell him the next day, a conversation about the Ununaki and the Younger Dryas broke out (Lizzid People!) so... Yeah. Call the old man to see the funny lights in the sky! Roger that!

I've had a string of really upbeat and positive days, and my previous angst toward the captain and mate for working us watch standers on watch has slowly subsided. In some ways, it has alleviated the slowdown of time caused by taking two sleeps a day, and so I am forced to appreciate the requirement.

That was not the case two weeks ago, but now I begrudgingly must concede - busy busy busy is being much gooder.

I have studied management styles since I first "went to sea," and I've seen some of the worst bullshit imaginable. Demeaning, demoralizing, and deadly. I know exactly what not to do, and I know why not to do it.

But I've also seen very good management, and this company's captains and mates continue to impress me. Even when the unlicensed crew text the crewing guy shoreside, they get cordial responses... I have never heard of that before. Never.

So kudos to them. I've bitched long and loudly about bad management before, so I feel it's important to acknowledge when it's done right.

We have retarded our clocks several more times since the last blog post, and crossed the IDL into the future. I am one day ahead of y'all.

Maybe I've crossed back into my original timeline, and maybe I haven't, but so far the future is warm and sunny.

A 5-meter swell rolled us all night long, and at one point, we hit a few 12-degree rolls and things went everywhere, but nothing like the 30-degree rolls on our way into Tacoma several weeks ago.

We continue to have safety drills, inspections, and the horrific firefighting equipment in the EGL (emergency gear locker, the new moniker for the damage control locker these days) has been completely replaced with brand new gear. 

I was just awarded a $50 Amazon gift card for having the cleanest room aboard during our latest sanitary inspection.  Go me!

Anyway, that's all I got. There isn't much traffic out here; the client has sent us completely around the low-pressure system, so the weather has been perfect, and there are many boobies for me to enjoy while on watch!  As well as pilot whales and dolphin, and one lone albatross... But I do love the boobies.

I must note that I have many videos I'd prefer to embed on this blog, but Blogger has seemingly stopped supporting video in recent years, so I've been trying to take more relevant photos... I'm actually not a Luddite. Promise. 

To Home And Back Again

After picking up the pilot from the Port Angeles pilot station, I drove us south through Puget Sound to Yukon Anchorage - a little triangle of water behind Blake Island (a marine park), north of Vashon Island, and south of Bainbridge Island.

We shifted the next day to the Tacoma dock and began cargo watches (8-hour watches), so I was able to, for the first time in my maritime career, go home and sleep in my own bed while working on a ship.

Cargo was a slow and tedious process, so our departure was delayed several times, which was fine by me.

While I wasn't able to truly relax, it was relaxing. What I found was that even a short time at home felt like a full reset to my energy level by the time I drove the ship out to sea, 6 days after the gangway hit the dock.

Another car carrier was moored at the Port of Tacoma when we left. And a third RoRo had replaced us at anchor in Yukon Anchorage.

As we passed yet another inbound car carrier, I commented to the pilot that it seemed like there were more RoRo's than I'm used to seeing. I didn't know if it was because my awareness was suddenly greater, since I was on one of them, or if my observations were correct; he confirmed it was the latter.

Laura grabbed some spectacular photos when I passed by Shilshole. If you zoom in all the way, you can see me waving from the wheel. 

I turned over the helm at a quarter ‘til four PM north of Point No Point. When I went back on the wheel at 1945 hours, we were almost to Neah Bay. We exited the vessel traffic system on that same watch and travelled south 1000 miles before taking a right turn and beginning the transit across the Pacific.

The next day, I was sad to learn that this new captain and mate had tasked us watchstanders with maintenance work – chipping, painting, etc., during ocean crossings, instead of standing our customary watch. I signed on as a watchstander, not as a day worker, so now I feel like I'm getting the worst of both gigs -- dirty-ass, physically demanding deck work, lack of sleep, and a destroyed circadian rhythm -- all for less money.

It has become both a mental and physical slog, and keeping my morale positive is now the focus of all my attention.

I have witnessed without exception that shipping companies hire permanent captains for their vessels in pairs -- one is crew-friendly and focused on improving the crew's quality of life aboard, while the other is a die-hard company man, only concerned with checking boxes and adhering to budgetary constraints to the point of foolishness. 

The captain who left - the Hungarian guy - is very much missed.

This captain takes the standard approach to clock changes - we retard the clocks 20 minutes at 1800, 2200, and 0200 each. The net result sets the clocks back an hour as we cross each time zone. 

I gain 20 minutes of sleep on my first short sleep of the day, I stand an extra twenty minutes on my watch, and then I gain 20 more minutes of sleep on my second long sleep of the day.

A "good" captain (one who isn't sucking up to the company, anyway) will then advance clocks during the day on the way back over so that nobody is deprived of sleep, but apparently, this guy advances clocks at the same times that we retard them. So, I expect my return trip across the Pacific after the insanity awaiting us in Korea will be a grueling one, indeed - sleep being the most valuable commodity.

When we cross the International Date Line (IDL), we advance into the future and skip a day, so all my correspondence will be from Future-Me... Future-Me, who knows things from the future.

When we make the return trip from the "Far East," we’ll repeat a day, which reminds me of a previous IDL crossing I made on a holiday. I wrote in holiday pay for both the holiday and the repeated day as a joke (I had a correct timesheet ready to turn in), and the chief mate lost his mind.

Imagine having no sense of humor at all. 

Korea will be cold, cold, cold... Well below freezing, even at the high temperature of the day. At this port, there’s a 25-foot tide, which means the mooring lines are adjusted hourly, and with the ramp only able to handle cargo 2 hours at a time, twice a day... it could take up to two weeks to unload the ship.

But right now, we’re at the 30th parallel near Hawaii, the arctic air far, far away. It's warm and sunny, and the water has that magical shade of sky blue I named "Aloha Blue" years ago. I don't know why or what about it is so distinct, but you could drop me anywhere in the world and I'd know I was in the Hawaiian waters by the color alone.

A milk-chocolate brown booby took up his symbiotic residence aboard. He's spent days hunting the flying fish kicked off by the bow wake, but there’s no cross arm on the fore mast where booby's love to sit, so I've wondered where he's sleeping. I found his perch by happenstance today while painting on the forward mooring station: On the anchor. 

The brown booby was then replaced by a red-footed booby, who spent her time flying in an infinity-shaped pattern across the bow, much as her predecessor had done. I have not yet found her perch.

And, that's the news from this RoRo upon which I ride. Somewhere between here and there is the portal into the timeline I came from - the one where current affairs do not look like a mashup of the 1880s, the 1930s, and the 1960s with added robots, AI, and evil billionaire villains for that extra spicy flavor.