I could be far away...

It is possible that I will pick up my next ship in China!  However, nothing is nailed down yet, so I will post again when it is.  

All The Way

Well, the exams are done and dusted now.  The last two, Further Mechanics and Ship Stability, went pretty well I think.  We were all dreading the Mechanics, but it was a pretty fair paper actually.  I actually managed to enjoy one of the questions!  It was working out the manometric head of water in an pumping system, and then working out the pump power required to achieve a certain velocity in each pipe.  Useful stuff.  Ship Stability was as predicted, and I managed to finish with a good amount of time spare for checking.  My checking wasn't fool proof though, as realised after the exam that I had put one of the engine shaft speeds in rev/s when it asked for rpm!  Oh well, small error, so hopefully won't really make a difference.  

That's all the more physics and maths based modules finished now, so as long as my marks stack up I won't have to do any more.  Next academy phase we do our design project, instrumentation and control principles module, finish work based investigation (our bigger report we do at sea this year), and some management modules or something like that.  Then, after exams for those...preparation for the MCA Oral for our EOoW ticket!

Now, well I'm just catching up on work, and making preparations for going away.  I don't have any dates yet, due to moving.  Hopefully Emily and I will be moving into our new place on the 30th August, so would hope to get away before the middle of September so I can get back for Christmas!  

Oh, and I've just finished doing some inpromptu plumbing at Steve's, after the kitchen mixer tap gave up the ghost and started leaking from the mixer arm seals.  We turned all water and boiler off, drained the system sufficiently, and then removed the offending tap from the sink.  Went and bought another only to find they have now made the armored entry hoses a larger diameter, meaning we couldn't use the old ones.  To add a small complication, the pipes provided with the taps were dead straight with no fixings and not easily compatible with Steve's diagonal piping.  So, for practicality, we bought some larger armored hosing.  But, then, due to the change in size and connectors, the armored piping fell some 10cm short of the existing pipework under the sink.  So, I had to cut a 10cm extension pipe for each and then couple them all together to install it.  It would have been a bit more bulletproof to solder the extensions rather than the compression couplings, but with all my stuff in storage the options were limited without buying lots of extra stuff.  Plus with the limited space under there, it certainly made things cooler, and simpler.  

Half Way There

Well, it's nearly the end of the academic year (this Thursday), and I am now half way through the latest exams.  For these I would say that, as a group, we have been least prepared out of all the exams we have had so far.  And, our threshold for energy seems to be low coming to the end of this phase.  Not long until I go away to sea again now (no date as of yet though)

Yesterday morning was Further Maths.  It went pretty well, although I got a bit stumped by a couple of bits when I first got to them.  But, I went back near the end and managed to make sense of some of those bits.

Today was the much dreaded Further Thermodynamics.  It was unsurprisingly tough, most especially the steam (Rankine) cycle question and the refrigeration question.  Compressors is a topic almost everyone seems to have issues with, and that didn't disappoint either.  However, apart from getting stumped by some of these things, I think I will come out okay overall on the thermo - well, I hope!

Tomorrow is Further Mechanics, and then Thursday is Ship Stability.  So, I must go now and try to learn all the things that seem to have fallen out my head.  It's all so last minute at the moment...