First Days At Sea

I am safe and well, currently on passage to Bilbao from Gijon.  There is only about five ports we will rotate between – at least for September as that’s all the schedule I have.  There is only one French port - Bayonne.  The others are all Spanish. 

 

Yesterday was a tough day mentally, as within ten minutes of joining the ship I was dressed for work and helping clean heavy fuel oil (HFO) off the main engine – something had gone awry with one of the fuel pumps and the HFO had everywhere.  So it was difficult to adjust after staying in the nice hotel for two nights.  Especially as while I was there I couldn’t leave in case the agent called.  This meant I just mooched around trying to speak Spanish to the hotel staff, reading and watching films.  All this made joining the ship more of a culture shock.  So, my first day was testing for many reasons, but today was a better day.

 

This problem with the fuel pump also caused one of the fuel cams to get shifted – it’s now nine degrees out, which is too much!  This means fuel is being injected to that cylinder too early, which I think causes cooler temperatures but higher pressures.  I’m not entirely sure which problem came first, the cam or the fuel pump, as I joined in the midst of the problem.  The superintendant was supposed to come and have a look today, but another ship’s problem was suddenly higher priority.  We are still using the engine anyway.  Tomorrow we are going to open up the engine again and see what can be done – this will be the main priority for the Chief and 2^nd Engineer tomorrow. 

 

Yesterday we left Coruna and arrived in Gijon this morning.  Today we left Gijon and arrive in Bilbao tomorrow morning.  This morning we took bunkers (marine speak for filling up with fuel).  We took on 75 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, and 25 tonnes of marine gas oil (MGO).  Raj (the motorman, although he is an ex Engineer Cadet from New Zealand and has his officers ticket) prepared the ship to take on the bunkers, and then the fuel barge came alongside and pumped it in.  This took a couple or more hours in all, with faffing included.

 

While this was going on, a crane was loading this type of sand on board as the cargo – the dust was raining down on us a bit, but no problem.  However, the crane driver kept banging the jaws of the dropper (holding the sand loads in) against the hold, as he was trying the load the sand as close to the edge of the hold as possible.  It got to the point where he suddenly went wrong and smacked them into the cargo hold doors.  This caused a commotion, and a flurry of our deck people went to have a look.  The doors have sustained damage, but still close I hear.  The crane stopped for some time after that!  He probably had to go and have a siesta to calm down.

 

Today I’ve also got involved with soundings (measuring how much substance is present) for various tanks around the ship, oil sample testing from the emergency generator and water testing for the boiler, hot tank and cooling water system for the main engine.  At the end of the day I was with the Chief and Second engineer and observed what happens in the engine control room when the ship is manoeuvring out of port.  It was very interesting.

 

I’ve almost got my room sorted to how I want now – it has taken quite a lot of work as previous cadets haven’t really looked after it like their own.  They also left a surprising amount of stuff behind which I’ve had to go through.  I’ll finish that off tomorrow. 

 

It is bizarre sleeping while the room rocks from one side to the other – this combined with the constant noise from engine and turbocharger!  Although, I didn’t sleep too badly last night considering it was my first night.  It almost feels like things are the wrong way round, as in the day we only have generators running, and the ship is stable as we are docked. Then in the night we are rocking through the seas with the main engine and generators going.  As we have UMS (unmanned system) on this ship, we just have to work 8am until 5pm, and then the engine room looks after itself – an alarm system is routed to the engineer’s cabin who is on call.  If any readings fall out of certain set parameters it will wake him up and he can go down and fix the problem.  If he can’t do it alone, then he’ll call anyone else in the engine department that he needs for help. 

 

Tomorrow we have a look at the fuel cam again, and hopefully I’ll learn exciting things too.