Townsville Anchor

19^th September

So, we’re on anchor outside Townsville (east coast Australia) and passed the Great Barrier Reef en route (during the night though).  The sea is calm and beautiful, the weather good, and I have today (Monday 19^th September) off, bar my normal duties and being on standby as assistant watch keeper for engine room.  Normally Sunday would be my off day, but we were too busy preparing the ship to stop on Saturday afternoon or Sunday. 

So far, the ship has been very busy in unloading at Gladstone, through to clearing up the ship and preparing it for the next cargo which we will receive in Townsville.  We unloaded brand new freight railway wagons in Gladstone.  They were sat on top of the cargo holds, chained down, and made the ship look like it would be unstable to the untrained eye – of course the deck officers had calculated the stability and it was safe.  Everybody has been involved in getting the ship ready in time, so it has involved some degree of pain for everyone.  But on the eve of the last day of hard graft the captain provided us with a pretty powerful motivational speech which probably spurred us through that final day of preparing the ship (yesterday).

Last night, once we were anchored and finished, a few of the guys did some fishing.  They caught a number of fish, including a squid, which the chef prepared and cooked immediately and we ate.  It was great!.  There were also six bottle nose dolphins playing around the ship, and they were hunting the squid too – I came out a bit later so I only saw one dolphin, but I’m sure on this tour I’m bound to see more than the last!

I read on the plane that Townsville is known as the Capital of the Tropics so I’m sure it’s beautiful – let’s see if where we tie up is!  I’m not sure how long we’ll be there or even if I will be able to step ashore, but we will go alongside on the 22^nd.  After that we head for Onsan (not sure on the spelling) in Korea.  After that, I’m not sure.  It’s about a fourteen day voyage to Korea – that will be my longest sea voyage to date.  The crew said that during the last long voyage it was so rough in parts that most of the crew were ill!

I’ve just been up on deck enjoying the sun a bit (don’t get a chance once in the working week as most of the engine room = below waterline), and there are a few islands dotted on our starboard side, with a few ships at anchor around us too. I also heard on the bridge that we may not enter Townsville until 25^th now! 

 

21^st September

It’s now Wednesday and the ship’s plans have changed.  We are now definitely not entering Townsville until the 25^th – so we’ll have been at anchor for a week (my previous record on Andrea was a day – what a busy ship that was!).  We can see land, but cannot walk on it!  Surprisingly, I haven’t seen any yachts whatsoever, but I haven’t really been outside enough to judge whether that’s an accurate picture of sailing here.

For the last two nights more and more people have been fishing and there has been a lot of squid caught and eaten – right away.  I think the night before last between ten and fifteen were caught.  I had a go and caught one on my first throw of the line – it’s pretty easy really as they are very greedy.  Once you see one you just have to get an accurate throw of the line and that’s it! 

In addition to eating lots of squid, the second engineer caught a shark last night!  I couldn’t believe it when I saw it in the galley!  Then they went on to catch three more.  Two were large (for this kind of shark, but probably only around 15 kilos) and two smaller.  The larger ones were about two and a half foot long.  I wish I could post a photo, but alas it’s too expensive really; hopefully I will get to an internet cafe soon.  The chef cooked it for lunch today (with rice of course) and it was so soft and tender.  A bit like tuna, but tastes different.

This morning the ship plunged into blackout – which was a first for me!  Ironically, we were supposed to be doing a blackout drill in two days time anyway.  It was pretty cool.  Basically, we turned off the fuel into the main engine (it wasn’t running but we needed to replace some seals on the fuel line) and for some reason this resulted in the booster unit giving a large increase in pressure on the fuel line to the generators.  As the pressure exceeded the high high alarm set point on the geny, it tripped the generator and we plunged into blackout.  I was just cancelling another alarm in the ECR (engine control room) when darkness came.  All the systems in the ECR have UPS (uninterruptable power supply) so that the alarm and monitoring system continue to operate in an emergency (there is a quite a list of items on ship that have UPS, such as navigational equipment on bridge, GMDSS etc etc). Also, the small strip lights illuminating the main switchboard in the ECR remained on. 

Within about two seconds about 100 alarms came up on screen (I’m not kidding) and all I could do was madly press two buttons repeatedly – mute alarm, and acknowledge alarm button.  Regulations for emergency power basically require the alternative source of power (i.e. another geny) to automatically start, synchronise itself onto the switchboard bus bars, and resume power within forty five seconds.  Within about twenty seconds our next generator in priority order had fired itself up and put itself on the board – I was impressed.  Then it was a case of turning on all necessary equipment very quickly, such as cooling water pumps so the generator didn’t overheat and shutdown – which would have resulted in a second blackout!  Also, lots of circuit breakers had to be turned back on to get equipment the supply of power it needed, and all the pneumatically controlled valves dotted around the ship (which we control from the ECR computer) had to be reset one by one (not difficult either). 

The Chief Engineer was in good spirits despite the blackout, which was good; it’s the kind of thing that not every chief takes in their stride – partly because in certain scenarios it can look embarrassing, and the captain can get annoyed.  Of course, on a passenger ship you can probably imagine the chaos that might ensue if it suddenly blacked out with three thousand passengers and about a thousand staff on board – I’m sure the Chief in that scenario might not be so relaxed; albeit they have a lot of equipment with UPS, and extensive battery banks for emergency lighting etc – in fact one of our lecturers at the academy who is a ex chief engineer from P&O said that one of the biggest UPSs they had on board was the till systems for the shopping.  You may be in blackout but don’t worry, you can still spend money!  Anyway, I’ve gone off point here somewhat – it was a good experience, which all happened too quickly. 

One thing here which does destroy the lovely blue waters, is there is quite a bit of oil that seems to float our way – either it’s being discharged by some unscrupulous ship in the vicinity, or it’s coming from some port facility or factory on land.  Either way, it’s horrible, and really is a disgrace that people think it’s ok to put something as out of place as oil in the sea.  Surprisingly it doesn’t seem to stop the regular visits from squid and dolphins. 

Another exciting (relatively) boon on this ship is the recreation room.  Yes, we have a weights machine (similar to mum and dad’s for any family reading this) and a treadmill.  It’s fantastic, especially when facing a week on anchor.  Only problem – it’s all Chinese to me.  The running machine took a while to fathom; my Chinese must be a bit rusty.  I couldn’t get the machine to move faster than a slow jog for a while, then eventually managed the pace I wanted.  However, every two minutes the program changes speed and I’m suddenly about to run into the wall ahead of me.  I have figured out how to cycle through the programs, but there doesn’t (so far) seem to be a custom program where you can just run and control the incline and speed only when you want to. 

There is a farcical fan that blows at you while you run, although I would more describe it as the feel of someone blowing air at you through a cocktail straw, with the person sitting about a metre away from you.  It also has some rather ‘out there’ songs to run along to, which rather remind me of the kind of songs you get when pressing the demo button on a sub £100 keyboard from argos.  I notice there’s an mp3 player connection so I think I might avoid the machine’s tunes for the future, otherwise I might get confused and think I’m in a gameboy game from the nineties.

Anyway, I’d better wrap this up, as I have reports to write and Emily to write to!  On the 26^th we will probably be leaving Townsville headed for Korea so I won’t have any contact for a couple of weeks.