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| Behold !!! the typical butter wash machine's always typically used on almost all tankers in the world |
Although
Tank cleaning operations in a chemical tanker are common and usually done on a
regular basis, Product tankers however are much different even though their
also part of the "Tanker class" commercial ships. On my previous two
ships both Stolt Strength and Bow Ophelia, it is so common that there is no
need to conduct a "special kind of work" and all working schedules
are unchanged , Unfortunately i couldn't say much the same on Cape Tallin (my
current ship), tank cleaning here is very rare given that this is a full fledge
bonafide crude oil product tanker. Unfortunately as soon as this ship left
Lebanese port , this ship drifted somewhere near in Cyprus and started tank
cleaning ops and that's when all hell broke loose on working schedules . Here's
what happened
On December
18, 2013 Wednesday. I started work at about 6am given that BOSUN AMICAN ordered
me to do a job to clean my designated cleaning station, the reason why was that
this ship is expecting V.I.P. Personnel from CSM visiting at 10am. At 9am This
ship dropped anchor near Cyprus (CSM has a main office here) and at about 10:30
, a small boat went alongside and boarded this ship, as the usual procedure we
set our "props" (complete ISPS enchilada and costumes etc..) to make
the VIP's think that everything in this ship is doing well (even though on the
reality it is not), from what i recall there are 5 personnel who boarded this
vessel and they are two office trainee's , one ships agent and 2
superintendents . There's also a female who should have boarded this ship
however she got sea sick and decided to stay on the
An hour
later, a small ship went alongside on
the starboard side of this ship to conduct bunkering operations (refuelling).
At about 2pm the VIP's disembark and this ship was left doing bunkering ops
until at about 7 or 8 pm. During that time I was off doing either maintenance
work or some sort of "Special work" like mooring ship to ship at the
same time. It was difficult on the sense that BOSUN AMICAN doesn't have the
ability to handle the crew. Me , A.B. Homer Mallorca , A.B. Jay Briones and
O.S. Del Monte have been going to a lot of work on the mooring ropes like
changing the rope tails and such , down to the filing and arranging them on the
winches - enough to make us tired. The whole day was a total chaos on which
"Specific" work are we actually doing, We have no idea if it was just
only maintenance work for today or were in operations like handling of the
VIP's and Bunkering Ops.
At 3:45 pm
I was surprised to hear from Amican , that my working schedule will be retained
until 6pm. I didn't bother to ask him why I'd be extended , all that registered
in my brain was I'd still be on work till night. During the few hours
"Retain" i found out from A.B. Homer that starting today there will
be a special tank cleaning ops and all of us will be working on 24 hours in a
six hour shift. (my shift will be 12 in the midnight till 6 in the morning ,
then be back again 12 noon till 6pm) , rumor from homer says that the "new
chief mate" has a deadlock time of 5 days to finish the job. Found out
from homer that Saturdays and Sundays off are cancelled as well.
After 6pm I
went to see O.S. Del Monte to notify him of his working shift , and heard from
him that tank cleaning ops was going to start until 9pm upwards.
"BLOODY
FUCKING HELL !!!! " I shouted out of astonishment and said again
"You
meant all that blabber BOSUN Amican told me about me earlier extending till 6pm
was all horse shit ???" , O.S Del Monte replied "Apparently so , and
you've been overworked unnecessarily and your actual working shift will not
start till it's midnight"
Upon
hearing what O.S. Del Monte said , I felt that i was ripped off again by Mr.
Frog Face. That son of a bitch never told me that tanks cleaning ops for me was
still far out by midnight , from what i heard to him earlier it was as if it
was like i had to do it immediately.
Went to
rest and did some writing on this blog to update my journal.
December 19, 2013 Thursday 1am.
So much for
a six hour rest and I'm back again doing work. Tank cleaning on a crude product
tanker was boring to begin with and i had nothing to do but watch and see if
the butter wash machines are working or not, the rest of the hour was just
sitting around doing nothing at all. For the moment tank cleaning is currently
being worked on 1st wings (meaning both port and star board side of cargo
tank number 1).
At around
4am in the morning i overheard A.B. Bryan's conversation and A.B. Homer
Mallorca , something about criticism on BOSUN AMICAN's laziness. Apparently
from what i heard is that he just overslept and hid in his cabin to avoid work,
Strange and very ironic that he does exactly the opposite on what comes out on
his mouth , look at him now - the bastard is pretty much lazy doing his work.
For some
reason, the chemicals that was brought in during Houston USA will not be used
at all and the tank cleaning procedure here will just only use hot water . For
some reason i don't understand why they're just going to use hot water , and
all the efforts of hauling off the 32 plus drums of chemicals and the trouble
of ordering them in Houston were only just put to waste.
December 20th 2013 Friday.
Same old
tank cleaning schedule and not much action compared to a chemical tanker, and
very same old job in watching those butter wash machines spin over and over
again. By the way the weather was a bit
rainy with occasional strong winds but nothing serious to impede work.
Well
there's one thing that might have been a bit interesting, me , A.B. Homer and
O.S. Del Monte opened up a cargo tank hatch this morning. Unfortunately homer
forgot to open up the tank hatch slowly and let it rest for a while to
gradually release the pressure of the steam inside, instead he opened it up a
bit quick resulting to a strong gush of steam coming out , and guess who got
all the bloody heat coming from the steam ? - yeah i took all that steam that
came out, good thing i was wearing coveralls and i didn't sustained any burn
marks from it and this isn't a chemical tanker carrying acid's otherwise both
of my legs could have been burned off in an instant.
Another
thing aside from opening the tank hatch is that the laundry room is now finally
open after two weeks being closed , Immediately I didn't waste any time in
putting laundry on that damn laundry machine. Thank god that the washing
machine is open.
December 21st 2013 Saturday
Went to
work a bit late for this day, This time it was intentional that i arrived late
(well part intentional) after i mistook that the tank cleaning schedule was all
over. Now why did i mistook ? Well blame it all when i saw that the ship moved
early in the morning.
Anyway it
was an honest mistake , apparently i found out on the latter that the main
reason why the ship moved was on the
fact that this ship drifted very far from the current location yesterday. So to
correct the exact position of the ship it had moved its engines again to the
designated "drifting location"
For now the
work we did was just drop off the two portable butter wash machines into the
residue tank and let those machine clean the tank with hot water .
December 22nd 2013 Sunday
So much for
the weekends off , i could just write it in fat air and as expected its
cancelled.
We did a
lot of work on this day , mostly just inspecting what was the results of the
tank cleaning procedure of using only hot water. There was one funny thing that
happened during that time and it was when A.B. Jay and Pumpman Liscano entered
cargo tank number 4 , as soon as they entered the said cargo tank . A very loud
and strong sound came inside it (enough to hurt their ears) and incidentally
their hand held oxygen detector / hydro carbon device flashed wildly and then
accompanied by a gushing water leak inside one of the pipes.
Both of
them wildly went to get outside the cargo tank , as in running wildly like hell
was at in their feet .
Later they
found out that the cause of the loud sound was the new chief mate pressed the
wrong button alarms - WHILE THEY WERE INSIDE . Anyway it was the chief mates
blunder.
Late hour
on work, there was an oil spill at the bottom of the pump room and all of us
went there to cleaned it. I was going up and down on the stairs of the pump
room, delivering the equipment used for the cleaning - tedious and tiring.
