Journal entry: November 22, 2016 Tuesday
Location: Saudi Arabia
With a snap
its already going near to the end of the month of November, and as what I had
been long awaiting for is that I will get to finally submit my "early
vacation" request to CF Sharp. I think it’s the best that I go ahead and
hesitate no further in submitting this
request , and besides the working conditions on this ship are not that
comfortable enough for any Filipino seaman.
So far the
news on work is that after a brief loading operation in Saudi Arabia, this ship
went back again here in Fujairah to await "For Orders" . While in
Saudi Arabia , everyone here in this ship was distress to learn on the telex
massage coming from the Saudi government that some sort of team will be
boarding this ship as soon as it docks and that this "team" will be
searching the whole ship for any signs of contraband to the Saudi Government
like for example Magazines, DVD , Cd, Hard disk - any storage device that
contains pornography and any anti-Islamic materials , aside from the usual
contraband of drugs and firearms.
Immediately
the whole crew of the ship deposited those related stuff to the bond store. On
myself I deposited 2 hard disk drives that I had and left one disk drive to hid
in my cabin, as a backup. Fortunately the said "inspection team"
never arrived and basically were free again to get back those materials from
the bond store. Sadly it turns out that depositing my hard drives to the bond
store was a bad idea and that I couldn’t get back my hard drives yet, according
to "james" the deck cadet I spoke with and in charge of the bond
store,. They said that they can't release my hard drives yet from the bond
store until this ship leaves the waters of any Muslim countries. To my
annoyance, I recalled that this ship is permanently stationed here in the
middle east gulf area and most if not all the countries here are Muslim - so
expect that my 2 hard disk drives won't be returning anytime soon.
Despite the
annoyance, I'm glad that I didn’t deposited my third hard drive to the bond
store - or else I wouldn’t have any entertainment media at all on my cabin to
enjoy myself with. It was scary and risky at first to keep one hard drive
inside my cabin and had to hid it extra carefully, I was not very comfortable
and even had second thoughts of
depositing it just to make sure. But now recalling back - it was a good idea
that I had kept one.
In other
matters,
For now the
weather in the middle east gulf area is very comfortable even on noon time, no
thanks to the winter season from Europe. So I consider myself very lucky on
this situation that the middle east has a cooler weather right now, for now the
latest weather forecast is that the temperature is 15 degrees Celsius lowest
and something about 30 degrees Celsius the highest in noon time. It won't be a
problem for me working on this time of the year at the deck - well at least the
only thing I have to deal with is the sand storm in this area.
In another
news
A couple of
days ago, a surveyor visited this ship to conduct some sort of audit on the
ships performance and safety regulations as well. We were busy as usual sorting
out all sorts of matters related to the ship, apparently I wasn't called out
during the arrival of the said inspectors and probably they figured that it
would be best I was locked inside the cabin. During noontime I resumed my usual
work routing and wore the standard PPE for the time being since the inspectors
are still around.
Late in the
afternoon I was surprised to learned that , the inspector would be conducting a
one on one and private interview on each crew . We all knew what it meant and
that the inspector is asking us confidentially if there is some problems that
we would like to discuss with him privately.
When it was
my turn to be interview, I didn’t mentioned anything and simply played
defensively - a no tell, no ask policy. Another reason why I kept silent was
because on the fact of trust, I cannot simply take the chance that this
surveyor will reveal the names of the people who complain about the management
of this ship. Luckily my interview was very quick.
