A TIME FOR WAR, A TIME FOR PEACE

This is one of the improvised tools sticking out on the cargo hatch , as what the picture suggest its a tripod and wooden derrick 

As you can see on the picture , tons and tons of black plastic garbage bags are filled with oil sludge's 

primitive equipement we have for the sludge removal no thanks to the limited equipement from CSM

welcome to our lovely work place duh !!!

December 24, 2013 Tuesday

For the past two days , most of the deck crew are cleaning the water ballast tank, and for the past two days i was left out and didn't went inside the ballast , So I guess I missed all the action on going down (as in way down) and shovel a mountain load of mud.

Since i was just staying outside on the water ballast entrance and being the look out , i did manage to do my work by providing coffee and a few snacks on the water ballast entrance. Unfortunately for me Mess man Ferdinand Penera didn't like my idea of borrowing the coffee and sugar and lectures me in front of everyone during lunch time saying bullshit like "how about the others and the good for the greater good" . Yeah right , may I remind him about the time he took the cable for the T.V. A few months ago and left the whole crew wondering who to took it and left them out without TV for a few days . Now what does "ferdinand" say about the part "for the greater good eh ??" , Fucking prick preaches something he himself cannot follow , BAH !!!

At night I had a small talk with Byron and copied some movies on his hard drive at the bridge.

Early morning Christmas eve, BOSUN AMICAN was bitchy as always. The starts picking again fights, This time Me and O.S. Del Monte are the unlucky one's as he scolds us , the reason why the scum bag scolds us was that we went to work late, and wants us to work on an early time duh ! I looked at the watch at that time and it was only just 7:40 , way early than even the standard call time of 7:45 and official work time of 8am.

Christmas Eve, after all that dirty work of shovelling all that dirty mud off the water ballast tank on 6 wings and finishing it at around 3pm. I was off again doing the removal of mud on my helmet and equipment, an hour later i heard someone knocking on my door and when i opened it i saw A.B. Homer.

Apparently i forgot that i said yes on the invitation to have a small drinking session on Pump man , So he decided to give me a knock. I did went on Pump Man's cabin and found Fitter Sano, Oiler Rogel, 3rd engineer cranz among homer and Pump man. I decided to hang out on their drinking session for "public relations" sake, Bosun Amican decided to drop in on Pump man's cabin but I find his presence there annoying but for the sake of Christmas i will try to tolerate that bastard. They were talking about Mess man Ferdinand's nasty habit of always using the IMARSAT phone for personal use. Anyway I learned from them that Christmas Eve Dinner starts an hour earlier than expected, 6pm rather than 7pm , so i had to get dressed early - all in the name of public relations.

During the Christmas Eve dinner , everybody was there as expected and even saw the captain sitting on the dinner table on the crew mess. I had a few drinks and got badly drunk on Christmas eve , apparently the Lebanese scotch which "Johnny the boatman" sold during our stay in Lebanon had "kicked" in badly on my system.  Despite badly drunk it doesn't mean that I'm not aware on what's happening, The only bad thing I did was i showed them on how proficient i am in speaking English - but hell I care about it , I don't give a shit whether or not they get envious (specifically people like Zacarias Amican or Renan Olis "Bastard - O" ). Its a good thing that all of the asshole crews before have been disposed of and I don't have to worry about it been seen speaking in  British English in public .Aside from me almost everybody was badly drunk and I left the crew mess at around 10pm

(by the way the asshole crews I'm speaking with are  Xerxes Balagso Hall, Ronald Caldona , Robert Cervantes Peneranda , German Tan 

Totally destroyed headlight equipment and beyond repair. Good thing i have another spare one

Corales , Nilo Pastrana etc. People whom Patrick mentioned to me)

December 25, 2013 Wednesday Christmas Day.

Woke up 2am in the morning having a bad hangover, it was so bad that the moment I opened my eyes from bed , my whole vision was "Swirling" plus the feeling of being nauseous. Totally sick from the scotch I drank.

I did throw up on the toilet at around 8am, which relieved my symptoms of a bad hangover. After that I went back to sleep again till at around 2pm and went down on the crew mess to have a small meal, even though i feel like to don't have one. I checked the crew mail there while I'm at it and received news that this ship will be heading off in turkey first for some slop removal and there will be two small ship barges awaiting to received the crude oil sludge this ship has on the slop tank. In other words its a ship to ship discharge operations  by tomorrow .

For the rest of the day, I just stayed inside my cabin either I slept or just played Civilization 5 computer game.

Late at night at about 11:30pm. A.B. Jay came knocking to my door again and said that he needs assistance in closing all the cargo hatches , apparently there was huge rain that came out and the chief mate doesn't want all the cargo hatches to have rain water inside. I helped him out, aside from me O.S. Del Monte was also closing the hatches. Finished the task according to my watch at about midnight.

December 26, 2013 Thursday

As expected the small ships arrived as early at 8am and as the usual I was busy all day doing all sorts of maintenance work aside from mooring ship to ship task. The name of the ship (or more like a barge judging from its size) is M.T. Kollin 4 . During the ship was along side with another , our work was primary focus on unloading off mountains of garbage onboard our ship. Literary we have to drag human size (or larger than human sized trash) Sacks of garbage to the manifold are for the cargo crane to transfer it to the other ship .

Sadistically expected that Mr. "Frog Face" Amican didn't even bothered to give us O.S. Coffee breaks nor even a decent lunch schedule on all that long hours of work. Doesn't surprise me though how brutal this cocksucker is , expect that coffee breaks and lunch time wouldn't be given and if they do IT WILL BE ALWAYS GIVEN LATE.

At around 10pm the ship, MT Kollin 4 Casted off from the STS mooring.

December 27th 2013 Friday

2am, was exactly in the middle of my dreams when again someone knocked to my cabin door and saw that it was "Amican" and said that i should get ready and that the second barge (ship) will be going along side in a few minutes.

Well so much for nap time , i think even nap time here is compromised due to work schedules and someone's going to knock on your cabin door , even if I'm off duty at that time.

"Kollin" barge wasn't really that difficult to handle and work was not that tedious compared to the first one, The only objective here why this barge went along side was for the collection of the sludges stored on the slop tanks

December 28th 2013 Saturday

Week end rest is cancelled as usual. Work for now is the removal of solid (and semi solid) sludge's on the starboard slop tank, Apparently despite all the efforts put on the previous tank cleaning , some of the solidified crude oil is still accumulated on the bottom of each tank here. Seriously i find this work totally unnecessary if the Russian chief mate would have used the sea clean chemicals during tank cleaning ops. Obviously he didn't and that the reason why were doing this job order.

As expected the slop tank was teetering with sludge's from what i recall i have already pulled out about 30 plus black plastic garbage bags full of crude oil sludge's ( i happened to be on the wooden derrick just right beside the cargo hatch and was pulling it out manually) and we are still not finished on it.

After work, I decided to drop by at the bridge to give the slop chest order slips to Byron and of course get my commission from the months sales on the slop chest. During my short visit , Byron told me that I wont be handling the slop chest anymore and that mess man Ferdinand will take over starting tomorrow.

To be frankly honest , I'm very much relieved that i wont be handling the slop chest and i was very much reluctant when i handled the slop chest. However I can't help but wonder why mess man Ferdinand is so eager to get his hands on the slop chest ? Maybe i could only assume that money is involve here on the commission.  Anyway I'm glad I got rid of the slop chest as i could guess mess man Ferdinand is getting jealous on my work in handling the bond store and probably is spreading rumors against me behind my back.  Very typical for a lower class individual such as himself - and not very surprising at all.

December 29th 2013 Sunday.

Morning brought in a few tensions. As BOSUN AMICAN complained to the chief mate about the chief cook serving only rice porridge as breakfast (in other words breakfast doesn't taste good). Anyway the complaint resulted to a nasty confrontation in the crew mess , right in front of the whole crew , chief mate and the captain.

I felt sorry for the chief cook olan getting all the flak from BOSUN AMICAN, He got all the bitching. Honestly i felt ashamed on my own kind squabbling amongst each other , This ship has only a small provisions left and instead of joining and working together for a greater good ,  here we are Filipino's demanding good food and bickering to each other about food. I don't blame the chief cook if he only served rice porridge ("lugaw" in tagalog) as breakfast as it was the only available supply in the provisions.  It's not the chief cook's fault and why don't they ask CSM on why there isn't any provisions given yet and if they do why is it very limited and restricted ? These filipino co-workers of mine should take a moment and think about that , rather than bitching the chief cook.

Honestly i feel so low on the commotion that happened, I guess this is typical for lower class Filipino's . We wont always agree even on simple things - nor even band together for a greater good. In tagalog this is the only phrase i could say - "wala na ngang makain sa provision , eh eto pa tayo nag aaway away dahil hindi lang masarap ang almusal"

 December 31st 2013 Tuesday.

We have been working on the slop tank for some days now and its seems that removing all the sludge's inside this tank would take forever. For the record all the garbage drums located on the aft part of this ship have already been used up and filled with sludge's and that doesn't include an army of black plastic bags filled with sludge's as well.  Storage of this sludge's is becoming a big problem now given on the huge volumes of sludge's inside, Another thing to add more on the problem is the availability of the equipment needed. Worst is that chemicals needed for removal of sludge's are forbidden for unknown reasons , making the work more difficult.

Anyway i did make a few improvement and realize that even a standard issue rain coat can be modified in an improved chemical, yes believe it or not it can be modified.  Just remember to add a chemical glove for the hands and a few duct tapes here and there and voila !!! A chemical proof suit designed to withstand chemicals.

Unfortunately despite engineering efforts , Politics and human psychology are excluded . When Bosun Amican saw me on the improvised suit, he can't help and keep he's mouth shut and criticized me that i shouldn't be wearing it , the reason he gave was its bulky and hard to move on.  He could say whatever he wants be that doesn't going to stop me on wearing this on work , in fact i could only think he's jealous because i have a better equipment than his.

Believe it or not , incidentally i saw amican wearing a raincoat (the same thiing) a few hours later. Bastard sick old fuck !!!!

from left to right , Koba tsikarede, "bastard - O" Renan Olis, messman ferdinand Penera , Bosun AMican , and Chief cook Olan

OUr beloved captain krasikov

lots of wine and beer during chirstmas day

A little get together during christmas Eve

left to right, Koba , chief engineer and 3rd mate "byron"

Mr. ARs (2nd engineer)

Food , food and more food during chirtsmas day , despite limited provisions

Seems to be a fine typical co-workers , never figured that were always on toe to toe to each other . I guess its cease fire and time for peace even only for christmas day