CHRISTMAS WITHOUT YOU

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.