THE KINGDOM

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.