At least it's in the evening over here, so you just have to bear with it even though it's soon morning back home.
I'm finally done with the most horrible Sunday at work in a very long time.
As the master of everything technical on board the ship, you are more or less in charge of everything if you look away from knowing or being aware of where are, and/or where we're heading. Anything else is the engine dept. responsibility.
It's basically like running a small miniature town with all it's support system. Including the sewage, and the waste lines from the mess. Sometimes food waste pipes are getting clogged and there will be a problem with the sewage plant... but (luckily) very rarely on the same day.
I say no more about it other than mention that we just found ourselves in some very bad luck, from seven in the morning all the way around till six in the evening. That's eleven hours hard work with stuff you don't want to think about.
It's from a beach in Scotland, of course. There's quite a few places like this over there, and they are great places to go for a walk. You will of course always walk with the wind into your face and get a lot of sand in your wellies and into your cameras and lenses, but it's worth it. Believe me!
Other than that, you might ask...? Nothing much, I'm afraid. Nothing at all, actually.
I have not even had the time to take the old rangefinder out for a walk on deck. The sky was a bit more overcast today compared to most days, so it would be a nice day for it. Anyway, I'll get my chance again soon. And besides, I'm running out of film as well so might be a good idea to save it for crew change and traveling home days.
I have just started working ever so lightly on collecting a few snaps to put op on a small exhibition later this year. I got a few prints made up already, and got a few more I need to print from my pile of existing negs... and then I probably need a few more to fill in the gaps. I'll get there though, as long as I can get my old Italian enlarger to work again after the rather serious rebuild to LEDs and new timers and LED controllers and what have we all. I am sure I'll get there, but it has taken a serious amount of time, I have to admit. But OK, at least I know how the thing works should it suddenly show signs of behaving weird.
I'm looking forward to pinning these pictures up on the walls, because I'm probably going to mix them in between paintings, which will be a new experience all over.
We have been talking about doing something together for something like 20 years or so, which should mean it's about time soon. Life has come in the way for something like a lifetime, but now it seems we can get something done... I hope. If not, we'll just put aside everything and work against next summer. At least we got a plan now. I've seen some of her paintings, and they look great even on a computer screen.
I'll be back with more from the archive and a lot more talk soon.
It's the ship I work on, while on dry land inside the dry dock in Curacao last summer. We had some of the anchor chain out for steel thickness measurements to be done, and a lot of work going on around the bottom of the thing. All thrusters were out for checks and engines were overhauled and a lot of things were going on all the time, day and night. You can even see a couple of guys inspecting something. One of them looking inside one of the thruster holes, and the other just looking at steel plates, whatever that would be good for...?
Well, it turns out there is a lot more to running a ship than saying, "Full steam ahead!", "Land ho!", and "Walk the plank!". Joking, of course. I always assumed that human waste would be dropped into the middle of the ocean to fertilise the sea floor. Is it illegal to do so?
SvarSlettI really like the Scottish beach photo. Is it one of the pictures you plan on pinning to a wall?
Thanks, Marcus! I don't know about pinning it on the wall yet. I usually find out when I have it printed, but it is a candidate for sure.
SlettThere are strict rules for all sorts of waste going over board. Main rule is that nothing is going to sea... and then you got the exemptions which will typically be our drain water (from showers, wash basins etc.), food waste and the human waste. To take the human waste first to get done with that part it's going through grinders at first, and then through an extremely effective (works on natural bacteria already present in the stuff) sewage treatment plant. Then a very tiny bit of chlorine is added before it's ever so gradually dropped to the sea. We do daily measurements to make sure it's clean, so no worries there.
Some of the food waste (typically bones and the tough stuff) will be dropped inside a freezer and delivered for destruction ashore. The smaller parts will be sent through a food grinder and out to sea. No part of the finished result is to be bigger than 5mm in diameter. It will never reach the bottom most likely, as some fish and other animals will feed on it.
At last it's the bilge water, which basically is some sea water, some fresh water plus whatever else has happened to mix in with it. First it's collected from the bilge wells in the engine room and pumped into a bilge water tank. When we got a few thousand liters on that one we usually start the bilge water separator. It's there to make sure any oil is taken out of the water before it's leaving the vessel. There are certain international rules we have to follow to be allowed to use the bilge water separator, stated in Marpol Annex I:
http://www.marpoltraining.com/MMSKOREAN/MARPOL/Annex_I/r15.htm
The rules state that no more than 15 parts per million (ppm) of oil residue are allowed to go over board through the measuring cell on the bilge water separator, but our separator will do about 3-5 ppm on an average, so that's quite good.
There are six Annexes in the Marpol convention, all dealing with different aspects of pollution (oil, chemicals, sewage, garbage and air pollution).
Some new ships built today and designed to enter some special areas of the world will be built to "Clean Class" which means they will have to fulfill a quite strict regime regarding all sorts of pollution. You can read a lot more about it over here if you're interested :)
https://rules.dnvgl.com/docs/pdf/DNV/rulesship/2011-01/ts612.pdf
Bottom line is: Shipping today is a lot about following the rules, and always try to do better than just operating on the limits of the rules. For instance we don't burn our garbage on board, but take everything ashore for destruction. We got 9 different types of solid waste collected in 9 different color coded types of bins all around the vessel. Basically it'v very much filled up with waste bins...
It was a long explanation, but I hope it served the purpose of making a fair impression that we're trying to do what we can to not using the sea as a dumping ground of all sorts of shit. There are plenty enough of people who should think twice before throwing things away these days, because everything will eventually find it's way to the sea, and we all know about that problem these days.
I skimmed the documents you linked to. Wow, those are a lot of regulations. And I'm sure it took a lot of lawyer hours to make the definitions, etc. bullet-proof. It was interesting to me that the definition of being in port was not physical location, but the time between saying 'stand by' and 'full ahead'.
Slett:) That's a very good explanation of the term "in port" for sure!
SlettShe's a big lass, that Subsea Viking lady! I like the sound of your exhibition, Roy - I'm sure it will be great. It's a great project to focus on, get those prints done, mounted and framed etc. You've plenty of material to choose from, from what I can see - the difficulty might be knowing what to leave out rather than what to put on the walls ;)
SvarSlettShe sure is, Michael. And curvy and bumpy in the front as well...!
SlettWe'll see what I can manage to dig out to put on the wall. I'm quite sure I'll find something, but I'd rather see it was the right things as well as just anything.
But we shall see.