In need of good ideas for the on-board makeshift darkroom

As you have of course noticed by now it seems I'm probably going to be stuck at sea for quite a while. That would mean we need stuff to play around with in the weeks to come when not working with all the boring things that needs to be done in the engine department. You need some time off as well, we all know that. 

One of the navigation guys working on the bridge with pinpointing where to find the tiny little nodes we dropped off at the seabed 2000 meters below about a month ago. He's a bit worried about the future of course, just like all the rest of us stuck on board are as well at the moment. I caught him in a moment deep in his thoughts yesterday afternoon on the bridge wing using the old Rolleiflex TLR. Contact printed this evening on old Ilford RC paper and otherwise very simple equipment.

That's partly why I decided to check the availability of darkroom equipment on board the vessel. There is not much to tell you the sad truth, but I actually got a box of 7"x9,5" Ilford RC paper, some D-76 type of Foma developer, and also a couple of boxes of Fomafix. I brought the chemicals over from Norway for this trip to do some film development as you know by now, but the paper was a lucky thing coming over inside the bag of the first engineer. You see there was a huge load of old paper given away close to where he lives, so I asked him to pick it up for me so I can hopefully drive down south to get them from him later. Thankfully he dropped a pack in his bag before leaving for work, which might come in handy these days. 

We got no paper developer though, but might be able to find some when we get alongside. Still I'm a bit in doubt of what you can actually get hold of these days. Nothing much seems to be like it used to be, you know. 
Anyway, this evening I felt I had to do some experimental work, so I rebuilt the bathroom in my cabin. Made it into a proper darkroom, you know. Red light and everything as I suddenly came to think of the fact that there are red tubes in the ceiling up on the bridge. Used in night time for quite obvious reasons. They turned out to be paper safe believe it or not, so now we know that much for whatever it may be worth. 
The other question would of course be if D-76, or the Foma version of it to be precise, could work as a paper developer? Well, it can. Sort of anyway. 
It's slow, and I did not get the results I hoped for but that might just as well be due to the colour temperature of the light I was using to shine over the negs to make a few contact sheets. 
To actually call them sheets is also a bit of an exaggeration, as the plastic storage boxes for spare parts for the main engines wasn't of a size that can hold a full sheet. Or we do actually have bigger ones which will, but this was just a test, and it seems I need some good ideas coming my way before there's any point making full sheets of anything at all. 

Here you go! This type of fluorescent light tube should be available for anyone who's in the lack of a darkroom safelight. It works quite well, shines with a good light, and my bad contact sheets didn't go bad due to the red light. It might come in handy to some, as it's a standard 18W tube and will fit directly into many a bathroom or other light fixings.

You see the results are not very good to tell the truth. There's just not enough contrast. Not enough Ooomph, punch or whatever. 
The "blacks" are getting brownish, and the "whites" are not exactly pure white either. The worst part is the dark parts though. 
I don't have any grade 5 filters on board, or at least none that I know of. We might have something that could work as one, but I need good ideas for where to start looking. 
Another option I thought would be UV light, and we do actually have a small hand held thing of the sorts, but that didn't give me any better results either for some reason. Personally I would think the UV lamp should do the trick, because I know from experience with all the work I did on the enlarger LED's back home a while ago that the deep blue light did a lot of impact on the contrasty bits on the Ilford paper I got there. 
So, could it be the paper being gone and done for? Could it be the D-76 not being the right stuff? 
Maybe, and maybe not... I need to check that tomorrow as I can't bother to do any more tests this evening. 

Now that one is actually a rather nice portrait should I say so myself, that middle one there. Looking at the neg it's got just the right amount of light at the right places and so forth. It went all dull here though, but we might be able to fix that. Or what do you think?

Anyway, you are looking at darkroom prints even though they are just contact copies, all shot on film way out at sea. The film was developed out here, and now also the contact prints have been done here. Nope, they are not even close to great but still they are as good as they get for now anyway.

It's the sort of things you might find around this place if you just position yourself in a spot where you think something might happen within a half an hour or so. A ladder tied to something sturdy is a better giveaway than anything else. The clue will often be to snap the scene just before the "victim" discover you are there at all. This was close enough to a failure, but I sort of made it.

Tomorrow I might do a pinhole test or something, as I should be able to find what's needed for that as well. 
We need to stay busy you know, to keep our minds a bit away from the fact that we were due to go home tomorrow but still have to stay here for weeks yet. 

So, any ideas you may have (or make up here and now for that sake...) to getting more Ooomph! into the prints are very welcome. Just throw them into the comments and I'll check if I can find anything that might help us a bit further on our way to success.