Tours

Took my first group of passengers on a tour today with me at the controls from start to finish. The vessel is really nice to handle, since she is relatively light, being aluminum,  and decently powered, woth twin 250 horsepower caterpillar engines with the propellers positioned far to the outsiders of the ship. This gives lots of leverage and makes it easy to steer with just the throttles. In fact, the entire mooring procedure, as well as departing the dock is done using throttles only, woth the rudders set in the middle and not touched until were out. My boat, the Island Belle docks between the two larger boats in the fleet. When leaving the dock, you let the lines go at the stern, and put your port side engine in ahead and starboard in reverse to swing the stern out. Then you back out of the slip, do a tight 360 degree turn using the engines, and off you go. Here's I've posted the view from the wheelhouse!  Not a bad waterfront office I must say. Also you can see the engine room hatch. Its cramped down there, but workable. 2 generators, 2 engines. Its a good spot to work when you get tired of the shirt and tie and want to throw on a set of coveralls and get your hands dirty. My job is mate/engineer for the vessel so I get the best of both worlds!

Update:

Well, I'm back on the blogosphere.  Since I've been back from the tanker I've been doing various exams, got my commercial marine radio liscence, and went on the job hunt. As it turns out, ill be a first mate this summer for the Kingston Thousand Island Cruises.  I figured five months of steady employment,  getting to drive some cool little boats, and being home with friends and family was a good deal. We are in fit out mode right now, wildly preparing the three boats for the season. I will primarily be mate for the Island Belle, but will be licenced for the Island Queen and the water jet catamaran,  Bateau Mouche II as well. Im learning a lot and working hard. It looks like its going to he a good season!

Homeward bound.

I'm on my way home after an amazing five weeks on board the Acadian. The plan is to go back again in a few weeks for a lite bit more. I figured ot was a good time to come home for a visit, especially since my grandmother Popsie passed away while I was on board. Here ia a picture from yesterday's train from Halifax to Montreal. I just arrived in Montreal an hour ago and have a three hour layover until the train to Kingston.

Food!

Some people were asking about food...so here are some pictures! Home baked goods every day including buns, pies, cakes, etc.

Almost back to St. John

We have been very lucky. Very little wind made for a very confortable trip back Newfoundland. Not a whole lot to report. I had fun playing around with my camera on the bridge last night taking long exposure shots of the ship lit up in the moonlight. It is very hard to get a good shot with al the vibration of the ship but a few of them turned out quite well! I will post some later. Today we got all the glass, plastic, and other non burnable garbage ready to send off the ship and take to a garbage truck. Last time we did this was my first day on board so there is a month's worth of garbage bags. Pretty smelly. Not a whole lot of fun! Paper and food waste we burn in an on board incinerator which cute down on smelly garbage bags quite a bit. We are working on pressure testing and replacing winch break pads today. They are set at 31 tons, half the break strengh of the mooring lines. This means that the break should slip before we snap a line. Just on a coffee break, now back to work!

An ice covered trip

Finally, the internet is back up and running! For some reason it has not worked since leaving Halifax. Leaving Halifax was cool though. Beautiful sunny day, and since we left on my watch, I got to be the wheelsman! I was a little bit nervous since it was my first time steering out of port and under the orders of a pilot, but it went very smoothly. He just calls out helm orders for how many degrees to set your rudder, and you follow them. I was also on watch that night, but that was basically just four hours of looking out the windows of the bridge. It was the following day which was a challenge.

We encountered sea ice basically upon rounding Cape Breton and it only thickened as we got closer to PEI. I spent the entire morning watch on the wheel steering for what appeared to be the thinner patches of ice. This is actually pretty fun because the ship is basically yours. You just steer where you think looks best because really, it is anyone's guess where the thinnest ice is. We met up with a coast guard ice breaker shortly after noon when my watch ended. The ice got thicker and thicker until the ice breaker blew one of her engines and got stuck. we passed around the ship to avoid getting too close, and also got stuck. So the wait for the coast guard engineers to repair the engine began. Fortunately we werent waiting long. A few hours later, we resumed our slow push through the ice.

At 2000 hours, I got sent back up to the wheel. It is much harder to steer through the ice at night than in day. The goal is to follow the track left by the ice breaker. The problem is, even with our two searchlights going, it can be very difficult to determine which is the crushrd ice of the track, and what is just regular pack ice. Our rounded bow sometimes helps to guide us along, but since the track is always twisting and turning due to the currents, there is alot of evasive steering required. The ice breaker also got stuck again several times, which meant we had to leave the track to avoid them, then find it again once they got underway. They can go from 10 knots to 3 knots then back up to ten in a few minutes due to their small size. We take much much longer so the captain and watch officer are watchig their speed on the radar and ship identification closely to see if they suddenly slow down or stop.

The crazy thing about following the ice breaker was that it is reallly anyone's guess which way the track turns. As I said it's contantly changing. The breaker could be going straight ahead, yet the track may veer off to port 30 degrees. The captain and harbour pilot are both looking for it, telling you which way to steer. Often they asked me where I thought it turned because, as the captain joked, I'm younger than the rest of them and still have good eye sight. There were a few times when we slowed down to basically a stop, and once when we had to reverse. But eventually we made it right at the end of my watch and I was sent down to help tie up.

The usual 8-12 watchman is here now so I'm back to my usual duties. We are now back in St. John's, NL after a fairly uneventful trip, other than a lot more ice and a few more times getting minorly stuck. After my watch this morning, I'm going to bike around the harbour to visit my friend Shadow, who is working on a Mckeil Marine tug. We are supposed to be leaving late tonight, maybe around 12.

Back to Haliax

It is a cold and snowy day here in Halifax. We arrived at around six this morning after a fairly uneventful 20 hour trip.  It was really cold yesterday though, and the spray from the waves off the bow covered everything up foreward in several inches of ice in hours. Docking this morning felt a little chaotic for me. In certain ports that are less sheltered, we tie up with two extra mooring lines foreward, and two aft. Each are 600 feet long and have to be completely layed out on deck. It can get pretty confusing which goes where if you don't play close attention. Not long after we tied up, the snow started to come down very hard. So my watch this morning consisted of lotsss of shovelling. Fortunately, I had a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, cereal, and pancakes so I was all set. Then lunch was cheese and bacon hamburgers with onion rings, a bean soup, and ham with delicious rasberry crumble for desert. I am well fed here. The steward likes to joke that I am putting them way over budget because of how much I eat. I work it all off though. Just staying warm can burn alot of energy!

Today was also the day the other member of my watch Gerald was sent home. He was filling in for someone who quit but the company sent him home here because his releif is joining in PEI, our next stop. It is much easier and cheaper for the company to rent him a car from here back to St. John, then from PEI. From what I'm hearing, this means a promotion for me between here and PEI! I will be on the bridge at night keeping watch, and steering the ship in and out of port (to the captain or pilot's orders). Finally I am getting to use my bridge watchman's certification for what it's meant for. Keeping watch on the bridge.

I'm going into Halifax this afternoon to hopefully meet with sone friends. We likely won't be leaving until early tomorrow morning.

Rick Mercer video

Here's a cool/ entertaining video or Rick Mercer playing around in a Halifax harbour tug. We use these same tugs here in Saint John, and in Halifax as well. Those lines are extremely heavy to handle! As you can probably tell from the video.

We use two of these tugs coming into Halifax and Saint John,  and one one coming out. None in Charlottetown or St. John's, NL. We just have to use our bow thruster and it takes a lot longer to turn around.

Watch "RMR: Rick and Tugboat" on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EroFIT_wun4&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Another stormy day

We anchored just after sunrise this morning outside St. John harbour. As predicted, there were gale force winds (35-45 knots). It got so strong that even with 9 shots (810 feet) of anchor chain out, we were still dragging it on the bottom and slowly drifting towards shore. This basically meant we had to pull up the anchor, fire up the engine, and motor around until the wind and waves died down. Which they still haven't really yet.  The seas were approaching 20 feet from trough to crest,  if not more when the tide was going out (tide going one way, wind going the other). It did not get rocky though until part way through our evening game of cards when we had to out the waves on our side to get back towards where we were trying to anchor a second time. We are rolling quite heavily as I write this actually. I should probably go stow stuff before a bottle of shampoo or something falls and breaks. We are  supposed to be in St. John tomorrow morning but I will keep the updates going!

Latest News

Currently, we are anchored just outside of St. John harbour, our home port. There are six other ships anchored nearby, all of us waiting for the two spaces at the Irving refinery to be free. Originally, we were suposed to go into port on the Sunday morning tide. It was then changed to Monday (meaning a long wait at anchor), then to tomorrow morning, and now back to Sunday. Lots of last minute changes in this buisness! They also added a new port to our next trip. We have to take two tanks full of jet fuel to Halifax before proceding on our origionally planned Charlottown-St. John's route. This should be an interesting, but long trip.

Today was pretty mundane.  We had to scrape the ice off the deck from last night's spray for the third day in a row, only this time in -20 conditions. Not so fun, but the ice fog rising off the water looked very pretty around sunrise, and a few hours after! Other than that, we had to thaw just about every valve on deck with hot water and steam. Winter is quite the season to be on the water that's for sure.

The cool thing about jet fuel is that it requires the tanks to be very very clean. Normally, if we have a tank that contained diesel, for example, and on the next trip we fill with gas, they just turn on a pressure washer, fresh water cleans the inside, and is then pumped out into a residual tank to be re-refined. With jet fuel, people have to go inside the actual tanks and clean with mops and buckets. I guess jet fuel is that much more refined, and the engines aren't so tollerant on little fuel issues. I am not allowed in the tanks without confined spaces certification, but looking down the access hatch to pull buckets of the water/fuel/sludge mix, I could see how enormous they were! It is a solid 50 feet from the deck to the tank bottom. The headlamps of the guys working down there just seem sooo far away. Also each tank (there are 14) can hold 3670m3 of product, so that is about 3.7 million liters-each!! Imagine a full load. That is alot of money. Valuable stuff. Anyway, cool to look in the tanks. It's too bad I can't go inside, but as an office manager said to a fellow crewmember, "if you go in there without your confined spaces certs and you get hurt or die, the captain goes to jail". Pretty serious stuff.

Anyway, we finished off the night with a few games of cards. I lost a little money on the first two, then made up my losses plus a little more on the third! I'm heading to bed now. There is another gale warning tomorrow, which even at anchor I hear can be tedious. The strong Fundy tide pulls the ship wherever it wants, so we won't necissarily be head to the wind and waves, the usual position at anchor, and the most stable.

Oh one last thing. Kingston's local newspaper the Whig Standard 's Julia Mckay wrote an artical about my blog. Here it is!
http://www.thewhig.com/2014/01/23/getting-his-sea-legs

Goodnight!

And some photos from St. John's

Taken from Signal Hill, 500 fert above the world's most sheltered harbour. The vessel in the photo is the offshore supply ship the Maersk Challenger.

Yesterday's building storm.

A shot of the waves yesterday. It is hard to tell size from a photo but these are about 4-5 meters

A rough night, busy day.

We spent all day yesterday shovelling snow off the deck in freezing rain. The waves were a good 4-4.5 meters but since they were coming from dead astern, it did not feel too bad. Last night though, we changed course near Cape Canso (close to good old Port Hawkesbury!), where mainland Nova Scotia meets Cape Breton and started taking the waves off our stern quarter. That was when the rolling started, and it only got worse. It's pretty hard to get a good nights sleep when the ship rolls like that. Even for the long time career sailors. I managed a few hours in and I think I was one of the lucky ones. We woke up to a deck covered in frozen ocean spray, so chipping and shovelling the ice overboard was most of the day's work, aside from taking a steam hose to melt some frozen valves earlier. It is pretty cool, working on a rolling deck with huge waves all around you and spray flying in your face. Makes a menial job like shovelling a little more enjoyable.  We are only going about half speed right now. We don't have a spot at the Irving refinery to refill with cargo until Saturday so we are proceding at economical speed to an anchorage close by. The wind is strong from dead ahead now. The bow is going to get iced up nicely...more work for us tomorrow. Makes the day go by fast though! And you work up a sweat, even though it is well below zero before the wind chill.

Weather forecast

Could be quote the day tomorrow...

http://weather.gc.ca/marine/region_e.html?mapID=15

Signal Hill (Edited from the other day)

What a great day. I got to sleep in because a crewmember owed me a watch so waking up on my own was a nice change. I showered, ate breakfast, took one of the ship's bikes, and left. It took a while to get around the bay and up the hill, partly because of a headwind and the gears on the bike which would slip under pressure. But I made it up. The view was incredible! You are 500 feet above the ocean and you can see for miles. I watched a Maersk supply ship come in, probably from one of Newfoundland's offshore oil feilds. I stopped at a geology museum on the way down the hill. Lots of interesting information about the formation of the land and how the oil exploration works there. After that I biked back to the ship, again passing rows of coloured houses and an impressive fleet of all sorts of ships. Dinner tonight was a roast and Yorkshire Pudding. Reminded me of home! We are leaving in about half an hour. There is a big storm on its way we are hoping to avoid. I'll update when I can.

Ships current position

http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/details/ships/316012950/vessel:ACADIAN

A propper day at sea

Today was a great day to be on the water. It was just above zero, and the sun was shining! There was a good wind coming from the starboard quarter (which was SE) which gave us about three meter seas. Maybe four on the odd big one. It was enough to get the ship rolling and pitching, but not in an uncomfortable way. Enough to remind you that yes you arein fact on a ship in the Atlatic ocean.

My work started off with stitching up our torn Canadian ensign (flag), which is flown off the stern. It was pretty badly torn and my repairs with a needle, thread, and sailmaker's palm took until morning coffee break, which is around 10. The rest of the day was spent greasing more winches, and testing the emergency towing system, which is basically a three inch diameter cable we can putboff the stern so we can be towed if we ever lost our main engine.

One of the most amazing parts of today was passing the first bit of land we had seen since the the day before. Since it was isolated, and we were clearly extremely far from PEI, I figured it must be the French islands of St. Pierre et Miquelon. I ran up to the bridge to loom at a chart and see, and sure enough it was! Very cool to sail past France while sailing to Newfoundland. The rest of the day was just beautiful blue and turquois (sp?) water all around, with waves lapping up around us as we rollind towards them. We passed by two super tankers as well. Likely over 1000 feet in length and 150 in beam, but that was the inly sign of human life today (other than picking up cell service from a French company when we passed St. Pierre.

Tonight, I plan on getting  some sleep before we get into St. Johns around 3 am. On of my fellow guys on deck is covering my morning watch because I covered his 4-8 in PEI two nighta before (he lives there and wanted to go home). That way I can sleep in a little and explore St. Johns for the first time! Goodnight.

On to Newfoundland

We had a breif but nice stay in Charlottetown. Coming in was very cool. Ice everywhere and no tug boats to help us turn around and dock. It was a good workout for the bow thrusters. The town itself is very pretty! Walking around downtown brought back memories of our family trip there several years ago.
We left around five this morning. There was a little snow last night and thr coast looked very picturesque with the red rocks on the coast.  I also got some more practice steering the ship through the ice, which seemed much more tightly packed than yesterday. Anyway, we should be in St. Johns sometime late tomorrow night. I'm looking foreward to a long sleep tonight after a busy day. Hopefully the wind will stay light! I'd rather not wake up to my things flying around the room again.

Photos from today

Almost there!

It has been a pretty good trip to PEI! We are getting close now to Charlottetown. Just on lunch break now. We spent the first day at sea doing mundane cleaning-not too much fun. But the day after was some nice dirty work greasing all the deck winches. I got my shiny new orange coveralls nice and dirty, as they should be. Coming from sailing in the lakes, I have to say it feels weird to have barely any wind, yet still feel the ship rolling in fairly large (1.5-3 meter) swell. I guess the water in the open ocean never stops moving. We also spent some time replacing steam pipes which had corroded through and were leaking. We use steam during deep freezes  to thaw valves which get frozen shut. as Myles the bosun said, "we don't use it every day, but without it we'd be f****d". Later on that day, we ran into some heavy fog. It just appeared out of nowhere and more or less stayed until this morning. The fog horns were going strong, and they are very loud and piercing. This morning, however, we had to remove the one on the bow. It had frozen and the piston inside had basically bashed itself to pieces. I volunteered to go up the forward mast (a 20 foot high post with a ladder and platform), but they said that you need a permit to do work aloft, even with a harness. Regulations are everywhere.

The trip this morning has been very very cool. It was beautiful when the fog lifted and you could see dark sky contrasted with the sun shining through, ice on the water, and land on both sides (PEI and Nova Scotia).  We are currently  steaming through some pretty heavy ice and are following a coast guard ice breaker which is about 1.5 nautical miles (close to 3km) ahead. You still feel the ship shudder though as it pushes past the large, broken chunks of sea ice. There are also seals everywhere on ice flows. I have probably seen about 15 without even looking for them. When travelling through ice, the ship's autopilot has to be turned off and she has to be steered with a helmsman. I took a turn at the wheel too relieve the one who was on this morning so he could have his half hour break. It is the most fun I've had steering so far! You just need to follow the track of the ice breaker and more or less keep our ship's foremast lined up with the stern of the other vessel. The track is quite narrow and on very small turns of the wheel are required to correct the course. 2-3 degrees of rudder angle is enough. Then you watch the foremast on the horizon, and when it starts to swing in the direction you want, you bring the rudder back amidships (to the center), or give a little correction in the other direction as needed to keep on course. A few times, some larger turns were required to avoid the seals, who seem happy to bask in the sun right where we are trying to go. I guess they are unphased by  two large and fast moving ships headed straight towards them.

Hopefully, we will be all tied up in Charlottetown in a few hours. The mooring lines are all ready to go and all we need to do now to get ready is attach two cargo hoses to our tanks. Then we will be all set.

Start of trip 2

We left St. John for Charlottown, PEI arount 11 am today. We had quite a few delays with cargo. The supreme gas we were supposed to load was on another ship who missed the tide (ships can only leave at high tide, once every 12 hours). But we had a good time here. We tested the life boat and zodiac rescue boat yesterday. It felt food to be off the big ship and just scoot around in the harbour as fast as I wanted. We currently have the Charlottown harbour pilot on board because there is ice there and the pilot boat can't go out. So thats nice for us because rigging pilot ladders is a pain.

It takes about two and a half days to get to PEI. Hopefully I can do another post en route. If not, then this weekend! 

Some videos from last week

The view from my cabin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIoeHWl-a9w&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Andddd from the inside!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyXkDKNH79A&feature=youtube_gdata_player

The end of voyage 1.

Well, it’s been an interesting last few days. When I left off, I was going to play poker with some of the crew. This was one of the most nautical feeling things I’d ever done. The whole experience felt straight out of a movie. Playing poker with a bunch of Newfoundlanders on a cargo ship sailing into a storm. I had to stifle a grin when the bosun began to play Newfoundland folky fiddle music on his iphone. I spend the next few hours on the wheel. It was pretty hard to get used too at first because I’m used to feeling the pressure of the rudder on the helm. With this, it’s all electronic and when you turn the wheel over, you have to wait for the rudder to catch up. As the wind and waves picked up, it started to get a little harder. The wind was about 30 degrees off our port side and when it pushed on our relatively huge superstructure (the large “building” at the stern where the accommodations and bridge are), it drives the bow into the wind. This is something you have to get used too so you can counter steer. It is pretty amazing to be up on the bridge during a storm. You can see the entire ship, all 600 X 90 feet of it being tossed around in the waves like it's a little bath toy. You can really relate to the stories of how powerful the sea really can be.  I steered for about 2 hours, then went to bed.

That night was wild. We had a gale force wind gusting to hurricane force, which is over sixty knots, and with our cargo 2/3 empty, the ship was rolling like a pig. Fortunately, I stowed my things before I went to sleep and put a bunch on the floor, but this was not enough. As she ship rolled, the shower curtain opened and closed. My bag slid back and forth across the floor. So did my books. And water bottle. Even my mattress slid back and forth over the bed (it is not a tight fit) and loose change banged around inside the desk.  That was quite the wake up at 330 am, but not a huge deal to re stow everything. I took the third mate’s advice and shoved my lifejacket under my mattress to prop it up on an angle and keep me against the wall. This worked for a while, but on one especially big roll, it actually worked as a wedge to fling my mattress half off the bed- and me with it. In the end, I was lucky enough to get around five total hours of sleep, with lots of wake ups along the way. Most of the crew were not so lucky to get even that. However the next day, I started to feel how the six meter ocean swell was different from anything I was used to.

Our work the following day started with cleaning and mopping the officer’s mess, which had basically been completely covered in mustard, V8 juice, peanut butter, and margarine. These experienced sailors had apparently forgotten to properly stow their food and chairs. When the condiments fell on the ground, the chairs chased after them, smashing them to pieces and spreading their contents over the floor and walls.  We still had four meter waves and the ship was rolling heavily, making it a challenge to walk over that slippery floor. Sometimes, you just had to accept that you were about to slide 20 feet over the floor into the wall and there was nothing (save for grabbing onto the table) that you could do about it. Most of the heavy weather I have been in on the St. Lawrence II has resulted in pitching (fore and aft motion) and a fairly steady angle of heel which we would keep by setting a sail as a stabilizer. I am used to being over 30 degrees and staying there. But 30 degrees of roll from side to side every 25-30 seconds is a whole different matter. I progressively started to feel worse and worse. Fortunately, Myles, the bosun noticed and sent me to upstairs, telling me I could take an evening watch instead of finishing my work day then and there. By then, the waves were supposed to die down and I would likely be feeling better. He was right. In fact, we were stopped when I woke up. Just adrift 60 nautical miles (110 km) offshore. The ship’s engine  had been running off only 5/6 cylinders and our speed was down around 7-8 knots instead of the usual 14-15. The engineers were busy repairing the damaged fuel pump and getting us going to full sea speed again, with the engine running at its full 122 rpm.

We got tied up in Portland, Maine around 2330, ship’s time. There was nothing left to do on my 8-12 watch because we couldn’t begin transferring cargo until samples had been taken, and sent to Boston for analysis. I’m told discharging of cargo began around 5am, and we finished eight hours later, but had to complete an intense and thorough annual US coast guard inspection before departure. After that finished, we anchored to take on fuel oil- the heavy, black, high sulphur stuff, and prepared to make the 20 hour trek back to St. John.  It was another rocky night, but not as bad as the one two nights before. We arrived in St. John this morning, passing several anchored super tankers feeding the refinery, and a small pilot boat being tossed about in the three meter swell. On arrival, we promptly attached the cargo hoses to fill our tanks with diesel and gas. We also had to load three weeks worth of food stores, which goes fast when you have most of the crew and the crane helping out. We should be leaving sometime tomorrow, on the first high tide. The next trip will be Charlottown PEI, St. John’s NL, and back. I am looking forward to it quite a bit.    

A few photos from Thursday

Goodbye Halifax!

After a long and uneventful unloading of cargo in Halifax, we are on our way to Portland, Main. While underway this afternoon,  I was walking out of the work change room and saw the cheif engineer come out of the engine room, throw his arms up, and yell "FUCK". I went up to steer and from what I could tell from the cheif's conversation with the captain,  the no. 3 cylinder fuel pump broke again( that was why we had to anchor earlier in the week). It would take  several hours with the engine stopped to fix it.  We cant do that because its too deep to anchor and we can't just drift cause there is a building storm which would push us towards shore. In the end, they decided to just run the engine with that problem cylinder off line. Running undrr five cylindrs instead of six makes us go close to a third slower. Not something that Irving, who cuarters the boat wants. The reason they charter instead of own is to avoid responsibility if anything goes wrong, from minor setbacks like this to major accidents (knock wood).  But oh well can't really be helped right now. We will just have to keep steaming away through the storm tonight (woohoo six meter waves in the forecast, gusting to 60 knots in Halifax) and we will get there when we get there. You can already feel the ship starting to roll and pitch a little. Its pretty exciting. The plan for me tonight is a little poker with the crew, maybe a little steering, and an early bed time! I'm looking foreward to hitting the pillow already. 

Finally at sea!

We left St. John around 1700 (5pm) last night when the tide was high. And by high I mean it looked about 30 feet higher than it was before noon. That's the bay of Fundy for you I guess! We had a tug come to push our bow out. I was at the bow with some ABs and the bosun Myles. they worked the winches on the drums as I helped to spool the line on. We covered it with tarps to prevent it being covered in ice, secured the anchor in place, and went below. Promptly, the engine was stopped and we had to anchor to repair a fuel pump in one of the cylinders. The engineers were able to get us going again without too much hassle.
This morning was basically spent cleaning and shovelling ice off the fore deck. It's warmed up a little which is nice. Still below zero, but single digets at least. After lunch I got my first chance at the helm and got to take the ship through a course adjustment! It went pretty well but definitely takes a bit to get used too. Other than that, not a whole lot to say. We will be in Halifax tonight around 2300 to discharge cargo. Then on to America!

First day on board

This is going to have to be a quick one because we (me and another deckhand who is new to this ship) are doing our official ships tour. I had the 8-12 watch last night and this morning. The ship seems huge to me. 600 feet long and 90 wide. Wow. Last night, we began to fill up with a cargo of refined gasoline and diesel, about 250 000 barrels total. Thats an expensive cargo. We also stocked up with 100 tons of fresh water, and ither necesities for life on board. We are finished loading now and are jist waiting for high tide around 5. Ill post some pictures of my cabin and wibdow view, but we arent allowed electronics on deck becsause of the fire risk. The risk is very small but this ship definantely puts safety first, which is a very good thing. Our jext stop is Dartmeouth, the  Portland im the U S of A!

End of the line

So, there has been a little shift up in the plans. The Acadian is still anchored off St. John due to bad weather and won't be in Halifax for a few days. So I will be getting off the train in Moncton in a few hours and will take a bus to St. John. The company Norbulk has very kindly offered to pick me up from the bus station and they have already booked me a hotel! How's that for east coast hospitality. Turns out the oil industry is actually pretty nice! The train went alot faster this time then it did coming back. Kiera Vesnaver, an old friend and accidental travel buddy from KCVI  just happened to be taking the train to Truro to go back to school. This is the second time we have ran into each other on the train, The first time was back from Windsor. Holy small world. I basically just read a lot and slept in the lounge car. Not too bad. 24 hours from now, I'll be on the ship, so I'll post something about that tomorrow! Should be exciting.

Follow the ship

You can follow the ship MV Acadian at this link: http://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-66.07628/centery:45.2031/zoom:8/mmsi:316012950

Hello!

Hello to my friends, family, and anyone else who happens to find themselves on here. In a few days, I am taking a train from Montreal to Halifax to board the oil tanker MV Acadian. I want to use this site to keep a record of my experiences and to share what is going on with anyone who may be interested. I don’t really know what to expect on this trip because all the time I have spent on the water has been spent on the 72 foot tall ship the St. Lawrence II. She is a fantastic ship- strong, stable, and extremely seaworthy. Her sail training program is more or less single handedly responsible for teaching me about ships and sailing,and giving me a passion for being on the water. However going from a 72 foot sailing ship in the summer to a ~600 foot oil tanker in the dead of winter is going to be a big change, and I have to say I am very excited! Hopefully this is will be a big step into helping me figure out what I want to do with my life and will lead towards other jobs on the water, for the rest of this year, summers after university ends, or even after graduation. Whatever happens, it is a big stepping stone. I spent a fair bit of time and money doing my safety training in Cape Breton- a requirement for any work on ships. Then using my sea time from the St. Lawrence II, I was able to get my bridge watch rating, essentially a licence to steer and showing basic knowledge in proficiency as a deckhand. Whatever this leads to, I’m sure it will be a memorable experience!