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!
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