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