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.