According the The San Francisco Chronicle the Wan Hai 176 lost power approaching SF Bay Friday and drifted close to shore before getting an anchor down. Saturday afternoon it’s still out there.
NOAA NAM forecast for tomorrow afternoon is 35kts, gusts ~50kts. It’s going to be a rough night.
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In between rounds working for MSC, I was a vessel traffic controller for VTS San Francisco. I’m going to have to email my contacts there to ask about this.
From WAN HAI 176 Lost Power off Point Reyes, California | What’s Going on With Shipping.
QUOTE after the author: ship has 39000 gallons of fuel, which is approximately 8% of her total capacity , which is extremely low, i 've got to say i am surprised , they are that low on fuel . END QUOTE
Is the Author surprise justified ??? and does the ROB of fuel for the contemplated voyage from Oakland to Seattle ( 800 NM pilot to pilot) fit for “extremely low” qualification?? . Old Salts comments would be appreciated. In short : is it real concern or another hype . ? THX Actual and expected movements below:
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Sounds low to me! We heard it on vhf and later passed them on the way into SF The weather wasn’t great, even more so on something smaller and heading into it. Last I checked low on fuel and heavy weather doesn’t make a good combination. On a suezmax tanker you’d be emptying diesel out of the lifeboats and rigging the sails at PAPS if you left SF with 928.6bbls of fuel…
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Ohhh Man. 
You lost me on “PAPS” . Is it "Jones Act " jargon ? … I am not a native speaker and not a great user of twitter , sms and/or tanker acronyms. . Pls clarify before we continue.
PAPS, in US West Coast trade parlance, is the Port Angeles Pilot Station (Puget Sound).
As for the fuel, assuming something wasn’t lost in translation somewhere along the line, that does seem low to me. 39,000 gals is roughly 125MT. I wouldn’t be comfortable running the west coast with only that this time of year, especially northbound which anyone who’s done that knows it’s (typically) a bear until you’re well north of Mendocino. I don’t know what their company policy regarding minimum fuel reserve is but if it’s more than a couple days or so, leaving SF with that amount seems borderline.
Then again, it’s not a very big ship so who knows what the typical consumption is….
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While I was able to guess that’s what it meant, I have never heard that acronym, and I have picked up and dropped pilots there well several hundred times.
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It seems to be, for one reason or another, a tanker thing.
The pilots themselves don’t even use it (the acronym).
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Not on the ones I worked on. My experience was all tankers, mostly going to Ferndale/Cherry Point.
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Maybe a TAPS PAPS thing among a small handful of people. I sailed the TAPS run for years and never heard PAPS either.
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You got me, how about PA Pilot Station?
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PA Pilot Station!!!. Can not be ;-). .In my environment , while sending ETA to LA Agent or making any references to LA activities we were using LAX P.Stn. or LAX pilot, LAX longshoreman etc , etc.
So in container trade w/w we use a bit different jargon , which is fine with me and i see no reason to be ashamed to ask or simply say " i do not know" .We learn as we go. It is one of the reasons for my visits on g Capt forum to get savvy on Jones Act parlance and way of thinking Cheers.
forgot to add that San Francisco pilot station I know as SFX P.Stn. . Looks like foreign weird language to me but after a while on WCUSA one can get used to all local acronyms.
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Are you now confusing Port Angeles, Washington with Los Angeles, California?
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That is exactly what i have done so we can finally move on to the gallon issue. because one of the comentators here mentioned 125 MT and another ,whose name i will not disclose and who deleted his post said quote"
That’s what? About 50 tons? That number likely is an error, doesn’t sound right."t end quote. Can we leave then the acronym issue. ??
Ships like the Wan Hai 176 normally keep FO records in CBM.
Could it be that someone somewhere have managed to get their conversion(s) wrong??
PS> If we assume an “un-pumpable” figure of as low as 5% 125 MT (abt. 135 CBM, depending on Sp.g, and temperature) does sound like “too low to be true”.
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I don’t know what the exact conversions are. I used 6.6 bbl/ton but I think I must have used 328.6 bbls instead of 928.6.
Anyway, more of an engineer type question but even if they only had enough for a couple days seems like they would have had enough in the service tank to get them further up the coast than they did.