This is a thread to post some experiences that you may not want to recall but are interesting to others, for entertainment and educational purposes.
How scary is it when…you are getting relieved at midnight by the other Mate at who just upgraded to 1600t master and renewed his radar observer certificate and he asks you how you set up the floating ebl’s on the small non-arpa radars to determine cpa’s to the multitude of vessels and rigs in the oil patch. Sure, I am going to sleep tonight…had to teach him everything I could and hoped for some rest. :eek:
How scary is it when you wake up in the morning just prior to sunrise, while the vessel is on DP alongside a big ole semisubmersible, you come to the bridge to have a cup of coffee with the mate on watch to talk over the events of the night, and as the sun is peeking above the horizon you notice a slick on the water. You jump up for a better look and the slick extends down wind and current as far as the eye can see. You call the ECR and nobody answers. You call below to the galley and ask the AB if he has seen the watch engineer and he says “the engineer is in the TV lounge napping on the couch”. By the time you make it down four flights to the galley the engineer is getting himself a cup of coffee and says " it’s okay Cap I’ve got the sea suction cracked so the bilge pump won’t burn up…
year 1994. 0000-0400 watch in Sea of Marmara enroute Istanbul in the Traffic Seperation Scheme they used then, onboard cruise ship, moderate traffic, u/w 12 knots. mellow summer time mid watch, looking forward to 24 hours or so in Istanbul. sudden auto pilot failure: rudder goes over hard a port. vessel starts swinging faster and faster to port directly into path of oncoming Russian general cargo vessel 0.5 miles ahead and others astern of her. 3 vessels behind me, close. quickly try the 2 second repair. no go. quickly call capt “come to bridge” and hang up. stop engines. quick NUC lights on. capt on bridge. astern to stop vessel’s way (don’t worry about vibrations waking the passengers, just stop her). onto vhf for quick pan message (or did I give a securite? don’t recall). switching autopilot etc on and off, no change: she’s stuck hard over. deck lights on. vessels all around me are all altering course this way and that, like ants confused. Turkish authorities on vhf asking why we’ve left the channel. a few tense minutes pass and no imminent risk of collision. electrician on bridge. 1 hour later enroute Istanbul again but on hand steering.
hard time sleeping at 0400 so I stayed up with some of the filipinos and drank a couple san miguels and ate chicken and rice; I remember one of them strumming a guitar (Hotel California), at the end we were all laughing about the close call.
good news: 24 hours turned into 48 hours in Istanbul as we had techs on board fixing the steering gear.
did I forget to mention that the VHF was exploding with Turkish/Russian/Brit traffic to me as soon as the situation developed? that’s always calming background music to any situation.
you leave the bridge to the 2nd Mate (who is twice your age) with instructions for him to call you when the vessel reaches a certain point.
You wake up to the vessel shuddering from backing down hard. You glance out your cabin window and see a red buoy so close you could smack it with a boat hook.
You run to the bridge and before you can stammer out, “What the hell are you doing and where the hell are we?”, the mate turns to you and says, “Don’t worry Captain, I’ve been here plenty of times in my sailboat.”
what is really scary is when the third mate who holds a qmed rating tells the AB it is ok to use a 110 electric buffer while standing in the water as long as the electric cord does not touch the water you will be fine,3rd mate could not understand how you could weld while standing in water but could not use 110 electric in water
gotta love it, and NMC is pushing people to take more classes
[quote=Mr 100-ton;26447]what is really scary is when the third mate who holds a qmed rating tells the AB it is ok to use a 110 electric buffer while standing in the water as long as the electric cord does not touch the water you will be fine,3rd mate could not understand how you could weld while standing in water but could not use 110 electric in water
gotta love it, and NMC is pushing people to take more classes[/quote]
[B][I][U]I think I heard something about water and electricity not mixing in a class somewhere…
[/U][/I][/B]
Capt Fran, This one is great, while on my sailboat at a dock in fort lauderdale the marina was putting in new docks and hired a worker to drill the holes for the lag bolts, the guy they hired put an aluminum ladder in the water leaned it against the docks and stood halfway in the water on the ladder while using 220 to drill the holes, NO ground fault, when i mentioned this to him he said he had been doing to for years and to mind my own business so i did,:eek: can you say darwin awards
[QUOTE=Mr 100-ton;26457]
Capt Fran, This one is great, while on my sailboat at a dock in fort lauderdale the marina was putting in new docks and hired a worker to drill the holes for the lag bolts, the guy they hired put an aluminum ladder in the water leaned it against the docks and stood halfway in the water on the ladder while using 220 to drill the holes, NO ground fault, when i mentioned this to him he said he had been doing to for years and to mind my own business so i did,:eek: can you say darwin awards[/QUOTE]
Holy crap, that is amazing! “Mind your own business” just caps it!
Before we were all captains ourselves didn’t you just hate it when the captain would come up to the bridge after seeing something out of his window, and a say something like; “What’s that ship doing 3rd mate?”
Used to get him every time…with a panicked look, “Ship? Ship? What ship?” Then looking where he was looking; “Ooooohhh, now where did he come from?”
OK, I admit it, I was a young smart ass, confident, invincible, thought I knew everything…
You just realized how lucky you were by chance… Mid afternoon, coming eastbound to the Pilot station at the head of the St. Lawrence River on a Bulk Cargo vessel. Another pilot just boarded a little handy Dutch vessel at the pilot station,westbound. For some reason just by chance he was a little closer in and due to the wind direction we decided to meet starboard to starboard, which was not the norm, when about .25m from meeting, his vessel took off to a hard port manuever, that I couldn’t believe I was seeing, they were heading for shallow waters and the rocks. In a few more moments, which seemed agonizingly long, the other pilot contacted me that they had a steering failure but had it resolved. I knew what he was going through so didn’t try to contact him first… If we had met port to port, we would have surely collided. That was pure chance and very sobering how you are always one moment away from disaster, even with vigilance.
