Tankerman info

One of my fellow retirees subcontracts in a few ports on the southeast coast. He always has a computer, but goes nowhere without a sounding tape. Best 3rd mate and tankerman one could ask for. JMHO

Obviously thereā€™s a stability book but there are more variables. The load program has all the different cargo densities and does the calculation continuously while loading or discharging so you never go beyond the stress, trim, or draft you need.

Good lord. I go to bed and all hell breaks loose.

Youā€™re putting quite a lot of words into my mouth, so let me clarify.

Yes. Of course we have a stability booklet. And I even know how to use it! We also, like @Kennebec_Captain mentions, have a spare computer. And software to load it on. Which must ALL be approved. Canā€™t just go to Best Buy and buy some shitty Dell to load CargoMax onto. We run the conditions for class once a year, and every quarter as well.

Ok, so this has absolutely NOTHING to do with the loading computer discussion. Guess what - ships are automated nowadays. You think all of the engineers are standing watch staring at all of those gauges in the engine room anymore? Noā€¦they sleep soundly at night, until something sets off an alarm. Tank radars are all patched into some system and the load computer is patched into that. Gone are the days of manually sounding 14 tanks an hour and putting it into the computer by hand. Why? Because the radars work! And I know which of mine work well and donā€™t work as well, and the ones that donā€™t work as well, you know what I use? A sounding tape! Gee gosh.

Actually water paste is pretty fucking useless. 10 different gaugers will use it 10 different ways.

Yes, but when he uses that sounding tape, what does he do? Opens up an Excel spreadsheet and punches in numbers off the tank sounding tables! Nobody is calculating densities and temperatures and quantities in liters, gallons, teaspoons, and whatever else you want to measure it out to by hand.

So a sounding tape is useless? Or water paste?

@New3Mā€™s argument makes sense to me.

I canā€™t speak specifically to the practice on tankers but the general trend in maritime like other industries itā€™s a mater of reliably and risk analysis,

Imagine how the old-timers must have howled when they took the masts off steam ships.

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I knew you would show up again. Sometimes you have to cut them open to get the hook out.

NO! I said I use one. Didnā€™t you read it all? Of course you need a sounding tape. How else is the 3rd party independent gauger going to figure out much cargo is in the tank? Of course, if I can talk them into using my radar numbers because I know theyā€™re spot on and I work with the same guy a lot, weā€™d all rather save an hour and a half of wandering the deck in the hot/cold/rain/snow/whatever.

Yup. Pretty much.

All Iā€™m trying to say, is that if, while on the way to the dock, the Chief Mate discovers that CargoMax has shit the bed, there would be some serious discussions back to the home office about what to do before loading those 4 parcels of RUL/PUL/Jet/USLD and then sailing off to 3 different discharge ports with 2 docks a piece without a functioning stability program. It would not happen.

These days a stability program is a vital piece of equipment onboard. Your head would spin at some of the requests that I get with regards to cargo - sometimes FIVE VOYAGES ahead, wanting to know how much of this and that we can load and discharge, while going from black oil to clean and back again. It will take me half the day sitting in front of the computer trying to figure it all out, and you can be sure that the charterer wants to know before they leave the office at 5 how much Ethanol they can load in 3 weeks.

Oh - and what about Damage Stability? Is that going to be calculated shortly after the collision or grounding by some guy with an abacus and a stack of tables? No. Thereā€™s a reason that you can use the software to quickly determine what your Damage Stability is and how to best react in that situation. Also a good reason that ABS has their own Rapid Response Damage Assessment department, to be able to take that burden off the ship. Theyā€™re probably pretty good at that.

Actually you can. As long as the ship has the stability program loaded on an approved computer there are no prohibitions using the program on other computers that arenā€™t typed certified by Class. I dealt with this very issue when I was involved in newbuildings in Korea.

Edit: The type approved computer supplied by the shipyard in the cargo office was a HP7600 (if memory serves). The server and computers for the shipā€™s network were supplied by the company. Those happened to beā€¦Dell (off the shelf with no specific type approvals).

Abacus? Iā€™m not that old. I have found over the years on this planet common sense is a quite valuable tool to have. The ones that use it go quite far amongst their peers.

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Congrats JD, my first good chuckle of the day. Even my mutt barked at your superhero.

Ideally the decision of what procedures to use wrt tape vs gauges and the like should be made at the company level not at the ship level.

That is to say it should be just matter of following the SMS. Donā€™t know how good the SMS is on tankers today.

I have been retired for some time and went over the SMS, not every word, but the ones that applied directly to me and my most excellent tankerman. They all had a tape in their hind pocket, and water paste available. Shoreside tanks made water through condensation. When we loaded from a near empty tank, the tankermans awareness was appreciated. We were moving oil, not water. Computer wonā€™t tell you that. At least back then. 2003 or so

Feh. Real tankerman never went anywhere without a signal mirror and a rag in their pockets.

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Signal mirrors are a lot less common now since you canā€™t sniff the tank topā€¦

Mildly understated. We stopped using them about 1983. And stopped having to clean dropped rags out of tank valves around the same time.

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:rofl:

Now I just find a lot of pieces of sounding tape and bobs in tanks when I go down in them.

I have beheaded a couple closing the valve on the sounding pipe before I had completely reeled up the tapeā€¦

Shit happens.

Tell that to the charterer when a tape gets sucked into a pump and youā€™re into a $200k hole to pump the tank out, clean it, and go down and pick out a 6" piece of twisted metal tape from the impellerā€¦