Pictures (not many, since I took a lot of video footage):
The engine
The engine produces over 28,000 horsepower
The air conditioner
Gauges on the A/C
Electrical junction boxes
Water pipes
Fire alarm panel
Firefighting gear
Pump for refilling the firefighters' air tanks (breathing apparatus)
Video:
Engine room tour
I wake at 0545, with a slight headache from last night's festivities, somewhat dehydrated from the tropic heat and alcohol. I break fast on sausage and eggs, and drink half a bottle of water - to match the half bottle of whiskey I drank last night. I pass the time until my appointment with the chief engineer by reading on the deck. We are headed due west now, so the morning sun is at my back.
At 0955, I am in the ship's office, wearing blue jeans and steel-toed boots along with side shields for my glasses. The captain and chief officer walk in wearing reflective vests and hard hats. I gather that they are having a problem with one of the reefers. The chief engineer arrives, right on time, and after a brief discussion with his fellow officers, takes me down into the bowels of the ship. He bids me to put on ear muffs before we enter - the engine room is deafeningly loud.
He first shows me the control room, and the computers there with all the sensor displays. There are no active alarms, but the intake water temperature reading is showing a malfunction - the reading fluctuates wildly from 28.4 degrees Celsius (83 degrees Fahrenheit) to 0 (32 deg. F) and back. He explains that he has pulled the sensor and tested it successfully, so there must be some communication error between the sensor and the monitoring station. He goes on to say that in Panama, some of the network equipment overheated, and the bridge lost communication for a few minutes while we were anchored. We then tour the engine room. It is much larger than I imagined, and I run my camcorder's battery all the way down from a full charge as we finish the tour.
Following my tour of the engine room, the chief engineer asks me to come up to his day room to look at the painter's laptop. He graduated from the university in 1993 with a degree in electromechanical engineering, and complains that he does not know much about modern computers with graphical operating systems. On a ship, at sea, there is little call for full-time IT personnel (though they do have contracted support they can call). I happily oblige him.
He has already removed all of the screws he could find, but he is still unable to open the case. After a brief inspection, I locate the two screws hidden under the keyboard, but before opening it I press the power button. The machine spins up for a few seconds. The screen remains blank, and a sequence of seven short beeps is repeated. I don't know off-hand what the beep codes are for Dell laptops, and he doesn't have the owner's manual, so I'm not entirely sure what to do. I suggest we swap out the memory module with the one from his laptop (the one from my own laptop is of a different design and will not fit in the slot), this being one of the few things I can replace 300 miles from land. We get the same result as before, and I apologize for being unable to repair it. He thanks me just the same and offers me a cocktail of Jamaican rum with a slice each of apple and orange in it. It is quite refreshing. He leaves to make a report, but bids me to stay in his office. When he returns a few minutes later, we talk about engineering (I show him some pictures from jobs I have done) and family (he shows me pictures of his two sons - 8 and 11, his two Rottweilers, and his "third child", his lovely wife).
We take lunch in the mess, where we part company, and after a long nap, I find myself on the F deck once again, reading Swiss Family Robinson as the sun sets behind grey clouds. As I get up, bending over to collapse the chair, my phone and clip-on sunglasses fall from my shirt pocket. The phone is recovered easily enough, but the clip-ons are nowhere to be found. After a futile search, I give them up for lost and make my way back. Climbing down the stairs to E deck, I spy something dark on the deck at the foot of the stairwell, and am overjoyed to discover my missing sunglasses, which have been blown across the deck and down the stairs by the wind - there is a big wall on E deck (such that you cannot see the forward end of the ship), which blocked the wind there and prevented the sunglasses from being blown into the sea.
After dinner, I join some of the Filipino crew in their rec room for karaoke, before retiring for the evening. The chief cook has a pretty good voice, when he stays within his range, but being a heavy smoker, he is sometimes interrupted by fits of coughing.
No comments:
Post a Comment