June 21, 2007
Sailing Log: SS Lurline Week 1
Week 1--14JUN
Got to the pier in the morning around 7:30 AM, after a good 40 minutes of driving around trying to find out how the hell to get into the terminal. First thought that struck me upon boarding: Wow, they have nice ladders. Typical on a lakeboat is just a standard rung ladder (with slightly wider rungs than a home extension ladder) and a handrail. The gangway on the Lurline is quite a bit more solid, and I didn't have to tie a rope around my sea bag to haul it up, I just carried it up with me. Being as my sea bag is 57 pounds (discovered earlier at the airport) that wasn't exactly easy, but still a nice perk.
What follows over the next several weeks will be a series of journals detailing my experience on the Lurline, and the experience of sailing in general for those who have had questions. This journal fulfills two requirements.
1) Let's people know about what I'm up to.
2) Takes care of the shipboard activities log required by my sea project.
So while some of this may be tedious to either of the two groups (friends and family, and GLMA staff) for which this is written, hopefully both will get something useful out of it.
I've got some idea what I'd like to talk about for the weeks I'll be on here, but if I question comes up that's always bothered you, you can leave it in the comments and I'll do my best to answer it.
Note that I didn't say "answer it quickly". While I do have a fair amount of free time to write out here, I don't have much time to use The Internets, so several of these journals may appear at once, backdated to the appropriate week, and your comments might not show up right away either (as they are moderated to reduce spam).
The Lurline is a strange vessel, which is actually pretty typical of my sailing experiences. While there are many ships that are built to the same specifications and use the same equipment, I have to take that on faith, as all of my cadet ships have been "oddballs". She is a container ship primarily, which I knew coming onboard. What I didn't know is that she also has cargo tanks for hauling molasses, and that the entire area aft of the house is reserved for ro/ro (roll-on roll-off, like a car ferry) to bring vehicles (mainly) from the mainland to Hawai'i. So far, "vehicles" has included several hundred rental cars (mostly SUVs), UPS trucks, a cement mixing truck, a Shelby Cobra replica, a non-American model Mercedes (sorry, Rich, can't remember the model, just remember that it wasn't a C, S, L, M, G, or Z class) and several horse trailers. While I'm not sure yet how normal this is on other ships, the Lurline carries a fair amount of livestock, both ways on a frequent basis, so in addition to the crew we also have a few stocktenders, responsible for watering and looking after the cows, horses, goats, pigs, or baby marmosets on board.
My room is pretty similar to all I've stayed in, even down to that familiar light green color. I've got my own room, with a TV and DVD player, mini-fridge, a desk, a few drawers and hooks for clothing, and my own bathroom (the other room it's attached to is the linen locker). Its small but quite comfortable once you get used to it.
As explained to me ahead of time by several fellow GLMA cadets, the cadet program is quite a bit more structured in deep water. Upon getting on board the vessel I was shown where my room was so I could store my bags, and then a few minutes later (after the Captain was finished with breakfast) I began work on the dozen or so pages of paperwork required before I could start. Much of it was standard employment paperwork (I-9, W-4, etc.) but there were also a number of items on company policies for safety, security, environmental protection, and ship orders that had to be reviewed as well. Once all of that was complete, I was given time to prepare my room, but told to be back up to the Radio Shack in 20 minutes for Vessel Familiarization.
Vessel Familiarization was handled by the radio officer, and it was relatively short, but we (the Chief Cook signed on at the same time as I did) were shown the bridge and the two lighted ring buoys with smoke located up there along with the EPIRBs. He showed us the officer's and crew laundry, the officer and crew lounges, the lifeboat stations, the fire and emergency stations, the gym, and some other general information on how things work on the vessel. I suppose the reason this isn't done on the lakes is that most people come on board as a permanent relief, and most returning crew have been onboard for years before. Still, it seems like an easy and pain-free process for both new crew members and the management, and is much safer than the typical "figure it out when you're off watch" mentality allows. After the VF I watched a video on security policy, which was pretty straightforward, and then I was able to report for work.
It seems like with most deep sea companies the 1st Assistant is responsible for the cadet. While I met the Chief Engineer, my contact has been limited as I report and receive all my work details from the 1st. I'll talk in more detail in the coming dispatches about the crew and what they do, as well as what my duties (such as they are) entail. In the meantime, I'll just explain what sorts of things I was doing this week.
On day one, I assisted a Jr. Engineer day relief with filling the Emergency Diesel Lube Oil tank. Apparently the company changed vendors and now LO no longer comes in 5 gallon buckets, but only in 55 gallon drums. And since it's impossible for most humans to pick up a 55 gallon drum and pour it into the small spout on top of the LO tank, we had to use a barrel pump to pump the barrel into 5 gallon buckets and haul them up. Not a bad first job, we were done and cleaned up a short while after lunch, and I was knocked off to get my room cleaned up the rest of the way.
The ship had arrived in Oakland shortly after midnight that day, and wasn't sailing out again until 1300 the following day. So I caught back up with the friend I had stayed with since my plane got in, and went into the city for some dinner. I was told to report for daywork the next day around 0800.
Friday I worked on days, but spent most of the time in the engine room with the other engineers. I was officially assigned to the 4-8 watch tomorrow, though, so I spent most of the time with the 2nd. I began just by familiarizing myself with the engine room. It's similar to a Lakes steamer, but bigger (more than 25,000 HP here, compared with 8,000 on the Lakes). But still, its just a big pair of D-boilers, HP and LP turbine, main condenser and support equipment. For those not familiar with steam plants, I'll get into a bit more detail here.
The basic idea is to use steam to propel the ship. To get steam, you need a boiler. The boilers on the Lurline are D-type water-tube boilers, which basically means that there is a big furnace in the middle, surrounded by metal tubes filled with water, which heats up through contact with the combustion gases in the furnace and turns into steam. The combustion gases are created by burning some type of fuel. The possibilities are endless here (in early boilers it was wood and coal, on the Lurline we use bunker fuel, which is a very heavy (think road tar) type of diesel. Because of how thick the fuel is, it needs to be heated up to a high temperature to even be able to flow through the pipes, and then it is shot in a fine mist through the burner and into the furnace. There's quite a bit more to it than that, but that's the basic idea. Then then steam is transferred to a turbine, which is really just a big wheel with little blades attached (sort of like a pinwheel) that spins when steam is feed into it. This turbine spins very fast (around 6700 RPMs at full speed), so it is attached to a reduction gear to change that speed into torque that drives the propeller. The propeller spins at around 120 RPM at full speed. At this point you pretty much have a whole steam system, but there are some other parts that need to be added. For one, you have no way to put water in the boiler, so once the water that's in there flashes to steam, the whole thing burns up. So you need a high pressure feed pump to get the water into the boiler. Because the boiler runs at over 800 psi of pressure, you need at least that much pressure on the water to get it into the boiler rather than the boiler into it. So the feed pump (which is run off of steam power as well) pressurizes the water up to over 1000 psi, which makes it a pretty impressive piece of equipment. We also have a problem with what to do with the steam afterwards. If we were on shore at a power plant and were feeling wasteful, we could just dump it out after it had done the work of spinning the turbine, but on a ship the kind of high quality water needed for a boiler isn't in short supply, so instead we condense it back into water and feed it back into the boiler. Some of this water is lost though, so we also need an evaporator (or distiller) to make more clean water to make up the difference. And that, in its simplest form, is a steam plant. As my instructor Mr. Hochscheidt likes to point out, there are less than 5 moving parts required in this whole system, and almost all of that motion is rotary (the turbine, the pumps, the motors that drive the pumps) which is easy to lubricate. So when a steam system is properly maintained, it can last forever.
After the 2nd was done testing, we lined up a surface blow to lower some of the pH and sulfate content, along with the Dissolved Solids. The general idea here is to blow some of the water in the boiler out over the side to reduce impurities. I watched the Jr. Engineer clean the fuel strainer, and then met back up with the 2nd to clean burners. We got 6 new burners ready since we were scheduled to depart around 1300. Cleaning the burner required removing the tip, and leaving it and the sprayer plate to soak in #2 diesel, then removing the steam plate and soaking it as well. Each of the orifices were cleaned by running the correct size pin through, and then the mating surfaces of the two plates were lapped together with 400 lapping compound until all the discoloration was gone. The burner was reassembled after everything was cleaned thoroughly, and replaced on the clean side of the burner rack.
I went up for lunch at this point, but then it was time to start getting the plant ready so I headed back down to start lining things up. We installed a second burner in each boiler and tested the throttles. Then, I did an engine room round with the 3rd while we waited for word to leave the dock. Once we left the dock the 1st ran the throttles, which involved answering the bell and adjusting the main throttle controller on the board to the appropriate RPM. The main challenge in this is doing it slowly enough to avoid smoking, especially near the dock. Most of the remaining watch was spent maneuvering out of the bay and into open ocean, where we dropped off the pilot and brought the throttle up to a prop speed of 120.
The next day I got into the normal jobs of the watch. On the 4-8 watch there are two main jobs that are done every day, testing the boiler water and transferring fuel oil. As I said above, because of the process involved it is important that the boiler water be very pure. But because absolute purity is so difficult, chemicals are added to the water to control the impurities that do appear. So every day a number of tests straight out of chemistry lab are done to the water, which helps to determine if more chemicals need to be added.
Fuel Oil is normally stored in two very large tanks called bunkers. But because the fuel needs to be heated to be used in the boiler, and also because it is often filled with impurities like solids and water, it is a good idea to store it in a separate tank immediately before use, where it can settle out and heat up. This tank is called the settling tank amazingly enough. So every watch fuel is pumped from the bunkers into the settling tank.
Over the next several days I became quite familiar with both of these tasks. As well, I worked from 8-12 on days, assisting the 2nd (on overtime) or the 1st engineer with various projects. This week I worked on fixing some valve reach rods (basically a handle that extends a long way so that hard to reach valves can be turned more easily, replacing a boiler gauge glass (a level indicator for the boiler), and working with the 1st on putting the generator in service.
The first week has been terrific. I get along well with everyone and really enjoy the attitudes on the ship and the whole experience. Just when I was thinking it was the best sea project experience yet, we had the BBQ.
The frequency of BBQs depends upon the Captain, and the Captain we have now loves them more than anything. As a cadet, one of my jobs is to help the captain setting up the BBQ, which involves setting up several tables and putting on tablecloths, setting up chairs, and carrying all the food and beverages up. A fair amount of work, but well worth it. The food was fantastic, it was a beautiful day, and I got to enjoy eating outside and drinking a fun amber colored beverage before bed.
That's it for this week (and don't worry, future weeks will likely be shorter). Tomorrow I'll be in Hawai'i.