Category Archives: The Asifi Saga

All fixed and Bristol Fashion not

July 10, 2012   Lance   1 Comment

Welcome back.

The propellor system was fixed after many flushings through and emptying and refilling. This took us to to gone midnight and I had probably managed 3 hours sleep in 36. My body was ready for bed.

A quick beer ,bed and 5 hours later it was a new working day. Every limb was aching.

The ship was continuing its loading operation. we were carrying general supplies, food, beer, a helicopter, fire engine, cars , Martell surface to air missiles and most importantly The Christmas presents for all in Ascension and the Falklands.

Our own food turned up and it was every one to the task. Customs were suspicious that 300 cases of beer for 8 men on a 3 month round trip to the Falklands was a bit steep but the  Captain informed them it would all go. Not knowing, but a cold beer was going to be our salvation. Oh we had a couple of kennels on board as we carried sheepdogs down to the Falklands and Jack Russell terrier who was soon snapped up by one of the crew.

So when all was done we slipped our moorings (all the trapped oil spread across the dock and in went a pollution prevention vessel) and were on our way to the Falklands. We sailed mid afternoon and by 6pm were under full steam to the Falklands with me taking the me on duty. On the Barbara E (sister vessel) the Chief did a duty but this Chief didnt so it was duty everyother night which can get tiring.

With all settled down I put the engine room to unmanned and retired for something to eat , a quick beer and some sleep.

I managed the eating and a beer but sleep evaded me as engine room alarms started to ring.

The weather was really rough in the Channel and all sorts of level alarms were going off. Some I managed to stop by adjusting the delay time but when you get a high exhaust temperature and the turbocharger barking at you its serious . The weather meant we just had to slow down  a tad to reduce the high temperature until it was safe to stop. A cylinder head change was due and this takes around 2-3 hours.

Due the lack of sleep of all the personnel it was decided that the 2nd engineer and I would do watches of 6 hours on 6 off with the Chief looking after the refrigerated containers on deck. I couldnt wait, 5 hours straight sleep.

We anchored in Torbay to change the cylinder head which is a routine operation but on leaving the Chief Officer hauled the anchor in but there was nothing on the end. The anchor had dropped of and wanted to stay in British waters. Oh so I wished for that as well although they couldnt imprison us in the middle of the Ocean. We achieved that ourselves.

What else could go wrong!

 

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Water and Oil Don’t Mix

October 14, 2011   Lance   1 Comment

Where was I, having a summer break from writing this blog it looks like.

I was off doing my routines daily checks trying to forget the troubles of the last 12 hours and trying to forget the consequences of the future as well, when my sounding tape descended down the tube for measuring the amount of oil in the  hydraulic oil tank which supplied the propellor mechanism. I reeled it in and the grim nightmare of inevitabilty reared its ugly head with every centimetre of stainless steel tape that appeared. The tank had risen 40cm over night and the cause of this rise was clearly seen on the tape. WATER!!!

I peered under the floor plates and there right below me was a gooseneck air vent for this tank. The water from the nights leak which we had just let come in so I could get some sleep had accumalated in this area and when the ship lurched over to starboard whilst loading cargo, the water went over the vent and down it. I stopped the circulating pumps for this system but knew the damage had been done.

This system had to operate in a completely uncontaminated environment and had the most rigorous  filter maintenance cleaning schedule on the ship. Some of the filters were so fine they had to be cleaned by ultrasound only in special chemicals and know there was 60 litres of oily, dirty bilge water.

Off to visit the Chief. He was having is breakfast and he could tell by my face the news was not going to be “you just won the lottery”.

His head fell into his fried egg. It was time to call theships owners and manufacturers  whilst I was told see how we could  best empty the tank.

The only way to empty the tank was by sticking a tube down the sounding pipe and using an air driven pump to fill empty barrels  to get the level below the access door. It would have been convenient if the vent had been bolted to the tank but it was welded right on top of it.

After a couple of hours wait our instructions came back via the ships owners. The system had to be emptied, they would send in a team of tank cleaners, we would then fill the system up partially run the system and then empty it out and clean the tank etc etc 4 times. New oil had been organised by the owners. The engine room was filling up with shoreside teams. There was about 10 of them working on the crack to the ballast tank. Everything had to be cleaned of oil due to the welding. The crack though had to be inspected by a surveyor from LLoyds and it was he who would instruct the repair team on the nature of the repair required.

After a long night it was going to be a very long day.

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Breakfast interrupted

August 25, 2011   Lance   No comments

I awoke from my short slumber and hauled myself down to breakfast. I was starving. A full English was served when the Chief Officer or the Mate or CHOff came running in to the saloon and said there’s oil in the water.
My heart pounded and dropped in to my egg yolk.
Have we cement. I replied yes. The idea here was to pour the cement onto the oil and it would soak up and water and sink to the muddy river bottom.
Where had the oil come from? I had a bloody good idea when the engine room alarm went off again. It was the fwd bilge so the water was still coming in and the ship then lulled to port as we had started cargo operations. Surrounded by water and I had a spring in the engine room as well.
By this time the old man(Captain) arrived on the scene and was doing us nut. I will be going to jail you Bas**rds.
Just to let you know all this oil in the water and we were bang in the middle of a conservation area.
To cut a long story short yet again the bilge overboard was not shut before entering port so muggins here joined the ship and all night, once I had filled the bilge tank the water just went over the sideof the ship.
The 2nd and Chief Engineer blamed me but I argued how do you expect me to travel all day go straight on duty and you do not follow decent practice and close the most important valve in the engine room.
Things calmed down but the Captain and myself were expecting the worse. A heavy fine and possible imprisonment.

So now we had water across the engine room with no room to pump it apart from an emergency tank which was supposed to be a clean ballast tank. We had no option but to use this tank.
We could not find the leak so it was surmised that it was below the level at which the bilge pump loses suction.  An air driven submersible pump was drafted in to get the final lot of water out and as the smallest member of the team I had to dive down and check the bilge. Torch in hand I ferreted down to this most inhospitable parts of the ship and vOILa I found the leak. The ballast tank behind the engine room was discharging itself via a fracture in a weld. The ballast tank was emptied and a squad from shoreside was organised to join the ship to effect a repair. Loads of other bods were notified(Insurers,Classification societies, P&I for the oil spill), so it was all go.

So with the prospect of the law visiting me and the threat of having a very short trip I went off to do my daily routines in a very despondent manner. Guess what it was to get a whole load worse.

Now what happened to my Breakfast?

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Houston we have a leak

July 26, 2011   Lance   3 Comments

My evenings slumber was rudely awoken by the acoustic verbosity of the alarm panel in my cabin. I ventured to the engine room( known to engineers as the pit) to find the aft bilge was in alarm. I pumped it out whilst doing my other nightly checks. I checked the tank I was pumping it into and there was plenty of room. All checks done I retired to my cabin.

2 hours later my sleep was disturbed yet again by an alarm. I quickly chucked on a t-shirt and shorts and flew down a couple of flights of stairs to enter the engine room. It was the aft bilge again. It was pumped  out and moi grabbed a high power torch and shone it into the aft bilge. The pump had lost suction but I could not see any water running into the bilge area. A boilersuit was needed as a closer inspection was needed as the hydraulics for the controllable pitch propellor and prop shaft were obscuring my view. The closer inspection got us no further forward as to the source of incoming water.

I left the engine room to see if the 2nd or Chief Engineer had returned from shore but they were making the most of it. It was now 1am. I lumbered up to my cabin and fitfully dozed on my daybed but must have dropped off into a deeper sleep as guess what, the alarm went off and back down the merry path to the pit I went. Not a betting man the odds on a bilge alarm were savagley cut.

Oh joys, where is this water coming from. After this 3rd pumping,the tank I was putting this bilge water in to was three quarters full. It was now 3am and yours truly was ever so slightly tired.

Just to cut a long story short at 5 am in this sequential catalogue of alarms, I had to pump the bilge again and now the holding tank was full. The Chief had to be woken up and he was not happy but the buck stops with him and thats why he gets paid double my salary. Through his alcohol haze he told me to pull the aft bilge alarm so I could get some sleep and if it got bad then the water would flow to the front of the engine room and set off the bilge alarm there.

That was the plan. As you well know plans can go awry and daylight was to be the harbinger of even far worse news.

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The Asifi Saga Part 1 of many

July 06, 2011   Lance   7 Comments

I joined the good ship Asifi in Ridham dock which is up a creek in the middle of nowhere near Sittingbourne somewhere in Kent. Why the Ministry of Defence could not pick a dock on this planet still defies belief. Perhaps they were afraid of showing how they were replenishing the Falklands.
The only thing of note was a nature reserve, a marsh as far as the eye could see and a car crushing plant. The latter was like us out of sight but could pack a punch and our ship reverberated with a blast wave whenever they crushed a car with some fuel left in the tank.
I had previously sailed on the sister ship the Barbara E and she was a joy to sail on but whilst on her heard the horror stories of the Asifi.
The horror stories were not quite accurate as she was worse than those tales I had heard and in the next few weeks / months I will regale the magnitude of how bad things can get on board a 1500 tonne ship.
I walked on board and there were some people I knew. I met the guy I was relieving and he was packed and carrying his bags to the taxi and as he passed me shouted “your on duty tonight Lance”.
Just behind him were the other 2 engineers saying were off up the pub. So there I was having just joined the ship on duty and on my own. Things could be worse.
Having travelled for 12 hours to the dock now I was in charge of the engine room. I unpacked my boilersuit and work boots just in case and put my feet up. The time was 6pm and I could rest for 4 hours before I did a check of the engine room.
Well so I thought.
To be continued infinitum
Next instalment “Houston we have a leak but no idea where”

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The Asifi Saga

June 15, 2011   Lance   5 Comments

You might have guessed by now that I served for 24 years in the Merchant Navy. I always get asked (even now after being out of it for 7 years ):

Do you miss the sea? I miss the travel but not the job. I live by the sea so how can I miss it.

Whats your favourite place you have visited? Almost impossible to answer but top city I would say is Vancouver run a close 2nd by the old Singapore before it got cleaned up.

Top off the beaten track would be visiting the bird caves in Borneo ( the ones David Attenborough visited) full of guano and those amzing rickety ladders that disappeared into the heavens followed by Greenland. Waking up in the morning looking out of my porthole to be greeted with so many icebergs I lost count.

Whats your best trip? The one where I went around the world Rotterdam to Rotterdam and amazingly we docked on the same berth.

Whats your worst trip? Now this is where we get to the difficult bit, not because it is hard to choose but of the quantity of incidents that happened during it. Hindsight is a great thing and after this trip I met many of the survivors of it and we had a cracking laugh about it. That whole trip on the MV Asifi was a one long situation comedy/drama that no scriptwriter could even conjure up so that is why its goingI am to serial blog it.

The MV Asifi named after ASI for Ascension Island and FI for the Falklands was one of the 2 container supply vessels for the MOD and the Falklands after the war. I sailed on the sister ship and she was a joy but Asifi (we nicknamed her Asifilis) was at the complete other end of the universe bad.

Just to whet your appetite there will be tales and stories on these plus many more as I drag them out of my memory banks: A Lost christmas, Anyone seen the Jack Russell, Disappearing missiles, Engines that go bang, Bedding a goat herder, Wheres our water, Chief your going to laugh when I tell you this, Incommunicado, Stealth sailing.

This is just a microcosm of events so stay tuned folks!

 

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