Reprieve from the ship...
The ship is going through shipyard. Which means long hours of non sop manual labor while the mate on my ship sits comfortably in the pilot house of the ship in the Air Conditioning while every one of us works outside in the sun on various projects with the 15-30 shipyard workers.
Today they locked up the sewage system on the ship to get it cleaned out and inspected... so late today they decided to finally put us up in a hotel. A bath, a shower, and a meal I didn't have to clean up after later I feel human again.
Yesterday and the day before I slammed a 15lbs sledge into 24 dogs dozens of times to free them, then ran them through a buffing wheel to clean them, 4 of them wouldn't come out without being cut off with a cutting torch. (Dogs are the handles on a water tight door that seal it shut, not live barking dogs.) They hadn't been removed in at least 12 coats of paint... which is roughly 6-12 years.
Today I removed two 150lbs hatches from their mountings by myself and tore apart all their working mechanisms to get them working again... once again they probably haven't been touched in 6 years or more, and one of them is still broken after 30 minutes of hammering on it with a 15lbs sledge.
I also learned that the "We are a team, and as a team we help each other out and cover one another's duties if the other person is busy with more important business." speech only applies to when the officers need help covering their duties so they can you know get some sleep... but doesn't apply to sweeping up while the guys who normally do it are breaking their backs in the sun.
But there is good news in the love department, but that is for another post soon to follow.
Today they locked up the sewage system on the ship to get it cleaned out and inspected... so late today they decided to finally put us up in a hotel. A bath, a shower, and a meal I didn't have to clean up after later I feel human again.
Yesterday and the day before I slammed a 15lbs sledge into 24 dogs dozens of times to free them, then ran them through a buffing wheel to clean them, 4 of them wouldn't come out without being cut off with a cutting torch. (Dogs are the handles on a water tight door that seal it shut, not live barking dogs.) They hadn't been removed in at least 12 coats of paint... which is roughly 6-12 years.
Today I removed two 150lbs hatches from their mountings by myself and tore apart all their working mechanisms to get them working again... once again they probably haven't been touched in 6 years or more, and one of them is still broken after 30 minutes of hammering on it with a 15lbs sledge.
I also learned that the "We are a team, and as a team we help each other out and cover one another's duties if the other person is busy with more important business." speech only applies to when the officers need help covering their duties so they can you know get some sleep... but doesn't apply to sweeping up while the guys who normally do it are breaking their backs in the sun.
But there is good news in the love department, but that is for another post soon to follow.