PURIFIER DAY (PART 1 OF ?)

So today I did not return to the 4 to 8 watch. Instead, I joined Andy and the engineers down below. The first thing they had us do was practice using the emergency exits. The chief basically told us “There’s an escape hatch over there. Go find out where it goes.” There were 2; one goes up through the engine room into the machine shop and out into a passageway. The other goes through the cargo hold (it’s very big, very dark and full of cars) and out onto the container deck. We also learned that Andy is not heavy enough to close the escape hatches by hanging on them.

Then we started our new project. A little while ago, the fuel oil system in the engine room was updated. However, no new drawings were ever created, which is not in compliance with any regulation ever. So my and Andy’s job is to create the new fuel oil system schematics. Obviously this is going to be a great help towards our sea term project as well.

We started off with the HFO purifier system, one of the easier parts. We spent the morning tracing the system and comparing our findings with the old drawings. We have discovered that since 1980, the clarifier has been replaced with another purifier, a third FO heater was added, and lots of pipes that go in bizarre directions were given new uses but never re-labeled. I also found that the flux capacitor pipe is apparently a very important purifier component. Some of the system is hard to make sense of, so we are trying to find more drawings to see if they are any help.

Thursday is emergency drill day, so that’s what we did after lunch. Everyone had to muster at their specified emergency stations and the emergency squads practiced putting on their firefighting gear. (Kurt! Get outta here!)  I also tried on my emergensuit (the word emergensuit will never not be funny). Then all crew went to the officer’s lounge for safety video time (acting at its finest). There were also extra videos required for cadet viewing: the classic Drugs and Alcohol in the Workplace, and a security video.

After group video time, the 2^nd engineer invited us to assist in the weekly lifeboat engine tests. We have 2 lifeboats. The engines are water cooled, and when we test them on the ship this requires the use of a garden hose and a 5-gallon bucket.

In the time left before dinner we returned to the engine room to continue tracing our purifier system. I may or may not have gotten lost. Dinner options today included fish, fried chicken, and braised ox tails (“swingin’ steak”). Afterward, we went on an adventure to find some FO system plans the chief mate hinted might exist in a certain unused ship’s office. We did find them, but they showed mostly the connection between the FO system and the main engine which is currently of no use to us. Then we tried the computer in the Plan & File room, where searches indicate that the plans we are looking for exist in PDF form, but no searches turn up the actual PDFs.  We did manage to find a detailed schematic of the fuel oil heaters, which shows three heaters. This drawing was done in 1980, at which point the C-9 class of containership only had 2 FO heaters, as I said earlier. ?????? MYSTERIES

Not to be completely defeated, we made copies of the original plans so that we could get them dirty and fuel-oily and not feel bad. This actually took a long time because the copier was being ornery, and the original plans are on paper of size like 8.5 x 21.

Here’s to a more productive tomorrow.