/travel/freighter/More Photos
I've finally posted the rest of the
photos from the rest of my time on the MSC Malaga. I thought I'd done this
a while ago, but apparently not. My bad.
I've told lots of stories about it to lots of people, so I sorta forget what I wrote about. After the last (truncated) entry, I basically spent the last day hanging out with the various pilots that came on board to guide us through the St. Lawrence Seaway. We got into port at about 3am, and I was told I'd have to wait 'til 9am for customs to come onboard to clear me.
At 9am, I was told a cruise ship had come in, and they got priority. I was stuck on a boat, moored in a port of my own country, and I wasn't allowed to hop off onto the land. Weird feeling.
Finally, they came onboard. Two women, one in tough boots and generally tough looking, one rather more dolled up. Very good-cop, bad-cop. They asked me a lot of detailed questions, about why I took a frieghter, etc. They asked if I had obscene material on my laptop. They searched my stuff really thoroughly, but didn't pat me down, presumably 'cause they'd have had to call in a guy to do that. Finally, they decided I was clear, and pointed me at how to get out. They sat in their van, running the swabs that they took of my stuff, and then made certain I left the port area, and had the guy at the little entrance booth place call me a cab, and off I went.
I watched the finals (IIRC) of the World Cup while eating a pizza in the Montreal bus station, and caught a bus to Ottawa to visit Kathleen.
New Albums from the Gallery
/travel/freighter/Canadian Waters
Thursday, 07:50
Our clocks are now as retarded as they'll get; sometime early this morning, we came around Newfoundland. And the sun came out. It's been foggy for most of the trip, coccooning me such that not only can I only walk around in basically an eight story corridor and a few rooms, but I could only see a little more than that. There were times when the front of the ship -- 190m from the decks -- was shrouded. It was like that Star Trek episode where Crusher's in some kind of temporal vortex warp light anomaly thingy, and her universe is shrinking.
Unfortunately, by the time I went up to the bridge, we were out of sight of land again. The sun is a welcome change, and will hopefully mean I can go wandering about on the deck, to see the cargo up close.
I caught my finger -- just barely -- in a door this morning. It could have been a lot worse, since that door wasn't stopping, but it just squeezed my finger out of the way a bit.
I've mostly been reading, not writing as I was hoping. The writing often hasn't sat well with my inner ear, or something, but it seems okay now. The upshot of the reading is:
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood: Good. Entertaining, interesting ideas, well written. Lacked "point", but that's okay, it's fiction. :-)
Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell: I can only remark on the first half, which was sufficiently bad to stop reading. Full of applications of the Law of Egregious Capitization the Power of Naming Things. Unscientific. Amusingly, directly contradicted things in Freakonomics, of Gladwell said "prepare to be dazzled." The most charitable explanation I can give this book is that the only interesting things it has to say have since entered pop culture, and so all the interesting bits were already in my head. I don't think that's the case, though.
Undercover Economist, Tim Hartford: Very good. Interesting applications of economics. Piqued my interest in Microeconomics. Mostly rigorous and well-explained. Some diagrams and charts would have helped make some of the explanations shorter.
Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner: Fine. A bunch of interesting stories about "teasing" information from some serendipitous sources of data. Not always convincing, often proposed random explanations. Good stuff about how often-wrong "conventional wisdom" is, though not many tools to tackle that.
I'm onto Mythical Man Month, but just started. I'm not actually
/travel/freighter/Belly of the Beast
Since an hour or two before I woke up to in Liverpool to watch was we left bridge, there has been a steady, slow rumble. It's quieter, and lower frequency than the background noise on an airplane. Down in the base of the ship is a fearsome engine. It has sixteen cylinders, each perhaps 16 feet tall.
She burns 65 to 70 metric tonnes of fuel oil per day. The fuel has to be heated to about 100degC before it is sufficiently liquid to go into the engine. Unfortunately, between the accent and the noise, I didn't catch many of the explanations of the Chief Engineer about what various bits were.
This ship has about 2200 containers on it, and (IIRC, ICBW) 24000 tonnes of cargo. The total journey (Montreal to Antwerp to Liverpool to Montreal) is about 5000 nautical miles, or about 9000 kilometers, and they use 900 tonnes of fuel. So we have one tonne of fuel for every 10 kilometers. Which gives 22,000 container-kilometers, or 240,000 tonne-kilometers per tonne of fuel. Or 240 tonne-kilometers per kilogram of fuel. If you prefer.
I asked the Captain about whether there was pressure to save fuel, since he had mentioned that if the ship is even a little off-keel, the fuel usage goes way up. "No, not at all, it is always about speed," was the jist of his reply. Full tilt. The engine is running at 19.5 knots, but the roundtrip average is a little higher than that. He said even a small slow-down got big fuel gains. I'm hoping I can see the curve of fuel usage/km at various speeds, but not sure yet.
The whole engine thing is story told better by pictures.
/travel/freighter/Leaving Port
(It's Monday now, but my first shot at sitting at a desk to write was quickly bested by my moderate sea-sickness. :-/ )
At just before 0300, I went up the bridge. This was my first time up there. It's a large room, with its forward-side covered in windows. Myriad lights, buttons, wheels, dials, levers and screens are set facing two chairs. A few are recognizable from movies -- radar screens, a periscope -- or labeled clearly enough even for a landlubber to figure out what they are. Outside the side doors are two "wings" that stick out far enough to get a good vantage point. The sun is just starting to come up, but it's still chilly.
A man with an English accent was aboard. I wasn't sure where he came from, but he seemed to belong to the port, and was guiding us out to sea. They did the whole "repeat the command a bunch of times" thing you see in submarine movies -- "dead slow," the pilot would say, while he and the captain ("Master") stood out on the starboard wing. The captain would repeat it, then two fellows at the controls in the bridge would also repeat it. And so it would be done.
With the help of two tugboats, we navigated a lock just barely big enough -- the ship was touching one side -- and then out into the River Mersey. Slowly, we went along the buoy-marked path, until we were clear of the harbour area. A little red boat came into site, and the pilot climbed down a ladder, and hopped onto it and off he went.
Three days later, we're some 900 miles from our departure. I hadn't really realized that I've never been so hopelessly unable to see any land; even on the long slow-ferry to Newfoundland when I was young, I suspect there was always land in sight. Here, there is nothing, even when it's not foggy. The HF (High Frequency -- the frequency range that everything uses is one of the first things the crew mentions about a device; the tradeoff between distance and detail is critical) communications device that broadcasts dozens of details about our ship, and picks up like transmissions from ships within about 100 miles, ran blank. 21 people within 100 miles, and no way off. Leaving Port The swells got a little bigger last night, and pushed my thusfar slightly uneasy stomach into nausea territory, though no further. I went up to the bridge, to see who was there. There's always one person on watch duty -- though on some ships, it's two -- and this time it was Jani. He gave me a pretty thorough presentation of the controls, each with an automated version, a semi-manual override, and a more manual override. Though there's no wooden wheel to turn the rudder, there's still a strong preparation to be able to do things manually. It's interesting to see what 500+ years of solid reliability engineering does to a system, and to compare it to what I do in work every day. I'd put my faith in ships over computers. :-)
We had changed from the planned course a little bit, heading straight west for a while, rather than along the south-west line from the Irish coast to the St. Laurence Seaway. The Captain was hoping to avoid some bad weather or big waves. While I was up there, the swells were getting bigger, and the captain showed up, looked at some maps and forecasts, and went outside -- "sniffing the air," Jani said -- then angled us back towards our original course. We started hitting the swells at a slightly better angle (more perpendicular, I think).
Signs scattered around the boat reminded everyone to "retard one hour tonight". We shift timezones smoothly. The extra time is spread through three people's shifts, so Jani had to stay an extra 20 minutes. He changed the clock twenty minutes backwards, and said "That is now the ship's official time." Fancy.
He had a few duties to do: reporting the weather for the day back to the German meteorological folks, clickity click, copy to floppy, and then send as email; reseting a fifteen-minute "dead-man's" switch, to make sure he's still awake and...well, alive; calling the next person to come onto watch duty. Not much else, though. We chatted about a variety of things. I mentioned my increasing-but-still-moderate seasickness, and he said "That's good, it means you're normal." As the medical officer, he said he could give me something to help. "Only babies and midgets don't get seasick," he told me, since apparently both have an underdeveloped sense of balance. After his shift, we went to the medical area. He opened a book of problems, found "Seasickness", made a joke about how I didn't need the suppository version at this stage, and then dug out a packet of what I assume to be Gravol. It certainly put me to sleep that night. Other than doctors and paramedics, ships' captains and medical officers are the only people allowed to give morphine, and make certain other medical decisions.
It's 13:30 right now, Laptop Time. I thought we'd only retarded one hour, but when I went down for lunch about an hour ago (so 11:30, Rob's-head Time), he told me to come back at 11:30. I'm going to pop up to the bridge now, look at the official Ship Time, and then hopefully go for lunch, unless I'm still wrong about what time zone we're in.
/travel/freighter/Conversations with Crew (and Officers, too)
The crew are very friendly and welcoming. The officers consist of one Finn and six Germands, and the crew are 13 Philipinos, as I understand the divisions. They don't seem to draw strong lines between crew and officers; though they eat in different places, the officer's lounge seems to be fairly inactive, while the crew watched football, and the officers joined in.
The Ship Master is a burly man, of appropriate stature for a captain. His English is accented by comes easily, and is easily understood. He is friendly, and invited me up to the bridge to see us exiting port at 03:00. The captain was talking about how he was trying to get internet access onto the boat, but that no satellites covered the mid-Atlantic, and no company would give you an account that would work in both Europe and North America. I guess the non-stationary market is pretty limited.
The Chief Engineer is also German. He seems somewhat quieter and more surly, and has slightly more halting English, though he was easy enough to understand. He still seemed quite friendly, though.
The electrician -- one of the Philipinos -- was particularly friendly, asking me questions and answering mine. He was very careful in his questions, making sure it was alright to ask me where I worked and such. I guess when you carry two thousand containers without knowing particularly what's in them, you gain a sense of presumed privacy. He's been on boats for about 11 years, and an electrician for longer. The money is better on boats than in the Phillipines, though he said being on the chemical tankers wasn't worth it, for the fumes and other risks.
The ship's generating capacity is around two megawatts, the bulk of which goes to the "Reefers" (refrigerated containers). It's 440V AC through that stuff, 220V AC through the cabins and such, and there's a 24V DC control system. They normally generate even when they're in dock, though if they're in drydock they can accept power from land. There are two tiers of backup systems.
The ship has many signs up for procedures, and papers about various protocols (or "protokolls") lying around, with some references to ISO-9001 practices. Thers's a flowchart about waste disposal -- plastics and toxics are always separated and dumped onshore, while dumping food waste and other (nontoxic) waste into the ocean has a requisite distance from shore.
We'll have TV for about a day, if we're lucky.
The route that the boat will take is decided almost exclusively on weather and distance. Under ideal circumstances, it's six days, but more normally seven or eight. Wind direction and speed is basically irrelevant, except inasmuch as winds make waves. We're heading north, over Ireland, and then down by Newfoundland, so that we can avoid a low pressure system. The companyy that charters the boat (MSC) provides their desired route, which the captain can override if he sees fit, but then he takes responsibility for what happens.
One person's job is to control flow of water in and out of the ballasts as the cargo is loaded, to keep the boat balanced and floating with enough freeboard.
Jani, the fourth mate, works roughly 3 hours in the morning, 3 at night, and then has some other administrative work to do throughout. It seems like sleep schedules are all pretty flexible, which makes sense. And the clocks shift roughly with time zones -- some nights we'll change, some nights we won't.
During the soccer match (Angola: 0, Mexico: 0), the crew and officers were swapping tips about where to go when they get to shore: shops and parks and pubs within walking distance. I was a bit confused, since we were packing up and leaving that night, but of course they'll be back in about three weeks, and have been here several times before.
/travel/freighter/Food, Safety
After lunch (more below) I
spent some time reading "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood. I'm about
halfway through, and quite enjoying it, though I hope it goes somewhere, and
isn't "just a dystopian story" about genetic futzing around. I'm enjoying the
main character's involuntary construction of a mythology for his unintentional
worshippers, including a creation myth about animals (Children of Oryx) and
his worshippers (Children of Crake), and the detailed contortions he has to go
through to keep things consistent.
I've brought some videos to watch, but it turned out I didn't have the necessary software to watch them. Since we're still in port, I muddled around until I managed to get my laptop talking to my phone via Bluetooth, and my phone talking to the internet via GPRS. (Thanks, Keith.) Thus the miracle of blog postings.
Then I got the safety tour. My life jacket is just above my closet, in its own special place. Seven short blasts, then one long blast is the abandon ship signal. I should go outside, and down two decks. There are three separate small-craft setups: a primary "abandon ship" covered boat, two backup inflatable rafts, and a small motorboat for rescuing me when I fall overboard.
I also got a tour of the other facilities on the boat -- a small swimming pool, to be filled with sea-water, a sauna (which, presumably from Jani's influence, everyone pronounces in the correct, Finnish way: "sow'-na"), laundry, and such.
I then had a short nap. Which turned into a long nap, and I very nearly slept through dinner. The steward was kind enough to feed me anyway, though.
Eating the Children of Oryx
Lunch started with a fairly-tasty French onion soup, proper and home-made, with a make-do piece of toast and cheese floating on it. The table had a little ledge, so your plate wouldn't fall off. The main course was fish, with potatoes and white asparagus, in a buttery gravy. That was the first time I've eaten a whole piece of fish in five years. It was nonplussing, since I've had a few nibbles here and there.
Dinner was a bit more harsh -- "Goulash" to me is a sort of stew, but in this case it was basically just stewed meat, with new vegetables, served on a plain pasta. I neither enjoyed nor was bothered by the taste, nor the concept of what I was doing, despite careful consideration of the source of that food. There was also coldcuts and some bread and cheese and such.
On my way out, I noticed that a weekly menu is posted, so hopefully I'll be able to improve my food with tactical requests to increase pasta servings, etc.
My stomach felt a bit heavy from all the tough meat, and my teeth are slightly sore with chewing (it wasn't the most tender meat, though still quite edible).
Thus far, while I'm not bothered by it, I suspect this will serve mainly to reinvorce my vegetarianism.
We were a bit late getting loaded, and the boat needs high tide to exit the port, so we're not leaving 'til 03:00 now.
/travel/freighter/Arrival
June 16, 10:30
I'm now on board the MSC Malaga. She's docked at the 4th container terminal, at the very north of the Port of Liverpool. I'm sitting on a wheelless chair in my cabin, which is, as best as I can assess, at the aft (rear) on the starboard (right) side, with a window in each of those directions.
How I got here was not how I expected.
Departure
Last night, Thursday, I finished up my last bits of work, Clare and I made a quick pasta-and-sauce meal, and we scrambled out the door, 10 minutes later than planned. I wanted to swing by a grocery store, just to have a wee bit of food. One of my nightmare scenarios was finding out that they in fact did not have food for the passengers on this ship. It's crazy, of course, but every question unasked left a story in my head, and indeed I didn't ask many questions.
We picked up some groceries -- juice, some fruit, a bag of muesli -- and went on our way. First trying to find the P&O ferry port, for which the roads were blocked off. When we got there, the woman in the booth said they didn't take foot passengers. "I called ahead, they said you did," I replied rather belligerently. As it turns out, I had been confused about which ferry company indeed took foot passengers. She redirected us to Norse Merchant ferries, which rang a bell. We headed there, eventually finding it in the twisty maze that is the fairly old Dublin port area, only to find a big dark building. Then we drove around some more, and found a booth with some people in it, and asked where we were supposed to be. Since I looked rather desparate (having neglected to have a concrete backup plan), they made a phone call or two, but told me that the bridge was lifting.
So that was that. We drove around a bit more, found where we should have gone, and then headed to my office, which was nearby. Phil was there, and was most amused by the situation. We looked through the options -- fast ferries, ferries from Dun Laoghaire, ferries to Holyhead, ferries from Belfast, but nothing was going to get me there in time. So I ended up flying, undoing some of the precious carbon savings I am after in taking this mode of transit. I flew into Manchester, departing at 06:30, and took a fairly short trainride to Liverpool.
From there, I hopped in a taxi, and tried to explain where I wanted to go, not entirely certain myself. Despite having seen the maps, the Port of Liverpool was incredibly long; a reasonably well-kempt passenger-ferry area, and then progressively more industrial and giant-sized shipping areas, down to the container terminal. I hopped out at a police guard booth, and she directed me onwards to Dock (?) #4. Found another booth, and showed some papers. They told me that I was in the right place, and so I paid the taxi (10.70GBP..ouch), and hopped out. A rickety old van with torn seating and flooring showed up and drove me to the boat.
The van dropped me right beside the front of the boat, and I stepped out beside the giant rails that the container-loading machinery rolls along. I asked where to go next, and he said "up to that gangplank there" in a thick Liverpudlian accent. I walked over to it, and climbed up.
I fear none of this conveys the utter sense of lack of knowledge of the whole thing -- where to go, what words to use, who might know things and who might not. This boat takes up to 5 passengers, and this time I'm the only one, so even to various people involved, I was an oddity or a surprise. When I came onboard Philipino greeted me formally: "What is your purpose visiting the ship?" I explained that I was a passenger, and he warmed up immediately, checked my passport, and called the First Mate.
So, I'd arrived, dazzled but definite.
/travel/freighter/First Impressions
June 16, 11:00
Distinctly rolling
his Rs, the First Mate introduced himself as Jani. I asked if he was Finnish,
nearly certain of it, and indeed correct. I mentioned spending time in Oulu,
which put us on the right foot. He was friendly, showed me the B ("Bravo")
deck where lunch will be served in the officer's mess, at 11:30. Then up to
the E ("Echo") deck, where my cabin was.
He asked for the contract, my insurance papers, and my passport. He explained that he'd take copies of the first two, and the captain would keep my passport until we arrived.
The cabin is spacious but not huge, perhaps 20' (6m) x 12' (~3.5m). Its features are strongly reminiscent of my parents' travel trailer: clicking nobs on doors, no wheels on the chairs, little guards on all the shelves, all to keep everything in place. And the little cupboards have the same cooped-up-wood smell as the trailer always did.
Out my window, I can see the underbelly of the global economy in action; containers being stacked, raised, and loaded. Or unloaded into stacks, and then pulled off.
The scale of everything is incredible; the containers -- these are what seems so oppressive to a normal vehicle when they're on the back of a lorry, remember -- are moved around like small boxes. The machines lift them smoothly, like pieces of a machine I might have built from lego as a child. It's about 160 steps to the top of the largest device, name unknown, that sites near my window, doing the main movement of containers on and off the boat, as far as I can tell.
It's lunchtime now.
