DCdt’s Log 071148 SMT Apr 16

UTC-8

We’re currently sat at anchor off of Singapore, a frustratingly mere 400 metres away from the closest jetty, yet still unable to reach land and go ashore. We are awaiting our slot to berth in Pasir Panjang to receive our cargo before starting out on our next shipping route.

It has been relaxed for the first couple of days here, as everyone is recovering from dry dock and getting back into their standard watches routines on ship, however we now have an internal audit coming up in about a week or so, so we’re ramping up the work again to ensure everything is perfect for that, which includes everything on ship, from the big stuff such as all painting complete, to the smaller things like all documents and publications on ship being up to date, where they live etc. An advantage of the audit however [as a cadet] is that because we are ordering so many new copies of official publications, all the old ones are just going to be thrown away, so free books for me! Happy days.

Never being a place to have a dull moment though, we had one of our ship’s company being sent away to hospital following an incident on board, another member to be sent ashore to chaperone him, and another one taking rest in our on board ship’s hospital. During this time of being 3 crew down (which is more than 10% of our total manning power), we had a pipe blow on one of our generators and spray hot oil all over the engine room and equipment! I had just finished my 12 hour day and was heading to my cabin for some R&R when I got told to go get changed back into my boiler suit, grab gloves, hard hat and dust mask and to proceed to the engine room ASAP. I was greeted by oil having caked the walls of the engine room, and all spare hands having the delightful task of cleaning it up as best as possible. So already being three crew down, this put more strain on the rest of us. But! Being British and not wanting to grumble, on I got with it for about 3 hours. My white boiler suit was subsequently destroyed and completely black, I went through 4 dust masks before they got so saturated with sweat and condensation, and to top it off I was just covered head to toe in jet black oil, it took an age to get it all off me in the shower.

But knowing that I had done a good job, after I got sent to rest I threw away all the gear I was wearing, showered, downed a 1.5L bottle of water, lay in bed, grabbed a beer, and near enough passed out. All in all a good experience, 7/10, would recommend to do once, but I won’t rush to do it again out of choice.

As a side note, I’m sorry if the title of this entry seemed misleading, however I’ve decided to go with movie title-styled puns for my anchorage entries, just you wait until the fourth instalment, that’s my favourite that I’ve thought of so far.

-The Scouse Deckie

I’m not allowed to upload any pictures of the oil spill we had on board, so here’s a guy driving a train along the waterfront looking G as fuck.