Bombs, bags and bridge watchkeeping

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After a fun few days in the desert with camels and scarab beetles, Hannah and I arrived in London and I was straight onto the agency to get me out on a ship asap. The first one was another suction dredger like the one I had worked on before I came back to NZ. The difference with this one was that it was summer and on the south coast so the weather was baking hot and flat as a pancake for the whole three weeks. Whenever I got off watch it was up onto the monkey island above the bridge with a towel and a good book for a bit of ray-catching.
One of the problems with sea bed dredging around the UK is the quantity of ordnance scattered about. They used to dump all of the old bombs and ammunition at sea and now they are always getting sucked up into the dredgers. The problem is that bombs and the like get less and less stable with exposure to sea water so they occasionally go off once they get on the ship. We were tied up in port one afternoon when the bomb squad turned up and told us that they were going to blow up a ‘potentially dangerous object’ in the gravel that another ship had just discharged onto the quay. They did their thing then all retreated a good distance off and a while later there was an almighty bang and clouds of sand exploded out of the pile as they detonated whatever it was. It was all quite sudden, very wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, lots of build up, half a second of excitement and it was all over far too soon. Not that I would know anything about that ;-)

The three weeks passed pretty fast and I was quickly back in London. I immediately started getting itchy feet to be at sea again so I was on the phone to the agency pretty much every day bugging the crap out of them to get me some more work. This tactic paid off and I was shortly on a flight to Inverness to join a small research vessel that was doing seabed sampling around the oil rigs north of Scotland. http://www.vtplc.com/ocean/photocats.asp?s=
Unfortunately I didn’t take my camera on that trip which was a shame as the rigs look pretty impressive when you are right underneath them. Ten days later it was back in to Inverness and home again.

Hannah and I managed to squeeze in a trip to Paris before I had to go back to work, it ended up being a really great five days despite us having no luggage whatsoever. We flew two days after a big terrorism scare at Heathrow and the airport was in chaos. The inevitably lost our bags which were apparently left outside in a 20,000 bag sized suitcase-mountain for three weeks and came back sopping wet and mouldy. This was to spell the end of my digital camera as it bit the bullet a few days after I got it back.
So anyway, back to Paris. We ended up at the hotel with only our passports, wallets and the clothes we were standing up in. Not the best way to start a holiday. Nevertheless we got out and about and had a really fantastic time. We could have done with another week at least, the five days really were far too short but them’s the breaks I s’pose.
BTW FYI for those that haven’t been, the Eiffel tower really is impressive. It’s bloody monstrous and an amazing piece of engineering for what is basically a huge Meccano set. Quite clever these Frogs.

Back in Blighty and I had to head off floating again, I actually ended up back on the little research ship for a second trip after it had got back to Wales It’s owned by the University of Bangor in north Wales and does a lot of teaching trips for all of the Marine Biology students. I was asked back as chief mate for another three week trip which was really interesting. We did a trip around the Irish Sea taking sea water strata samples (or some other guff, I’m not really sure) along the way, it involved a lot of ship handling as well which was great. We also did a trip up to the Scottish lochs. The scenery up there is simply stunning and it was great to anchor up for the night in quiet little bays and take the boat ashore to the local pub, where we all ordered very responsible soft drinks of course.
I was actually offered a permanent job as chief mate of that ship but I had to turn it down due to it not being big enough to get the right seatime for my ticket.

Back in the job hunt, I got a call one day from the agent asking if I wanted to take up the job offer from Norfolkline that had been made six months ago, working on one of their cross channel ferries, the Maersk Dunkerque.
http://www.ferry-site.dk/ferry.php?id=9293076&lang=en
I thought for about three seconds and then said yes. I went on initially for six days to fill in for someone and ended up getting their job and staying on board for a month. It turned out to be really challenging and interesting work. We were sailing between Dover and Dunkerque across the Dover straits which is the narrowest part of the English Channel, the busiest shipping lane in the world. I was on a very steep learning curve, my bridge watchkeeping skills increased a lot in just the first week.
Basically the job was to navigate the vessel from just outside Dover, across the Traffic Separation Scheme in the straits, through the Dunkerque anchorage and up the approaches to Dunkerque taking about 2 hours. We were a 190 metre ship sailing at 25 knots perpendicular to the traffic flow, dodging all the ships steaming up and down the straits. It was a bit like driving a truck across a motorway except that we didn’t have any brakes.
Once we got into port I was in charge of discharging all of the cars and trucks off the upper cargo decks, then loading them back up again for the return trip. It wasn’t too hard really, a bit like a big jigsaw puzzle but it did get interesting when drivers took exception to where you parked them and decide to come and give you a piece of their mind. Yelling matches with smelly, moustachioed, eight foot Polish truck drivers are really best avoided if you want my opinion.
I found the first couple of months really quite challenging and interesting but after a while it all started to get a bit monotonous and I was starting to think about a change of scenery.

By some random chance I received an email from a friend of mine who was the captain of a yacht in the south of France asking if I would like to come down and work for him for the season. Once again I thought for about two or three seconds and wrote back to accept the offer.
Obviously I couldn’t just leave immediately, some rubbish about terms of appropriate notice or some such thing so I stayed on the ferry another couple of months before I had to fly home to be Groomsman at my brothers wedding. What is it with me flying home for weddings??

Just before I came home I managed to squeeze in a trip to Dublin for St Patrick’s day with Hannah, Leah and Beth (the terrible trio) which was an interesting few days. The whole world was geared up for a weekend of green-tinted partying, everybody was Irish for the day, all the bars were packed with backpackers looking for a good time and where was I? In bed at 9:30 with a bad cold. It sucked to be me that weekend.
Hannah, Leah and Beth however did have a great time, so great in fact that they all felt the need to wake me up and tell me about their evenings when they got back to the hostel at 0100, 0130 and again at 0230 when the last one rolled in. I was not impressed.
We got back to London very travel weary and hungover. We had been stuck on the ferry for about eight hours due to storm force winds lashing the ferry terminal in Holyhead which then delayed our arrival at Waterloo until getting on for 2300.
I don’t have any pics of Dublin, but Hannah and Leah took far more than enough to make up for it so check out their blogs for those.

I still had one more two week trip on the ferry to do but that was over quite quickly.
Next stop for me was Heathrow airport, looking forward to another 30 hours spent being very uncomfortable eating crap food and watching movies I had already seen. At least they couldn’t screw up the scotch…

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Photos

Eiffel Tower
A magnificent monument to the spirit of human achievement, and the Eiffel Tower

The Terrible Trio...
Hannah and Beth, two thirds of Dublin's Terrible Trio

The Terrible Trio...
The third of the trio