1st – 7th of November 2021

Portbury. We sailed on Sunday night: picked up the pilot at the pilot boarding station and sailed in later in the night. I was sleeping when all this happened because I needed to wake up early early to open the hatches, so I missed the fun of entering the Royal Docks of Portbury: small locks but a large dock behind with quite a few big vessels alongside. Luckily the weather was very good and quite warm and sunny for the first of November! 

The discharging of the sugar beet pulp pellets went fast and smoothly. As a precaution, I did only open a few hatches by a few hatches. Indeed: although the sun was constantly above our head, not so far away the front was passing above Bristol and I did not want to take the risk of having wet and damaged cargo. They had rain for sure. When I looked at those dark clouds… it could only confirm that it was wise to keep an eye on the surroundings.

At the end of the day, the bobcat was in and the last cargo was coming out at 20h. It was fun, I usually like to make a small game with the crew to estimate either the number of grabs left in the hold or the time it will take us to complete the discharging. I started doing this when I was a trainee. I would challenge captain H. on this. He likes to be challenged like that. And I like to win. But he would change his mind in the middle and change his answer so that he could win. That was not how it should be played…. 😉 Now with the ABs and whoever is there in the hold at the time of the game, I give a start time and ask how long each and one of us think it will be finished and the one closest to the completion time ( usually when the bobcat is out) wins. I won already a couple of times, A. Our engineer won too. The ABs still need to work on their skills. Captain H. Is not allowed to play till further notice haha. No rule changing in the middle of the game and he knows that. I will probably let him play again. Next time he is in the hold with us. It was not the case this time so no worries… I am not an excluder….. all are welcome to play. 😉

We had a lot of cargo stuck behind our bulkheads. I knew that from the loading in Liepaja. I had prepared my afternoon watch the tarpaulin for on top of the bulkhead to avoid the problem, but during my sleep, I got woken up by sounds against the wall of my cabin and knew directly what was going on. When I came on my night watch at that time I saw the tarpaulins that were taken off « because of the wind ». I remember at that time it made me really upset because there were small lines that were on the tarpaulins for making it fast and avoid having them fall in the hold. And when you know how long it takes for the whole crew to move the two bulkheads and sweep the leftover cargo from behind; well you make sure the tarpaulins are in place. We would all agree that even though it is not nice at the moment, it avoids so much more work to wake up one or two crew members to fix a tarpaulin if we cannot do it alone…. But that was not how it happened.

After completion, we moved the bulkheads and swept the remaining cargo out. Because we were not sailing out before the next day, we postponed the cleaning of the hold to the next morning. We had a chance still to have a good night’s sleep. The cleaning of the hold would be done the next morning thoroughly. We were going to Bird port, close to Newport, only a couple of hours out sailing. We would be loading steel slabs so the hold also needed to be washed with fresh water because there would be a salinity test too during the hold inspection.

We sailed out of the locks of Portbury later in the afternoon on a beautiful sunny day for a change. We were not going into our next port for a few days. They still had a few vessels ahead of us in the planning. The bad weather from the previous week made a little bit of congestion in the harbours. I did not mind. It was also the way it was and we could not change it. This time the anchorage was very easy and smooth: almost no wind and nice weather so we focused on outdoor jobs. A bit of maintenance here and there and some painting on deck.

I am glad that happened. As we are going into the winter period, areas with a bit of open paint and cracks will get even worse during the winter. And when it is cold outside, it is not ideal for the paint to dry either. I mean these are normal maintenance things that every officer knows onboard right? The good preparation of the surface to be painted. If you quickly just paint on top then you are sure you can do it all over again in the spring.

So this is what we did for a few days at anchor: drills, painting, greasing, general maintenance… the usual. 

We heaved up anchor and entered the river to Newport in the late afternoon of the 5th. It was nice because as it was getting darker outside, we could see a lot of fireworks and bomb fires along the coast. It was Guy Fawkes day. I joked saying to the captain that they were making a part for us for finally entering the harbour after so many days!

There were a lot of tides and thus current at that time on the river and Birdport was a small harbour situated behind Newport. It was quite tricky because it only gave us a few minutes to make the turn and enter the small kind of lock where the loading would happen. And…. Surprise surprise, there was still a vessel loading at our berth! The problem was that if he did not make it in time to sail out then we had to cancel coming in and had to sail all the way back to the anchorage to wait for the next tide to sail in…. At the moment, I must admit I thought we were not so lucky with all our trips so far. But 20 minutes before our deadlines we were waiting drifting in a safe area on the river Usk, we hear on the radio that the vessel at our berth was ready and proceeding for departure. Great! We would make it on time.

It was a funny place, like a single lock with halfway doors that would close so that the tide did not take away all the water and always 6-7m remained at the berth. The inspectors came in the evening, directly upon arrival to inspect the salinity and cleanliness of the hold and to make the ultrasound test. It was all fine, the next morning we would be able to load directly the steel slabs.

The nice thing about this cargo is that it was not weather-dependent like the steel coils. These were just on the quayside outside. They just needed to be protected from salt water. This meant that I could easily open up all hatches in the morning and let them load patting attention to the trim while deballasting. Each slab was approximately 20t and we were going to make 4 piles of 7 slabs per high, 5 high; which meant 140 slabs to load. It was – normally- going to be pretty fast loading. 

Except that….. wait for it ;-)…. The next morning, I was ready with all the hatches open but by the time the stevedore came and the shore workers…. Well the tide was higher and they couldn’t load the timber in the ship with their crane….. haha They did not want to change the hook either so they had to wait for the tide to lower to start working…. 3 hours later…. Really?! I thought this was ridiculous. They had 1. Started on time and 2. Changed the hook, they could have started slowly. But well in the end we managed and way on time so it was the same for us.

In the evening at high tide, we sailed out with the pilot on board and proceeded towards the English Channel for a couple of Days. We were headed to our next port of call in Gent, Belgium, to discharge the slabs. We had 3 days sailing ahead of us. Luckily the weather had changed and we had nice and smooth sailing.

Let’s see next week what Gent would bring us this time! New adventures to be followed! Have a nice Sunday at sea my friends!

Xxx

Sopietje