That is the first stint of the journey completed, finally no more trips into Baltimore!
The last few weeks have been pretty slow with little work to be done. I have been watching a lot of the engineers controlling the engine through manoeuvring. Today I was monitored as I helped to start the main engine as we left Brunswick.
We are now heading to Namibia which will take exactly three weeks. One of the turbo chargers has reached its maximum running hours so it will need cleaned and repaired in the next few days. Since the main engine will be running day and night until we reach Africa we wont be able to start this turbo charger until the main engine is stopped so this means we will be sailing at a reduced speed, hence why it will take three weeks to cover roughly 5000 miles. On my last vessel it took three weeks to get from Singapore to New York, so this is very slow passage for me. Since we won’t be in port however, we can carry out bigger jobs on the machinery.
The main task for this trip is to completely overhaul generator number three. Usually this means just to clean or replace the piston and cylinder liners but because we have a larger time window we are planning to clean and repair the whole generator and carry out several performance tests once it is running again.
Last year I had little trouble with the weather, purely because of the size of the vessel but speaking to the chief engineer, who has been at sea for nearly 20 years, he was telling me this passage and onto the Indian ocean in this kind of vessel is the roughest in his experience. Since the vessel has a much larger freeboard than other vessels it is affected by wind much more and rolls very easily. So now we will find out if I have really got my sea legs or just been lucky to avoid bad weather up until now!
Once we reach Africa we will go to Namibia and two ports in South Africa. Then we move onto Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea and finally a few ports in Japan. If all goes to schedule, we should finish this contract on November 1st. After that the future is uncertain, we might join the majority of the fleet and drift at sea for weeks or a few months until the company find another contract for us or we might fully load up in China and head back to the States to discharge. Knowing my experience though these plans will change a hundred times before we finish this contract!
