The Start Of Piracy Watch

It is now Sunday 19th May and I have settled into my schedule on board. I have my 0800-1200 shift in the engine room which mostly consists of sounding the tanks, basically taking a measurement of how much oil/water is left. Saturdays is “check day” so we check all the emergency systems on board. I am shadowing the 3rd Engineer that I joined with, we check the emergency fire pumps and generators, he has showed me both ways of starting these.

The engine room itself is seriously impressive, our main engine spans over 5 floors and has 9 access points if we need to do work inside it. The rest of the engine room is littered with generators, oily water separators etc. Takes a while to get used to the layout however as there is so many doors that lead off into other rooms filled with more machinery although I haven’t spent much time in these rooms.

So far, the crew seem great I am getting along with the other cadets who are all deck cadets but we work the same hours so we can spend time together at the gym, playing ping pong, cards and saving the best for last…the sauna! The engineering crew that I work with are all Ukrainian which can make it hard to understand them in the engine room because its so loud.

We are now passing Somalia which is a pirate active zone we have been given watches on the bridge for “Piracy Watch”. At first I thought this sounded exciting but turns out its standing on the Bridge Wing for 4 hours in boiling temperatures watching up to 38 degrees so far, so in conclusion it is not.

The next stop is Pelepas (Malaysia) then we are moving deeper into Asia with some stops in Vietnam, China and Singapore before turning back for a stretch at sea heading back to the Suez Canal and then onto America.

119 days to go!