Ship Spotting

One thing I love to do is spotting ships, boats and other means of aquatic conveyance . Just like a birdwatcher with a zoom lens focused on a nest of eagle chicks I've whiled away many a watch staring at some of the worlds largest man made structures. While you could fill pages arguing over the aesthetic merits of modern ship structure versus traditional I find a beauty in the utilitarianism of today's seagoing vessels.

Working on some of the arguably ugliest car carriers around may have played a role in my appreciation for ships with attributes other than raked stacks, a cutter bow and curvaceous fantails but still, if the industry interests you than you might enjoy the following pictures.

The entirety of my last job at sea was spent either on the hook in Singapore's sprawling anchorage or maintaining position in the Singapore Strait to repair sub sea fiber optic cables. This meant ample time with little more to do than watch concerning traffic and snap photographs of some of the more interesting vessels that passed us by. The above photograph is a typical sunrise over Indonesia and one of the worlds most crowded anchorages.

This boat would circle us every evening as curious Singaporeans looked on from their tacky dinner cruise experience. A steel hull with fake cannon ports and a dirty exhaust stained transom, this motorized replica of a Junk never inspired me to buy a ticket.
A deck cargo of rough cut lumber makes this Russian stick ship look a little tender. Chained athwartships the lumber could very likely be coming from Russia's Kamchatka peninsula. I would see at least four of these vessels pass by in a week.
Another Russian vessel, this naval ship was circling Singapore while Vladimir Putin was visiting last October. Those long barrels on her deck were designed to fire missiles at the American ship pictured below.
A floating helicopter base this U.S. Naval vessel was part of a large fleet that called on Singapore late in 2009.
Another American naval vessel, this Lewis & Clark T-AKE Class vessel is the newest installment in the Navy's underway replenishment Combat Logistics Force. A classmate and good friend serves as a cargo mate on board this very ship and was just returning from an eight month humanitarian and goodwill mission to the South Pacific.
This Q-Max LNG tanker passes by in the morning hours on a dedicated run from the loading port in Qatar (Hence the Q in Q-Max) and a discharge port in LNG hungry South Korea. The newest design in liquefied natural gas transportation, the Q-Max class vessels were built in anticipation of a boom in LNG consumption to carry 266,000 cubic meters each, enough gas to power 70,000 homes in the U.S. for a year. Yet as the economy has slowed and demand for imported natural gas fallen word on the street has it that some of these 7 brand new ships are being laid up as soon as they're launched.
Compared to the membrane tanks used in the Q-Max LNG carrier these spherical tanks are representative of the old technology in LNG transportation, though when I say old I mean since 1964 when the first LNG tanker, Methane Princess was launched.
Another modern LNG carrier this one sporting the distinctive Maersk paint job can be scene with fire hoses trailing a mist astern, obviously an anti-piracy precaution.
The dinner cruise sets out from Marina South Pier with the skyline of Singapore behind. The three towers to the right are currently under construction to become Asia's most spectacular entertainment destination, Marina Bay Sands. The tops of the three buildings are to be joined by a ship like structure complete with rooftop gardens. While it would be free for you or I to have a go at the roulette tables here in a year's time it will cost each Singaporean $100 to enter.
A FPSO or Floating Production Storage and Offloading unit is passed by in Johor on our way to Sembawang cable depot. This converted tanker will be moored offshore in an oil field to receive, refine and store oil.
This pipe laying vessel, one of the largest in the world, is also seen in a Malaysian shipyard. Ships like this will be necessary to install the sub sea pipelines to link oil wells, FPSOs and all the other components in the booming offshore oil and gas industry.
A heavy lift vessel loaded with four towering container cranes passes precariously by. Surely welded to her deck weather routing couldn't be more crucial for any other vessel. We saw a lot of east bound cargo cranes.
A "bum boat" comes alongside to deliver stores. These strangely shaped motor boats were busily plying the near shore waters of Singapore to deliver food and spares to the thousands of ships at anchor. A design that probably goes back a thousands years in these waters must prove seaworthy despite the ingress of water at the bow and simple welded pipe tiller at the stern.
A capesize bulk ore carrier passes by in ballast westbound. With a cargo capacity of at least 175,000 dead weight tonnes this ship is too large for the Panama canal and the Suez canal when loaded. She must therefore transit around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn when passing from one ocean to another.
This zoom of her house shows just how massive each component is from the stack to bridge wings to the rudder. Capesize bulkers range from 150,000 DWT to 400,000 DWT.
This dredge can be seen bound for sea to dump spoils dredged from the bottom of Singapore's constantly evolving harbors. This dredge, owned by a Dutch company, the undoubted leader in dredging technology, was operating non stop passing by us at least twice a day on her way out and then back in to Singapore.

One of my favorite ship pictures is of this cattle ship. After inspection with binoculars it was obvious that she was void of all livestock and most likely destined for a ship yard in Malaysia for some maintenance and new deck paint. I couldn't imagine how many head of cow or sheep she is capable of carrying nor the stench with a following wind but really, how many people have even contemplated such a vessel much less seen one? Her crew must be size able as well to feed and clean so many pens though I imagine it is mostly an automated operation.

A new FPSO that appeared more like a city as we passed her close abeam while coming into anchor early one morning. The mass of piping looked like any other oil refinery in Texas City except it all is designed to operate offshore. I wonder how a ship like this is navigated to it's destination with absolutely no visibility from the still existent bridge.
Singapore's navy had a large presence throughout the duration of my hitch. What were the worst pirate waters in the world are now mostly tame within the Singapore and Malacca Straits due to a joint anti-piracy effort between Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.
Big is all I can think here. I snapped this picture on my way ashore after paying off. The western half of Singapore's southern shore sports the largest container terminal in the world. These absolutely massive gantry cranes service the worlds largest container ships.

Scrapping an old home

A few weeks ago while crossing the Atlantic I passed the car carrier where I lived, worked and "Cut my teeth" for the better part of three years voyaging around the world. She was built in Japan in 1978 with all the bells and whistles imaginable for a ship of her day. These included some of the first hydraulically lifted decks for cargo versatility on a ship of her size, automated tension mooring winches and stern ramp and even an taffrail speed log with an electronic repeater on the bridge. By the time I worked on her all of this equipment was defunct or on the verge of inoperable requiring endless days of stemming leaking hydraulic oil. Her hull though was constructed of thick gauged mild steel and took a thousand poundings that would have cracked the brittle steel of any modern ship but left her undaunted.

She sailed under different flags, the first and last being Norwegian and in the middle under the stars and stripes for fourteen years. She was, as far as I know, one of the first foreign flagged vessels to be registered in the U.S. to carry cargo for the Department of Defense in addition to her normal commercial trade.

This government subsidy, now known as the Maritime Security Program is touted as essential to maintaining the American flagged deep sea merchant fleet needed to support the United States during times of crisis and conflict. It provides a subsidy for foreign built hulls to be flagged in the United States is kept available to the Department of Defense and is the reason many American's have seafaring jobs retaining a small and highly skilled labor pool.

It seemed very strange to see her on the Automatic Identification System (AIS) under her original name which had been repainted on the transom the day I walked off of her. Re-crewed with a mixed nationality compliment, Indian Captain and Engineers, Phillipino Mate and deck crew, she left Abu Dhabi to fill the projected void of tonnage in the owners vast logistics network when shipping was still good.

Unfortunately for her the recession has affected the roll on/roll off markets substantially necessitating the "Cold steel" lay up of 25% of the fleet. Being one of the oldest ships in the company she was being eyed for the chopping block. After spending a month at anchor off Annapolis Maryland she finally set sail for Jordan after one last load in Dundalk.

The same week that we passed in the night, when I called her on the radio to see where they were headed next, the owners in Oslo had all ready decided her fate. Sadly for the new crew they were sending her to the far east for one last discharge after which she would meet her demise at the end of a thousand cutting torches in Shanghai, just a Yellow Sea away from where she was born.

Even in her death the vessel will probably set a profit record. Commanding day rates near those of super tankers she gained the reputation of being a money maker in her hey day of government contracts and now with her thick hull and framing she'll fetch a very good price in the scrapyards of Asia.

I can relate to how her crew must feel paying off an old ship knowing it's the end of her days. Once a ship has delivered you and your ship mates safely through a harrowing storm or two you begin to feel an affection as if she was a living being. In scrapping her away you can't help but feel like your loosing something more than just a vessel. Above is the old ship just passing through the Kills in January of this year. A familiar sight for the last thirty years.

From the Front

Below I have pasted an email received from my brother who is currently sailing aboard an American flagged vessel and recently transited the Gulf of Aden. I should mention here as a disclaimer that our mother was a merchant mariner, married a merchant mariner and now has two sons in the merchant marine so I do believe that she won't be too surprised about the dangers her children face when going to sea in this day and age.

Man we've been going back and forth in the Red Sea for 3 extra days now waiting for our turn to go through the Suez Canal. I'm writing this on the 3rd day and we should be going through tomorrow. The gulf of Aden was pretty gnarly every night, there were a few attempted boardings.

The day after the Straights of Hormuz at about 1500 when I was asleep (I would have loved to have been on watch when this happened) AB Willie, a toothless Vietnam vet who is hilarious, spotted two real small boats about a mile out dead ahead. They then split up and went down either side about a hundred yards out. Each boat had twin outboards and 5 guys wearing camouflage and head wraps with one guy standing on the bow holding the painter, you know, using it to stand up.Obviously not fishermen since we were about 40 miles off shore in broad daylight. I guess they started to come up close and then they noticed the fifty calibers mounted on the bridge wings and they took off real fast.

Being that we are so small a ship we were prime targets it would have been relatively easy for them to get over the side. Not to mention the fact we have like 10 or 11 Black Hawk helicopters and containers filled with grenades, missiles and bullets for the poor bastards in Georgia (In the Caucasus that is, not in the lower 48). We would have probably been in real trouble if we didn’t have this EST (embarked security team) on board. They are a team of 12 kids, all real young, except two of the head guys who are like 30. I mean kids my age all walking around with M16’s and pistols all the time.

Like I said we have a fifty’s on the bridge wing and one on the stern. When were going through the gulf of Aden they also had two guys on the bow with 60’s so we are f****n strapped for sure. Every night after that until we got to the red sea there were reports of ships getting harassed buy these pirates. One night there was what turned out to be a fishing fleet of 12 small boats. It was pretty freaky seeing all these little contacts popping up just about dead ahead. Everybody was like "Holy f*****n shit, thank god for these kids".

If the pirates rolled out like that we would all be dead for sure. The two ships about 12 or 13 miles in front of us just about turned around when they first saw them. So needless to say the pirate threat ain't no joke down here even with all these coalition warships set up all over the place.

Tomorrow we are finally going to transit up to the Mediterranean where we will drop these Navy kids off in Souda bay. Then to Georgia then back to the states. (I cant wait to get to the U.S.. I'll get to swing some 20 million dollar helicopters around,Hehehe! 4 tons ain't nothing, its gonna be great!!

My brother is fortunate in this instance. His vessel is most likely under contract to the Department of Defense and therefore has a U.S.N. Embarked Security Team aboard which is undoubtedly armed to the gills. During my last transit through the Gulf of Aden the most force protection we had on board were four contract security guards with pepper spray and flashlights.

The company had previously ordered all the collapsing batons thrown over because they were too much of an "Offensive weapon" and we were only trained for "Defense". That was a year ago. Now I believe the same company is putting security guards on board but allowing them to come armed, which consequently means more $. If this is true I couldn't be happier.

Ships at sea need to be defended and given the amount of traffic in these waters and the legitimacy given to the pirate's business by companies paying the bribes and not doing much else the coalition vessels have a daunting task. Companies need to arm the vessels by providing professionally trained ex-military personnel on board. The crew has enough to do, learning to fire a 7.62mm SAW is a bit much.

In my opinion the embarked security team is the best solution, LRADs and fire hoses aside, until the IMO, NATO and the U.N., with or without the help of the Somali Transitional Government, decide on a final means of putting the pirates out of business. Afghanistan and Iraq are not the only front lines of the war on terrorism.

Old Ships

It is a telling thing when the merchant fleet of a maritime nation is as out dated as ours here in the states. Ships are being built all of the world with gusto but here in the USA our deep sea fleet is getting older and only slowly being replaced by new builds. The following is my experience on old ships.

In my first five years of sailing in the United States Merchant Marine as a junior and more recently as senior officer in the deck department, I have worked on three commercial ships. Two were tankers and the most recent a Roll On / Roll Off vessel. Their suboptimal condition resulting from long hard years at sea has had a formative influence on my career so far.

The first ship was a Suez Max tanker of 136,000 DWT. She had been built by Mitsui shipbuilding of Japan in 1974 making her 8 years my senior. Of the three ships she had been cared for the best, a testament to her 25 years sailing under the American ensign. On an interesting side note, and as a dating method she was featured in the original film King Kong as the giant apes' transport to NYC.

Unfortunately for me her days of running Alaskan North Slope crude oil abruptly came to an end shortly after I had joined her. My first voyage became her last as we sailed west from the United States to the scrapping yards of Asia Minor. It wasn't all bad though. Being an older ship she had been built large. Large accommodations, large officers mess, large pool. And the company was top notch providing as much in the way of diversion and entertainment on board as possible. An important thing for a voyage to Singapore that lasted 24 days.
The second ship was a chemical tanker of 48,075 DWT. Having been built just one year shy of my first birthday she was slightly younger but her age showed in a multitude of rust, stress cracks, and wasted deck piping.The sheer amount of cargo piping and headers for the 43 segregated cargo tanks created a maze of steel running down the entire cargo block.

With the addition of 43 individual electric hydraulic Framo cargo pumps, inert gas system piping, an efficient Pneumatic stripping systems, Shand & Jurs tank level indicators, center line fixed tank washing machines, a longitudinal electrical tunnel cutting the deck in half a maintenance disaster was built right into her design.

Like the crude oil tanker this ship was also operated by an American oil major for most of her life. Only recently had she been sold and it soon became obvious to her new unionized crew that the former owner had been fiscally conservative at her ship yards opting out of any large life span lengthening expenditures.This lack of maintenance on a very specialized ship led to a hazardous situation from an operators point of view. During my six months on board split between two hitches, I remember watching the cargo control board and having neither the S&J nor the less reliable back up float gauge correspond with the MMC reading during critical cargo operations.*As a side note for those to never set foot on a tanker - when moving a liquid cargo on or off a ship several methods are available for accounting for the amount of product in a cargo tank. Radar systems are among the more modern and accurate but on my older ship a spring loaded tape with a float resting on the liquids surface would send an analog signal to a needle gauge in the cargo control room. To back this up was another float system but this was much less accurate. The safest and surest measure was to have the Able Bodied seaman standing by at the tanks ullage cap with a hermetic sounding tape or MMC.

Not a big deal if you are topping off a product tanker but when simultaneously loading and discharging multiple products with only two or three working MMCs and three crew on deck it was difficult to keep accurate flow rates without making the crew do laps around the 600 foot ship all night long. But doing laps, and abusing a few cadets along the way was the only way to get the job done.

It was during my first trip on the chemical tanker that I realized how the ship was as old as most of the officers I was working with. It was evident in the look of amazement a vetting inspectors showed the Captain when he saw the crew's training synopsis record. The vetting inspector (A third party hired to evaluate the quality of the ships operation in minute detail) was a Master Mariner from India with decades of experience on similar ships. He was astounded because at the time the oldest member of the deck department, the Captain, was a mere 28 years. The Chief Mate was 27, and the junior officers including myself between 23 and 26. Our cumulative experience on this ship didn't add up to what was normally encountered in sea time and experience for a chemical tanker's Captain. We still passed the vetting, barely.

After two trips of wrestling with inadequate gauges, bursting pipes, and leaking low point drains along with the pleasure of working with naphtha, para xylene, methyl ethyl ketone, and a host of other petrochemicals I found myself looking for a different and hopefully newer place of employment. As luck would have it I found a fleet of car carriers that include several recent new builds trading internationally. I was elated to be joining a different ship and in my naivety thought how wonderful it would be to worry no more about oil leaks, cargo spills, and carcinogens.

When I joined my new home in the port of Houston I was not excited to find out that I had joined the oldest ship in the fleet and probably one of the oldest Roll On / Roll Off ships afloat. As I would learn, this particular vessel was a prototype for the modern day car carriers in world wide service. She was designed with hydraulically lifted decks maximizing cargo flexibility. This was a new approach in the 1970s to moving mechanized and rolling cargoes. She would be used in trade routes all over the world, most interestingly carrying paper products from the Pacific Northwest, including rough timber to Japan in the early 1980's.

Much like my last ship she too had seen several years of neglect and the problems were compiling quickly when a new operations company had taken over. The hundreds of hydraulic cylinders that moved the lifting decks up and down and secured them in place were leaking profusely. It took the crew two years to stem the flow and keep the oil from damaging cargo.

The mooring winches forward would frequently blow out putting hydraulic oil onto the fore deck and nearly over the side on several occasions. Miracle red hand patches kept us calling on our ports without delay. The accommodations would rain inside on the engineers quarters any time there was rain outside. The bridge and engine room had issues I'll decline to mention in this forum.

Built in 1978 she turned 30 this year and was just recently sold to a foreign operator and re-flagged back to her original Norwegian colors. I with the rest of the crew were somewhat relieved to pass on her mountain of issues to a larger crew with a ship yard in her near future.

For several reasons the United States Merchant Marine operates some of the oldest ships in the world. I for one look with envy upon the brand new ships I see in ports all over the world. I peer through my binoculars sizing up all the differences between what was slid down the ways three decades ago and what are being built today.

I always am reading about new ships have ergonomically minded bridges with enclosed wings, 360 degree visibility, and integrated chart systems. As so many of us who work these older ships know, as long as we are sailing deep sea we may not see such brand new things for quite some time. For me the problem solving, maintenance, and work load of older ships is a source of pride, but it would be nice to keep ahead of the rust for once. Crews of 18 can only do so much in a day at sea.

Lastly I should mention another vessel I had the pleasure of working on for a short stint. In between college semester I was able to get a mates job on a schooner in New England. This vessel was over a century old. One hundred and sixteen years to be exact. She was a two masted schooner, originally used as an oyster scow on the Chesapeake bay and eventually left to rot on the shore. She was salvaged and refit in Rockland Maine thirty years ago to join the growing number of Windjammers along the coast. This, the oldest ship in the passenger fleet, was home to some of my fondest working memories. So not all things old are a total pain in the sailor's ass. Just the ones that are neglected.