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After a hectic three months leave at home in Cape Town I was off to my next ship. It was the Cape Size bulk carrier "Saldanha", in lay-up alongside a repair quay in Las Palmas, Canary Islands. My leave had spanned the period from before Christmas to after my older daughter's 21st Birthday at the end of January 2000 and included various birthdays, the Millennium, Y2K fever and other events. The main problem with leave is that it comes to an end!
I was originally going to join a smaller ship but things changed. They always seem to! One has to be flexible as a "deep-sea truck driver". Anyway, I flew off to Las Palmas, which I had not been to for a number of years, with the usual mixed feelings, glad to be off on a new adventure but not happy to be leaving home.
The ship had been laid-up for a while and there was still a lot of work to be done on it, mainly in the engine room. This was all done. After a few days and after sea trials lasting for most of a day to test the systems, we set course for Tubarao in Brazil to load a cargo of iron ore. The weather from Las Palmas, across the Equator and down to Tubarao was very good with the sea flat calm. This allowed the crew to give the ship a much-needed clean-up as it had got into a very grubby condition while alongside with all the dock-side activity going on in port. There is always a sense of relief to leave a dry-dock or lay-up berth and get back to sea, where the ship can do what it is supposed to do, which is to transport cargo. No seafarer goes to sea to spend time at a repair quay! Not even in Las Palmas.
On arrival off Tubarao we anchored in a crowded roadstead a few miles offshore for about a week waiting for a berth. Ports are often congested and ships may have to wait a few days and sometimes longer, for a berth. This gives the crews a break and a chance to catch up on maintenance but can be very boring and of course, it does not make the Charterer happy! We do try to keep the Charterer happy! Once the berth became clear the pilot came out by launch and we went in. Loading started after the usual draft survey and took about 32 hours to load 168 500 tonnes of iron ore. That gives a rate of 5265 tonnes per hour with stoppages. They can load at over 8 000 tonnes per hour (not counting stoppages) so the planning has to be right. During loading (or discharging), monitoring and checking must be continuous, otherwise there could be some embarrassing incidents, like bending the ship or even breaking it in two! It has happened but not to me! To motivate the Deck Officers on cargo watch there is a photo of a ship with a broken back taped to the bulkhead of the cargo office. Meanwhile, the ballast is pumped out and all the storing, bunkering, repairs and crew changes take place. It is a busy time and most of the staff do not get a chance to go ashore. The days of seafarers going to sea to see the world are long gone. But we do see airports!
Tubarao is near the biggish port city of Vitoria north of Rio de Janeiro. Its main export is iron ore and they import coal for the blast furnaces at the local steelworks. While at anchor a friend of mine sailed out on a catamaran that he was delivering to the USA from Cape Town, where he had built it. For the two of us to be in the same port at the other end of the world at the same time is some coincidence! It is his third "build-and-deliver" catamaran.
After completion of loading we sailed for Beilun and Baoshan in China. The course set was a great circle plus a few degrees to take us south around the South Atlantic high pressure area and into the favourable winds and currents to The Cape. We would take stores and change some crew off port limits at Cape Town and then take bunkers at anchor off Singapore. That is a long trek halfway around the world but is a fairly standard voyage for Cape Size bulkers.
The great circle route from Tubarao to The Cape curves south but not as far south as Tristan de Cunha. The idea is to sail the shortest distance and take advantage of the winds and currents so as to make the best speed with the lowest fuel consumption.
We did a good speed in nice weather and arrived off Cape Town's Atlantic coast in daylight to take stores and relieve some of the crew who were due for some leave. The anchorage is close to the Sea Point light house, but not too close, as we had a draft of around 18.00 metres. The Marine and Engineering Supers and the company Buyer came out on a supply boat with the stores. Provisions and spares were loaded using the ship's stores crane, the 'Suits' toured the ship and the off-signers handed over to their relief's. As usual it was all action. I also made a couple of VHF collect calls home and had a chat to my wife and daughters who were just a few miles away over the mountain. So near and yet so far. The action slowed down as the storing was completed and the off-signers climbed down the pilot ladder and boarded the launch. A few waves later and they were on their way home and we were on the way around Cape Point and headed for Singapore and China.
The weather around The Cape can be anywhere between fantastic and foul, it was not called The Cape of Storms for nothing. As it was we had great weather and a flat sea most of the way to Singapore, although there was a tropical cyclone east of Mauritius that I had to check on as they can be nasty. It stayed away fortunately. We passed by west of Mauritius and made for the northern tip of Sumatera, then down the Straits of Malacca to Singapore. We anchored in the Eastern Special Purposes Anchorage, where big ships take bunkers, and waited for the bunker barge. And waited. Eventually it arrived and we took bunkers. A couple of crew members changed, the anchor was heaved up and we sailed. This is prime pirate country so we had double watches and search-lights on to check for suspicious small boats. None were seen. The Singapore Straits are very busy with hundreds of ships passing through or at anchor. It is a real ocean cross-roads.
The passage up to Beilun went well, with some very good daily noon to noon distances due to a strong current. Getting into Beilun is tricky as there is a shallow bar to cross before the vessel gets to the pilot station. We had to cross at high tide to maintain a safe under-keel clearance of two metres. Timing is important. Once over the bar we anchored and picked up the pilot the following day. The plan was to discharge part of the cargo in Beilun and the remainder at Baoshan. This went without a hitch. The crew went ashore in Beilun and went wild over some cheap pirate CD's. Bad move, as the quality was awful. It is only one hundred miles from Beilun to Baoshan and the trip took a pleasant half day. Baoshan is on the Changjiang (Yangtse Kiang River) and is part of Greater Shanghai. (Pop. 16 million/Altitude30ft/9m/9 million bicycles).
Pilotage takes over six hours from the river mouth, Changjiang Kou, to the Baoshan Steel quay. The river is shallow so the pilot does it carefully! Baoshan means Jewel Mountain. That is half the Chinese I know. The other half is technical!
Baoshan to Port Hedland
Boashan Steel is the biggest steel works in China. The officials kept telling me that so it must be true! It is situated upstream of the confluence of the Shanghai River and the Changjiang. We used three gantries to unload so it went fairly fast As most of the iron ore had been discharged in Beilun we sailed after only two days. There was some fog around after getting out of the river and fishing boats gave us the usual hassle. We made good speed south and passed east of Taiwan and west of the Philippines. The junior officers are Filipinos so they were on the VHF radio most of that day! As the course took us through the worlds most infested pirate area the watches were doubled up and other precautions put into place. This is a standard procedure on ships now. The freeboard is around 11.50 m when in a ballast condition so it would take a determined man to climb from a small boat to the deck of the Saldanha! When northbound and loaded the freeboard is much less so the danger of being boarded by baddies goes up.
After passing the Philippines the track was west of Sulawesi through the Makassar Strait. The sea in this area is always flat calm with frequent heavy thunderstorms. The fishing boats are mainly traditional outrigger canoes with sails and outboard motors. There is a constant stream of ships going north or south from Australia to the Far East, mainly bulk carriers but also LNG (liquid natural gas) tankers. A lot of Japan's energy comes from the Dampier gas-field off Western Australia.
Leaving the protected Indonesian Seas we passed through the Lombok Straits and across a short stretch of the Indian Ocean to Port Hedland, Australia. This port was at one time the biggest port in Australia in tonnage terms. They export mainly iron ore as well as manganese and salt. We anchored for a couple of days before going alongside. While there we had some very heavy rain squalls. This was bad news for the salt business as all their evaporated sea water was promptly diluted and this set their production back somewhat. The iron ore business was not affected as it is just rust anyway!
My relief joined here, he had flown down from Thailand where he lives and we went through the usual handover routine before I left the ship late in the evening. The Agent had booked me into an hotel on the beachfront. The Saldanha was due to sail early in the morning so this suited me. The beachfront consists of a few houses, a small yacht club and a couple of small hotels perched on some sand dunes. The best view of all was the Saldanha sailing out of the harbour entrance early the next morning just before I caught the plane to Perth! It is a two hour flight to Perth where I had a five hour wait for the Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, (KLM on the luggage tag) plane. The coffee was good and it was a bottomless cup. The flight to KLM was also somewhere around five or six hours and then there was a good wait there as well. No more coffee! The airport in KLM is very modern and one of the best I have been to. I had a good sleep, in an inside aisle seat, between KLM and Johannesburg (Jo'burg) before the two hour hop to Cape Town and HOME! It had been a long three months!!
Stop Press!! The Cape Size bulk carrier "Treasure" has just sunk off Cape Town. It was on the way from Brazil to China, with a cargo of iron ore, when it developed a leak in the hull. After inspection off Cape Town it was found that there was a 50 square metre hole in the ship's side! It was ordered to move off the coast but sank before it got away. There is now a very serious chance of an oil pollution crisis in Table Bay and the Cape Atlantic seaboard, which are prime conservation areas.. The cause? Dithering by owners, amongst others.
It is about time that safety was taken more seriously, regardless of cost. You can quote me. It seems to me that all these "safety authorities", including the IMO, talk safety but when it comes to actually implementing it they do "another study " or "convene another committee" or the Captain must "sign another piece of paper". We all know that bulk carriers do not have enough reserve buoyancy. It would be a simple matter to build safer ships but no, it costs money to do that!
Stop Press!! I will be joining the "Lion Max" on about 10 August in Los Angeles. It is a container ship trading between Chile, the USA and the Far East. Should be interesting and a pleasant change from the bulk carriers that I have been on for the last few years.
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