Ship Update

Saturday I started writing support letters to send back to the States, since I am virtually out of money. During this attempt, I decided that it would probably be best if I just started staying at work a hour longer each day and working on letters and updating ye ole blog with ship related information.

The ship is coming along nicely. A couple of weekends ago, we ran the main engines and clutched in. Everything went really well. It was nice to feel the ship vibrating. Last Monday, I had a company come in with 34 tons of weights, two tirfors, two come alongs and two load cells to run a test on the container system. It was a success and the containers moved with very close to the amount of force that my calculations showed. A decisive victory.

Friday we finish installing a new oily water separator and I made a drawing of it and sent it to Bureau Veritas for approval. I've sent a few other drawings this past week to Bureau Veritas. The biggest item we have to overcome before we can leave the yard is certification. All of the mechanical systems have to be certified as well as all of the machinery. Much of this is already taken care of, but there are still some lingering anomalies to be resolved. One of those is my newest task.

The sprinkler system needs a bigger pump. That means it needs a bigger motor. That means it uses more power. That shouldn't be a problem, except that our emergency generator is now too small and we have to provide a new means of emergency power for this pump. One pump. So I'm working on figuring out all of the regulations for the enclosure of a second emergency generator up on the weather deck of the ship (the top part). I spent all day looking through classification society books and writing notes about what we need and determining what kind of boundaries we have to have in the event of a fire. It's really tedious work.

There are only a few big issues remaining before we can leave for Africa. The fire detection system still needs some work. They thought that they had finished it last week, but this weekend a few faults showed up, so they have to sort that out. Once that happens the ship yard will remove their fire alarm system, which is a few thousand meters of cabling running throughout all of the passage ways, and we will be able to close all of the doors.

Another big thing that's in progress is vacuum system. I organized a test of this system two weeks ago and we found major problems. The vacuum system is the system that makes the toilets flush and operates the sinks, showers, and drains. Serv Vac, the company that installed the system, has run some tests and they think that they have fixed the problem. We are going to test the system a few more times and hopefully agree with them that the toilets do, in fact, flush.

Other than those problems, we're ready to head out to sea. I hope that they get sorted in a timely manner...