We departed La Rochelle at 3:30 on
Sunday morning for St. Nazaire. There was a bit of a westerly coming
in as we made our way out through the approach channel, and Daphne
stubbornly dug her nose into the chop and sent huge sheets of spray
flying in all directions. I had the con with Bart until eight
o'clock, and we fought our way through the drowsiness until the time
came to hit the bunk.
I fell into an uneasy slumber, and was
more dead than awake by the time George gently called from the
doorway an hour and a half later. The alarm buzzer was beeping on
the bridge, and it was my time to shine. At this time the ship was
rolling heavily over to Starboard every few seconds, and when I came
up on the bridge I realized that we'd been hit by a serious Biscayne
squall. The sea had turned an ugly, leaden shade of gray, and
patches of spindrift were skipping from crest to crest. George quite
calmly reckoned that the wind wasn't much more than thirty knots or
so, but the conditions looked alarming to me, especially as he told
me that the wind had only been up for fifteen minutes.
None of the lamps in the alarm panel
were lit, but the buzzer didn't respond to either the reset or off
buttons. I was jabbed by a jolt of concern for my baby, rumbling
steadily away in the engine room, but apparently unhappy about
something. I rushed downstairs and scanned the gauges.
Temperatures: Normal. Oil pressures: Normal. Air pressure:
Normal. As I went through my list, my heart rate slowly settled back
to normal. All the while, we kept rolling fifty-odd degrees over to
Starboard, so that I had to constantly brace myself on the scorching
hot pipes around the main. This is why you keep the engine room
floor clean at all times; If it had been covered in oil, I wouldn't
have had a chance of keeping my footing.
As it turned out, there was an
intermittent fault in the bilge water alarm circuit, so I deactivated
the buzzer (Snip!) and told the bridge crew to keep a sharp eye on
the red light signifying a main engine alarm condition. At this
happy conclusion I suddenly felt the urge to take a leak, so I made
my way down to the port side toilet. There was an awful stench in
the air, and the whole area was fantastically dirty. Too tired to
give a fuck, I simply took my piss standing up, as opposed to my
custom of sitting down when the sea is up. Thank God for that, or I
would have had my first surprise enema. The toilet slurped, gurgled
and without further warning spewed its contents forth in a deluge of
flying shit that reached at least a couple of feet above the bowl.
Applying my engineering mind to what
was essentially a hygiene problem, I concluded that the waves
slamming us on the port side created a pressure spike in the pipe,
with said spectacular results. Oh well. I should probably see about
freeing up that frozen valve so that we can shut it while at sea.
Exhausted and disgusted, I stumbled back to my bunk and
unsuccessfully tried to get a nap before it was my time back at the
con. On the bridge for the final leg into St. Nazaire, I received
the news that the GPSes had failed yet again. Same symptoms as last
time – all of them had suddenly lost their signal. This gave me a
bit of execise with the little Raymarine back-up radar, using
ERBL/VRM to plot a more or less accurate track until the GPSes
magically came back on line.
The harbor approach was somewhat
tricky, as the ocean swell surging into the dredged channel conspired
with the two knots of tidal current to make the autopilot near
useless for maintaining a steady track over ground. Still, we made
it without incident, and I handed the con over to The Man to go
through the lock and to our assigned berth. That part went smooth as
silk, even the lock certainly wasn't too big for us. In the picture
(thanks, Gwen!), you have Bart and myself grinning at the clearance.
In an instant we transisted from the noise and commotion of passage
making to the surpreme calm of a ship on the dock, the generator
quietly purring away in the engine room.
St. Nazaire is perfect for this month of maintenance. It's a seriously industrial little town, with a major shipyard servicing the big cruise liners, and it has everything you might need to repair a ship. It's also working class to the bone, and I'll have no problem fitting in with the locals. To top it all off, there are several HUGE German submarine bunkers in town, which look perfect for exploration. Look forward to an illustrated update if I find the time for that.
(Note the 20-odd thousand horsepower MAN diesel abaft of the two tugs)
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