Blue Mondayh

I thought I knew what hard work was. Boy was I mistaken. Today I spent about 7 hours scraping not skid material from the engineering deck. The deck is made up of 2’ by 2’ heavy aluminum panels that cover various pipes, hoses and wiring. The panels are normally slippery so the glue this non stick material on them. They changed there mind and now want to paint it with non skid paint. I used a razor blade in a holder to try and scrape this crap up. I was difficult I broke one of the tools. I eventually learned that you need to break off the corners of the razor blade so its not so wide. Then you start scrapping any way you can. Since it’s a floor in an machine area, there is oil and grime everywhere. There are also hundreds of nicks in the floor and your tool gets stopped by every one of those nicks. It was unbelievably hard and tedious but I made it. Someone else had done a little of it earlier so that helped.

What makes the job more difficult is that one of the generators is always running so its incredibly noisy and pretty warm. Fans keep the air moving but its still no place you want to be. I wore ear plugs and ear muffs today do try and stop some of the noise. I really don’t like being around all that machinery when its running but its just part of the job.

I had my first night watch last night. I was woken up at midnight and had to be on duty until 3:30. Basically I had to crawl down into each pontoon and make sure no water was coming in. I also checked the generator and a few gauges, the ice machine and the chiller. You do that once every hours but it only takes about 10 minutes for each round. Obviously its pretty hard to stay awake in the middle of the night. I found some yogurt to snack on the help pass the time. I have watch again on Wednesday and I think I’ll have my computer ready so I can mess around on it to pass the time. That assumes they don’t have duties for me.

Speaking of duties, the work seems to never stop. We are working 7 days a week in port with only the evenings being free. This is grueling.

My free internet isn’t working tonight so its hard to say when this will get posted.