FlyingFortress

I think in these days of information at your fingertips literally now with smart phones people tend to forget that Mother Nature was not included in the software development team. 😩

Not in Broadland but it works just fine in Yarmouth Harbour. You just have to ignore which way the tide is actually running 😳 I am not jesting it is reasonably common to visually see the tide ebbing when the water level is actually rising.

What 😳 You mean Look East reported it 😳 That meant leaving Norwich and acknowledging there are other places in East Anglia Noooooo don't believe it. 😩

Bet Purdy has been well spoilt. 🐕

Blimey New pants please. 😥 Seriously just goes to show how brave these folks are that do this. 👍

Tidal prediction is not an exact science. I am led to believe that Aweigh uses tidal harmonics which gives a correction to to printed in advance Tide Predictions so should be better the printed ones as it takes into account the trends for the previous days. Coming into a Berth at London Gateway Port on an Ultra Large Container Ship at High Water myself and the second pilot discussing if the tide had turned or not both of us equipped with state of the art I Pads with a navigation function running and a very expensive precision docking computer (PPU or Portable Pilot Unit) The Captain asked how we knew if the tide had turned or not and we both simultaneously pointed to the Tugs on swing buoys that had not swung yet. So simple answer, Look out of the blooming window 🤣

I have mentioned on another thread that at the moment I am laid up with my back out. Nothing to do but grin and bear it until the inflammation goes down.😫 Old seagoing injury that flares up now and again. Now as many of you know I do have issues with the way we are not allowed to voice some views on here as they are deemed too much for a public discussion forum. I have always disagreed with this and the early controversy on this thread highlights that fact . I did not make my feelings known. As I have had nothing to do for the last couple of days I have been looking at a Seagoing Forum and have been reading some threads related to a former company I worked for. The forum is populated by current and former seagoing staff and obviously that particular one by current and former company employees. One thread was about a fatal accident that had only just happened ( there are many about ones that happened in the past). Obviously members discussed possible causes of the accident where a Young Man died in the pump room of a tanker. There was much speculation about what he was doing in there alone and at the time it was not clear if death had been due to being overcome by gas or it had been a fall . There was much discussion about Pump Room safety and could there be measures put in place to prevent this accident in future. Unfortunately this young man is not the first or probably the last person to die in a Pump Room of a Tanker. Around 20 posts into the discussion there appeared one from The Mother of the unfortunate young man IIRC 20 years old. She was disgusted that people could be so callous in discussing his death and even inferring that he may have been partly to blame. That was not IMHO the drift of the thread but of course it was a possibility that he had made an unauthorized entry into a hazardous space. What I am getting at is that bereaved families will scour the internet looking for information and will jump on every little piece of information available. This grieving Mother had stumbled on a Professional Mariners forum and found a lot of speculation based on very little facts but the incident was being discussed with a view to improving safety. It makes me reconsider my postings on The Fatal Accident at GTY . Although my feelings about a systematic cavalier attitude to safety have not changed I will be more guarded in my postings in future.

During the dredging of The Sunk Deep Water Route prior to the opening of London Gateway a massive brand new dredger turned up on its maiden voyage. Due to its size and deep draft when loaded 12.3m 😳 It had to have a pilot on board 24/7 so we were doing 24 he stints on board. Now all the dredgers had to have an ordinance expert on board usually ex Royal Engineers, and always known as Dangerous Dave. They had a bit of a cavalier attitude to ordinance and would tend to juggle things like hand grenades saying it's nothing 😥 I had only finished my stint around 48 hours previously when they pulled in one of the drag heads ( dredging pipes) with something large attached to the end of it . So the call goes out to call Dangerous Dave. DD sauntered up the deck whistling to himself until he sees what it is, goes pale and mutter's all sorts of expletives. They had picked up 1000kg parachute mine 😳😥 Related to me by DD on a later trip he told me he had realised this was pretty serious and phoned his boss who told him to cut off the drag head and dump it. This did not go down too well with the ships crew as this thing would cost many millions of Euros to replace so eventually the RN was called and the ship stripped of all but essential crew and anchored in The Sunk inner anchorage with a 3 mile exclusion zone later reduced to one mile when I pointed this out to our Harbour Master team that this would shut the Port as the Sunk Deep Water Route ran closer than 3 miles to the offending dredger. On the second day of the incident I was tasked to bring in one of our regular Hamburg Sud large container ships for Tilbury. German Flag , German Officers. Whilst transiting The SDW route Sunk VTS made its regular broadcast about the exclusion zone. The very young and bright Second Mate asked me what this was all about. Now trying to be diplomatic l explained that a few years ago our Grandfather's had a bit of a disagreement and this was something left over. Now The Captain had been listening in on all this while sitting at the rear of the Bridge now piped up. " It's OK Pilot, you can keep it, we don't want it back". Who says The Germans have no sense of humour 🤣 After some difficulty The Navy removed the offending object and carried out a controlled explosion 💥 We were living about 5 miles inland from Brightlinsea at the time and it shook our windows 🫣

I will hazard a guess that they still are. 😳 There is still an awful lot of unexploded ordnance around. Just imagine what it must be like for German Cities such as Hamburg 😥

When we did a Capital dredge on the Thames to deepen The Sea Reach Channel off Southend from around 11m to 14m to allow deeper ships access to The new London Gateway Container Port around 2013 they kept a running total of ordinance that was picked up by the dredgers. The final tally was around the 130 mark. Now considering The Sea Reach is about 10 miles long and 400m wide that is a lot of bombs. 😥

Not just older ships. The Monkey Island is where the magnetic compass lives on modern ships as well. There is a periscope arrangement above the wheel that allows the helmsman to see the magnetic heading. As part of your Masters ( Captains) Oral exam ( the ,hardest part compared to the writtens ,because you had no idea what the examiner was going to ask you and if you were not careful you could head down a rabbit hole) the first part was being left in a room with an outside view with a magnetic compass binnacle on wheels that had its correction magnets buggered up and you had to successfully do the calculations and then physically correct the compass. A very strange subject that had really no comparison in any other academic field. It was really a penny drop moment. You could struggle for weeks thinking it would never make sense then Bingo 😃 Sorry thread drift but I am still layed up with my back out at the moment.😥

Blooming heck. Upside down. AGAIN 🤣

Wow Thanks for that Tobster I don't know why but I had her length down as 380m. As you say at 500m dwarfs the Container Ships I used to park for a living. Any more you can post without breaking confidentiality would be appreciated 👍

During my musings earlier about The Thialf I was wondering how she compared to the PS . Just as well I didn't use her original name I must say that thing is some beast. IIRC she is almost 400m long so is pushing the big Container Ships for being the largest moving object on the planet May I ask what is your job on board and maybe you could chip in with some of your tales and possibly pictures on this thread. I remember her fitting out at Rotterdam prior to her being fully in commission and speaking to some British guys working on her. Found it hard to believe what they said it could do , but it does

Great pictures Vaughan. Keep them coming. Always good to see it from the other side. Only got to visit a few mostly when paying off offshore. One I remember distinctly was going up to a Dutch " Nobel" jack up that we had been working. My company had bought 2 ships from Smit Lloyd and the first one had gone straight back on charter out of Den Helder doing the same job much to the disgust of the Dutch. We had experienced a load of problems discharging bulk (powder, cement and the like) to this particular rig and we suspected ( no we knew) that they were trying to get us a bad reputation. We had no problems with any other rigs. This had left to several heated exchanges over the VHF which led to us giving the Barge Engineer step by step instructions on how to load bulk. As we knew he was deliberately sabotaging the process we led him down a dark alley that proved our point. We successfully pumped bulk after that. When I payed off I had to do the basket transfer to the rig to await the helio . When I was waiting in the radio shack this enormous Dutchman walked in and asked if I was off that Supplier ( Dutch slang for Supply Vessel) as he was the barge engineer. I replied yes I am The Captain with much trepidation. He smiled and said "fair play" and shook my hand .

Yeah a lot of our crews were ex fishing/ trawling. In the early days they were the only ones who had the ship handling skills that manoeuvring at a platform/rig required. The deck crew were also the only ones daft enough to work up to their waist in water getting washed around the decks in rough weather. I distinctly remember one sunny afternoon in Lowestoft having a beer on deck with my crew after work when I was Mate , there were 2x Hull trawlermen and one from Lowestoft ( a Brummie ) and almost wetting myself with laughter listening to them.

Don't know if this is going to work or not but as I put my back out this morning I did think I will be doing any scanning for a while so I will try to post a link to The Thialf. https://www.google.com/search?q=thialf+vessel&oq=thialf&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0i512l7.11578j0j7&client=ms-android-ee-uk-revc&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8&chrome_dse_attribution=1 Reading a bit. The biggest crane in the world now can lift 20,000t Above I said the Thialf could lift 14,000t and IIRC at that time the biggest was The Micropiri 3000 that could theoretically lift 16,000t The lift I was on was the topsides of The Britannia Platform in the North Sea at 10,500t . There was a Channel 4 documentary made at the time called The Mission or something similar, My Ship The Englishman is shown several times and although I am not shown my voice is on several radio communications. This record was broken within a year by The Micropiri

The last picture of The Spider deck on The Leman platform was one I saw many many times as I was on charter to Shell for many moons

On the deck of the Maersk B class (Boulder Beater, Battler etc) is a smallish anchor, I would guess 15 to 20 tonnes perfectly capable of holding the crane barge in Southern waters and the surface buoy , the big yellow thing.

Great pictures Vaughan I can't identify the semi sub crane barge but 800t lifting capacity was certainly around at that time , I would suspect the capacity of that barge was much larger but looking back the numbers can seem unbelievable.I will try to scan later a picture of one of The Thialf that I worked with in the 90's at the time she was the second largest in the world with a theoretical lifting capacity of 14000t . While I was working her she did the at the time world record single lift of 10500t The towing tug looks like a Maersk B class the same as in the picture with the personal basket later. The supply vessel recieving the waste skip is either The Stirling Dee or Stirling Esk that are still in service in the North Sea as safety stand by vessels. One of them is Called Putford Terminator and had a nasty accident last year when a very large wave put the bridge windows through, the duty officer was thankfully making a cup of tea at the back of the bridge when it happened and was not badly injured. The other large AHTS I should know but can't think at the moment.

Not even a mention on BBC local news this evening. Hardly surprising as it didn't happen in Norwich

2 meals for £16 at the Bridge at Acle 12-3 then 5 to not sure. Limited menu but should be enough to tempt most. Just back from there. 2 X cod and chips 2 X liver and bacon. And very nice too.

Never got past Molly's in Yarmouth or the FBI in Gorleston 😳 Mind you we were a bit posh when on Shell Lowestoft and we used to skip The Bank Stores and wander up to The Commadore at Oulton. Did sometimes frequent The Nobs and Snobs but only with the Lifeboat crew until they opened The Hut at Corton. A converted public toilet 😳 Yes really Simple Sailor me. 😁🍺😁 Never had a sports car either. It was big coupés for me. Audi Quattro and Jaguar XJS 🤣

Never worked The Rough field but one of my Ships did for a long time before I joined it. Cumbria Service. Although it's in my discharge book as Master I never actually worked The Cumbria as it was only a delivery job to drydock. I was Mate on there for around 2 years. The famous story on there was the Chief Engineer bump starting the Starboard Engine. It was always rumoured to be possible but as far as anyone knew never been done. But needs must when the air starter on that engine failed. They took the ship out of Yarmouth on Port engine only then went to full power with the Starboard Prop de clutched and windmilling. Put fuel on and clutched in and the momentum of the windmilling prop turned the engine over enough to allow it to start 👍 Not being an engineer I don't know how they managed the shaft brakes. Must have disabled them I suppose 😳

Don't suppose any of you remember a series on the TV called Roughnecks? Would have been early to mid 90's and about the crew of a drilling rig. It started when I was on leave and when I went back to sea we were servicing a Rowan Drilling Rig. We used to tease the crew on the radio that we knew what life was like up there as we had been watching Roughnecks. I even got to calling the crane op Archie after the character in the series. One of the plot lines involved this big rufty tufty Scottish crane op finding a bunny rabbit in some drill casing (pipes) and for the remainder of the series he carried it around tucked into the neck of his overalls. We started having a break regularly at the time it came on so we could go and watch it and we would then discuss it afterwards. What you do on a long stint at the controls.🤣 Anyway when back in Yarmouth I asked Mrs FF to see if she could find a stuffed rabbit which she did. The next time we had casing to discharge we put the stuffed rabbit in a box and put him in a section of casing with a note saying his name was Archie and he ate Barites ( a drilling powder). Apparently the crane op carried this stuffed rabbit around tucked into his overalls for the rest of the hitch. What platform were you on Vaughan? I probably brought your supplies out.