One of the cleanest Engine Rooms I sailed on was the worst from an Engineering point of view the ER crew had been trained to spend all their time cleaning and painting, half the machinery didn't work properly, but that wasn't considered important, the Engine Room had to be clean and freshly painted to pass Port State Control, doing maintenance would have made a mess so it wasn't done.
BP

Hence my earlier phrase " overhauled with a spray gun " ie just looks good. BS job.

Yes, when I read the article I had the same thought. Paint covers a lot of shite.

Back in the '60s, I sailed in one of the 6 tank landing craft, Mk 8, powered by 4 Paxman 12 TPM engines. We had done a 3 month stint on the run to St Kilda (a rock in the middle of the Atlantic!) and arrived back in the home base of Portsmouth on a Friday morning with 2 main engines and one genny down. We looked forward to a weekend off, then turn to on Monday tearing the machinery apart. Friday afternoon, word came aboard that the CO, Southern Command was visiting the Regiment on Monday and wanted to tour an LCT.......and we were the only one in port!

So the Chief, a guy I greatly admired, set a weekend schedule with paint and polish and by Monday, everything in the machiney spaces gleamed with new paint, every copper pipe sparkled, burnished brightly. When the General came aboard, he admired the shiny stuff, but asked "does it work?"

The Chief bristled, stood up to his full 5' 6" and said "Second, start an engine!" Diesel Des reached over to the nearest engine (which worked, of course, it had all been rehearsed) and started it, revving it loudly. This was well before ear defenders and a screaming 12 cylinder Paxman is quite loud. The General was duly impressed, nodded, then left the engine room.

The Chief gave us the next day off, then we turned to ripping the machinery apart. Moral of the story is really an Army adage, "Bullshit baffles brains!"

Good one, well used saying, still holds true to this day and is used over here regularly. It still works after all these years.

A certain government ship was tasked to convey government officials across the Halifax for the G8 conference. It was hurriedly painted from the helicopter deck down the port side where the officials would be escorted from the helicopter to the gangway. It looked great in that area.

It is amazing that not only did they find it, recover it, now they are taking information off of the box.
Hopefully there will be a meaningful outcome to this.



https://gcaptain.com/nstb-26-hours-of-i ... faros-vdr/

NTSB opened their docket on the accident:

http://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/hitli ... XTSEARCHT=



http://www.wokv.com/news/news/local/nts ... iga/ntGkb/

More from NTSB, seems the old man was a bit autocratic "Master before God."

http://maritime-executive.com/article/n ... idge-audio

counterballasting a flooding situation....dicey , is it not?

I know that ballasting during cargo operations on the OBO I worked on, was tricky. And that was against the wall.

Haven't read the details yet; but,
Counter ballasting a flooding...Free surface effect is a real thing...

And the right way to pump the Ballast is counter intuitive...

BP

Big Pete wrote:And the right way to pump the Ballast is counter intuitive...

BP

Reading your post it struck me that I can't ever really remember the instruction on ballasting for flooding. Maybe we were....
Our biggest concern and were taught how to deal with, was ice on the uppers and the resulting list. Same counter intuitive ballasting.

Yeah it goes against what your gut would yell ya.

Just to clarify what we mean by counter intuitive,

You add ballast to the low side of the ship, to lower the centre of Gravity, and reduce the Free Surface effect in the low side tanks. If you add Ballast to the High side and try to correct the list, you are liable to flop right over in the opposite direction to the original list.

BP