Soogy-ing the ship

[JK]

Remember when the ships were actually soogied to remove salt and dirt. The old steamer I worked on was hosed daily to remove soot and carbon. When at the dock, it was religiously washed down with fresh water to remove salt. You don't see this anymore. This picture is an old liner with the crew over the side with the wash buckets.

[Merlyn]

Reckon that crane could be an old Stothert and Pitt? We allways called Soogy the soluble oil used for machining metal, can't recognise you from the photo though.

[The Dieselduck]

Actually we just did that yesterday.
On cruise ships, it was a regular part of daily activities. We had high pressure machine in the engine room, plumb to outlets on deck, and the deck dept was constantly soogeeeeing. The machine would constantly trip and alarm in the control room, what a pain. There is also quite extensive network of staging built into cruise ships now, its somewhat subtle, but if you look closely, the staging is on rails and cover the entire ship side.

[JK]

Soogeeing. The word you never know quite how to spell LOL

[Merlyn]

Seen the gantries running round all the window areas but spray rails? Not seen them. Surely it can't be Soogy as in soluble oil, used to really stink when it went stale in the bottom of the lathe/ milling machine trays.

[Big Pete]

I think Sooji came from Hindustani originally like so many words used at in the British armed forces and Merchant navy, Jildi, asti, decka, jao, avis, arrier, panni, dhobi and indeed ashore, such as Bungalow.

As Martin says a lot of ships now have big high pressure washing machines in the ER and high pressure piping all round the decks for washing down with fresh water, some can inject metered amounts of liquid detergent as well although I am not sure how that complies with MARPOL or Port State Rules.

In Victorian times soojiing was all down by hand with rags and liquid soap or hard block soap was used with a dash of washing Soda, for stubborn dirt "strongers" was used with a dash of Caustic soda. (No gloves then either)
When I came to Sea it was all "Teepol", then various proprietary Chemicasl from Vecom, Unitor etc. Nowadays the detergent supplied by Unitor/Willhelmsens is so good for the environment it won't clean anything so we have gone back to "Fairy Liquid" a well known British brand of domestic washing up liquid.

I remember the soluble oil Merlyn is talking about, a prime cause of skin cancer and dermatitis, I think it has been banned nowadays.
Several European built ships I sailed on in the past used the same soluble oils as a corrosion inhibitor in the cooling systems, never seemed to find favour in the UK or USA. That was banned also, partly because of Health reasons and partly because of MARPOL, dumping tons of emulsified oil into the Bilges every time you did engine work really screwed the OWS.

BP

[JK]

35 years ago Seaclean was the favoured cleaner. It's like that commercial, "we used that shit on everything". (We used to wait until the wind was blowing down on the Navy before giving a quick bilge clearing, JIC. The old steamers always had water in the bilge from the drains.)

[Merlyn]

In the days of no control rooms and open enginerooms my experiences were that there's was more than bilge water present down below. Engineers would do a complete watch without leaving the engineroom at all for any reason leaving gallons of coffee needing to be pumped out? Hence the slang " that's a load of old bilge, " we used to do the upwind pump outs especially if the discharge was above the waterline. And especially where the Royal Navy was concerned.