Gulf Ice Video

[JK]

We left Beldune in Dec 88, it was 10*c in the ER, taken forward of the main engine. I was wearing insulated coveralls on watch. Less then 20 hours later, we hit the Gulf Stream and temperature was in the 30s, then we hit GOM and it was in the 40s. My fat, little body is not designed for that kind of temperature swing. LOL .

[Merlyn]

How weird to see people walking alongside a ship under way, never seen anything like it, ever time I look at ice in my gin glass I shall, from now on think of all you fellers amongst it all. Cheers!

[D Winsor]

Early in my career on the Coast Guard Icebreaker Labrador we were breaking out a harbour on the north coast of Newfoundland we got stuck on a pressure ridge. While the Captain was maneuvering the engines at full power astern to come off the ridge, a kid walked out on the ice beside the ship and called out to Captain who was standing on the Bridge Wing "Come astern on 'er Old Man she'll come off"

[Merlyn]

Blimey, we have a saying over here, when bragging in the pub about sea trips of rough weather, the bigger the gin, the bigger the waves , but what's your equivalent saying over there ?

[JK]

LOLOL Dave, one of the fellows showed me a picture of a fishing boat drug out on the ice in one of the outports. A CG ship was due in to break the harbour out and that fellow was all set.

[The Dieselduck]

I think your thinking of the ice class drill rig, Kulluk, which was towed by the Aivik, for Shell. For some reason I seem to have read that they have taken the rig to asia for scrapping which raised my eyebrows, that's a pretty unique rig that's been around forever, why scrap it now?

[JollyJack]

When the Kigoriak was breaking ice out of Mackindley bay at the start of the season, she was confronted by a polar bear, up on his hind legs..."YOU SHALL NOT PASS!".......a polar bear is no match for a 14000 ton icebreaker though.

[JK]

I looked that up Martin out of curiosity, the Kulluk was sent to China a year ago for scrapping. It must have been damaged more they thought in the grounding. Or maybe they knew about the oil downturn?

[Max Oiltemp]

The Terry Fox was built by Beaudril in Vancouver. It now is in the CG fleet after being leased for 2 years in 92' the bought outright.

Wow! A blast from the past in this thread

IIRC, Beaudril had 4 ships of their own up there - the two big boys were the Terry Fox and Kalvik; their smaller brothers were the Ikaluk and Miscaroo. One of each class was built in Canada, the other in Japan - as I recall, there were some major differences in quality control at the beginning. Ikaluk and/or Miscaroo would fit their bows into the two notches on our stern and push us through the ice field (a very bumpy ride is was, too - especially if they were in a hurry - and they always seemed to be in a hurry!)

I remember watching Kalvik break out one spring - she had been backed up against a barge at Herschel Island all winter. There were more than a few spectators when the dark smoke started pouring from her stacks; I'm sure I could hear those turbos winding up. A few seconds later, she slid majestically forward and away from the barge as if that ice were styrofoam slabs!

The other memory I have is the rumble and whine of an approaching vessel penetrating the heavy fog. It got louder and louder until finally, at about 100 ft., this enormous orange hull loomed out of the mist and thundered by, shovelling great slabs of ice as she went. 'Twas the Robert Lemeur.

Regards,
Max
(Geopotes IX, Geopotes X, Arctik Kiggiak - Lo, those many years ago...)

[JK]

Blimey, we have a saying over here, when bragging in the pub about sea trips of rough weather, the bigger the gin, the bigger the waves , but what's your equivalent saying over there ?

Usually what you have is the icebreaker engineers doing exactly what we are doing here, just talking about what they saw. The plants were pushed to their limit and then some with some spectacular results. Meanwhile, people who weren't there are rather shocked.

I heard the Ikaluk and Miscaroo went to the North Seas, now that must have been a roller coaster ride!

We blacked out the Terry Fox one afternoon, the generators were acting up. We didn't catch it in time, but I called the bridge and told them we were going dark. The Captain told me that evening it was the first time that engineers had ever told him before the blackout it was going to happen. We just happened to be in the MCR when all hell broke loose which gave us about 15 seconds to react uselessly LOL.


The most amazing thing was if you shut the engineroom lighting off on some of these ships, was seeing the exhaust gases pulsing through the manifolds when you were in heavy ice.


It is the only place you could beat and pound for a watch in heavy ice and go backwards 3 miles from where you started.

[JK]

This the Louis on the dock.

Here is the Arctic, light ship at the Chenxi Shipyard in China, sshown on their webpage:

[Merlyn]

Just finally worked it out why you fellows love crunching through all that ice, JK gave the game away when he said how he prefers a lockup in the ice with the ship still. After much consideration and thought as to why in the world anyone could like the low temps and skidding around in a permanent white world I see from the videos sent to me of people walking alongside the ship that the conclusion I draw is therefore that perhaps you go home for dinner. Can't really think of anything else to say.

[D Winsor]

Here are a couple of pic's I took while steaming in the Ice at night on Lakes Michigan and Huron this winter using the 'High' and 'Low' Beam headlights to find a route through the ice

[Merlyn]

How bizarre, what do you do when the headlights need adjusting at night? Looks like a mast head jobby to me, spanners in a hot water bucket as opposed to an ice bucket required for a furnace entry. You must be ahead/astern continually, hopefully bridge controlled engineroom, seems unnatural all round to me. How can you plan a trip, how long can it take, we say as long as a piece of string you must say depends on how thick is the ice?

[Revolver]

The office gives the cargo destinations and assumes it takes about the "normal" amount of time...
Then you get delayed in the ice...

I was sailing winter 2013 December and the run was supposed to be a 4 day trip to pick up cargo and drop it off. We got stuck in ice all the way up the sea way at various places etc. So about 3 weeks later we complete the run and tie up the ship for the winter. It was a headache.
So many times did I have an elevated heart rate having to deal with sea water pressure dropping to 0.