Ship of the year - headache of the year

[JK]

T
Road Diesel in BC is low sulphur adn weighs in a B5 or a mere 5% bio-diesel.

Cheers,

I stand corrected. I was heading back east as it was coming in, but understood it to be all diesel sold in the province.

[jimmys]

I have just checked the diesel pump where I fill my car and it is 2.5% bio and is an ESSO pump. I am told in some supermarket it is up to 7% bio. This is the limit for a large number of cars and voids the warranty.
I have just checked my wee weather station and it is 14 degC at the moment. Clear and sunny with jet vapour trails in the sky. I dont think I will bother checking my diesel for freezing.
If the tug has been swamped and sea water entered the bunkers, the dissolved salt emigrates to the bunkers. You can remove water but the sodium in the dissolved salt is difficult. It will wreck the Cats.
The Kulluk gererators are wrecked and some spaces are flooded. One fuel tank is blowing at the moment but no leakage so far.

regards

[offshoresnipe]

I have once again learned much from this forum and it has sparked my intersted even more in leaning all I can about how to get good fuel to the engines, thanks for all the great information.

With that said back to the mess at hand!
The one thing that I find here in the USA, is the press has seemed to loss sight of just how she ended up on the rocks. As each day passes we seem to hear less and less about the Chouest vessel that started this mess.
As someone who has sailed in these waters on a ocean tug boat, (128 ft.) I am still hard pressed to understand what happened. I have sailed in the winter throughout Alaska, fueled in Dutch Harbor, Deadhorse, Anchorage, Kodiak and other garden spots. I have loaded fuel on the cargo barge in Seattle that we were towing north with us in warm weather and then had it sit in the barge for 40 or more days, as we sailed all over Alaska, then when it was time to head home I would pump this fuel to the bunker tanks on the tug, and fuel tanks that supplied the generators on the barge which are used to power the reefers. We carried fuel in the deck barge tank 40,000 gals due to fuel is cheaper in Seattle then Alaska, so bring a little extra with you. The vessel I was on had Cat 3608 for mains and 3408 for gens, prior to departing any port to cross the gulf of Alaska and head for Seattle which I knew was going to suck, I always changed all filters in the fuel system, cleaned the Racors, and had been cleaning my fuel while sitting at the dock, making sure the day tanks had good clean fuel, I would clean the F/O purifier every other day, drain day tanks and last but not least I would check all sounding tube plugs knowing once we got into open water no way would I be able to get on deck. Our vessel would have a good 4 feet of green water always on the stern deck maybe more if I had pressed up the tanks. I found myself more then once getting up out of my rack when off watch to take a walk through the engine room just to check the gages, racors, drain a little water off the tanks, etc, pray to the gods and throwup, helped me sleep a little better.
I know the Aiviq is by far a much more high tech vessel then the tug I was on, and sailed with a Chief, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4 QMED's, so how could they lose all four engines and lets not forget breaking the tow wire or conection more then once, thanks to the deck crew.
I just feel that it was a lack of good engineering and deck skills is all. I have sailed with many US licensed engineers and they will be sure and let you know what kind of a ticket they have, and how soon they will have the sea time to upgrade, but when it comes to very basic stuff they are clueless. I could go on and on with more then one story of complete incomentence I have been witness to in the enginroom by guys with unlimited tickets.
What I am driving at is there has been a ton of good information just in this post started last week, and in other posts through out the years I have been reading them. We need to use it to better ourselfs, I think no matter what the outcome will be (which we will never know) the crew in the engine room just did not have the training, experince or give a shit factor to know the plant inside and out, or the just the plain balls to say "hey I'm not sure how this works", the one thing I have found here in the USA is that many of the mariners just care about that big pay check and have very little pride in the engineroom or vessel. I offen think about the book "Left Handed Monkey Wrench", in which the author a engineers engineer said "it is not what you do in front of others that counts, it is what you do when no one is around that really matters.

Keep the great information coming in this forum. I enjoy reading it and am learning all the time!
About the only good thing so far is Shell had the brains to hire Smit Salvage!

[JK]

They quite simply could have got buggy fuel and spread it through bad fuel management.
Rough weather exacerbates the problem and the filtration is overwhelmed very quickly. It can be so bad that someone would be changing and cleaning filters as fast as they could. It doesn't take long to blow through the ship's entire stock of filters in a bad case of contamination.
I wonder what would have happened if that buckle hadn't broken? Would the ship and rig be on another beach, side by each?

[Wyatt]

I agree with "snipes" on the majority of the points he made. I too find it hard to comprehend why such a bad fuel problem could overtake such a modern vessel. But then I would have to agree with what has been mentioned about being overwhelmed by a bug contamination and running out of filters. I too have spent 30 years on an assortment of different types of tugs and engine arrangements all in the Arctic, and have never experienced a complete fuel crapshoot. I was on a dual fuel transport ship working in the Caribean back in the early eighties, and we had a heavy fuel ingestion of bugs, and it was a nightmare. We had a fine wire mesh style fuel filters and these were plugging up as fast as we could clean then. We had no choice but to continue to clean and burn out this crappy fuel, spent hours and hours, days and days cleaning these damn filters. The purifiers got plugged to the point where the bowls would not separate for the auto cleaning to function, and this was a truly ugly situation, these friggin Alpha's were not built to be dimantled to be cleaned easily, but let me tell you, we became pretty proficient in dismantling these pieces of crap. Talking about purifiers, the new style of Alpha's on the Sir Wifred Laurier actually inject water into the clean output fuel discharge so as to check the water pick-up sensor. This water will accumulate in the running day tank and will if not drained every watch, accumulate and will become ingested into the main engine, which happened I am told, and blew out quite a number of injectors on one of the main engines. These new style purifiers are pure crap, you must rely on a computer panel with numbers flashing. I much prefer the old style purifier with the see through glass and the water output dump on the side, something that is tangible, something I can see immediatly and know what is happening, and something where a hammer will not screw it up. Rebuilding one of these new units is quite a pain in the ass, with all the special lubricants, sealants, spray on lubricant film, all done in a cronological order with seals, o-rings, gaskets, teflon seals, one mistake and everything has to be redone again, newer but not better, in my humble opinion.
As too the busted tow line, I too wonder what happened. In 30 years towing in the Arctic, had only two mishaps with a broken towline. Does seem to be a seamanship mishap. Something this large must have had a surge protector on the towline, wonder if we will ever find out what happened. Hopefully one of the engineroon crew will read this blog and let us all know what actually happened.

[JK]

and further to the contamination, if they have glycol in the central cooling system, that shite will take out fuel pumps within a few strokes if the fuel is contaminated by a leak.


This is a good read http://www.adn.com/2013/01/04/2742726/xg.html

Way down to the bottom there is this:

The afternoon of Dec. 31, the tow line to the Aiviq again broke. By then, the second towline was to the Alert, a powerful tugboat borrowed from its normal oil spill prevention duties in Prince William Sound. But the Alert's engines began experiencing problems and it couldn't hold the Kulluk alone. A command team in Anchorage ordered the Alert to let loose its tether so its crew wouldn't be in danger.

[JK]

No signs of external leakage. Still nothing on cause of the loss of propulsion. We will have to wait for the USCG report on that.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-575 ... ar-alaska/

[offshoresnipe]

She is off the rocks and towed to a safe harbor for inspection. Will we ever know what happened?
I can see Shell pushing the US goverment to change the Joens Act for drilling, this way they can bring in crews who have worked in the Arctic and have experince, it is all about money. GCapt forum has been having some lively discussion over the Aiviq.