Tonnage

[j.sabourn]

Talking about reserve buoyancy, when taken a supply vessel sold to the navy for a protection vessel around the Falklands l apart from the trials I was there for a week in the shipyard waiting for the conversion to be completed.I had never even thought about it but obviously the Admiralty had. There is a lot of tank space on a supply vessel for rig water drill water ,mud etc which would be void. These spaces were filled with what I would call ping pong balls of various sizes from normal to football size. The void spaces were filled with these. In the hope that if the ship was holed a certain amount of reserve buoyancy maybe would be retained to keep her afloat. I don’t know if this is normal practice on warships ,maybe those with naval service may be able to answer that one. JS

[happy daze john in oz]

While on the subject, what about bulk carriers?
In Port Melbourne there is a Cement bulk carrier berth which sends out about two ships per week, I often wonder how they would cope with a water leak in the cargo hold.
Dried cement is not easy to move.

Read a story some years back of a ship carrying bulk Rice and the rice got wet, left the ship in a bad condition as the rice expanded.

Bulk Iron Ore if wet can cause problems I am told and coal if spontaneous combustion takes place can be lethal.

[j.sabourn]

All those cargoes and more are well known to mates of ships , if they aren’t then you have imposters in the job John .going into ice up at Port Churchill on the Hudson Bay , it was
usual to carry at least 5 ton of ready mixed concrete down the fore peak store as this would have been the most obvious place of getting ice damage.Bulk carriers as their name implies are built to carry bulk cargoes , if on the more rare occasion of carrying rice in bulk this would be classed as a grain cargo and the ship expected or the hold it was in to fill out with no room for free surface , if there was free surface then she would have to comply the same as other ships with shifting boards , feeders , and bulkheads . Or putting and stowing bagged cargo on top. As said in one post a long time ago bridge duties although important are the easy part of the job and should be Second nature. Cheers JS

[j.sabourn]

#62 Bales of cotton is another one liable to spontaneous combustion , and has to be stowed in a certain manner to ventilate correctly. Carrying motor cars in the drive on and drive off mode for long passages , the holds have to have extractor fans fitted and be able to change the atmosphere of the hold to keep gas free at stated amounts and times. However I found this method due to change of hold temperature did damage to some of the new cars by causing rust , so only paid lip service to the advice rather than fill in damage reports when discharging the same. There are all sorts of different cargoes, iron ore is not just iron ore there are all different types with different water contents, and there are then the concentrates. You dont learn these in 5 minutes , like most things at sea one learns from other peoples experiences as well as your own , you never stop learning. Anyone who thinks they know it all is living in a fools paradise and must have his head up his own backside. I was shocked at the lack of knowledge shown by some in my latter years at sea and in a way pleased to retire. It wasnt only the lack of knowledge people can learn if they want to, but the attitude of couldnt care less that got me. Cheers JS

[Ivan Cloherty]

Bagged rice cargoes are a nightmare as every few tiers of bags you have to build horizontal and vertical ventilation shafts out of bamboo to stop the rice sweating, carried one such cargo from China to Indonesia, the stevedores build the shafts and it is second nature to them and would tolerate any interference on being told how to do it (if you dare!). However come discharge you are left with tons and tons of bamboo and coir matting to dispose of at sea, because port authorities would not let it be landed, they have enough bamboo of their own. But it was an experience watching the expertise shown by the Chinese building these shafts, which logically should have collapsed with weight of cargo on them, but never did.

[Bill Morrison]

#63 & 65. My knowledge of cargo stowage is nil. The mention of rice as a cargo brought to mind an article by Frank C Bowden's SHIPS published in the Thirties I think. Bulk cargos etc. etc.
Grain is a nasty cargo on account of it's liability to shift, but rice is even worse. It has all the disadvantages of grain and others as well, so much so that it is practically never carried in bulk, but is always bag before it is shipped. Left to it's self. rice is very liable to heat and burst into flames and then there is a heavy price to pay. The ordinary way to put out a fire is naturally to pump water into the hold affected, but if this is done with a rice cargo it will swell and burst open the stoutest ship afloat. In order to prevent it heating . an elaborate system of wooden ventilators has to be fitted leading from cowls on deck. which have to be trimmed round to the wind with the least change of it's direction or of the ship's course. It is the extraordinary power of rice in the bursting of it's bonds which causes it to be shipped in none but first-class vessels.
It's strange what your mind can retain but the mention of a cargo of rice brought it back.
Bill

[j.sabourn]

The same when people talk about grain Bill , they assume it as one . They all have different stowage factors and you have to know what they are.you have In General including rice which is classed as grain. Wheat ,Barley , Oats , maize,flaxseed, apart from a few more , then you get the sample ones where the stowage factors are very casual.When you got 4 or 5 different types of grain in one cargo on an ordinary ship , before loading you had to work put first how to fit it all in by fitting out the ship to fit.Today with bulk carriers it is a piece of pzzz compared to what it used to be. JS

[happy daze john in oz]

From one simple statement we have again learned so much.
There is more to shipping than ,any of us realise I think with so many regulations and rules it takes a good seaman to know it all.

[j.sabourn]

Especially the ones to dodge. You don’t put 50 men together in a confined space of a ship for a period of up to 2 years and expect no trouble . Seamen always had to be self contained and self adjusted as necessary just to survive . The laws for seamen are made mostly by landlubbers and get whatever respect they are deemed to deserve. JS

[Ivan Cloherty]

[QUOTE=happy daze john in oz;
There is more to shipping than ,any of us realise I think with so many regulations and rules it takes a good seaman to know it all.[/QUOTE]

John, in life at sea, you never know it all, life is a constant learning curve, a simple statement such as 'your next cargo is a cargo of rice' will throw up numerous questions, including but not limited to stowage factors, temperatures maintained, human grade, animal grade (in case the cook/steward pilfers it, animal grade is poisionuss to humans!), bulk or bagged, care in loading/discharging, human grade rice has to be handled in certain ways, you can discharge bulk grain with any vacuuvators, you can only discharge rice with specially designed vacuuvators, the internal suction turbines have to have different curves, as do the pipes to prevent the husks breaking away from the seeds, I spent some time with VIGAN the Belgium manufacturers in design parameters and temperatures we had to work in when on food aid in West Africa, if the husks are destroyed the rice becomes unfit for human consumption. In addition our bagging machines had to be adapted to handle rice.