What was the worst cargo you ever carried?

[leratty]

My mother always used to make us boys pee on her lemon trees.

[john walker]

1) sacks of raw asbestos in South Africa. knowing now what sort of health time bomb that stuff was.
2) crates of ginger in Mauritius. Which harboured the biggest cockroaches that I have ever seen and infested the accommodation.
3)25,000 live sheep at a time in either Oz or N.Z. I don't think I got over the stink for about a year and made me a vegetarian for about 2years.
4) Bitumen from Trinidad. on a small bitumen carrier trading around the Carribbean, no air conditioning and accommodation temperatures that always seemed to be 100 faranheit.
The above are just some of the s***ty cargoes that we carried on ships that I sailed on. They were negated by the great ports that the cargoes were loaded or discharged in.
It has just occurred to me that I much prefer to remember the good cargoes like whiskey, mars bars, and other consumables that we 'Borrowed from the hatches'

[Louis the Amigo]

Hi shipmates, Hi leratty, An old donkeyman told me years ago rabbits do the same job on lemon trees... I pour gin on lemons...

[John Gill]

not quite relevant to this thread, but i'd like to explode the urban myth about cargos of shoes being stowed left and right in different holds to avoid 'inching'. I loaded and delivered a lorry load of footwear from Northampton to Liverpool docks for the Middle east. The shoes were all boxed in pairs and were loaded as such into one hatch, and NO- none of them found their way to my cab (none of them were my size).
gilly

[Doc Vernon]

As I was just in the Catering Dept. all I can add to this thread is a lot of times the worst cargo (Human) LOL! Was some of the Bloods we got at times! Some right you know whats!
But mainly most were OK!
Cheers

[John Arton]

As John G says shoes always came boxed ready for sale when we carried them on the Beaverfir from London to Canada. Somehow a very nice pair of hand stitched pigskin leather boots magically appeared in my cabin one voyage, have no idea how they came to be there We also used to carry Polish made work shirts which were very nice.
Any grain cargo was a pain as the dust went everywhere and if wetted stunk like crazy, Soya Bean meal being especially foul smelling if it got wet plus it self heated and caught fire when wetted. Phosphate and alumina dust got everywhere and wrecked any machinery and electrical contacts it came into contact with.
On the Beaverfir we also used to regularly carry Canadian Dollars printed by DE La Rues over to Canada, millions at a time.
One summer trip we were due to load frozen strawberries and these were in an unrefrigerated barge alongside waiting to be loaded. By the time the Dockers had their lunch/smoko's they were starting to unfreeze so on loading the ship was covered in strawberry juice leaking from the boxes of unfrozen strawberries. This juice stained everything it touched so the tween deck hatch boards took on a deep reddish tinge. Plymouth gin was another big cargo for us which was nice.
When I moved onto chemical tankers the first couple of times I carried Palm Oil and Coco Nut oil, the smell of it, especially the refined fatty acid Palm Oil, made me feel quite sickly but the other chemicals such as Styrene Monomer and Ethanols I found quite pleasant. The First Chief Officer I sailed with on a Chemical tanker was literally addicted to the smell of Styrene Monomer to such an extent that when stripping tanks he would lie on the deck with his head in the open butterworth hatch, breathing the fumes whilst watching the tank being stripped, this before closed loading/discharging was introduced. God only knows what it did to his long term health but one rather strange side effect that I found of carrying all these chemicals was that I never suffered from colds or flu (still don't) nor any sinus problems.
rgds
JA

[Keith Tindell]

Worst cargo i was with was on the medi run, Baltic Trader, we frequently loaded pumice powder from an Island in the med, was pushed down the mountain by bulldozers, and loaded in sacks by small boats rowed out. Dust got everywhere, food, clothes etc, and itched like mad. Best cargo we loaded, same boat was orangeboom lager for the yankee 6th fleet i Genoa. We must have been short of hatch space, because they even used crew lockers to stow some of it!!!!, KT

[Lou Barron]

Lou do you drink the gin first or pour on straight from the bottle (what a waste

[John Arton]

500 tons of Heineken lager from Amsterdam to the Caribbean on a KNSM charter, not on drop spilled or drank en route. Same trip back loaded100 tons of Bacardi in San Juan P.R. for Nassau, again not a drop passed our lips.
Also in the specials locker, chewing gum and dried peas, open stow, Phillips radio cassette's and stereo systems and shoes, guess what was ravaged by the Dockers in Port au Prince.
This on the Beaverpine on a one off charter from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Bremen to St. Croix, Santo Domingo, Ponce, San Juan, , Kingston and Nassau.
Great run on a one of charter but the super cargo was a pain but very generous with his Genevers gin.
rgds
JA

[Peter F Chard]

Two cargoes come to mind, the first was human cargo and the second was animal -- sheep. I joined the Anshun ( China Navigation Coy ) in Chittagong as Second Engineer for what was to be the last run of the Pilgrim season, Chittagong - Karachi - Jedda and return. We were supposed to carry Pakistani Army officers and troops from Chittagong to Karachi and replace them with pilgrims to Jedda. This ship was licensed to carry 9000 passengers, the GT was 6186 only so not a big ship. They were housed in the tween decks of numbers 2 and 3 holds by stacking a couple of thousand wire weave bed frames and mattresses into all the available tween deck spaces. The foredeck was partitioned from the fo'cstle to the front of the bridge, the port side was set up with field kitchens for cooking the curries and the starboard side with a hundred or so Asian style squat toilets. That was the idea but it did not really in practice -- any left over food simply finished up at the bottom of the hatches and the toilets quickly became blocked up and simply overflowed into the lower holds. The result was that we became infested with Bombay beetles and by the time I joined the ship they were about 1.5 m deep in the lower holds of 2 and 3 hatches, we could not pump bilges and the ship was getting very tender, so much so that the Skipper reported our problems to H/O in Hong Kong. Their response was to say " get fumigated and clean out the holds -- go anywhere except Hong Kong ! Calcutta said they could not tackle such a big job as did Singapore, Belawan, Manila, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. We ended up in Adelaide. They did an incredible job -- the whole wharf was cleared, the fumigators built a huge tent over the ship and used cyanide to fumigate the whole ship for 72 hours. Meanwhile the crew had to rough it in the Dorchester Hotel. Almost 200 skips of dead beetles, each 8 cubic metres, were dumped at the city tip. We went back two weeks later for another fumigation to kill those beetles in the incubation stage at the time of the original fumigation. But those Aussie guys did a brilliant job, I never saw another beetle or rodents of any type during the rest of my time on the ship.

My second bad experience was carrying un-sheared Merino sheep from OZ to HongKong, they were penned on deck but one managed to get out and jumped over the side and guess what -- the rest followed. I can tell you, getting a water sodden Merino out of the sea and back on board the ship took most of the crew most of the day. Never again. Regards Peter in NZ.