Ballast water

[John Arton]

All vessels have to have a ballast water management plan and ballast water treatment equipment is required for vessels trading between different oceans/areas of the world. This is to prevent the transfer of waterborne species from one area to another that could lead to destruction of native marine life.
A Korean ship builder and designer are working on plans for ballast free or minimal ballast discharge, feeder container ships.
Would have been nice to have been on ballast water free vessels when I was Mate as some of those ships, getting all seagoing ballast out and tanks stripped whilst at the same time loading at around 15000 + tons per hour on bulkers was a nightmare.
Rgds
J.A.
https://container-news.com/joint-dev...rean-partners/

[Bill Morrison]

Think of it John before water ballast, stones, scrap iron etc. When building a new quay where the shipyard was the dredger brought up cannon barrels and the only explanation they could think of was ballast. I can't remember what became of them.
Bill

[happy daze john in oz]

Went to a briefing on one of the cruise ships we were on couple of years back.
Interesting about water and how it is used.
According to the second officer giving the talk water is used when turning the ship.
It is used in a similar way he explained to shock absorbers on a car.
When the ship turns water is transferred from tank on one side to tank on the other, this prevents the ship from listing when turning.

Would he be correct or did I misunderstand what he was saying?

[John Arton]

John
Sounds like that one was fitted with a flume tank system rather than active stabilisers.
Rgds
J.A.
https://www.google.com/search?q=flum...obile&ie=UTF-8

[Richard Lines]

Good Morning All,

It's not often I contribute to this forum but the heading of this sparked a response in me.

The relatively new fangled ballast water treatment systems are still very much 'works in progress'. It is three years now since I left my last deep sea vessel which was built in 2014 and the system never worked properly in the time I was there. The system was also not on the latest approved list so I know the owners were going to have to carry out modifications at the first dry dock.

In our case the two problems were:-

1. The coarse filters blocking all the time with sediment from the water we were taking onboard. We found the most effective way to load ballast was just to use just the one of the two ballast pumps which allowed the system to better cope with the auto-backflush of the filters. As you can imagine only being to load ballast at effectively 50% made life more complicated operationally.

2. The dosing system to treat the water being discharged was very 'laggy' with a lot of hysteresis in the system although to be honest the system treating the water being taken on board was equally 'laggy'.

I'm sure the systems will improve but I don't envy the grief the ship operators and staff onboard will have to go though until the systems are reliable.

Regards

Richard

Regards

Richard

[Alan Hill]

When I was an cadet with Lyles. There was a story which I believe to be true about an ore carrier loading in Monrovia which got deballating badly out of sequence with loading. She ended up several thousand tons overloaded and they had to charter a liberty ship (which happened to be around) to tie up alongside and discharge the excess iron ore. Ouch !!

- - - Updated - - -

He was probably talking about flume tanks. I was on a supply boat fitted with these and it worked really well.

[happy daze john in oz]

John
Sounds like that one was fitted with a flume tank system rather than active stabilisers.
Rgds
J.A.
https://www.google.com/search?q=flum...obile&ie=UTF-8

Thanks for that John, sounds just like the system the officer was describing.