I had kind of a frustrating day today. I expected and wanted to spend the day happily in the engine room with cleaning and putting back togeather a really rusty horrible old valve. But ended up spending most of the day helping a deck team with trying to set up pumps and running around the engine room with them, trying to pump the last few centimetres of water out of parts of a tank so they can work in it.

The chief mate and bosun went briefly into the tank this morning, looked around and said it should be a quick job to do the whole thing. At lunch time, the bosun asked the team leader how it was going, and said, “oh well, at least if you get the tank empty of water by this evening it’ll be good.”

This evening, there’s no noticeable progress made at all.

I went and crawled though the whole length of the tank, found two old rust scrapers from last time the tank was opened (2 and a half years ago). It’s going to be a really big job. Loads of the bits of the tank in the forward end have all the cement fallen off, and rust and all kinds, so it’s not just a one day job. Once it’s dried (which may take 2 or 3 or more days) it may then take another week or so of work chipping all the cement and stuff and putting in new cement. It’s down in the bottom of the engine room, below generator 2, so the deckies feel really uneasy and keep coming to me for help all the time.

Luckily once it’s dried, all the rest should be done by deckies, not us. But still it’s kind of annoying.