{"id":393,"date":"2008-12-29T07:06:26","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T03:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=393"},"modified":"2009-01-02T17:26:22","modified_gmt":"2009-01-02T13:26:22","slug":"10-days-at-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/393\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Days At Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am now back in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk having survived 10 days or so on the Yuri Topchev<\/em>.\u00a0 I must start this post by apologising for the lack of photos: I might be able to get some from colleagues, but I didn’t bring a camera out with me, the main reason being that taking photos around live oil and gas facilities is seriously frowned upon for safety reasons, and it wasn’t until I was out on the ship that I realised I was missing out on some superb photography, far outside any danger zone.\u00a0 I did take some pictures when I was on the Lun-A though, which I have been too idle to post.\u00a0 I will do so shortly.<\/p>\n

The Yuri Topchev<\/em> is a 100m long icebreaking supply vessel, a photo of which can be seen below in the Sakhalin port of Kholmsk.<\/p>\n

\"Yuri<\/p>\n

It was built in Norway a little over two years ago, and for the large part is a lovely ship: the standard of finishing in the cabins, bridge, and walkways is top class.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the owners hit hard times at about 90% completion and they ended up skimping on a few essentials which would have made her a world-class vessel.\u00a0 As such, it has second-rate navigational electronics and an enormous winch which takes up a quarter of the hangar-deck\u00a0and – because a relatively minor complementary part was\u00a0axed\u00a0from the scope – is utterly useless.<\/p>\n

Since its completion, the ship had not really done any work, and appeared to be brand new.\u00a0 Unfortunately,\u00a0nor\u00a0had a lot of the crew.\u00a0 As soon as I arrived on board, I discovered that they had not\u00a0filled up with nearly enough food or potable water for the number of crew and length of trip.\u00a0\u00a0All we had to drink was gassified\u00a0bottled water, kvas<\/em>, kompot<\/em>, and tea and coffee.\u00a0 Then the\u00a0coffee ran out,\u00a0then\u00a0the UHT milk ran out (fresh milk\u00a0is rare onshore Sakhalin,\u00a0never mind\u00a0offshore)\u00a0and we were onto powdered milk mixed in a jug.\u00a0 I hadn’t seen powdered milk since the 1980s, and I discovered\u00a0it’s taste hadn’t improved any in the interim.\u00a0 Then that ran out and we were onto cans of condensed milk.\u00a0 We ended up scrounging milk and coffee from one of the platforms we passed.\u00a0 The ship had left port only about 3 weeks before I got on board.\u00a0\u00a0Good job Russians weren’t in charge of supplies\u00a0on the Mayflower<\/em>.\u00a0 <\/em>Food consisted of pelmenii<\/em>, varenikii<\/em>, pre-cooked sausages in boiling water, and a seemingly endless supply of cold-cut salami and cheese.\u00a0 A middle-aged Russian lady did most of the cooking and did a great job considering what she had to work with.\u00a0 The head chef, a Russian man decked out in full cook’s regalia, appeared to do nothing more than stir the pot of pre-cooked sausages in boiling water.\u00a0 Fruit, salad, juice, and desserts were as absent as they were in a 1990s McDonalds.\u00a0 Eventually, two days before we arrived back into port, a container of food was craned onto our deck, which turned out to hold what looked to me like about twelve tonnes of potatoes and cabbage.\u00a0 After that, the food did improve somewhat, but the Safe Astoria<\/em> it was not.<\/p>\n

I’d not really been on a ship before, and I found it all rather interesting.\u00a0 Unlike on the St. Petersburg pleasure cruisers or the Singapore-Bintan Island ferry which have signs everywhere keeping\u00a0passengers out of all the interesting areas, I was free to wander around the Yuri Topchev <\/em>and talk to the crew, with the exception of the engine room\u00a0out of which\u00a0I got chased by a rather grumpy Chief Engineer when he caught me looking as though I was about to meddle with someting (I was).\u00a0 As such, I spent a lot of time up on the bridge in one of the five driver’s seats (I’m sure that’s not the nautically correct term) first looking at all the controls, then waving my finger gingerly near the controls, and eventually fiddling with the controls.\u00a0 I limited myself to the radar display, which explains why the Yuri Topchev<\/em> was not lost with all hands.\u00a0 During my wanderings, I noticed with some interest that there was a room marked “Survivors” and another, just along the corridor, marked “Deceased”.\u00a0 The latter was locked, which made me wonder what was in there and made me look a bit closer at the fatty soup we were being served for dinner.<\/p>\n

The ship was registered in Murmansk which served as its home port, and most of the crew were from the same place.\u00a0 The Captain was a chain smoker in the strongest sense of the term, puffing his way through a packet of cigarettes every two hours or so.\u00a0 He wasn’t the most confident of captains, and seemed to panic when asked to do anything other than drive his boat in a forward direction,\u00a0and when asked to hold the ship in a certain position or align it in a\u00a0fixed direction he’d wave his arms and moan about the strength of the currents, the wind,\u00a0the alignment of the stars.\u00a0 Everything\u00a0was all a bit too difficult.\u00a0 Aeroflot pilots are reknowned for their bravado in landing their aircraft in the most appalling of conditions; their counterparts on the\u00a0water don’t seem to be made of the same stuff.\u00a0 At one point he said it was much too difficult to follow\u00a0in the ice-free wake of an icebreaker leading in front\u00a0of us, and raised all sorts of objections as to why it couldn’t be done.\u00a0 I went to bed as the\u00a0argument was in full flow, and woke in the morning to\u00a0find a deckhand – the lowest ranked man on the ship, who the day before had been sweeping snow off the deck\u00a0– at the helm doing a fine job.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the\u00a0Chief Mate was a chap called Oleg, aged 34\u00a0with a\u00a0tattoo on his upper arm of a bear bursting between the Russian flag and the saltire of the Russian navy<\/a>\u00a0over a ship on the high seas.\u00a0\u00a0He was very obliging, highly competent, and seemed to present his ideas before the Captain who quickly adopted them and issued them as his own orders, much to the amusement of all who had figured out what was going on.\u00a0\u00a0I got on\u00a0pretty well with Oleg, and he\u00a0told me a whole load of stuff about ships, the Russian Arctic,\u00a0and showed me a few dozen pictures of\u00a0Murmansk and the areas around it.\u00a0 He had attended a maritime academy in Murmansk and was continuing his studies in the hope that in 3 or 4 years he would make captain.\u00a0 I hope he does.\u00a0 Maybe we’ll bump into each other again on the Shtokman project?\u00a0 Or at Yamal?<\/p>\n

The rest of the crew were pretty good, and with one or two exceptions all willing to do some work.\u00a0 The Bosun was an older chap\u00a0called Vladimir who sported a neatly trimmed white beard around the bottom of his chin and up the rear of his jawline which made him look like\u00a0he’d stepped off the set of Planet of the Apes<\/em>.\u00a0 For a bosun, it was a good look.\u00a0 And the toughest man on the ship was a Russian with a round, pock-marked face who would stand on the deck at 3:00am in -18C with a howling wind, his face uncovered, with\u00a0all the concern of standing on the beach at Yalta in July.<\/p>\n

Incidentally,\u00a0before I came on board I’d always assumed\u00a0that normal attire for a ship’s crew included items such as heavy knitted polo-neck sweaters, woollen hats, and welly boots.\u00a0 As it turns out, shell-suit bottoms,\u00a0flip-flops, and an old vest do just fine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So what was I actually doing on the ship?\u00a0 I was clearing the moon-pool of ice,\u00a0lowering and raising the ROV cage, deploying and recovering the sonar beacon,\u00a0supervising rigging, lowering and raising the USBL pole, conducting tool-box talks,\u00a0manhandling\u00a0acoustic shackles.<\/p>\n

Still with me?<\/p>\n

Transmitting ultrasonic signals, securing hatches, pressurising the moon-pool, making vents air-tight,\u00a0and raising and lowering a clump-weight.\u00a0 In English, I was\u00a0supervising a group of Russians whose enthusiasm often took the form of suicide and it was my job to talk them out of it.\u00a0 And I occasionally had the task of asking nearby icebreakers if they wouldn’t mind awfully smashing up some ice for us while we worked.\u00a0 A 4,400 tonne, 91m long supply vessel performing 360 degree handbrake turns in under 20 seconds is worth watching.<\/p>\n

So after 10 days at sea we arrived back in the port of Kholmsk on Christmas eve, in time for me to get back to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk for Christmas day and join a group of friends in devouring a whole pile of turkey dinner.\u00a0 We’d had a 44-hour voyage to port from the Lun-A platform which took us around the southern tip of the island within a short distance of Japan and close to areas of Sakhalin which are hard to reach by car.\u00a0 Most disappointingly the weather was awful and you could barely see the prow of the ship through the swirling snow, and when the weather cleared up a bit it was night.\u00a0 But I had spent a few hours here and there watching the ship plough through the ice leaving a perfectly straight channel of dark water behind us, and looking out over the lily-pads of ice which had all fused together in a patchwork, and the sun rising and setting over the ice sheet, and it was at times well worth\u00a0being there (frustrations over my not having brought\u00a0a camera notwithstanding).\u00a0 Almost worth having to stand on deck in freezing wind with ice forming\u00a0from my\u00a0breath inside my balaclava trying to avoid a swinging basket filled with rock and coated with a thick layer of ice from\u00a0being dipped in the\u00a0freezing seas over and over again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am now back in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk having survived 10 days or so on the Yuri Topchev.\u00a0 I must start this post by apologising for the lack of photos: I might be able to get some from colleagues, but I didn’t … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}