WRITING IS FUN
Ted Polet
1970s SHIPPING NEWS
2 - Angin kras
The day after we arrived in Baltimore, there was a spring-like sun very different from the icy wind we had been sheltering from behind the break of the forecastle, as we were approaching the harbour. We were tied up to one of Baltimore's many quays, a long way from the city. That night I was on call, sleeping in my cabin with a sailor doing the rounds on deck. I slept until I felt the ship rocking softly, then a knock on the door followed. The Indonesian sailor put his head around the door: "Stuurman, ada angin kras" (Mr Mate, there is strong wind). I shot into my working gear and was on deck in a blink of the eye. The snow whipped past horizontally and the temperature had dropped from plus 5 to minus 15, a typical 'blizzard' which the east coast is notorious for. Fortunately we were pressed aganst the quay by the wind, but there were six-foot seas running in the harbour which gently rocked us. The next morning we struggled to get extra hawsers ashore: a dozen Indonesian sailors, each about 5 feet tall, swaddled like Michelin puppets, slithering with the warps over the ice covering the quay. The ice had been deposited by all the the water that was blown over, at minus 15. The promised load of prefabricated dwellings would be loaded into the deep bulk holds on large wooden trestles, which were constructed on the spot by the stevedoring company.
I have never seen a crazier way of loading cargo. The amount of fine American pine that went into that ship would have sufficed to build a couple of bridges. In the P.G. regrettably it all went overboard after discharging, and the idea wasn't a great success either, because halfway through the Atlantic we had to go into number 5 hold because some of the trestles had collapsed due to the rolling of the ship in a following swell.
Back to the Persian Gulf
From Baltimore we returned, crossing the Atlantic to Gibraltar and continuing to Port Said. The Purser, the Chief Engineer and one of the engine room hands were Jewish, and with the imminent arrival in Arab territory, they were busy pulling each other's leg. The Purser announced that he would hang half a pig in the ship's funnel for smoking, and the Chief said that the pig would be shot into the air in Port Said by the air blasts as he'd reverse the main engine ... you'll see those Arabs run, he chuckled. They were arguing at the bar whether the engine room hand was properly Jewish, but I won't explain how that was determined!
The passage through the Suez Canal was much faster than the last time I had been there with the mv 'Maaslloyd' on a previous occasion due to repairs having been carried out on the canal, but the damage caused by the war of eight years previously was still clearly visible. On the east bank of the canal, broken remains of the former canal railway were still t be seen.
After passing through the Red Sea and along the Arabian south coast, we passed Ra's al Hadd and, through the Gulf of Oman, ended up in the Persian Gulf. Here we had to wait for three weeks in the Dammam roadstead before we could start unloading. We killed time with boat trips to a Dutch suction dredger and to other anchored ships, exchanging our box of 16mm movies.
Dragging our anchor
Whilst unloading at the roadstead, a large pontoon with a travelling crane was moored next to us. In view of the extra wind drag of that pontoon the three 'shackles' of anchor cable we had out proved to be insufficient. One night the wind got up a bit and the next morning we found we had dragged our anchor for three miles all the way across the busy anchorage, luckily without hitting anything. The Old Man was furious, and rightly so, because neither the Second nor I had noticed anything. We had been struggling all night in the hold hauling those d**n flat packages out of the holds with a wire attached to the crane, which had to be rove through a snatch block. In the smooth sides of the bulk holds however, there was nothing to secure the block to, a bulkcarrier not being suitable for general cargo... Until I thought of putting the snatch block on the frame of a package on one side of the hold and attaching the wire to a package on the opposite side. We hauled the cargo out double quick that way. In daylight however, to our eternal shame, we had to slowly steam back to our former anchor position with the pontoon alongside... Well, the Old Man should have streamed a longer anchor cable to begin with, shouldn't he?
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