- At sea

The life onboard sea going ships not as a passenger but as a worker is an exciting occupation. It is my first overseas job.

To be able to work in a ship's engine room I had to take apprenticeship in a marine engine reapir shop for one year and four months, followed by an exam, safety and sea survival courses and health check ups. Chemical tankers require additional certificate on Chemical Tanker Safety.

On the first two ships (semi automatic and fully manual) a day work during the normal cruise was divided into six 4 hours watches or shifts; everyone except the chief engineer had to take two shifts each day plus day works and maintenance jobs as necessary. The watches were mid night to 4 a.m., 4 to 8 a.m., and so on.

There were two duty men in each watch - one senior and one junior.

Watch duties during normal sea cruise include (but not limited to) operation of all machinery, keeping watch on parameters, taking corrective actions in case of any parts mis-functioning, doing routine and necessary maintenance, putting data into the log book, repair and testing of machinery and ship's stores that are under the responsibility of engine crew and so on.

The ships had a workshop with a lathe machine, drilling machine, work benches, welding machines, portable pumps, other specialized machines, power tools, hand tools and special tools for each machinery.

Engine room conditions were often hot and noisy. For example Chemical and oil tankers have larger boilers to produce steam for heating of cargo oil, ship's fuel and for other smaller loads. Thus these vessels tend to have hotter engine rooms due to more heat leaks produced by higher capacity boilers. There are a lot of rotating equipment; the largest and noisiest is the main engine.

Usually the marchant ships' propulsion engines are heavy oil diesel engines of two stroke slow speed type. These could be as high as a four storey building. They burn heavy cheap fuel oil and because of the size advantage of ship's engine room there are many equipment to extract energy from each process so as to make lowest energy loss. Thus these big engines tend to be more efficient - the best in the year 2000 being about 50%.

MV Cougar Ace (Car carrier) - my third ship

Source: http://perdurabo10.tripod.com/ships/id128.html

More about this ship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar_Ace