-  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 in both semi-auto and fully manual engine rooms.

Watch duties during normal sea cruise include (but not limited to) operation of all machinery, keeping watch on parameters such as pressures and temperatures, taking corrective actions in case of any mis-functioning, doing routine and maintenance and a lot of cleaning, putting data into the log book.  Inspection and testing of machine parts are done on schedule.  We also take care of receiving engine's stores,  bunker oil  and lubrication oil.

Each ship has 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 boilers. There are a lot of rotating equipment; the largest and noisiest is the main engine.

Usually the merchant 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 auxiliary equipments such as exhaust gas driven turbocharger and exhaust gas boiler to extract energy from exhaust gas so as to make lowest energy loss. Thus these big engines tend to be more efficient than smaller ones in vehicles.