I don't like to cuss on here. But shit show is the only way to describe the offload today. I may have mentioned that offload is the worst thing to hit fishing since the Kraken. Today proved it. My nemesis, the boxolator, got it's teeth kicked in. This should make me happy. It really didn't. Fish being off of this boat will make me happy.
So I got to work at 4 this morning. I woke up at two because there was an incessant racket coming from the engineering klaxon. Turns out the engineer was in Dutch Harbor doing who knows what. So on and on it went. Anyway, partially rested I arrived with my crew of allstars. The fun started when my favorite all star tried to swipe my freezer boots. He grabbed em like he knew what he was doing and long story short I told him in no uncertain terms that the boots were mine and that if he wanted to keep track of his boots, he should put a pink ribbon on them. It was actually a blue ribbon rant. Got me into the flow.
Went smoothly for the first 8 hours. I took a lunch and everything went to hell. I'm not gonna sit here and act like I didn't cause the catastraphe because I have any experience at sea or special foresight. Basically I lucked out because I didn't want to see too many people on one side offloading fish. It was merely a matter of aesthetics. But when I came back from lunch about forty thousand pounds of fish were offloaded from one side and not the other. The boat listed. Hard. And every third or fourth bag that we sent up the boxolator tipped on end and wedged itself in a bad place. It was ugly.
This was a Poseidon-like disaster. We seriously spent over an hour and a half watching the thing get jammed until they hung enough weight over the side up top with the crane. Trust me when I tell you it was worse than it sounds and I thought a bomb was gonna be the only way to get the fish off. But I'm too tired after living the ordeal to explain it. We steam out to new fishing grounds tomorrow. If I get a wake up at three am something might break. That's that. All in all though, still having a great time. Yay boats.
*Note-Neither engineer left the boat at any time. That was a hasty assumption. The Katie Ann crew is of the highest caliber and has the utmost respect for their respective jobs. They just couldn't get to the button that turns the klaxon off any quicker than thirty minutes.
2 comments:
Corey, I highly doubt that the klaxon rang for 30 minutes as I happen to know the engineer only left went ashore to throttle down a hose. Maybe 10 minutes? At the long end.
Ya well waddya gonna do? I was sleeping and ten minutes may have felt like thirty. If you know it was ten minutes at the long end, I'm not gonna argue. I'll take the heatfor any fallout this worthless rag of a blog causes.
Post a Comment