Sailing across the pacific III

TOWARDS DISTANT HORIZONS - PART I

‘Politechnika Slaska’ - I was told in the office on Malopolska Street in Szczecin. After half a year's daymanship I was completely financially washed out. The ship stood, as I was informed, at the mustering, at the coal pier in the North Port.

At that time the largest bulk carrier in the Polish fleet (apart from two others) was to carry 55 thousand tonnes of coal dust to the other end of the world, to the port of Hirohata (Honsiu) in Japan. Well, at that time - in the 70’s - we did not have anything to trade, and such goods as Inka coffee, our ‘Wyborowa’ vodka and just coal, even transported so far, brought us foreign currency.

It was December 1976. There was no tunnel crossing under the Martwa Vistula river then. I could get to the ship from Stogi district only on my own legs. Snow had fallen, I was trudging at night along an unknown road ‘with my soul on my shoulder’ through deep snowdrifts. The distant lights of the North Port were leading me.

Getting acquainted with cabin II El was a pleasant surprise. After several previous ones, where - depending on the function - I lived with four occupants (‘Phoenix’), two (‘Oder’, ‘Sola’) or on the stern oble (‘Miner’), this cabin was spacious, with a couch, windows instead of portholes and had a bathroom with shower!

We docked the next day. What a terrible ‘quake’! Those three bulk carriers (‘Manifest Lipcowy’, ‘Politechnika

We invite you to read a series of articles that will take us back to the harsh reality of the 70's and 80's, known to most of us only from stories told by our parents or grandparents. Their author is Mr. Andrzej Buszke, a graduate of the Naval Academy in Gdynia, a sailor who worked 28 years of his life at sea. The stories are accounts and descriptions of subjective feelings of the author. The stories describe the reality of communist Poland, as well as the world, which no longer exists, seen through the eyes of an adept and then ETO (Electro-technical Officer).

Szczecinska’ and ‘Politechnika Slaska’) were known in Polsteam (Polish Marine) for terrible vibrations, coming from the badly bearing main engine shaft. It was the worst on the first of the ‘Manifest Lipcowy’ series (During sea trials, the lamps in the engine broke off and the wings of the bridge, which were flapping, had to be supported by pipe brackets in the shipyard. The crew

of the convicts were packed in a food net and hung over the deck on a crane (this was later forbidden). They had to bail themselves out with whisky, purchased with redeemable dollar balton vouchers, from the ship's canteen. I was the Astrologer, and had to pinpoint the exact moment of passage through the EQUATOR. Everything then proceeded according to the nautical routine, as the photos illustrate. The only difference was that the electrician from my department, not very popular with the crew and nicknamed ‘the crooked snout’, was cured of his bad habit with an inductor for measuring resistance, which, as we all know, generates voltage of 500 V.

According to tradition, a feast followed, during which Bogdan, the mayor, repeatedly ran to the canteen for supplies.

numbered 42-45 people? It was a form of patching up the hidden unemployment in the times of the People's Republic of Poland, similarly numerous or even more numerous crews were only on Russian ships. There were three electricians, yet overtime on long-distance voyages was a welcome addition to earnings.

We sailed around Africa. The Suez Canal was not available for deep draft ships as it was only dredged by the Japanese in the second half of the 1970s. It took about 40 days to cross the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean to Japan.

The temperature in the cabins exceeded 30°C, in the engine room it was 20°C more. If it hadn't been for the fans... The momentary blackout was a real pain. Witek, a fat ‘motorman’, was on the watch of the fourth engineer. Despite warnings he was cleaning the centrifuge plates under the supply fan, covered in sweat, with a dirty wet rag on his shoulders. And it happened - he got ‘rootlets disease’ and got twisted. Placed in a berth, he could not handle himself, and he weighed over 100 kg.

After crossing the Tropic of Cancer and entering ‘the tropics’ the wine ‘TROPIK’ appeared on the table with a nice sailing ship on the label, produced by the Cooperative ‘LAS’. It was issued in the amount of 1 bottle for 3 days (later for 5 days), for health purposes. Supposedly, it helped to regulate the body's ionic balance with increased sweating. There were those who did not drink every day and collected portions to ‘celebrate’ with several bottles so the captain ordered that wine be poured into glasses during dinner time. The air conditioning was also turned on (high-pressure). Fights broke out on the ship because those living downstairs, closer to the climate compressors, where the air pressure was the highest, would take the covers off the cabin air conditioners, set them on full blast, and steal cold air from those upstairs, where there was barely any wind. The temperature differences in the cabins were significant due to this practice.

The ‘baptism of the equator’ was approaching. ‘Grandfather’ - Captain Anthony G., who celebrated his 70th birthday on this cruise, took care to continue the maritime traditions. I was already baptized and luckily did not forget to bring my certificate with me. After many days of oppressing the neophytes with scary stories, the day came. A few The days ran, varied with Saturday and Sunday movie screenings. However, something began to happen in the Indian Ocean.

The ship made a sharp turn through the stern, circled the loop - returned to the course and stopped. This was the famous maneuver called the ‘Butakov loop’, which is performed on the alarm - ‘man overboard’. Indeed, a pole was spotted on the bridge over, presumably, a castaway. According to the movements of the waves, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, he was floating on the water. An albatross staggered over him...

We lowered the lifeboat very efficiently. The crew took their seats, some were joking. They swam up, turned over the body with a bare foot. They came back

‘Politechnika’ in the roadstead dropped anchor, bunker ship and shipchandler's dinghy with fresh vegetables and fruit came up. And not only. ‘Mazowsze’! Boats with beautiful, smiling girls. Malay, Siamese, Chinese. Wrapped in colorful skirts, black-haired, swarthy, they gracefully climbed the gangway. We instantly became their friends. A normal workday was out of the question. ‘Grandma,’ the captain's wife, whom we mostly saw knitting something, was indignant.

– Anthony, throw those fu***rs out.

– Let the boys have their fun...

in a completely different mood. No one was willing to joke... It turned out that the castaway had been carried by the capok with his back up and he no longer had a face because it had been eaten by fish.

We had 4 refrigerated rooms on the ship, two of which were ‘heavy’ - Fish Room and Meat Room. Fully loaded. To take the body, one of them would have to be emptied, then the chamber would have to be disinfected. However, the captain decided to cut off the capok after taking the documents, which were found in a watertight pouch at the belt, and let the ocean become a graveyard for the castaway.

From the documents and from subsequent conversations with the shipowner (whose representative visited the ship after it docked in Japan), it was clarified that he was the only crewman of the Taiwanese ship that was found and sent a message about entering the hurricane zone and the dramatic situation in which he found himself.

One sunny day I had work to do on deck. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a female passenger - the steward's wife - walking on the tank with a deckchair in her hand. A pretty redheaded girl with a fair complexion speckled with freckles. ‘She's going to sunbathe,’ I registered. And I forgot about her... We came back at the same time for lunch (12:00 p.m.). She was very red. It turned out that she fell asleep on her deck chair. She didn't show up for later practice lifeboat alerts until we arrived in Japan. She was badly burned. I enjoyed hanging out on the decks at night. The constellations were different from ours, the smell was different... As we approached Malacca Street there were more lights on the water. Our huge ship lit two vertical red lights on the main mast and sped forward. These were the days when wooden boats were home for many Malay fishermen. Away from land, on the shipping lane, at night, they would light a kerosene lantern on the bow, giving off a yellow light, and sleep. There may have been times when the lantern went out. It seemed to me sometimes that I could hear a crackle coming from the bow.

The waters were then free of pirates, the air was clear, there was none of that hanging smog of later times, the fog mixed with smoke, burned by jungle planters in Sumatra and Borneo, which limited visibility to a few miles and was Along with the girls appeared two-litre cans with ears of ‘Nikka whisky’, ‘Hi hi whisky’. Hustle and bustle, laughter in the mess hall... Traffic in the corridors. Friendships were made, which moved to the cabins. After some time the girls appeared again.

Hey, guys reading these words, you were born too late....

The captain arranged for two rounds of motorboating into town. In the morning at 8 a.m. for the watches and at noon for the deymen.

The city - a metropolis in the 60’s and 70’s - was very different from the later city crowded with skyscrapers, with gardens on roofs and terraces. There was a harbor with colorful jonks, a large Chinese quarter, of which in later years

Vicinity of the Indochinese Peninsula, Malacca Street

an area, maybe 200 × 100 meters, was left for tourists. Low bamboo and clay houses, streets in the middle of which ran a stinking gutter covered with a metal grate. Bazaars, piles of garbage. Streets red with the spitting of red betel by the Chinese. Opium smoking rooms.

We returned to the ship in the evening on a singing motorboat:

‘We're going to drink our grandmother's ship whole.

The whole ship, the whole ship.

... Grandma's gold teeth and mantals.

Still today, still today, still today.’

I looked in the cabin and my entire berth was covered with Christmas tree lights. The flashing ones. It was a business hit back then. The captain! He was the only one who had the ‘master key’ to all the cabins and rooms on the ship. He later told me:

– After all, you're not ‘doing business’ anyway.

Right. I had no money for a business start-up. And the duty relief - for every day I was abroad - it was a shame not to use.

– In Hirohata we were unloaded in two days. The waterfront of a huge thermal power plant was well away from the city. We took a cab there. We walked along narrow streets lined with colorful vertical signs. Japanese people not very polite, Japanese women - some dressed in national kimonos, on their clogs with transverse rungs, as if brought back to our times from the ‘Madame Butterfly’ opera. Very stiff and were aloof.

We wanted to have fun at their disco. We were not allowed in.

– This is where the Japanese are having fun. The Americans are playing on, oh there... - they were showing.

What chauvinism. I never thought...

We had been planning to visit Kyoto, the former capital of Japan and the seat of the emperor, just a few dozen kilometers away, but time was so short. The return voyage along the same route began, with a call at Karachi along the way.

Singapore. The Lion City

THE NEXT ISSUE OF OUR MAGAZINE WILL BE AVAILABLE IN APRIL

Scan me*

*This QR code will take you to the short movie about how we work at MAEM.

Do you like cooperating with MAEM? Did our products meet your expectations? Tell your business partners about it.

Your recommendation would be highly appreciated

Follow us:

www.maem.com

MAEM has no associations and/or claims to be associated with the Allweiler, Aquafine, Alfa Laval, Colfax IMO, Desmi, Jowa, Kral, Moatti, Nirex, Westfalia or the Group of their Companies worldwide. Any implied associations are purely coincidental and are not inferred. MAEM is a supplier of fully interchangeable non-genuine spare parts (alternatives) for equipment produced by manufacturers using in accordance with law the following brands: Allweiler, Aquafine, Alfa Laval, Colfax IMO, Desmi, Jowa, Kral, Moatti, Nirex, Westfalia and their products, i.e. separators, pumps, filters, fresh water generators, heat exchangers, sterilizers, etc. Alternative spare parts produced by MAEM are manufactured according own technological documentation developed with the use of reverse engineering.