Rough trip
 

One of our vessels was running a bit late - the owner said that he was encountering some rough weather off Sudan - oh, yeah said the charterer, heard that one before.. so he sent us some photos:

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I have a couple more to show, but my editor on this pc at work won't let me resize them to fit the Cellar limitations - will add when I get home.

Holy crap CF....that would be my worst nightmare!!! Awesome pics though :D

This one fits...

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Wow. That is awesome! Is that a new ship?

No, she was actually built in 1976 - so that makes her 31 years old, but these are well-constructed ships built in Poland - this one has just been in a yard about 3 months ago for some repainting and also re-coating of cargo tanks. She performs well - she's currently on her way to Genoa in Italy and then Barcelona, Spain and Lisbon, Portugal where she will discharge her cargo of vegoils.

Might put a few people off cruise holidays... what do you think?

eek! I'm with Ducksnuts==raging seas are one of the things that scare me badly.

I love the sound of the surf. I would much rather die in the raging waters of the sea than to fall out of a plane.

Where are these Vegoils coming from?

This particular shipment was loaded in Indonesia and Malaysia - out of the ports of Belawan and Port Kelang I think. We have regular trade with our clients from those countries plus Philippines - discharge can be anywjhere out of the Mediterranean, north-west Europe, West Africa and east and west coast USA.

Not wishing to sound morbid, but how about falling out of a plane into a raging sea?

So the vegoils are off loaded in Europe and used to make food that the natives are comfortable with, because it's made locally. No siree, none of that adulterated foreign food for them. Heh heh heh

Now with organic sea salt!

Well, the oils go into a lot of consumable products these days - still a big market in soap and skin creams, and also for margerine, and we have one client who is a major supplier of base products for the confectionery industry - so the oils are used in the manufacture of chocolates, ice cream and other sweet stuffs.

Well, at least you don't have to worry about Somali pirates in those seas!

A bit of shipping industry insight for you. On the top two pictures you can see laid out in rows a number of flexible hoses - they're the grey things that look a bit like over-sized worms. In the third picture they have been re-shaped by the force of the waves hitting the decking where they are stowed.
A lot of the ports where the vegoils are are loaded and discharged have pretty basic facilities - in some cases insufficient hoses or hoses in too poor condition to have the cargo either loaded or discharged. So these ships that are regularly in this trade tend to carry several lengths of flexible hoses themselves - nothing worse than being stuck in a port somewhere and wasting time which could threaten the vessel's next business, just because a hose wasn't available.

I've found a few photos from an incident in a West African port. The ship we had on charter didn't have any hoses on board (happens sometimes), and the shore wanted the vessel to use these hoses - the captain wasn't happy about it and eventually once he threatened to sail without discharging the shore crew made the effort to get hold of some newer hoses. First picture shows the hoses when they were first offered to the vessel - they were immediately rejected - the pressure-damage that might result from pumping product through them was too high a risk - there was a real danger they would rupture completely.

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So the shore gang said they would repair them so that there was no risk. This was their repair.

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The captain was having none of it, but they still insisted on connecting the hose to the vessel's lines so that they could show the captain that even if the hose did leak they had an anti-pollution measure in place. It was at this point that the captain said he'd had enough - really, this was a brave move on his part as it is quite common for armed police to be called who will then arrest the captain and throw him into a cell for failing to deliver the cargo to their country.

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Like applying a napkin to a severed artery...

Excellent simile, SG.

Here are the two pictures of the vessel in the rough seas that I couldn't edit earlier:

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Thanks for the inside poop, Cf.