05 Dec. 2014; At Sea.

It almost looked like as if a curtain descended over the ship, the moment we left the Cape Verdes. Today was basically an overcast day, it was windy and as predicted yesterday the temperatures started to dip. That will continue tomorrow as well by another 2 degrees or so.  Luckily there is enough to do inside the ship to not to be detained by the weather very much and there are also a lot of area’s were everybody can sit outside the wind as well.  Life just goes on.

For the remainder of the cruise, which ends in Rotterdam on the 21^st. of December, we will be calling at Santa Cruz, Las Palmas and Arrecife in the Canary Islands. Then Agadir, Casablanca and Tangiers in Morocco, followed by Cadiz in Spain and Lisbon in Portugal. Here I will leave the ship while the Rotterdam continues its cruise with calls at Vigo and Southampton. By that time it will have completely circumvented Africa.  An unhappy part of the cruise was that due to Ebola a number of ports had to be cancelled and no other ports could be substituted are there were simply no other safe ports in the area. But that is always the challenge that one gets when going on an adventure.

Today the class was focusing on Damage Control and Security. That meant in the morning that yours truly spent some time going through the theoretical part of what we have to do if there would be a hole in the ship under the water line and what equipment we have available for that.  A ship is equipped with watertight doors which sub-divide the ship in 10 or 12 compartments. The Rotterdam is a two compartment ship which means that if the two biggest areas in the ship, between watertight doors, would flood, the ship would still stay afloat. If smaller compartments would flood then probably 3 or 4 could be flooded without endangering the ship.  A Navy ship could probably have 10 compartments flooded and still stay afloat but then those ships are designed to expect holes, if being shot at.

We have a lot of equipment onboard to close off a hole if we would get one. Varying from small plugs to close off small cracks; to shoring equipment to put big plates in place to cover larger holes. All that material is located in a damage control locker, well above the water line. In case the ship would start to flood we should be able to get at this equipment easily.  I know this is not really sexy, but some items are simply not that exciting, but very necessary.

Sleeves for pipe punctures

Supports for shoring up bulkheads

As is the case with everything that Holland America does, it has to be trained and exercised to reach a high degree of proficiency. Varying from discussing on how to tackle a problem by means of a table top discussion, to executing a real drill.  The latter is a bit of an issue, as we cannot make a hole in the ship to make it look real. We have to simulate. Thus this afternoon I spent some time with the sailors to build on the mooring deck aft, part of a ship’s hull. Made of strong wood and with a hole near the top. Tomorrow we will do the drill and then a lot of water will be pumped through that hole. As it is on the mooring deck aft the water will not damage the ship and as the water is pure sea water it can flow overboard again without damaging the environment.

The challenge will be to plug the hole (8 x 4 inches) while 5 fire hoses pump an enormous amount of water through the hole. With the pressure that we use we can pump approx. 10.000 gallons through the hole in an hour, which approximates the same ingress of water if that hole would be 18 feet under water. As the Rotterdam draws 28 feet, this is not un-realistic.

Whatever happens during this drill, one thing is certain, a lot of people will get very wet.