# A Ghost of Christmas past 8



## R798780 (Oct 27, 2004)

It is that time of year again. I regularly receive a desk diary from our insurance brokers and reminisce when writing back to say thank you. Here is one of the offerings.

Ghosts of Christmas Past Luminetta, Christmas 1984

We returned to UK in December after the Tahiti charter (where we had taken petroleum products from the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and Panama to Tahiti) to take an MOD cargo to the Falklands. First we part loaded (a few thousand tons of diesel and a small parcel of gasoline) in Fawley, the tanker terminal just down the street from Southampton and then sailed to Invergordon in North East Scotland for the next parcel. 

On the way up the North Sea, at about five o'clock on a dark December morning, the engine room alarm sounded, raising the fourth engineer from his bed. "Good morning, Bob", I said to myself. Then the phone rang in the wheelhouse. "Good morning, Hugh", said Bob, "You've got a pumproom bilge alarm". The pumproom was my territory so, of course, I went off to see. And it was real. So often an alarm went off in the night and it was a false alarm. Not this time. Where the previous day there had only been water in one edge the bilge there was now a depth of about two feet. So I lined up the bilge pump and set it going and it seemed to be doing the trick. The engineer fired up the main boiler to give it some more wellie though it had been doing OK on the exhaust gas boiler. When I went to look at the end of my watch the water was back with a vengeance, and there were engineers and captains, well, one captain, one chief engineer and one second engineer. So we lined up a main cargo pump with an emergency suction system. That fettled the water, but no signs of where it was coming from, as soon as we stopped the pump it built up again. Then I noticed a blue light down below the surface of the water in the bilge. No, it wasn't a blue light, it was pale December daylight from outside, down twenty odd feet from the surface, just under the port side bilge suction pipe. No wonder we couldn't see where the water was coming from, it was coming in under the pipe end and going straight up to the pump. Later, when the third engineer and a fitter unbolted the pipe and removed it there was quite a fountain into which they hammered a sharpened wooden stake - and subsequently one very wet third engineer. My ears burned.

In Invergordon they removed the stake so a diver could position a steel and rubber patch through bolted into the pumproom. More wet engineers, more burning ears. Then we made a cement box, filled the space between frames with concrete. Good concrete that, they swore it was when they tried to remove it in Capetown drydock six months later, or swore at me!

After loading FFO at Invergordon we sailed to Immingham, across the water from Hull, to load Jet A1, the bulk of our cargo, which was for the inauguration of the new oil tanks at the new airport (Mount Pleasant) in the Falklands. We spent Christmas at the Bull anchorage just inside Spurn Head, then went on to Weymouth at New Year to change crew and load containers - with the same ship's derrick that had been damaged at Antofagasta in Chile. Containers on the deck of a loaded tanker. A loaded tanked pretends it's a submarine in any sort of a swell and the South Atlantic around the Falklands is notorious. We were so blessed, I've never known a twenty day passage on any other occasion with so little in the way of bad weather.

First off we moored alongside our sister ship MV "Lumiere" at Port Stanley and trans- shipped some stores and the petrol which they call civigas down there (civilian gasoline I suppose) . Then we went round to San Carlos water and discharged our FFO (black Furnace Fuel Oil) into the "Scottish Eagle", another tanker on station.

Next our ultimate destination, Mare Harbour, where we stayed for three weeks. One morning, half past six, the MOD fuel engineer came up to the navigating bridge where I was keeping anchor watch. We wondered why the mooring buoys were moving. Mooring buoys don't move, it was us. I called up "Oil Mariner", our attendant tug. "How soon can you be here?" I asked. "About forty minutes", they replied. "We're dragging our anchor, and we've moved about a hundred feet so far. How soon can you be here?" I said. "About forty minutes", they replied. and they were. Then we stopped moving. We shortened the anchor cable and never budged after that. 

One afternoon I went on watch at four o'clock. The sea was like a mirror, a thoroughly lovely afternoon, with troops sunbathing on the deck of the RAF tender alongside. About five o'clock there was a light breeze, but that built up to a strong breeze by six o'clock, and by half past six when I went for dinner it was a gale. When I got back to the bridge twenty minutes later it was storm force and the tender moored alongside capsized and sank. Next morning was beautiful again, we went fishing up the Swan Inlet. The one thing said about the Falklands: If you don't like the climate, wait twenty minutes. Christmas and mid-summer all in an afternoon.


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