Container Ship Capsizes in Belgian Port

[FrankZ]

Originally Posted by mudnut

Yep ,that makes sense,and they have someone checking on that all the time.Another funny thing I thought,In the R.A.Navy,a CPO.stands for Chief Petty Officer,In the USN it's something like coffee percilator officer.His whole shift on the Enterprise is to check and fill all the coffee stations aboard the ship.WOW,there is a career.Mudnut.

Never underestimate the importance of coffee.

[Dunkers]

Do they have separate De-caff, Half Caff and Caff officers or are they cross trained to keep the defence budget down?

[LtBrett]

We generally cross train, although the real expenses come in the capital acquisition costs ($1500 percolators, $100 mugs).

On bridge watches, it was usually the junior quartermaster who was the duty CPO (coffee petty officer). It was his responsibility to keep the charred tar sailors refer to as 'Joe" flowing. Real sailors were always thought to drink their coffee black. I caused a minor revolution when I showed up with some french vanilla flavored creamer. Caught a whole ration of crap from the rest of the watch team. Funny thing was, I discovered a couple of bottles of flavored creamer stashed away in the chart room on our next cruise.

The funniest coffee story came a little later on when I was an engineer in charge of all the auxiliary systems. The main coffee maker broke, and we couldn't get parts. The Navy has a casualty reporting system (CASREP) for reporting when mission critical things break. Write a CASREP, your problem gets priority. I CASREP'd the coffee maker.

Now what was this thread about?

Brett

[Hubec]

The 1" water thing is one of those "urban rumours" that is just compelling enough to stick in your mind, but upon closer simply doesn't hold water (pun intended). In very cold conditions you can have freezing spray accumulate at well over an inch a minute... Oops. Not cold enough for freezing spray? What about freezing rain? What about battle damage (fire) "Sir we should really put out that burning aircraft on the deck." - "No dooing son, we don't want to flip the ship". And etc...

[Dunkers]

I used to send the Bosun's Mate down to make the coffee - always black of course. However, whenever the captain would wander on the bridge to see how things were going he would glance at the chart only to ask what time we were due to reach the "coffee roundabout" - left by the bottom of the mug on the pristine chart - - the bane of the navigator's life. Now several years later my charts have all got the same roundabouts. Must be like crop-circles - left by aliens as no one ever owns up to causing them!

Much more fun than discussing ship stability

[Dunkers]

Hubec, then why in all damage control lectures I attended were we told that a compartment was much safer if it was completely full of water than it was being partially full. Perhaps an inch is a little extreme but by the time its knee deep it is a real problem. Don't forget that when you are fighting a fire the compartment is also being pumped at the same time to get rid of the water. Obviously on deck if an aircraft spears in then there is no problem as the water goes overboard immediately. In the hanger however, it would be a different matter and the pumps would be employed. I'm sure that the ex-Navy guys like myself will agree that this is the way that we were trained assuming that the USN used similar practices to the Royal Navy.

[Dunkers]

Oops forgot the mention the ice. Any ship in Arctic conditions will have the crew getting rid of the ice immediatly to cut down on the weight aloft as it really does affect the ship's stability to a dangerous level. Sorry but your arguments really aren't realistic. As I said in an earlier post the North Sea ferry which turned over ten years ago didn't have much water inside her, and that was relatively low down on the car deck, but over she went. This springs to mind as there was an article on the BBC last week as it was the tenth anniversary of the capsize.

Anyway, lets talk about coffee stories - its much more amusing