Alistair Baillie.co.uk

We’ll GMDSS went fairly well - the exam was a bit of a let down since everyone says its a really hard course - personally I found it reasonably easy and was a bit disappointed after the exam! Not that I am complaining it means I can return to studying for my Orals which are fast approaching.

I finished GMDSS on saturday and then started PSCRB - thats Proficiency in Survival Craft and Rescue Boats. I don’t expect this course to be particularly hard after all I have plenty of experience of launching and recovering, lifeboats, rescue boats and tenders pretty much every week at sea - but what is shocking is the people on the course who despite having the same sea time as me have never been in a lifeboat in the water!

PSCRB runs until the practical assessment on Friday, then my parents are visiting for the weekend.

Last night I went to see Terminator 4 with some guys from the course, it was reasonably ok although not really a brilliant movie!

Carrying on from last time, if anyone does have any more questions they want to ask, and me to answer about the cadet ship, college or life at sea feel free to add them as a comment to any entry (or send me an email via the contact me link) and I’ll reply at some point.

That's another few weeks done so I’ll give you all a quick update. Following on from EDH I had a week off. This was mainly spent continuing my studying and drinking coffee in Costa. As a bonus it was also very warm and sunny that week so I spent a bit of time outside in an attempt to go slightly less white!

Following my week off was a week of first aid - well 4 days of first aid. This was one of the most interesting short course so far - possibly just being beaten by advanced fire fighting.

Following that was NARAS - this has to be the most fun short course I have taken. NARAS for those not aware is basically a ship simulator course where you do a mixture of singular and interactive exercises involving the other teams on the course.

I am presently at home for a few days before I head back to Warsash on wednesday to continue my revision.

I have only two short courses left, GMDSS starting next week and CPSC which starts the week after. I then have a week or two until my orals examination which is quickly drawing closer.

This week started off nice and early at 0830 on monday morning with my Efficient Deck Hand (EDH) refresher and assessment course. This is a 2 day course with the assessment lasting around 1 hour on the third day.

Monday started off fairly easy with a quick introduction to the various types of ropes and then into splicing. The afternoon consisted of some whipping, knot tying and then the use of the stage and bosuns chair.

Tuesday saw us carrying out a wire splice in the morning, followed by some more splicing in the afternoon - this time with 8 stranded polyprop.

The assessment was done in pairs, with myself and David at 1045 - it lasted around 40 minutes and we both passed - in fact, all of us passed. For anyone who may be interested the knots you are required to be able to tie are;

• Reef knot
• Timber Hitch
• Clove Hitch
• Bowline
• Bowline on the bight
• Sheetbend
• Double Sheetbend
• Rolling Hitch
• Round turn and two half hitches
• Fishermans Bend

I then had the rest of the week off and also have next week off as well - which leaves plenty of time for me to revise for my Orals exam which is now booked!!

My next course is Medical First Aid which I start a week on tuesday.

So last week had me doing the first of my final short courses, Advanced Fire Fighting. For those who don’t know what’s involved it is a 4 day course which extends the content of the STCW Basic Fire Fighting course.

The first day is a theory day and pretty much recovers the content of the basic course - only in a lot less time, at the end of the day there is a brief lecture on the correct wearing of the BA equipment and the correct way to perform various types of searches and open doors.

Day two starts nice and early at 0830 using different types of fire extinguishers to put out class A and B fires. This is followed by using hoses to extinguish a class A fire. You are then taken a walk round the fire unit which is designed to model a ships accommodation and engine room.

After a short break you put on BA and are split into your teams, we then walked through the unit carrying out search and door opening procedures with zero visibility moving from level 2 up to 3 and then out again.

By now its lunch time and after lunch you put BA back on and re enter the unit. This time they have set a large class A fire in the bottom of the unit. In our case we entered on level 4 and proceeded down a stairwell, performed a casualty search, then opened a hatch and descended to level 2. We carried out another casualty search before descending down onto level 1 into the room where the fire was. After spraying it with water a few times we made our exit via the nearest door and the next team proceeded through.

Day 3 is another theory day this time covering fixed installations and in groups you discuss failings during previous incidents onboard ship.

Day 4 again starts nice and early at 0830 using foam to extinguish class B fires. This is then followed by the first major exercise of the day where 3 BA teams are to enter the unit where there have been various class A and one large class B fire as well as a few casualties reported. I was in BA team 4 so not required to enter on the first exercise, I spent the exercise rigging the hoses and inline inductor for the BA teams and then helping with the BA control board.

The afternoon had major exercise 2 which was similar to the morning exercise, except rather than entering via level 2, we were to enter via a shaft tunnel directly into the engine room where the large class B fire was located. I was in the first team to enter, after extinguishing the class B fire we located a casualty, evacuated them and proceeded to extinguish a class A fire. We then made an entry through to the aft of the engine room where there was another large class A fire and a casualty, in this case we couldn’t get to the casualty and due to running low on air we retreated and the the second team entered.

To sum it up it was a lot of fun. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I have EDH (where you have to tie knots and rig stages / bosuns chairs) and then I have a week and a half off before the 4 day first aid course.

On a totally unrelated subject, Twitter was down for maintenance a few days ago and still manages to impress me with its funny error messages.

My excellent driving skills at Isla Catalina

So thats week one of phase 5 at Warsash down. We all arrived back nice and early at 9am on monday to the wonderful news that the MCA had decided that the "NARAS" component that is built into the foundation degree course is rubbish and that we have to do an individual 36 hour NARAS theory course!

For those doing this course a year behind us, its not a big problem, the college just added it to their phase 3 timetable, however for us they are fast running out of time and have replaced what we expected to be 3 weeks of Orals preparation with 9 - 5 NARAS theory with a bit of Orals preparation dotted around.

One bonus is we now have 3 copies of the notes with 3 different covers - but still with the same mistakes in them!

So... moving on, after the next 2 weeks we all start our short course period. There are 6 short courses in total, which in no particular order are;

• CPSC - Proficiency in Survival Craft & Rescue Boats
• EDH - Efficient Deck Hand
• AFF - Advanced Fire Fighting Course
• MFA - Medical First Aid On Board Ship
• GMDSS - General Operator Certificate
• NARAS Simulator

These take place randomly dotted throughout the months of May and June with me finishing my last short course on the 3rd of July.

The timetable for the next two weeks remains a mystery at the time of writing, however I shall assume it’s probably going to be much the same as last week.

While crossing the Atlantic I decided to make a quick video tour of the bridge onboard the cruise ship Island Star, here it is...

Time for a bit of a random entry, but how many of you have thought about data backup? I direct this post at all my fellow students and also officers, staff and crew serving on ships!

When you think about it, when we’re away at sea our laptops store a lot of important irreplaceable things - such as photos and videos of all the great places we have visited and friends we have made! For my fellow students, if you are like me, you more than likely have your entire training portfolio and reports stored on your laptop - what would you do if your hard drive crashed, got nicked or worse - the ship sank and took your laptop with it!

Ok, so the ship sinking might be highly unlikely but it could happen, has happened and it adds a bit of drama to the post.

Alright, so if you are a student you are probably already aware of the importance of backing up your work - we’ve all lost something at some point when we deleted the wrong file, saved on top of something or the computer just died. If you’re currently backing up chances are you are using CD’s, DVD’s, Flash Drives or just emailing the files to yourself. You might even be using Apple’s Time Machine or Norton 360 to do the backup automatically every few hours - but these methods still require you to backup onto a disk which you’ll keep near your laptop - or at the very least have on the ship with you!

A simple solution comes from a company called Mozy, they offer (for personal use) free* online automatic data backup, there software is compatible with both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, but most importantly its really simple and quick to setup;

• Simply visit mozy.com, create an account and download their software.
• Run the installer and follow the simple onscreen instructions.
• Select the files you want to backup - you can choose only your important files or everything.
• Mozy will then create a backup of the files and folders you selected - the first time you do this it can take a little while depending on your internet connection - but after it’s done it once it only saves the files that have changed so its much faster.

Even better! You don’t have to remember to run the backup, Mozy will automatically backup the files whenever they are changed or new files are added to the folder.

If I haven’t sold it to you already, take a look at one of their adverts, if you're interested take a look at their web site here: http://www.mozy.com.

*The free version of Mozy lets you backup up to 2 GB of data - plenty of space for your important documents and files, they also offer unlimited backup for $4.95.

Since my last entry a few weeks ago I have updated the web site with a new design and switched my blog to using a program I designed for another web site. If you have been visiting over the past few weeks you may have noticed lots of one line entries - these were imports taken automatically from Twitter, I have decided however that this was a bad idea as a lot of the messages were pretty random and not really of interest to people outside twitter, I have since removed the automatic Twitter importing, so if you want to see what I am up to regularly you can follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/alistairuk.

Speaking of Twitter I was playing around with Photoshop this morning and changed the way my profile looks, inspired by Justine who did a similar thing a few months ago.

In other news videos I place on YouTube automatically import too, so there are now two videos of me at Maho Beach on the joint Dutch/French island of St Marten in the Caribbean.

On the merchant navy front I am returning to Warsash Maritime Academy (who have a new web site by the way) on sunday for what is hopefully my last time there.

I believe I have 3 weeks of revision/finishing off the foundation degree and then around 9 weeks of short courses such as GMDSS, Advanced Fire Fighting, Emergency First Aid, NARAS and EDH. Before being able to sit my orals examination with the MCA.

Anyway, this was meant to just be a quick update, I shall start writing more when I return to Warsash.

On Saturday the 28th of March 2009 at 8:30pm, people, businesses and national landmarks throughout the world will be switching off their lights for WWF’s Earth Hour.

It all started back in 2007 in Sydney Australia and spread world wide in 2008. This year so far 1180 cities in 80 countries have signed up as well as numerous famous landmarks including Nelson’s Column, the Forth Bridge, Eiffel Tower and Sydney Opera House.

You can find out more by visiting http://earthhour.wwf.org.uk

Maho Beach is located at the end of the runway at Princess Juliana Airport on the Dutch/French island of St Maarten in the sunny Caribbean. Here is a quick video of a 747 landing!

Maho Beach is located at the end of the runway at Princess Juliana Airport on the Dutch/French island of St Maarten in the sunny Caribbean. Here is a quick video of a plane landing, and the result of a 747 taking off at the airport. I learned a very valuable lesson, sand when blasted at you by a 747 hurts a lot! But was still a lot of fun. Thanks to my sister for filming - even if she wasn't that good at it!

I am now back home in sunny Scotland where it’s a bit chillier than the 28+ degrees I am used to over in the Caribbean.

I flew back last thursday, getting back to Edinburgh around 10am on Friday morning.

The last week onboard was rather interesting, we got to Panama ok, however on our run from Panama to Aruba the weather worsened and we ended up getting into Aruba around 2100 instead of 0800. The captain modified the itinerary slightly so we spent the night in Aruba - there was only one bar open on account of it being a Sunday but I still had a good time, and then set sail around 7 pm the following day.

Because we had lost a day and the weather had not drastically improved we dropped Port of Spain from our itinerary and headed straight to Grenada and then back to Barbados.

There’s not much else for me to say on the merchant navy front other than I have around 4 weeks until I go down to Southampton and return to Warsash on the 20th of April.

In other news you may have noticed my new web site, it is partially using software I developed for my Blog Off web site to import twitter updates and youtube videos automatically, which is why it has lots of one line entries. Let me know what you think by commenting on this entry or sending me a message using the Contact Me link above.

Time for another update, training wise not much has really happened since the last entry, my family and some friends were onboard during the last cruise which was fun but slightly tiring.

Since the last entry we dragged anchor twice, the first was at Dominica where due to the large number of cruise ships (six of them), we and the Eurodam were at anchor and tendering ashore to a very annoying pier. I say annoying because it was square with a small entrance at one of the corners and we had to drive the tenders into the middle, turn them around then come alongside. Leaving was a bit more challenging as you had to get off the berth, back as far over to the other side as possible and then make a run at the entrance to get clear before the current sent you crashing into the side. The advantage of being on the inside was there was no swell, however Eurodam were having a much easier time on the outside edge of the square. Anyway, during the 1200 - 1600 watch which I was on, we observed that we had moved around 2 cables out of the bay. This wasn’t a major concern as it was all safe water and no traffic around. About 1600 a squal hit us and the wind speed increased pretty much instantly to 50 kts and then died down again as the squall past. While re-checking the position during the handover it became pretty obvious that we were dragging anchor (Eurodam was sailing past our windows and we were doing 2 kts out of the bay), the captain had already appeared on the bridge when the squall hit and opted to wait a few minutes to see if the anchor would regain its hold. This unfortunately did not happen and 10 minutes later we had one of the son engines started and clutched in to begin maneuvering back towards our original position.

As we were due to sail at 1730 and it was now 1640 the captain decided to just use the engine to hold position while the last passengers came back onboard and we sailed from Dominica an hour later with no problems.

The next cruise was a bit rough due to strong winds from the north, we had to cancel our port of call in Grand Cayman as the port authority closed the port due to the weather, meaning we proceeded directly to Isla Catalina and added in an extra stop in Antigua later in the cruise.

We got to Isla Catalina where we were experiencing a moderate swell and gusts of winds and began tendering there. Mid morning the ship dragged anchor so it was retrieved, repositioned and dropped again, however throughout the 1200 - 1600 watch she continued to slowly drag anchor, however as it was in a safe direction the captain took the decision to leave her dragging slowly rather than attempting to re-anchor again.

We also stopped off at Sint Maarten where I went to a beach which is directly at the end of the main airport runway, it was a lot of fun, but a 747’s engines blow a lot of sand very fast, and its very painful when it hits you! But I did get some good videos and photo’s which will be on Facebook when I get home in around 4 weeks.