Alistair Baillie

Greetings, its another fine sunny and bloody warm day down here at Warsash, I think its rained twice in the past fortnight!

I have now finished EDH until I return in phase 3 when we are all tested on it. The past week has been interesting the 3 guys that we had teaching EDH were great with plenty of stories to tell us about their times onboard ships, unfortunately most were stories involving decapitation and sharks eating people!

The senior of the 3 guys told us a rather worrying fact when he was saying goodbye to us, out of the 30 odd cadets that started along with him, only 2 (including him) are still alive, the rest all died while at sea.

Over the past week we have been shown how to tie various types of knots including bowline, double bowline, reef knot, figure of eight, clove hitch, rolling hitch, sheepshank as well as how to splice rope and create eye splices.

We also learned how to setup a stage, and bosons chair for doing maintenance over the side of the ship.

The last day was spent watching some videos on safety at sea mainly relating to entry into enclosed spaces (the video is funny starting of with the phrase “You wouldn’t enter an enclosed space with a mad gun man” – but does have a very serious point 30+ seafarers die each year from entering enclosed spaces where air is not breathable).

We also watched a video about mooring the ship, and along with stories we were told earlier in the week drummed home the fact that you have to watch where your stepping and stay the hell away from the ropes and wires, and if they snap you either better get out the way quickly / have a lot of good luck or your dead.

On the more social front, yesterday I went into Southampton with Ben and David to get some stuff, jogging trousers and a cheap t-shirt that I can wear when doing my power boat course in a few weeks time since I don’t really want to get my jeans soaking.

Last night I went to the campus bar and had a few drinks, played darts rather badly, then wondered off down the road to the Ferryman pub in Warsash for an hour or so then wondered back via the marina and coastal path to the college.

Next week I have my STCW-95 Short Courses including Personal Safety & Social Responsibilities, Fire Prevention and Fire Fighting, Personal Survival Techniques and Elementary First Aid. They wont necessarily be in that order, as both group 1 and group 3 are doing them this week, so hopefully they’ll split us up so were not doing it in a group of 44 people!

These short courses are a requirement for all seafarers working onboard ships so everyone has to do them before they are allowed to board a ship. They do seem to be fun and the only bit I’m dreading is the Fire Fighting and entering water from height part of the PST course, but they cant be that dangerous and there will be actual fire fighters in the training tank with us when were doing the fire fighting so it should all be fun!

Ohh, and on a technical note, I am aware that the Questions and Answers section of the ‘Deck Officer’ pages wont allow you to validate your email address. Your question will still have been added it just wont show up until I return home at Christmas – unfortunately the network firewall we have in the student residential network wont allow me to access my site admin software, or FTP, to correct the problem!