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Captain's Log
DATE July 3, 2007
CAPTAIN’S LOG
After leaving Honolulu Saturday night,
the ship just meandered the 60 miles down to the southwest
coast of Lanai. We use this part of the Hawaiian Islands
because it is one of the most consistently sheltered places
to the prevailing northeasterly winds. We like to pick a
location where the wind speed is very light so as not to
complicate the ship maneuvers that we want the senior deck
students to complete.
During what we refer to as the
“underway training” portion of the cruise (most of it of
course is underway), we have each senior deck student
maneuver the ship in a mock docking situation. Letting the
students actually conn the ship gives them an appreciation
for the ship’s turning characteristics and difficulty in
stopping her 15,000 tons of momentum. The exercise is to
create a sort of fictitious “rubber dock” in the ocean and
have the students complete a race-track type maneuver and
bring the ship back to the invisible dock and try and get
her stopped and parallel to this make-believe dock. We use a
rubber buoy (and a good thing too) to represent the dock
that the students use. That way if we hit it, which is
regularly, we don’t have to get our checkbook out and write
a repair bill. During these exercises, myself and some of
the senior officers spend time coaching the students through
this entirely new experience. We are fortunate to have two
very experienced shiphandling faculty from Texas, Captains
Jack Smith and Jack Lane (both retired port pilots). For
many cadets who plan to sail, they will not have the
opportunity to actually maneuver a ship on their own again
for a very long time, maybe not even until they are Captains
themselves many years hence.
In order to cycle through our 56 deck
seniors, we needed two full days of going around and around.
Each exercise requires the ship to engage and disengage the
engine clutches several times for each exercise; sometimes
backing the propeller pretty hard to try and get the ship
stopped dead-in-the-water. While the ship is maneuvering in
this racetrack pattern, we use that opportunity during each
exercise to let the seniors practice launching, maneuvering
and recovering the ship’s rescue boat while the ship is
actually moving. This can be a little intimidating from the
boat’s perspective when you are lowered to the ocean right
alongside a large moving ship hull.
After the seniors have taken a turn at
maneuvering the ship and riding the rescue boat rocket, we
have them visit the engine control room (EOS) to observe the
process the engineers must perform to get the engines to
answer the bells ordered from their counterparts on the
bridge. Before any conning officer orders an engine “bell”
(the ring on the engine order telegraph), they ought to have
a deep appreciation for what it entails, so that they know
what it takes and what the limitations are. For example, on
the GOLDEN BEAR, every time you want to clutch in the
engines to the propeller shaft, it takes eight long seconds
to do that from the time the engine bell is given to when
the propeller is actually turning. Believe me, if you’re
trying to get the ship stopped, that eight seconds can be an
eternity.
Using some pictures to illustrate, we
see the buoy in the water as we go by. There is a fictitious
line that runs through this buoy and represents the face of
the dock.
This picture shows me coaching Texas
Cadet Kyle Entzel. Pilots and mariners just have to talk
with their hands – ya just gotta.
The next two pictures show the rescue
boat operations: first at the rail for launch (you can see
the buoy in the background), and second in the water ready
for pickup.
After the last exercise, we turned the
bow to the west and finally began steaming toward our first
port in the Philippines. As good as the maneuvering was,
everyone was anxious to start the voyage proper.
Tomorrow is the fourth of July, so we
plan a little celebration after the day’s work. We’ll write
again in a couple of days.
Captain Leyda
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