Good morning world, this is radio dan blogging at 20 past 10 from the good ship Doulos. I’m tired, folks, and the reason is this: I got up at 3.30 this morning to go on watch. Was quite a good watch, did one fireround in the middle. Followed the paper list, and finished in 35 minutes, so could spend almost half an hour in the mess getting something to eat and drink. Nice break.

This week has been quite busy, with many different things rather than just solid work. I had 3 days of “fire watch” which everyone in deck assured me was the most boring job on the planet. Basically, whenever someone (an engine room dude) is doing welding, there must be someone watching, from the other side of what they are working on (so sometimes a whole different deck!) to make sure sparks and heat don’t transfer into something else and start a fire that they can’t see. So I took my tenor recorder (blockflute) and some juggling balls expecting a day of relative quietness.

Wrong.

About an hour was sitting watching, but then after that the guy needed me up with him on the sun deck (top of the ship!) actually helping. What we were doing was removing an old air-vent cover from up there, so that there will be space for a new satellite communication dish tower thingy.

So I was hammering, chipping, scrapeing, jumping up and down on top of the air vent trying to make it fall off while the guy hit it with a hammer, pulling on chain blocks trying to get the thing to move, and then eventually I was in the coffee bar below, with a hydraulic jack and 2 metre long metal pipe and a few empty book pallets pushing it upwards, while on the deck above the other guy was using a chainblock and pulling it upwards. I got slightly worried when the ceramic tiles on the deck I was standing on started buckling and cracking everywhere, but he said not to worry. Occupational hazard of being a floor tile, I guess. We got it shifted in the end though.

Ah. I need to go. Some friends want to play Carcassone. Cool.