After a night wallowing in the broken ice we set off again towards Murmansk.
The weather is better and the captain has been told by the agent that the Belakoneka, the VLCC storage vessel, will be able to take our cargo tomorrow after 1600 when an export aframax will have left for Western Europe. We are aiming to be at the pilot station by that time tomorrow, where my voyage in the Arctic will come to an end.
As we cross north of the entrance to the White Sea the broken ice floe is littered with thicker ice, as well as brown ice.
This apparently is brackish or freshwater and therefore more compact. When solid it is more difficult to pass through than the flatter ice formed on top of the sub-zero sea water.
One or two of the larger chunks of ice are occupied by the occasional walrus that merely raise a tired head to watch us go by.
I am, still, the walrus
The crew are out on deck again in force chipping away the ice from the deck, mainly on top of the ballast tanks as the heat from the crude oil cargo has helped melt anything frozen above it.
One Comment
Congratulations Craig on your interesting blog and to Lloyd’s List on the idea of sending somebody to make (for majority people in shipping including me) unusual voyage where we understand luck is more important than skills and experience of crew! The photos are beautiful!
You say ‘the ship has a special hull coating that makes it resistant to the ice and that the coating was applied in Dubai because in South Korea is illegal’. That tells us that everything is possible in shipping (see the story of LNG Margaret Hill).
You say ‘a day in thick ice when all three engines are in use the vessel consumes 120 tonnes of heavy fuel oil. In good conditions and at an economical speed of abut 12 knots it uses about 40 tonnes’. This is an impressive fact.
You say ‘lifeboats are pretty useless in ice conditions’ and I would say most lifeboats are useless in bad weather with rough sea though seafarers still need to perform dangerous drills by lowering boats into water.
You say ‘it is amusing that the second officer is correcting the chart for the approaches to Liverpool while the ship may never sail to that port’. That tells us that chart system is not perfect and needs intelligent officers with skill to notice the details and patience including the time to correct the charts accurately.
You say ‘the danger will come with a company that finds itself a cheap ice class vessel and decides to try to save time and money by taking it through these waters while not having an experienced crew’. You are absolutely right and that indeed worries me.
Are we ready for global exploitation of Arctic? I want to say that somebody says that some scientists fabricated results regarding global warming researches, depending who had financed their researches. That’s why we have those who say that global warming is a fact and others who say that ice age is coming. The truth is somewhere in between. I doubt that anyone can predict the future or let’s say weather conditions accurately in some area not even for only one month ahead. We all see that the NE or NW Passages are facts due to ice melting and melting happens when the temperature rises. At the end I must confess to be pretty depressed after understanding what consequences can bring melting of ice and pollution of last global reservoirs of water which are also reservations for animals (Arctic and Antarctic). I’m not against exploitation of oil, etc. but if we have local national parks then we should have also global ones.