Activity

If you are given the choice to sail with your friend, would you?

Writing from personal experience and observation of others, the short answer is “it depends”.

Factors to consider:
– Rank: Unless both are cadets or different dept, you or your friend will be higher rank than the other. We all know how the chain of command works onboard, and…[Read more]

This happened to my contract, MC engine, MAN.

One of the main engine unit, exhaust temperature drops rapidly suddenly. Vessel is manuvering with pilot on. 🙂 what do you think is the cause?

Some observations

that some ships do not have clear indication on inlet or outlet, but in all designs,

Cooling SW/ FW always enters from top and exited from below. ( Cool to hot )

Vice versa the Coolant(JCK or OIL) enters from TOP and exits below. ( Hot to cool )

Helps if you come from a messy piping ship or just tracing pipes. 🙂

The title is very clickbait, like those ads “How to earn 100K in 1 year!”
But just like those ads, getting promoted is never as straightforward as following a checklist then all will be well.

Many unknown and incontrollable factors such as:
1. How many people in the same queue for promotion?
2. What are their qualifications? (3rd Engineer…[Read more]

For Engine department, may differ from company to company and for different types of vessels.

Engine Cadet -> Junior Engineer or 5th Engineer -> 4th Engineer (AKA 3AE) -> 3rd Engineer (AKA 2AE) -> 2nd Engineer (AKA 1AE) -> Chief Engineer

what is those 10k 40 or 5k 25 marking you see on the valves?

10K – is the pressure limit, 25 is the norminal size of the pipe. Sometimes the valve is too badly corroded to know its marking on the valve itself. A trick is to just look at the system drawing, by right all drawings will indicate the pipe norminal size.

those 15A,25A, 40A,…[Read more]

As a Second Engineer, I supervise the Third, Fourth, Trainee engineers and a greaser/wiper.
Everytime I meet new crew, I tell them my focus is on safety and accuracy.
Sometimes the junior engineers tell me they were told by other senior engineers to work faster. E.g. If they can’t finish a pump overhaul job in 8 hours, they’re lousy engineers.
I…[Read more]

The practical side is a big learning curve for all marine engineers in their first 3 years or so.

You may or may not had experiences of assisting with overhauling/repairing certain machineries, and now you’re put in the situation of overhauling it as the main engineer in charge. That’s really daunting, we’ve all been through that befor…[Read more]