I'm back in the Pickle factory, and have a little bit more of the adventure to share.
I had just the 2 weeks at home for the School holidays, now am on board the Vessel I normally work on and are along side in Leith, near Edinborough, UK
The vessel is in downtime now, for maintenance.
It is nice onboard without the Dive Crew here, we get lots of work completed.
The dive system is now open, the system is "On the surface". So I climbed around with the camera inside 1 of the Larger chambers.
Here are the 6 bunk beds. The mattresses are removed.
Now looking the other way inside the same chamber.
In the above pic, you can see through a Hatch into the adjacent chamber. This is that chamber.
The black thing you can see below the open hatch is the toilet, this chamber is the Entry Lock, it is where the divers can transfer from 1 chamber to another, up to the diving bell, or across and up to the rescue chamber.
The open hatch is the equipment lock where the large items they require are transferred in.
Now another view inside the same chamber.
The hydraulic cylinder (long silver thing) is to lift up the top door into place as the doors weigh the best part of 200 kgs. How would you like to have to open and close a 200 kg doors x 2 every time you go to the toilet?
Next pic shows a trunking, the tunnel from 1 chamber across to another. If you had to move across, you must crawl through so that you can open the 2 x latches, the swing open the door. When you pass through, you must close the 1st door you opened.
The doors ( hatches) must never be left open.
Now for the tunnel one hopes to never need. It leads up to the rescue chamber, known as a SPHL, self propelled hyperbaric life-boat.
The engine room is getting a work over at the moment. Periodic maintenance sometime means engines get stripped down to see why they were working.
Here is 1 of the large engines in bits.
Yes, that is a man head you see, he is assembiling a cylinder head. To his right, 2 of the head and cylinders are removed.
Here is a combined cylinder and cylinder head ready for installing.
A side view of the engine with the access covers off. The top covers are the cam shaft, lower for the con rod connections to the crank.
Now looking inside the engine toward the bottom of the sump.
Notice anything?
Clean, and this has not been cleaned, it is how you would expect to find the insides of these sorts of modern ship engines.
I got 6 weeks today before I am home, the count has begun.
We're of for sea trials over the weekend, then when that is done and everything works, we're sailing to Poland for major works to be done on the main crane. They are taking the main winch off I think. Should be an interesting exercise.
More later.
Happy camping Swaggers.
