When I went to sea in 1961 I don't think I was ready for the work routine that I would be working. It was way different from anything I had heard of. Four hours on and four hours off. At first it sounds alright. Work four hours and do everything that you think you should do for the next four hours. Things like eat, do your laundry, clean your bunk area, go on deck and see whats going on. If you spend your time working way down below deck in an engine room, you really look forward to seeing sky, clouds, waves, breathing air that's not filled with diesel mist from the injectors.
The engine rooms, and there were two of them, each had two Fairbanks Morris diesel engines that produced one thousand seven hundred and fifty horsepower each. And they did this at about seven hundred R.P.M. Running at slow speed the propellers would only turn about sixty R.P.M. The noise was so far above what is now allowed in a work area. No one used any hearing protection. We used hand signals to communicate. If we needed to talk to each other you would have to cup your hands over the other persons ear and yell, so when you went on deck, you really enjoyed the quite and the fresh air.
Each engine room, like I said had two engines and powered one propeller. The ship had two propellers, one prop shaft came from each engine room. During your four hour duty shift, a log was kept, showing about a hundred different readings from the gauges on the control panel. Other areas of the ship also needed to be checked every hour. One of these places were the shaft alleys where the prop shafts went from the diesel engines all the way to where the shafts went through the hull to the propellers.
To check the closed areas and to be sure that nothing serious had occurred since the last check was always a little unnerving. You would open a hatch, go through, close the hatch and so on and so on. There were lights everywhere, but bulbs did burn out once in awhile. Really, really dark down there when the lights go out. The shaft alleys were big enough to walk through if you stayed bent over. There was enough room to walk on ether side of the propeller shaft, about three feet on each side and about four feet above the shaft. The shaft itself was about eighteen inches in diameter, and was supported by huge bearings encased in what is called a pillow block that has an oil sump that needed to be checked every hour also.
Here's one of the games us young men played on the ship. When we were going at slow speed, you could wrap your arms and legs around the prop shaft and see how long you could hang on. About one minute was about the record. You think the teacups at Disneyland are bad, try riding the prop shaft. We got caught riding the prop shaft and were told to not do that anymore. We ran the ships' Captain crazy with some of our antics. One other game we were told to not do anymore was jumping up while the fantail of the ship was at its highest point. You could get ten to fifteen feet in the air as the bow climbed the next wave and the back of the ship fell. Way cool as long as you landed on the deck and not too close to the edge of the ship. We never did this alone. It was a little dangerous, but fun. Keep in mind, we were seventeen and eighteen years old, and there were about ten of us at this age. It kept the old guys on their toes!
Along with two main engines in each engine room, the aft engine room also had two huge generaters that powered all the electrical needs, and a steam boiler for heating needs throughout the ship. The steam boiler also was used to run an evaporator that took sea water and distilled it into fresh water.
This ship was a research vessel. We had a bunch of scientists on board that were doing things like mapping the bottom of ocean, logging the sea temperatures at different depths, and dragging a huge net, way deep and seeing what was living at those depths. It was always exciting when the net was brought on board. The deck crew would sort out all the big things with teeth and stingers, then the scientists would jump in and start sorting the rest out. We would stop in the middle of nowhere and take bottom samples of the sea bed. It would be like five miles deep. It would take three days to drop the cable, and another three days to retrieve the tube that would fire itself into the sea floor as it made contact.
Once in awhile it wouldn't fire in straight and we would have to keep the ship in one place and do it all over again. Another six days in one place. It was during one of these extended times that us kids got the Captains' permission to swim off the fantail of the ship. Two engineers would stand by with 30/30 rifles while we dove off the deck. It was sooo clear that you couldn't swim down far enough to go out of sight. Keep in mind that we were in five mile deep ocean. Really a cool thing to have done.
While we were lowering and raising the cable for a bottom sample we would have these huge lights at night pointing down at the ocean. You should see what comes up to that light for a look see. We would see a really big fish come up to check out the lights, and, whosh, something bigger would snap it up and disappear. Now I know why the Captain had two engineers standing by with rifles while we were diving off the stern. Kinda like, whosh, and we would have been gone. Ha, 30/30 rifles? we needed something way bigger than 30/30's after seeing how big things get way out there. Of course we would have see it coming with that really clear water. If someone would have yelled, "something really big is heading up for you", Ill bet that would have been exciting! especially if gun shots, yelling and screaming were involved. Kinda makes those little hair's all over you stand up thinking about that one! Ill just remember how much fun it was swimming in five mile deep water that was so clear and clean!
