BLOG 56 - "Marine Musings 15" - Iran, War Zone and Exocet Missiles - 'Stulken' Motor Burn Out

At Last

Marine Musings 15 – Back on MV Taronga – This Time as Chief Engineer – Tenure From 23rd July 1981 to 4th Sept 1982 – More than 13 Months!

Chapter 1 – Once Again I Board the MV Taronga – But This Time as Chief Engineer

For me, the 23rd of July 1981 was a red-letter day. I had fulfilled a promise made 3 years ago that I will prove myself, become a Chief Engineer and only after that will I think of leaving, if at all.

I joined the ship at Hong Kong, after spending a day in the Hong Kong Office. I relieved the same person who was Chief Engineer when I left 3 ½ months ago. The Company had decided that, as I had been Second Engineer on the same ship, there was no necessity of a parallel voyage with the outgoing Chief Engineer.

All I needed to do was check Fuel Oil, Diesel Oil and Lubricating Oil figures and sign for them in the Log Book. Sometimes, the incoming Chief Engineer checks the Tank Soundings, calculates quantities and has a discussion with the outgoing Chief Engineer, if there is any discrepancy. I did not do so and took his figures on faith, as he was, basically, an honest man. (Mark Anthony says “So are they all, all honest men”).

The Chief then teared up and said “The faith you have put in me is not deserved. When you were here on board, I did not treat you fair and square and never gave you credit for the work that you did. Anyway, I am glad that you are the one to relieve me”.

It brought to mind the rather shabby treatment he had meted out to me when I was on board the same ship as Second Engineer till a few months back. Whenever I went to his cabin to discuss work, he would never ask me to sit down. I would keep standing, while he would bombard me with questions and used to berate me for inconsequential reasons, with his wife in attendance.

After a couple of days of this I realised he was just impressing his wife. I refused to pander to his ego and told him that in future, if he wanted to know anything about the Engine Room, I would meet him either in the Engine Room or in the Ship’s Office - not in his cabin. After that, I never entered his cabin while he was there.

Once I had signed off, he found himself working more and more in the Engine Room, as the new Second Engineer was not up to the mark.

Now, I had returned to take over from him.

He then handed over a file, saying that he had prepared and typed the ‘Handing Over Notes’ for me to re-acquaint myself with the ship. An hour later, he left the ship. I got the cabin cleaned and moved in.

We left Hong Kong that same night and, being on the Willine run, started the same rotation of ports as before. 2 days down the line, I opened the file containing the ‘Handing Over Report’. It was a typed copy of my hand written report, which I had handed over to the 2nd Engineer 3 ½ months ago. I asked the 2nd about it. He was sheepish enough to admit that he had given it to the last Chief Engineer about a month after I left, claiming that he had checked all machinery and made a preliminary report, in order to get into his good books. The Chief Engineer, on the other hand, had passed the same report as his own and given me back my own report. Such are the perfidies of men.

All in all, it was like being back home. The Captain, then, was Captain Bobby Abraham, the best of them all that I ever sailed with. Quiet, unassuming, a fount of knowledge, an expert navigator, a very practical approach to all problems and an experienced seafarer who did his best to avoid storms, who took us through severe storms so very safely when it was unavoidable.

In the days before animated weather forecasts, he would sit in the Captain’s chair and, watching the state of the sea, the wind direction, the barometer and whatever weather forecasts were coming in, he would figure out the heading of the storm, how severe it would be, when it was likely to turn etc. He was one of the few Captains I knew who could locate each and every constellation in the night sky. It was a pleasure sailing with him. He tried his best to teach me but did not succeed.

When he was in Scindia’s, some of their ships were carrying locomotives’ chassis to Yugoslavia. They were difficult to load, resulting in fewer numbers in each hold. He devised a plan of loading in a manner that increased the number in each hold which, then, became a template for locomotive loading. He did not get any credit for it. Following in his own words:

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"I think you are referring to the undercarriage chassis on which an entire rake sits.

These were Indian made and exported to Yugoslavia is what I remember. It was a pretty large consignment as well to boot.

Made you feel good.

I was given the dimensions of each chassis and the weight and asked how many I could accommodate in No. 2 Hatch.

I have a feeling that I was in command then and the ship was the Jalakanta.

What I do remember is that each of these were as long as the hatch opening and widthwise we could accommodate two side by side.

With a heaving line marked for length and width and height went down No. 2 hatch with my officers in tow and checked out whether we could load the way I thought.

First layer two chassis along the length of the hatch, second layer say six loaded athwartship, then third layer again two lengthwise and fourth layer six athwartship.

I gave them the number we thought would fit comfortably and gave a generous allowance for ease in manoeuvring before dropping in the slot so to say.

They asked if I was sure of the number. I said if the particulars given to me were correct then this is what we could accommodate in No.2.

The first layer in the t’ween deck or hold went fore and aft. The second was lowered within the coaming or coaming swung manually around to an athwartship before lowering.

In the lower hold you do not get the full width of the hold till about five or six foot above the double bottom which suited us fine.

This configuration worked well for ease of loading and discharge and number loaded. The receivers too were very happy as damage if any was nominal.

All ships loading these chassis were required to follow this method.

A pity the Company did not have the grace to credit us for showing them how best to load these.

No matter. This experience stood me in good stead in Barbers when asked to load a bunch of heavy lifts for some Iraqi or Iranian port whose name I forget."

My comment: It was the "Taronga", where we loaded 'Fuji' articulated mobile cranes in No. 1 Hold, using the 40 ton derrick. Cargo weight was 38.5 tons per piece. The Japanese were able to load only a certain number. He showed them how to load more numbers in the same hatch. (Which was the time he had told me about loading the above chassis in Scindia's_

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Chapter 2 – We sail into War Zones, where Angels Fear to Tread

By this time in 1981 ~ 1982, the war between Iran and Iraq was in full swing. They both were selling oil and, with the money, buying arms and were trying to pound each other out of existence. When they were running low on arms, they would sell more oil and buy more arms.

I think we made 3 trips to Bandar Khomeini in Iran, carrying containers, contents of which were unknown to us, but presumed to be arms. We would anchor at Bushehr in the Gulf, wait for a convoy to assemble and, under the supposed naval escort of Iran, make our way to Bandar Khomeini (later Imam Khomeini). The armed support consisted of an occasional helicopter in the distance and a boat with a machine gun. On the first such voyage, of the 8 ships in the convoy, the ship ahead of us and the ship behind us got hit by Exocet missiles, with loss of lives and damages sustained.

Courtesy Google Maps

Note Bushehr towards the Centre and Bandar Khomeini Further North

On reaching Bandar Khomeini, the first act of the Khomeini revolution was to paint a massive portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini on the accommodation front, for which we dared not object. Only after that would cargo work start. Cargo work was allowed only during daylight hours, as a total black out had to be maintained during nights. On each visit, we spent almost a full month there, to discharge full containers and load empty ones.

I was an observer of a very saddening aspect of the Revolution and a consequence of the war. The old Iran – or Persia, as it was then known – was the millenia old seat of learning and knowledge, a crucible of enlightened civilizations.

Here we had hundreds of trucks taking away the cargo we were discharging, the trucks mostly privately owned. Because of the ongoing war, many items were in short supply, including lubricating oil for trucks’ engines.

On the second day of our arrival, I had two truck drivers come into the Engine Room asking for just 2 litres of SAE 40 lubricating oil. The drivers were poor, impoverished. One of them spoke good English, the others Persian but could also speak a mixture that included Urdu and Hindi. The English speaking driver had been a Professor in Tehran University and had to now make a living as a truck driver. I never refused any such request for lubricating oil, knowing their struggle. The trickle of drivers turned to a flood and quite a bit of oil was given away. A couple of days before we finished cargo and sailed, the Engine Control Room and my cabin were nearly flooded with 5 kg and 10 kg sacks of pistachios – the drivers’ return offering of what I had given them. For them, with their livelihood at stake, 2 litres of lubricating oil was as good as gold.

I have always been very proud of our Company, but it failed us in one instance. We were entering a declared ‘war zone’. The crew, because they belonged to a Union which had a specific Agreement with the Company, were paid double the wages from the time they entered the war zone, till they cleared it.

But the Officers were not paid double, as there was no specific agreement. When we queried the decision, we were given the choice of leaving the ship. This was a period in which unemployment in shipping was increasing. We resigned ourselves to our fate. I do not know what transpired later, but we were all paid double wages on subsequent entries into war zones. Maybe it was because most of the other shipping and management companies were paying double wages when in the war zone and they had to follow suit. We made two more trips to Bandar Khoemeini, after which the political landscape changed and Iran started facing sanctions.

Chapter 2 – Problems Faced, Solutions Found

STULKEN WINCH MOTOR

A few months before I signed off the ship as 2nd Engineer, I had been privy to the 220 MT Load Test carried out on the Stulken derrick, which ended disastrously in the final moments, with the main winch motor burning out. The motor had been rewound and flown to Singapore to be fitted back in place. The Norwegian Chief Engineer, who was then on board, had gone through the Norwegian Maintenance Records and found that this particular motor had burnt in a similar fashion, quite a few times in the past. We did not use this rewound winch motor during the rest of my tenure as 2nd Engineer.

Within a month of my joining as Chief Engineer, we loaded a 180 MT piece of cargo, using the Stulken. Sure enough, just as we were completing loading of the cargo, the same motor burnt. This was in Japan. The same Japanese workshop had done this same job of rewinding the motor for the last few years. The first recorded time it had burnt 6 or so years ago was in Europe.

During my leave period, I had thought about this a lot and consulted books on Electricity and Motors. I felt that the workshop that had done the first rewinding did something wrong and subsequent rewindings in Japan just copied the same mistake. It struck me that the only primary mistake would have been if the wrong gauge of wire was used to rewind the stator coils. I kept it in my mind, but I did not know, then, that I would rejoin the same ship, on promotion.

The baby was now mine. We had a 180 ton piece of cargo in the hold and no gear to discharge it in the Persian Gulf.

After the motor burnt out, the Electrical Officer and myself opened the covers of the motor, so that the stator was revealed. The stator photo below is more or less representative of the burnt stator, as far as I can remember.

You may notice that the air gap between each stator coil is pretty large in the photo. On board our ship, the gap was very little and looked really cramped. Each coil was secured using bolts which went through the motor casing into threads tapped into each coil. These were older designs, which you may not see in modern days. Each of the coils were rhombus shaped in cross section, extending the full length of the motor (maybe a metre in length)?

Courtesy Google search

Just a guess, but after looking at the difficulty level of inserting each coil / pole after rewinding, due to the very small gap between each, at some point in the years of rewinding, the workshop must have used a smaller gauge wire, so that each coil could be easily slid in.

Using thinner gauge wire meant lesser torque produced. Loss of full torque meant that the motor could not pick up the load that it was designed for. The use of thicker gauge wire would have produced more torque.

So, instead of giving the motor to the same workshop in Japan, I got it air freighted to Singapore, after receiving the ‘go-ahead’ from the Hong Kong Office. Mr. Datta was then General Manager of the Singapore Office. I elaborated my suspicions to Mr. Datta, who followed it up with ASEA Brown Boveri, who were doing the job in Singapore.

From name plate details, which I had sent to ASEA, they calculated the correct gauge of wire to be used. On receiving the burnt motor, they found a smaller gauge wire had been used in previous repairs, causing this motor to fail at crucial moments. After receiving the rewound motor and fitting it, we successfully discharged the heavy cargo. After this, we were using the Stulken and carrying heavy lift cargo of 200 tons regularly, with no problems.

===== Continued in Blog 57 =====