Seagulls

…Just as we were bothered by starlings on the ‘Jacob van Heemskerck’, we were attacked by seagulls on the ‘Gelderland’ in Persian Gulf.

Seagull.

Where they came from and went to, we could not read from their beaks.
But there were hundreds of them.
We tried to chase them away, but that didn’t make any sense.
On every horizontal spot on the ship were those animals.
They didn’t hold their beaks either.

The next day everything was fully be shit under.
That was washing and scrubbing until everything shone again.
Fortunately they didn’t come into the engine room.

The cooperation between deck and grease pit was not always happy.
This way the sailors could have put everything neatly painted on the outside and then of course the engineers had to weld on the inside just a bit.
The result can be guessed.

Sometimes they were to blame for it because of their zeal.
On Saturday morning the deck and the structure of the ‘Hector’ in Libya was always scrubbed and sprayed with fresh water.

‘Hector’.

Of course the pipe was not forgotten either, so there was some water in the funnel of the central heating stove.
Water, soot and heat together.
A thud and a cloud of soot blew out of the funnel on the newly scrubbed deck.
From that greasy, black and hard to remove substance.

In the engine room the insulation cladding started to glow, so we also got work to do.
With hindsight, the inside of the funnel was burned clean, but the work on Saturday now lasted all day.

That’s how you keep each other busy.