29 July 2001 - Finish of the refit !
RRS James Clark Ross Diary
Position at 12.00: Alongside at Cammell Laird shipyard, Hebburn
Air temperature: 23.5°C; Sea temperature: 15.3°C
Finish of refit and mobilising for the BGS Rockall Cruise
Firstly many apologies to anybody who has been checking out the web page over the last couple of weeks as due to work commitments it has not been possible to do an update.
We finished off the refit at A & P last week and shifted the ship
across the river to the West Berth at the Cammell Laird shipyard. With
no shore workers or equipment on the ship it was nice to be able to start
to clean up the considerable mess of the refit which involves a lot of
hard work from everybody.
So what have we been up to?
Just some of the things that have been done since the last weekly update are the re-covering of the internal stairs and maintenance of the flooring within the ship. The catering staff have been cleaning all of the inside of the accommodation. The new LAN system (see previous updates) has now been finished and is apparently working well with the whole ship now using it. The engines have been put back together along with all of the other bits in the engine room and the engineers continue to be busy doing lots of maintenance. The deck crew have been painting anything that doesn't move and washing and scrubbing the ship! The cargo tender and rescue boat have been given a run on the river and from Wednesday July 25 we have been mobilising the equipment for the BGS science cruise.
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Keith and Luke Painting and the Deck Crew Scrubbing.... | |
An inspection of the stern-gear by a diver has been carried out to investigate a problem which became apparent during the move of the ship to the South side of the river from A&P at Wallsend. The result is that the ship must go back into the dry dock again at A&P to determine and resolve the problem, thus unfortunately delaying the start of the BGS cruise.Hopefully this will be accomplished during the coming week.
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Diver entering water | |
Mobilising for science
The science cruise [JR64: BGS Rockall] that we will be doing when we leave here is for the British Geological Survey (BGS) and will take place around Rockall off the West coast of Scotland. This week we have mobilised all of their equipment and they have been successfully testing it to ensure it all works before we sail. There will be lots more on this over the next couple of weeks.
To load the equipment we had to move the ship along the quay to allow
the shore crane to reach our after deck, as the winch for the Rock Drill
is too heavy (at 18 Tonnes) for the ships aft crane (10T). Once this was
on board and we were back in position on the berth we loaded the rest of
the equipment. Because the distance of the ship from the edge of the quay
is too great (the drill therefore being outside the 10 Tonne range of
the aft crane), the Rock Drill was landed onto the pontoon between the
ship and the quay by the shore crane, then picked up by the ship's crane
to land it in position on deck.
Once everything was on board and connected up we then wet tested the
Rock Drill over the stern of the ship in the River Tyne.
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Testing in the Tyne |
Landing the Gravity Corer |
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Lifting on the Rock Drill | |
And so this is how it looks when it is all in place.
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Looking down from the Nav Bridge Deck |
The view across the aft deck |
Coming up......
We will be in and out of the dry-dock, taking bunkers and sailing for the science cruise.
Also for those of you who don't know we are going to be in Portsmouth for the International Festival of the Sea on August bank holiday weekend.
Written by Paul Clarke (Third Officer)
