Friday 3 Sept 2010

Today has been kind of crazy. I started out the day by accidentally adding some freshwater to the tank. I had left one of the return valves open after I had done a water change yesterday. Today as I was preparing to mix the salt in the reserve tank, I turned on a pump that - had the valve been closed - mixes the water in the reserve tank. Since the valve was open, it instead started pumping the water to the display tank. Oopsie! Luckily I caught it quite quickly and shut the valve. Not before the sump tank started to overflow though! In an attempt to prevent too much of the freshwater to get to the actual tank, I shut down the main pump, hoping to isolate the low salinity water to the sump. With that shut down, the main tank started to drain. ACK! Luckily it was break time so all the guys were hanging out in the mess just around the corner from the pump room. I grabbed an engineer and had him turn the pump on as I opened the valve. I'm sure this makes very little sense to anyone - but it's what happened.

All in all, the salinity did drop but only by 1 ppm which in the grand scheme of things isn't too bad especially since the tank runs pretty high anyway. When I do my next water change I can add slightly higher salinity water to try to bring it back up.

Next I had to do water quality testing and I kept getting strange results so I had to re-do almost all of the tests. While I was doing the testing I was filling some bottles with water in the pump room. The reverse osmosis unit that produces the water is very slow so I let it run while I did the tests. Or course, I forgot about them. Luckily, the bottles were sitting in a bucket and I got to them before the water overflowed the bucket. I need to stop trying to multitask until I get the hang of everything.

On another note, the Corsica/Sardinia "ferry boats" are actually cruise ships. It's approximately 170 miles between Nice and Corsica and takes about 5 hours. They literally use cruise ships. It looks like they have all the amenities of a cruise ship as well. State rooms, pools, buffets. It's crazy. Check out their website.