Tuesday 7 Sept 2010

Where do I begin for today? Oh, I know, how about 5:30 this morning when there is an insistent knock at my door. I open it to find one of the guys who was apparently on watch telling me that I have a "call" from the Odyssey on the bridge. I fumble into a t-shirt and find my glasses and head upstairs. My eyes are freaking out because I have gone from the dark of my cabin to the blazing lights in the hallways back to near pitch-black in the bridge. Over the radio I hear Jamie, the chief officer on Odyssey tell me that an alarm is going off on the aquarium for high temp. He says it's at 27.5 C. I tell him it's ok, it happened slowly and it's because the pool is full, I'll check on it when I get there later.

I luckily fell back asleep but then managed to sleep through my alarm. I woke up at 8 am sharp - which is when I am supposed to be starting work. I run down to the galley, grab some delightful chocolate-granola-something-or-other, and a cup of tea and then head out to the aft deck hoping a tender would be available to take me to Odyssey. Thankfully, Jamie was on his way over to pick up something from Shadow so he gave me a ride.

I decided that since the sea water here is the correct salinity and a few degrees cooler then the tank, I would set up a flow through system to do a bit of a water change and hopefully drop the temp a bit. It turns out that the heaters for the pool have been running so that is what has caused the tank temp to go up. I asked if they could shut those off and they did. Anyway, the water change went smoothly but I was cut short when some of the deck hands started sanding something off the side. I was worried about drawing some kind of pollutant into the tank so I shut down the water change operation. The temp did drop ever so slightly though.

I had previously filled the reserve tank with ocean water to have for my next water change, just in case the water around the boat became unusable. Today when I checked it's salinity I found that it was too high so I turned on the reverse osmosis unit to add some fresh water and hopefully bring the salinity down. I went into the dining room to observe the tank, make sure everything was ok when one of the stewards came in and told me that there was water leaking in the pump room. I rushed over to find the RO unit spraying water all over the place. Lots of water. Awesome.

One of the coupling had burst and the supply line was just free flowing all over the pump room. I got it shut off quickly and one of the engineers brought me a small wet vac that filled up so quickly I had to empty it 5 times before I got all of the water up. It's strange because the small length of hose that came disconnected was held on to the pipe with a clip that didn't seem loose or defective at all. I'm worried that there is something causing a blockage and increasing the pressure higher that the system can deal with. With any luck, we will stay in an area where I can keep using sea water and I won't have to use the RO unit so much.

The one good thing that came of this was that I stayed onboard Odyssey for lunch and they had pizza!!