Our trip to go to the dry dock for our 5 year ABS inspection was postponed due to the coronavirus. We have a stay in place order till further notice. We had done a lot of work to get ready for the inspection though. We spent a lot of time in between the decks and in all the void spaces to inspect the aluminum for pitting. We cleaned any salt that may have built up over the years as we went through. It was not easy to do. The chief engineer and I crawled around some pretty tight dirty spaces for a couple of days to get it all cleaned up. But lucky we did not see any major corrosion or cracks.
Now that we have been staying in place I have been doing alot of other work. I fixed two of the ship’s pneumatic pumps. I took them apart and I found two of the check valves were fouled up with debris. I cleaned them out and put the pumps back together. I tested it out and they worked. The ship also has a distilled water system for the scientists, but the system has not been working for months I was told. We ordered new pressure gages for it because the old ones seemed to not be working. I had a little bit of extra time so I decided to install the gages and see if I could troubleshoot the system and figure out the problem. I narrowed the problem down to the pressure tank. I read the manual for the tank and found out it was possible the air pressure in the tank could be too high. So I used a car tire pressure gage and found it was at 45 psi and it needed to be at 18psi. So I let out air till it was at the proper pressure and turned the system on. Once everything was recharged and all the air was bled out of the system I tested it out and it worked.
The rest of the crew have been asked to stand down until april 15th due to the coronavirus. So they are not coming on board the ship now and are trying to do what work they can from home. Now just the engineer and I are staying on the ship to make sure everything keeps running smoothly and we continue to chip away at projects.
Yesterday we noticed the black water pump was not shutting off. Which means there is either a problem with the pressure switch or the system had a leak somewhere and are losing the vacuum pressure that way. We shut the system down last night and decided to work on it today. We did a lot of trouble shooting to figure out where the problem was. We figured out that it was not a problem with the switch but a vacuum leak in the system. This is not an easy thing to find because the system runs throughout the ship and the leak could have been anywhere. By shutting down different parts of the system we narrowed down the leak to the part of the system where all the other parts come together to the vacuum pump. We found that there were two bad check values that were letting air escape. We replaced the valves and tested the system and it solved the problem. This kind of problem shows the importance of having someone on board the vessel. If this had happened and no one was here to catch it. It would have kept pumping and could have really damaged the system and the pump would have needed to be replaced.