Importance of the loading period, arrival in berth, preloading surveys, acceptability of offered cargo, duties of ship's officers, loading/deballasting programme, monitoring loading and deballasting, supervision of work of the crew, liaison with loading staff, damage to ship or cargo, maintenance of full records, chief mate's role as troubleshooter, master's role, shifting ship by warping, safe procedures for working cargo
THE LOADING PERIOD is a most important one for the master of a bulk carrier and for his officers.
Loading is usually more rapid and concentrated than is the carrying or discharging of the cargo. Events happen quickly. Unexpected problems can arise if the cargo is unfamiliar or the port unknown and will require prompt attention to ensure that the cargo is loaded in a safe and satisfactory manner and that the ship and cargo are protected from damage through- out. A high level of alertness will be required from the start to the end of the loading period.
The system used by the deck officers for sharing the supervisory work during loading will be governed by the number of officers carried, their experience and the normal procedure for ships of their flag or ownership. There will always be at least one deck officer on duty during loading, under the direction of the chief mate. The chief mate will himself usually take charge of all important steps in the loading, such as draft surveys, the completion of deballasting and the calculation and execution of trimming pours. In smaller ships with only one or two mates he will also take his turn on cargo watch, as he may also do on larger vessels. The master will hold himself available to advise where required or will take a more active supervisory role if his officers are inexperienced or unreliable.
Arrival in the berth
When a vessel approaches the berth through sheltered waters, it is normal to berth with the first hold to be loaded already open, ready for commence- ment of loading, and if conditions are favourable several or all the holds will be opened. This makes a preloading inspection a quicker and easier process when such an inspection is required and avoids the possibility of moving hatch covers, and thereby altering the vessel's trim or list, during a draft survey.
Hatches open, ready for loading, may be a requirement for the tendering of notice of readiness.
On vessels which are required to change position under a fixed loader, the pilot before berthing will require to know the first loading position so that he can position the ship ready for commencement of loading.
Preloading surveys
Before the commencement of loading there will often be a requirement for a preloading survey of the holds and for a draft survey. Where the vessel is a regular trader employed on a period time charter carrying the same commodity every voyage, preload- ing surveys of the holds are less likely to be required except when the cargo is easily contaminated. Draft surveys by independent surveyors are not required when the charterparty states that the tonnage carried is
to be established by some other means such as shore weighing, although the ship's personnel should always make their own survey to calculate a ship's figure for cargo loaded.
Normally the ship's agent will be able to advise the master whether surveys will be required, if there is any doubt. When surveys are undertaken it is sensible to treat surveyors with courtesy and consideration. A surveyor undertaking a preloading survey of holds should be accompanied by an officer, preferably the chief mate, and should be helped to gain access to holds and assisted with lighting and ladders, if required. Careful note should be taken of any items which he notes for attention and the officer must be sure that he has a clear understanding of what the surveyor requires. Any work required by the surveyor should be given top priority, since failure to pass the survey will normally mean that the ship goes off hire until such time as she is passed as ready to load. A hold inspection certificate is at Appendix 14.1.
The draft surveyor should also be accompanied by an officer when taking his readings. For soundings of bunker tanks the chief or second engineer is usually the appropriate person, whilst the chief mate should accompany the surveyor to read the drafts and to check the bilge, ballast and fresh water soundings. It is fairly common for the draft surveyor to board the vessel and announce that he has already read the drafts, but this should not be acceptable to a conscien- tious chief mate. An officer should check and agree the readings obtained, and should independently complete a set of calculations to obtain figures for bunkers, ballast and constant.
Condition of cargo offered
When the vessel is berthed and the master has satis- fled himself that she is safely secured alongside, information will be exchanged, as described in Chapter 11. A copy of the ICS Ship/Shore Safety Check List®5 may be completed and the loading programme, which can be set out in The Nautical Institute's Cargo Operations Control Form (Appendix 9.3), should be confirmed. Thereafter the master and his officers must satisfy themselves that the cargo is acceptable.
Where possible the cargo should be inspected ashore in the stockpile, silos, trucks or wagons or in the lighter before it is loaded, as it is always easier to object to unacceptable cargo before it has been loaded and many bulk ports do not have the facilities to discharge cargo from a ship's holds once it has been loaded.
Officers must be on the lookout for any defects which would make the cargo unacceptable or which might later be blamed on the ship if not seen, recorded and made the subject of a protest. Bulk grain which is wet, sprouting, mouldy or infested would be unacceptable, as would wet or caked fertilizer, rusty cold rolled steel
BULK CARRIER PRACTICE 151
coils or bulk ores contaminated with a different cargo or containing excessive moisture. Coal contaminated with iron ore, wheat in a cargo of corn, and timber stained with oil have all been found and rejected by alert officers. The great number of possible cargoes, each with many possible causes of damage, make it impossible to do more than provide examples here.
The IMO Code for Solid Bulk Cargoes2'2 states that the shipper should provide the master with details of the nature of the cargo so that any safety precautions which may be necessary can be put into effect. The shipper should also provide a document stating the transportable moisture limits of the cargo and a certificate of moisture content showing the average moisture content of the material at the time that the certificate is presented to the master. In practice all this information is normally contained in a single document, the declaration by shipper (Appendix 14.10), described in Chapter 14.
The master should request the foregoing information by cable before arrival and should insist upon receiving it before loading commences. With effect from 1 January 1994 the provision of this information by the shipper is a Solas requirement. In most loading ports except the more isolated ones the necessary information is reported (in 1993) to be readily available.
Where the cargo cannot be inspected ashore it should be regularly inspected at the point of delivery aboard ship, where officers will hope to avoid the painful experience of a certain pair of chief and second mates. They were standing by the hold at 0200 hours on a winter morning to watch the commencement of loading aboard a bulk carrier in Chicago. What they saw was 50 tonnes of ore poured into the hold and then rapidly covered with the cargo of petcoke! This seems to have been a case in which the shiploader operator cleaned the conveyor belt of a previous cargo into the ship's hold, a practice which is completely unaccept- able. It was not possible to stop the loading when this incident occurred because the operator of the ship- loader was out of sight (perhaps deliberately), but the fact that the incident had been observed made it possible for the ship to issue a letter of protest.
Duties of the officer of the watch
During the loading period the officer of the watch (OOW) must be concerned with a number of matters, some of which are common to all ships and other which are specific to bulk carriers.
Loading/deballasting programme must be s t u d i e d a n d u n d e r s t o o d : A c o p y o f t h e loading/deballasting programme prepared by the chief mate will be provided for the officers of the watch. This may be the same programme as has been passed to the loading foreman or it may contain extra details, of ballasting, for example, which the chief mate considers that it is not necessary for the shore personnel to know. Each OOW must make sure that he understands every item in the programme and what must be done at every stage.
Cargo loading process must be monitored:
Monitoring of the cargo loading must have the highest priority because it is better to get things right the first time, since it can be very difficult to correct mistakes in 152 THE NAUTICAL INSTITUTE
loading. Ships' personnel must keep in mind the fact that the interests of the shippers of the cargo and of those employed to load it are not necessarily the same as those of the ship's personnel. What is convenient for one party may be quite the opposite for another.
The initial positioning of the shiploader arm must be watched to ensure that the calculated airdraft is available in practice. If the shiploader has insufficient height to plumb the hold it may be necessary to alter the ballast. Alternatively, if the extra height need is small, it may be possible to allow access to shiploader by using ballast to list the ship towards the quay. If the ship is already fully ballasted the list should be created by discharging ballast from an after topside or double bottom tank to avoid any decrease of the forward mean draft. As soon as sufficient cargo has been loaded to achieve the required increase in draft, ballast should be used to bring the ship upright again.
Air draft is unlikely to be a problem in those bulk carriers which are provided with extra holds which can be ballasted in port. Where necessary such holds can be ballasted in sheltered waters before berthing to ensure that the ship's air draft is sufficiently low.
Any contact between ship and shiploader should be avoided as it is likely to lead to damage to one or both.
Contact is most likely if the shiploader is left unattended whilst the ship moves as a result of swell, rising tide, ballast changes, slack moorings or the shifting of the ship to a new loading position.
The OOW must regularly check that the loading is continuing in accordance with the loading pro- gramme. Each pour must be loaded into the correct hold and into the correct position in that hold. The latter requirement is often achieved by ensuring that the loader is aligned and remains aligned, say, with a white mark painted on the hatch coaming. On smaller bulkers with long holds the chief mate may have planned a different cargo distribution, requiring the cargo to be poured in another position—e.g., '2 metres forward of the mark'—and such instructions must be strictly followed.
It is also necessary to ensure that the correct cargo is being loaded. If the loading programme calls for iron ore fines in No. 3 hold and iron ore pellets in No. 5 hold, the OOW must ensure that the cargo being loaded in No. 3 does look like fines, not pellets. From time to time during the pour he must confirm that the cargo continues to have the same appearance and that there are no signs of contamination, or of excessive moisture.
The method of loading must be kept under survey and the ship's requirements must be enforced. If the ship is to be kept upright and all cargo is to be poured amidships, the shiploader operator must be reminded as necessary of the requirement. If the cargo is to be spout trimmed in the hold involving some listing of the ship first one way and then the other, the operator must be warned if he exceeds an acceptable amount of list. When a list develops as a result of uneven deballasting, the shiploader operator must be informed so that he does not try to eliminate it with cargo. Some bulk carriers are fitted with indicator lights on the bridge wings. For example, a row of lights, green to starboard and red to port, with a single white light amidships, may be fitted. When the ship is
listed 2° to starboard two green lights will be lit. When indicators of this sort are available it may be necessary to bring them to the attention of the operator of the shiploader.
If the cargo is not evenly distributed in each hold—if the ship is kept upright by balancing the excess cargo on the starboard side of one hold with the excess cargo on the port side of another hold—the ship will be twisted and may suffer serious structural damage. It is essential that a ship which develops a list because there is too much cargo to starboard in No.2 hold is brought upright with cargo poured to port in the same hold.
The ship should be upright at the completion of each pour.
The OOW will find it useful to have a reasonable idea of the loading rate. The time taken for the first pour will provide an indication of the rate in tonnes/hour. This can be checked against whatever rate the loading foreman or ship's agent has predicted.
A slower rate than that predicted will be unsurprising since it is common to quote the best rate rather than the average rate. A faster rate than that forecast needs careful examination to confirm that it is correct and to consider its effect upon the rest of the loading/
deballasting programme. If loading continues at this rate, will the deballasting be able to keep up?
It will also be useful to observe whether the loading rate is a steady or a fluctuating one. That can often be determined by watching the flow of cargo from the spout or by observing the method of delivery of the cargo to the loading conveyor. Once the loading rate and any variations in it have been observed, it can be used to predict the time when each pour will finish.
Pours which finish unexpectedly early or continue excessively should be carefully checked to confirm that the correct tonnage has been delivered.
The quantity of cargo loaded in each pour must be monitored as far as possible. A useful check can be obtained by taking a set of draft readings and checking the soundings of the working ballast tanks when the loader moves from one loading position to the next.
Provided that the readings can be obtained quickly whilst loading is stopped, the results can be studied after loading has resumed and should be in good agreement with the values shown in the loading programme. If they are not in good agreement, there must be a mistake in the tonnage loaded, the quantity of ballast discharged or the loading/deballasting programme and it will be a matter of urgency to recheck everything and find the mistake.
Most bulk carrier officers know of one or two occa- sions in which serious errors in loading have occurred
—when a hold has been overloaded by as much as 1,000 tonnes and the ship has finished up excessively trimmed by the stern or, even worse, by the head. It is very difficult for such errors to occur if the OOW is thoroughly alert and regularly checks the draft read- ings. Errors of this sort sometimes occur when officers are inexperienced and find themselves with too many problems to solve. On other occasions they occur when officers believe that everything is going well and their conscientious supervision is unnecessary. There is never a good excuse for overloading: draft readings, carefully taken, will always show the tonnage loaded and provide warning of possible overloading.
Deballasting must be monitored: Aboard many bulk carriers the deck OOW will personally imple- ment the deballasting programme by operation of the appropriate control switches at a ballast control station. On other vessels the deballasting will be carried out by engineroom personnel on instructions from the OOW. In both cases it is good practice for the OOW to satisfy himself by direct observation that the deballasting is proceeding and a flow of air into the air- pipe on deck provides a clear sign that ballast is being removed from the correct tank. Before deballasting starts the OOW or someone assisting him must where necessary ensure that airpipe caps (on older vessels) and manual valves (for forepeak tanks) have been physically opened.
As the loading continues, the OOW must check regularly to ensure that the deballasting continues without problem, a problem being anything which prevents maximum discharge from both pumps. First warning of a problem in deballasting may be the ship listing as a port tank pumps out whilst a starboard one fails to do so or vice versa. The pump gauges should be watched, and will provide a similar warning. A normal reading on the amp meter shows the pump is pumping and this can be confirmed by a normal reading on the discharge pressure gauge.
By itself, evidence that the pumps are pumping effi- ciently is not sufficient to guarantee that the deballast- ing is going well. Mistakes do occur and equipment does fail. It is essential to make regular checks by sounding or by observing the flow of air into the air- pipe to confirm that the ballast is being drawn from the correct tank. Direct manual soundings of ballast tanks must be taken with sounding rod or steel sounding tape, particularly as the tank approaches empty, to check how much ballast remains and whether the tank has been properly drained.
As the deballasting continues, the OOW (if he is directly responsible for the pump controls) will have to adjust them as necessary to maintain optimum discharge rate as per the makers' instructions. On a large vessel—say, a Cape-sized bulker—the ballast pump controls are likely to require checking and adjustment at intervals of about 30 minutes, a frequency which increases in smaller vessels.
Deballasting of a compartment normally continues
Deballasting of a compartment normally continues