Page 52 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

Thus, early in the afternoon of May 27th, we weighed anchor and proceed-
ed into the Gulf, en route for Penang. But at 3:26 pm, the engines unaccount-
ably stopped and electric power was cut. As I was on watch at 4:00 pm, I went
up to the bridge to see what was happening (with no power and no noticeable
wind, conditions on board in such heat quickly became less than comfortable).
We were only a few miles off the coast, but the water was deep, and we had
emergency power, so inconvenience was more appropriate a term than difficul-
ty. And so it proved; at 5:15 pm power was restored and off we went but only
for about ten minutes.

Again, all power was lost, and the chief engineer, a man of consummate gloom,
came up to the bridge to report that a small problem had occurred; apparently, the
4th engineer, charged with turning on the engine’s lubricating oil, had forgotten to
turn the requisite valve, and that, therefore, the problem was no longer minor. The
engine could be repaired, but considerable time and work was needed.

This turned out to be not quite the case. As I was on the 4 to 8 with the 2nd
mate, I was on the bridge for one of the most boring watches of my life. But,
again, not for long; at 10:45 pm, power was restored and again we resumed our
course. But only for an hour or so, as just before midnight we again came to a
juddering halt. Again, the chief engineer came up to the bridge, and now was
even more glum (come to think of it, practically every engineering officer that I
ever knew was of dour mien – I think this was caused by the almost eternal high
heat and the permanent loud noise, neither wholly relieved even when in port).

Now the R/O was the man of the hour (he was one of the very few officers
who could normally rely on sleeping most nights, his enthusiasm for late night
hours being self-evidently easily contained). He was, however, able to call up Co-
lombo pilotage, who were able to inform us that a tug would be sent out to us
right away and that we could expect it to arrive late the following afternoon (this,
by itself told us quite a lot about the word ‘urgent’ in this part of the world; we
were only 27 miles from Colombo!). So, we waited.

At 9:00 pm the following evening, the tug arrived. By then I had, of course,
seen quite a few tugs in various ports, Rotterdam probably having the smartest
and most handy, Cebu and Rajang undoubtedly having the smallest and least use-
ful. However, Hercules, registered in Colombo, was huge. From the ship’s bridge,
it seemed to be about half the size of Khyber and looked as though many decades
ago, half-way through construction, was converted from paddle-wheels to pro-
peller (I have not omitted an ‘s’). Other surprises awaited, especially that it did
not possess a radio; thus, all our signalling had to be in Morse code by night (by
aldis lamp) and semaphore during daylight hours (and I had wondered why we

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