View from the Algowood of Cherry Street Slip in Toronto

What I look like after unloading 30,000 tonnes of coal in the rain


Trip #13 went off about like you’d expect from a trip with “13” in it. It was uneventful until about halfway through the Welland Canal (in #5, for anyone who knows just how bad that is) when I spaghetti’d the #4 wire. Imagine a dropping a pot full of freshly boiled pasta on the kitchen floor…now imagine that pasta is 1” thick steel cable…now imagine that it is attached to a winch that has the capacity to pull 11 tons at 50ft/minute. Or in practical terms, that winch can pull a Ford F-150 truck (with the driver in it, in gear and pedal to the metal) backwards off a wharf (don’t ask how I know this). It was, as my friends in square-rig ships would put it, a cluster-fuck. We held up traffic for about 45 minutes before giving up on it and using the tag wire as a #3 and the #3 as a #4. We finally got it straightened out at on the way to the #3 lock.

On arrival in Toronto, I got woken up at 6 and during a shift at around 10:00 the #4 wire (which we had slaved over the night before), broke a strand at the swage fitting. So I had to call another mate and two more guys to replace the wire. Thankfully the rest of the trip went off without a hitch. Now we are on our way to Sandusky to load coal at the most clockwork loading rig in the lakes, and then back through the canal to Hamilton.