One of the smaller barges in the portable dry dock next to us in the ship yard

And off we go again

Hay there hiring like crazy out here

If only they would stop PUTTING THE DANG COOKIES ON THE TOP....well middle.. SHELF !!

But as far as food the company has this website hooked to a wholesale grocery store I think , we just made a list , the captain oks it and the mate went on and ordered Everything and they just brought it to a dick in Memphis and loaded it. I was off shift and asleep when they did the last load though so noc pictures of that unfortunately

Well I know your are not gonna grow up to the cookie shelf. So maybe you could bribe some tall guy to move um within reach

Wolfdog, cook that duck medium rare like a good steak and it will be a lot better next time. Well done duck is no bueno. Thanks for taking us along

Breads not burnt!, , could even be a little darker, lol

Next time put some garlic and parmesan cheese in the butter before you spread it on the bread....

30 years ago I'd be game but at this stage, I'm gonna sign on the line and collect easy money in about 8 months.

Sorry I haven't been updating, seems everytime I stit down to type and up load pics some things happens anyhow I'll try and do a dump today

So after getting those repairs we went and took off down to go get our new tow. So up the river we go.

Some weird cit looking thing on a sand bar


" Black clouds rollin in off the gulf mmmhmm" if you know what that from we can be friends

Random gutted speedboat... People and their trash man..

Noticed this log tied to this tree and idk... Gave me some weird vibes

Think this is a lil mini light tower

A smaller feet boat with one of the smaller barges


And passe by this place . Think it's a hotel

So that night we tired up to one of these .. idk what you'd call it other then a grave yard barge. Think its really more of a storage /portable docking situation for the fleet but there's where a few boats tired up with no crews as far as I saw and that usually means their being decommissioned or about to be sould off I think.


And we spent a day or two her waiting for all of our two barges to get to the fleet. In the mean time cleaning and Polishing

Gotta have some biscuits getting a little better with the oven

Had a wood duck and her babies floating around us. Was neat to watch her do the whole injury thing to try and distract us

So someone had asked on FB about my work vest set up and here it is



So this is a cool type of boat. It's called a jack up because the entire bridge either the captain controls the boat sits on ram, can't remember if is hydraulic or pneumatic but it can extend up and down to allow it to go under bridge boats like ours couldn't. Pretty neat bit of engineering imo

For a size comparison this is a fleet boat. Cam up and used use to butt up against for a second to off load some stuff and it entire bow only takes up 1/3 of ours , we a big boy

Still working on my photography skills




Like a dang Ole picture on the wall man

Engineer said he wanted to bake some chicken so I helped him quarter up all the wings

Welp got told most of our tow was here so off we go across the river to the fleet

So this is a fleet. Not sure about the actual size and all but basically the barge's are stacked and organized in these teir and worked by the smaller boats and pushed into place to build ties for larger bows like us. It's what we did for two weeks after our classroom training


Wonder what this lil contraption is ?

Not the best picture but this is pretty cool to watch. Basically the boat will catch one head like at the top of the bargers and use it to pivot them in the river and mate them up almost PERFECTLY

It's like playing Tetris with these somtimes

So spent most of the morning helping the fleet boat build our tow . Fun snatching wires and ratchets...my back still hasn't felt this good in YEARS ! and that not sarcasm! But did that and got a call we had some deck supplies waiting on use so we got picked up by whas called the shamrock boat... because it has a shamrock painted on it and took a wet lil ride around the river to the dock to pick it all up before coming back and un loading it all



The engineer made some fine eating!
And one of the guys made these lil strawberry blueberry muffins things. Really good



Back on shift at 5.pm and went back to finishing up our two. Finished up around 7 and the fuel flat cam.bybfor use to take in fuel and off load trash. Look like I've been doin a lil work ? it's only been topping out at like 93 but the humidity is a pain



Well took on fuel and didn't really have much left to do for the rest of my shift . Made something quick up for dinner

Well today was crew change so got tasked with cooking. The mate said he had a 10lbs log of ground meat thawed out in the sink and need to feed a out ten people with the new guys getting on so decided to put the rest of the spaghetti sauce I made the other day to use along with making tacos with the rest. So found some lasagna noodles and some mozzarella and attempted to make a lasagna



And the rest of the meat for tacos



Also said why not the ovens still hot and made some muffins


And must have been good ...it them just really hungry because went up to my room for 15min and came back to this

So note to self order more pasta stuff

That's some interesting pictures. Like the painting. Thanks for all the food pictures . Sounds like you are getting assigned to the galley which is good because it gives you a break from the hard physical stuff. Get some Frank's hot sauce for those wings. Be interesting to see how much bulk you put on from the physical work. Shamrock boat is interesting. Fascinating about stringing barges together. I just though you hooked up to a barge and off you went. Where are you today? What was that weird thing on the sand bar? So you change crews? How does that work? You do not all stay together, then leave together then come back as the same crew? Will you get a different boat when you come back from time off and all knew crew ?

So currently pushing though a lighting storm, some tall white caps ,cap says we're fighting some 75mph winds right now , this big girl is rocking a little bit My gf is gonna kill me when I send her some of these videos of these lighting strikes welp 30 or min and I can get some sleep. Got moved to back watch and man it's kinda boring

Ugh it's hard to take good lightning pics at night btw is pitch black out all that light is just from the storm cracking lol

So apparently where waiting on a dredge up river to come by so where just parked right now

Looks like you guys eat more than anything! lol

Won't be long until your stint is over? Do they send a jitney service if you're close enough to home?

What we called a may fly growing up on the river. They would pile up under the lights sometimes knee deep. Smelled like rotting fish and would make the bridges as slick as ice. Many times they would close the bridge until it was washed down. Really slick and dangerous on a motorcycle.