The Shadow of a Dream Part 1
How many times have you ventured into your engine room while underway? Not a pleasurable experience. “Hammers of hell” is an expression that comes to mind. Robert Louis Stevenson said it best about engine rooms in his “MacAndrew’s Hymn”:
“Lord, thou hast made this world below the shadow of a dream,
An’, taught by time, I tak’ it so – exceptin’ always Steam.
From couple - flange to spindle - guide I see Thy Hand, O God -
Predestination in the stride o’ yon connectin’ - rod.
John Clavin might ha’ forget the same – enormous,
certain slow –
Ay, wrought it in the furnace- flame – my “Institutio.”
I cannot get my sleep to-night; old bones are hard to please;
I’ll stand the middle watch up here - alone wi’ God an’
these My engines, after ninety days o’ race an’ rack an’ strain
Through all the seas of all Thy world, slam – bangin’
home again.”
The bigger your engines get, the less hospitable the engine room becomes. Go from an engine room with a pair of 3208 Cats to an engine room with a pair of Detroit 149 diesels and you’ll see what I mean. These engine rooms, however, pale by comparison to real engine rooms -- steamship engine rooms in which I had the pleasure(?) to work over a period of six years.
Getting the Hot and Sweaties
All the hot, sweaty feelings came back upon discovering a letter I had written home in 1962 while on a cadet cruise of the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. We were aboard the good training ship “Empire State.” Most of you probably venture into your engine room while underway for a quick look-see and then emerge with eyeballs spinning and ears singing after maybe 30 seconds in hell. Take that experience, magnify it maybe 1000 times and imagine yourself there continuously for four hours. Such was my fate. As an engineering cadet on three training cruises and thereafter a professional marine engineer for three years (unlimited license for steam or diesel power), I’ve seen my share of real engine rooms and I’d like to pass on my experiences so that you will consider the next trip to your engine room a cake walk.
Picture a control platform sitting atop 30,000 horsepower steam turbines and multiple boilers in a space maybe 88’ wide, 80’ long and four levels high absolutely packed with pipes, valves, motors, boilers, generators, electrical boards, turbines and miscellaneous machinery. There are no port lights -- in the engine room there’s no distinction between day and night. In warmer waters the temperature is a constant 120 degrees. Underway at full cry, steam turbines don’t whine -- they wail (ear protectors were unheard of when I shipped out). Now as impressive as all that sounds, the fact is the ship runs itself so it’s extremely boring. Heat, wailing, boredom. Heat, wailing, boredom. Heat, wailing, boredom for four hours after which you have an eight-hour break and then get to do it all over again. This does funny things to people and it was always interesting to see how they coped.
You Are There
Rather than give you recollections of events that occurred over 30 years ago, I will quote the above referenced letter so you can hear the words of a guy right there on the scene while it was happening.
“I just finished two days of the 12:00 to 4:00 watch… We stand one of four billets: The cadet engineer is in charge of the entire engine room; the assistant C.E. is in charge of the boilers and makes steam; the oiler makes rounds and fills out a log sheet; the senior evaporator makes potable water from sea water. Now all this sounds very important and complicated.
Actually, there’s absolutely nothing, but nothing to do down there for four hours. The ship really runs itself. What you have, therefore, is 15 tired guys in a hot, noisy, screaming hold WHO DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR FOUR HOURS! As a result of this four hours in hell, guys start doing funny things. Some guys make funny noises to themselves. Some guys start laughing at nothing. Some guys stand on one leg like a crane. Some guys swing on overhead valves and pipes like apes in a zoo. Some guys lean on something and don’t move a muscle for four hours like they were in suspended animation. Some guys walk around aimlessly with a glazed look. Some guys continuously scratch.
Some drink water and artistically belch for four hours. Some guys just sweat. This needs some explanation: most people sweat passively and naturally. In the engine room, some guys sweat creatively -- it’s like a talent or skill. “Look at him! Boy, can he sweat great! I wish I could do that,” can frequently be heard down there. At the end of the watch, you emerge from the engine room and change back to a normal person. There’s light, air, and clean people around you and you feel good “cause you made it.”
Kool-Aid Brigade
That letter has immersed me in a subculture I hadn’t thought about for years. Let me tell you more: When we were cadets standing (“standing” means just that nobody sat while on watch) engine room watches, the only “food” allowed in the engine room was… KOOL-AID! Lower classmen were in charge of mixing the Kool-Aid for the watch in a big pot and I must tell you, the color of the Kool-Aid was the subject of much speculation and excitement during that watch. The stuff was made from little packets of dry powder mixed with pure water made from our own evaporators.
A gross amount of sugar was then added and the whole witches brew was mixed with the handle of an (often greasy) crescent wrench (every cadet standing engine room watch had to carry a crescent wrench). If the flavor for the watch was lime, you had a bunch of guys standing around doing nothing, smiling at each other with lurid green lips, gums and teeth. If the flavor was lemon, they’d have yellow smiles. Cherry was best making everybody look like Dracula after a neck raid.
Today the wail of steam plants has mostly been replaced by the thump of huge diesel engines. Engineers on watch sit in an air-conditioned automated control room. Expeditions into the engine room itself are allowed only if proper ear, eye, head and foot protection are worn. For all I know, jockstraps may be required! Someday some kind of air-conditioned space suits may be worn. The tough, hard, dirty guys I worked with have been replaced by nerds with computers and, sadly, the “Shadow of a Dream” has been replaced by a comfortable workplace.
(Reprinted with permission of Regina Fexas.)
If you would like to read more of Tom's pearls of wisdom, tune in next Friday -- "Fexas Friday."
Better yet, why not get a full dose of infectious Fexas whenever you need it -- and buy one of the volumes below. Better yet, why not buy all of them -- we call them the "Fexas Five." They will provide many evenings of fun reading (better than Netflix), and you'll make the widow Regina very happy knowing that Tom will live on with you the way most of us remember him.
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Tom Fexas (1941-2006) was one of the most influential yacht designers of the last quarter of the 20th century. With the narrow Wall Street commuters that were built in the 1920s and '30s always on the back of his mind, he wanted to design boats that were at once fast, comfortable, seaworthy and economical to operate. Over the years, he and his firm designed over 1,000 yachts for some of the most prestigious boat builders in the world, including Choey Lee, Palmer Johnson, Grand Banks, Mikelson Yachts, Burger, Abeking & Rasmussen and many others.
Even though toward the end of his career he only designed megayachts and superyachts, including the remarkably influential PJ "Time" in 1987, he is best remembered for his first major vessel in 1978 -- Midnight Lace -- which became a series of 44-52-footers. They were light, narrow, and fast with relatively small engines. He was also influential in the boating community because of the monthly column he wrote for Power and Motoryacht, which began in its very first issue in January 1985.