by Nick Fisher
“Fucking piece-of-shit boat,” says Matty accusingly. “I’m only thinking it’d be nice to dip me pastie in hot soup. Yeah? Only, of course there’s no fucking gas.”
The other sachets landing on the two-ring burner, with the grill of sticky rusty bars and an adjustable strut to hold the kettle in place in rough seas.
“No. Fucking. Gas.” says Matty, hissing in Adrian’s face. Like it’s his fault Matty’s Country Vegetables are never going to know the sweet caress of boiling water.
“For about the last three months,” says Adrian. “Not that you’d fucking know.”
Last time Matty ever boiled a kettle on the Kitty K was when he was trying to expand the plastic lock on a security tag attached to a shoplifted pair of size 6 Timberland boots he bought in The Sailors, from ‘Tight’ Mick, and then wanted Adrian to buy off him, for Helen. On account of her being the only one he could think of who’d wear works boots in half the size of anyone who actually wore work boots to work.
Adrian pushing past Matty now, roughly. Out onto the deck, where he kicked up the lid of a brown wooden locker.
“See that,” he points at a blue propane gas bottle slicked with orange rust and mackerel scales sitting in the pit of the rotted locker. “Costs 32 quid for a refill. Back of the Texaco garage,” he says. “Anytime you feel like a fucking Cup-a-Soup. Be my guest.”
Adrian knew chances of Matty finding the right spanner to turn the right nut, the right way, to undo the pipe linking the bottle to the burner, through a hole drilled in the wall of the wheelhouse, and dragging it up the Texaco garage, was about as likely as Portland shitehawks shitting Euros.
So, he did it himself.
That afternoon after they’d unloaded into Weyfish and Matty had stomped off up the harbour muttering about the shit price of brown crab at Brixham, and what he was going to do to that cunt Rich Tovey when he saw him again. Slippery fucking weasel would gnaw his own leg off to get out of a corner. Probably fucking swallow it too. Stealing my fucking dope and our truck was fucked up enough. But torching the truck up on the deserted MoD Bridging Camp. Now that was a low blow. Truck all gutted out like a pouting. Thing getting so hot, wheel rims melting to the break drums.
Since when did it become ‘his’ dope and ‘our’ truck? Adrian thinking, as he took the wire brush to the rust crust on the gas bottle regulator, in order to spray it with WD40 and uncouple it.
As Kitty’s engine gurgled and lurched like a proper park bench alkie trying to swallow the first Special Brew of the day, Adrian tidies the corner of the wheelhouse above the gas burners. Tidies. Three mugs in the rack. Teaspoons in a mug. Jar of Spar instant coffee and a tub of dried milk, jammed down the side of the burner.
On the floor beside it stands a three-litre bottle of Morrisons spring water. In the window runner groove, a big new shiny box of matches. And pride of place, on top of the burner’s heavily stained stainless steel frame, Adrian had laid out Matty’s three Cup-a-Soup sachets.
Ainsley’s smile looking a bit crumpled, but still very white.
Just because everything is shit doesn’t mean they have to wallow and roll around in it. Nope. New gas bottle. New coffee jar. New matches. It’s hardly a gin palace, but at least, thanks to Adrian changing the propane bottle, on board the Kitty K, they can now make a brew.
Of course, Matty didn’t notice. All morning in between half-hearted hauls of worse than usual pots, Matty giving Adrian his ‘expert’ opinion of the police charges currently levied against them. Opinions according to Matty and his team of ‘legal advisors’, who were mostly toothless, tattooed men propping up the bar in The Sailors.
Fair enough, he was bang-to-rights for punching the Chinese cop. That was going to be a hard one to dodge. But there were mitigating circumstances. The other stuff. The bit of black hash and the pictures. Those sorts of busts fell apart all the time. Technicalities. Especially as the so-called fucking dope is now missing.
Tovey is so fucking dead. So dead. When Matty gets his hands on him.
In fact, all in all, to be honest, it just makes Matty look like a bit of a fantasist twat with a big mouth and a little lump of dope. Who goes and makes a complete tit of himself on CCTV. Nothing else.
“That won’t never fucking stick,” he says. Matty never mentioning Tim.
Not once.
Ever.
“I changed the bottle,” said Adrian, now pointing a steel toecap at the rotting wooden locker.
They were out on deck together, Adrian in a thick woollen jumper. Matty in his skanky, spattered Star Wars t-shirt. The K drifting over a patch called ‘The 34’s’ just to the west of the Bill. The lull after they’d pulled up a shank of pots that hadn’t done any good in over three weeks, sitting and re-shooting on the same ground. Rocky seabed being too jagged and the pots sitting wrong, then getting all shagged up in the roaring spring ebbs. Adrian deciding it’s now time to haul them and shift them east of the Bill. Shoot them in close to the cliff face just out of the screamer tide.
Three pots of the shank lying on the deck, needing repairs. Between the brothers, a pair of pliers and a fist full of cable ties, to fix the slices of car tyre rubber, back on to the frames.
“What bottle?” asks Matty.
“Could even have a Cup-a-Soup,” suggests Adrian.
Matty now clocking the clean pipe sticking out the gas bottle locker and doing the mental calculation, that adds up to: Matty, in wheelhouse, making Cup-a-Soup, equals Matty not having to keep stabbing his fingers on the sharp ends of snipped cable ties, while breathing the lingering stink of over-soaked crab bait, out on deck.
“Fuck, yeah,” says Matty. “On it, like a car bonnet”.
And he drops the pliers and walks across the deck to yank open the wheel house door.
The ‘bilge’ is a boat’s belly. Its guts. The deepest pocket of space which, like an abdominal trench, runs the length of the vessel on the inside of its keel.
A boat floats like a man on his back. The keel, like a spine, slightly-curved, lying deepest in the water with the air-filled belly encased above it. The bilge is the lowest internal space within any vessel and so it becomes gravity’s toilet. Anything, any liquid, oil, fuel, piss, blood, ooze, grease, tea or fish jizz, that can seep through the deck, down holes, gaps, ill-fitting corners, leaking scuppers, will end up slopping around inside the belly of the bilge.
Oil that leaks from the engine mixes with seawater leaking from the cooling system, mixes with freshwater from the tank, mixes with saltwater and crab shit from the vivier.
The bilge pump is normally a battery-operated Chinese-made piece of shit that sucks up the thick gloopy soup of mechanical emissions and coughs it out of a piped hole on the outside of the hull, just above the water line.
A bilge pump’s life is not a happy life. Semi-submerged in a witch’s brew of scum juice all day long, kicking into electronic action when a float-regulated switch deems the depth of foul liquid detritus is deep enough to need venting out into the sea. Then the pipe vent vomits lumpy boat scurf into the sea, causing a slick of grease to trail behind as it goes.
Kitty’s deepest bilge deposits are too old, too thick, too congealed to actually be sucked up by any tiny little diaphragm driven bilge pump. So they stay, year after year, growing deeper, thicker and more toxic as time passes.
In ancient sail ships and slave transporters, bilge gas was a killer. Diseased fumes, if breathed, could poison or asphyxiate. Sometimes the quantity of human waste and organic matter, would give off volatile levels of methane gas, causing explosions and unnaturally fierce combustions.
Fires on board boats are never fun.
Unlike the vast open-bellied vessels of old, modern boat design moved away from the single, huge boat-long bilge, to a multiple compartmentalised design.
Compartments are good for boats. And good for bilges to some extent. Compartments can relate to specific functions: an engine compartment, a fuel tank compartment, an anchor chain compartment. The breaking
up of the belly of the boat into sections means that between each compartment, separating walls have to be erected. These walls increase structural strength as well as provide an infilling with strong buoyant material. Even if that’s only wood, it all helps the thing float. A bonus in most circumstances, except in the case of fire.
In the event of fire, it actually just means there’s more stuff to burn.
Without fire, compartmentalisation of the bilge makes a lot of sense. Even in a high seas collision where the external structure is stoved-in under impact, chances are water will just pour into one compartment. The other separate compartments remaining intact, water tight, inherently buoyant and therefore able to help keep the vessel afloat.
Compartments are good for water ingress. Compartments are good for overall structural integrity. What compartments aren’t good for is that methane gas build-up. Because the smaller the compartment, the less oxygen there is to dilute the gas. The less oxygen, the more methane. The more methane, the more potentially combustible, concentrated and powerful an explosion is likely to be.
On fishing boats, compared to ancient square-rigged sail boats, the lack of hens, pigs and goats or shackled slaves on board, reduces the amount of shit, and therefore the risk of unwanted methane.
So all in all, methane is no longer a real hazard on board commercial fishing boats.
No one is worried about methane production on fishing boats. Not since the collapse of the whale fishing industry, methane hasn’t been a problem.
In fact, the only gas that really worries anyone working on a boat these days is propane.
Matty looking at the clean mugs. No brown sludge around the bottom edge. And a teaspoon! Metal one. Real one. Not plastic. Jar of Spar instant coffee. His three Cup-a-Soups laid out on the top of the burner grill, with its struts that now looked like they’ve had some of their rust and gunk wire-brushed off.
Shit. Things are looking up. Instead of everything in their world getting worse. One thing getting better…
Matty glancing out of the wheelhouse window at Adrian, past the long untouched life jacket. Adrian shifting across the deck, this side of the busted pots in his stupid fucking woolly jumper looking like some twat off Country File.
All the same, Matty understanding what Adrian had done here, by attempting to make an improvement. Adding a plus. Instead of just minuses all the time. Fair play.
The smallest seed of a smile curling at the edge of Matty’s mouth, as outside Adrian seems to be dragging two pots up alongside the closed wheelhouse door. And then, just that moment, Matty sees it…
A new box of Bryant and May long matches. A whole brand spanking new box. Each match nearly five inches long. Huge phosphorous heads blobbed onto matchsticks thick as drinking straws. The sort you buy if you’ve got some big fat fuck-off wood burner, or a tricky pilot flame that’s deep in the bowels of some big gas boiler. Or else, you’re lighting every single candle on a 21-year-old’s birthday cake, and you’ve never heard of a Clipper disposable.
A box of matches so over-engineered for the job of lighting the Kitty’s puny gas burner, that Matty’s thinking Ade must’ve nicked them. Or else Spar’d run out of regular-sized ones.
Matty taking one out of the box, feeling its weight. Size of it. Like a joke match. Three times bigger than a normal match. Matty, in awe, strikes it against the black sandpapery stuff along the side of the box. Huge head fizzing up into a ball of chemical flame, as the head simultaneously pings off the matchstick and twangs against the steel of the burner, bouncing down towards the wheelhouse floor.
Useless fucking thing. Matty holding up the huge matchstick to see where it had snapped clean off after striking. Clean through. Like someone had already cut it half way.
Propane is an amazing invention; a really cracking piece of innovative domestic gas technology. A by-product of petrol and natural gas refining, its most significant and marketable property is its portability. Propane gas is non-toxic and odourless, but what makes it such a friendly utilitarian combustible is its co-operative willingness to liquefy under compression.
Quite simply, a very large amount of gas once compressed into a liquid, can be stored in a relatively small container. Tiny in relation to its potential energy output.
In 1910, when propane’s inventor Walter O. Snelling, working at the US Bureau of Mines, first applied for its patent, the New York Times subsequently extolled the magical properties of this liquefied gas. Because, ‘a small steel bottle will carry enough gas to light an ordinary home for three weeks.’
Propane, this miracle liquid gas, only really presents one problem in all its many widespread domestic applications. That is its propensity to sink to the floor should it ever leak from its pressurised bottle.
Propane is more than one-and-a-half times heavier than air, so when it leaks, or seeps out from where a pipe or regulator has been incorrectly fitted, the odourless gas will sink. Not just as far as the floor, but even beneath the floor too. Should there be any holes or gaps through which a heavy gas could pass. This being something of a nightmare in houses with cellars beneath the kitchen stove.
Or, for example, on a boat. Especially a boat with a compartmentalised bilge, where there’s a small boxed-off space located beneath the wheelhouse floor. One that could fill gradually through the course of a morning, with a heavy and highly combustible explosive gas. Gas which could collect at floor-level and below and probably go undetected, because it’s a gas almost devoid of odour. At least not enough odour to be noticed above the stench of putrid pot bait.
On deck, Adrian leaned one of the two crab pots he was dragging across the deck, up against the wheelhouse door. The other was then acting as a back stop, the rubber tyre tread creating practically an immovable friction between pot base and gritty deck. Then, Adrian walks towards the transom, away from the wheelhouse. As Matty, shaking his head at the stupid big matches, prepares to strike another. Almost before the previous fizzing snapped-off match head had finished falling from the cooker top, spinning in a buzz of flame to the floor.
As Adrian walks across the deck, his hand instinctively feels for the uncomfortable bulge of the uninflated 150 Newton Crewsaver automatic life jacket, hidden under his incongruously thick jumper. As Matty glances out of the rear window, his eyebrows meeting in the middle of his forehead from a frown he is pulling, in reaction to seeing Adrian, out on deck, put his foot on a crab pot, and use it as a step to get up onto the transom, at the arse-end of Kitty K.
Adrian climbing up onto the aft gunwale.
Matty would have frowned way more if he’d noticed the two life jackets that always hung untouched and unloved on the hook at the back of the wheelhouse door, were now reduced to one.
Matty would have probably said, “What… the fuck?” As the next match head also bust clean off, tumbling like a mini fireball to the wheelhouse floor.
But, he never did.
It’s called a ‘pill’.
Like so many great technological inventions, it came about because of war. Naval seamen were unable to operate efficiently at their posts wearing bulky cork life jackets. So when disaster struck, they often drowned, because they didn’t have time to locate and fit their bulbous life preservers, before their crippled ships spewed them into deadly seas.
The automatic self-inflating life jacket, invented for Navy Seals and USAF pilots in 1942, was inspired by the internal swim bladders of fish. A sealed air cell that could be inflated to order, affording life-saving buoyancy.
The automatic self-inflating life jacket uses a gherkin-sized steel canister filled with highly compressed CO2 gas, which when released, instantly inflates the nylon bladder inside the horseshoe-shaped life preserver.
The massively compressed CO2 gas, stored at a pressure of 853 pounds per square inch, is released explosively into the jacket’s bladder when the gas canister is pierced, with a firing pin. This steel spike is hammered deep into the canister’s dimpled head, by a powerful spring.
The
whole point of an automatic inflatable life jacket is that it should automatically inflate when its wearer is submerged under water. Even if the stricken seaman has been knocked unconscious from the blast of enemy shells or exploding fuel tanks, the life preserver will still automatically inflate around his neck and hold him right way up in the sea. Whether he is conscious or not. Alive or dead.
So, the powerfully sprung mechanism is designed to fire the spike into the steel canister, to release almost 900 pounds of pressurised CO2, when the water-sensitive trigger device is activated.
The thing that activates the trigger is called a ‘pill’.
Originally it was made of salt. A tiny, hard salt biscuit that held the firing pin locked in place. And when water flooded into the mechanism, the salt would dissolve, triggering the release of the spring, which then hammered the spike into the bottle’s neck.
Nearly every time an automatic life jacket doesn’t inflate on contact with water, the pill is to blame. The pill has a limited life span. And so automatic self-inflating life jackets need to be maintained and ‘re-armed’ with a new pill every six months.
Adrian and Matty had never replaced the pill. Not over the last six months. Not last year. Not any year since the life jackets found their way onto the boat.
Even though every two years when Adrian had to fill out the Marine and Coastguard Agency’s check list, for the Code of Safe Working Practices for Merchant Seamen and Commercial Fishermen, he’d always tick the box that stated the automatic life jackets had been checked and re-armed with a new gas canister and pill.
Truth is, they never bought the jackets new in the first place. When the huge 74-metre Condor Ferry had a total refit, a lot of the crew’s safety equipment found its way out the back door, into The Sailors.
Most of the commercial boys in Weymouth had ex-Condor Ferry life jackets hanging on the back of their wheelhouse doors.