Black-out day

Saturday 28th November was the Africa Mercy's third Black-Out Day. All the sea water used for cooling our generators and main engines go through two big coolers, but they needed cleaning after getting filled with mud and silt from the dredging operations earlier this year. And to clean them, all the ship's generators had to be turned off (with the exception of the small air-cooler generator on Deck 7 which runs our emergency systems). So at 7am the ship was plunged in darkness, and our engineers spent the next ten hours rodding out the thousands of little pipes that make up the coolers (as you can see in the photo). It was a long, hot and dirty job for them, but power was back on by 5pm. As for us and the rest of the crew, with no power or light or even flushing toilets we had no option but to camp out at local hotel pools for the day with the rest of the crew. Suffering for the Lord, eh? Olly