The Steamtug Blog

I have been so busy lately, that I have not had time to update my adventures. There has been the underwater hockey tournament, a BBQ in a sewerage plant, getting the water tanks installed in my yacht, and beer at Uncle Dave’s place.

Hockey… Underwater style!

As you know, I am the president of the Geelong underwater hockey club. (You can check the tab at the top of this page for more info) I got involved when Mitch invited me to come along and help out with his team at school. (He played this as his summer sport) I then started playing with the geelong club on wednesday nights, and finally got addicted. Now Mitch has gone off to university, and left me there so long they made me president!

Our Geelong team had a bit of money in the bank, and with some new players getting more confident with their game, we decided to put an invite out to teams from across Victoria to come and challenge us to a game. We had positive responses from Wonthaggi, Leongatha, and a mixed team from Horsham and Ballarat. Over the course of the day, we played a tournament style competition, with my team the stingrays coming second last ahead of the other Geelong team, the seals. So what… it was fun anyway. We celebrated with a presentation night down the my Mum and Dad’s bowls club with pizza, beer and ice cream, which was a special treat because we hired La Campagnola gelati cart loaded with yummy home made ice cream! (Mitch’s mate James runs the business. You can find him here… )

Don’t eat sausages in a sewer plant!

On the work front, I am now working on a project between Shell and the Geelong water authority, Barwon water, on building a water recycling plant. It will take sewer from our neighbourhood, waste from Shell, and return recycled water to be used instead of drinking water by shell.

It came about as Barwon water wanted to tighten the spec on discharge of trade waste to the sewer, forcing us to clean up our waste before discharge. So a big bag of money was allocated to build a new bio treater, just for us. Then Barwon water saw the big bag on money sitting on my desk, and suggested we give it to them, they build a water treatment plant for Geelong, give us back the cleaned water and we can continue to discharge our waste as normal. It is a win/win for Shell and Geelong! The new plant will reduce the flow to the sea at Black Rock, by 10%, give back 5% of Geelong’s drinking water, enough for 10,000 homes, and solve the problem of getting all the sewer from the Northern suburbs down the pipe line in peak flow periods. It’s great to see industry and community working together for the benefit of all instead of the usual government waste!

See:  http://www.barwonwater.vic.gov.au/projects/nwp

Or see my presentation…  NWP Schematic

While the construction is around 50% complete, I was invited to a special BBQ lunch to celebrate 100,000 man hours worked without an accident. I told my manager I was nervous. Why? I just have this thing about eating sausage shaped items in a sewer plant! Fortunately there wont be any sewerage there until mid next year, and it was a delicious spit roast anyway!

Uncle Dave’s new beer fridge

I don’t get to catch up with Uncle Dave much. He lives in Melbourne, and last time I went there I had my Russian mate Evgeny with me, who was fascinated by the old aussie tradition of having a fridge just for the beer! Well this time I caught up with Uncle Dave, he had a new beer fridge! Wouldn’t Evgeny like this one! It was a clear door just like in a shop. Uncle Dave told me it was even too tall to fit in his shed, so he had to dig a trench, drag the fridge in, then back fill and tile around it! That’s determination… but then having cold beer is a big priority in Australia, not like Russia, which is why Evgeny has such a fascination.

My cousin Will is a character. Riley mentioned that he wanted to study psychiatry when he leaves school, so Will brought out a straight jacket and locked Riley into it!

Yacht progress

Finally the water tanks are installed in Mercator! I have been waiting a long time to get them in, and finally there is work happening. If I can keep the momentum going, we should have her in the water early next year! Keep watching for the progress report, and your invite to the launch party!

But in the meantime, I will make use of John’s little yacht. Did you read the recent post about sailing across the open ocean to bring it to my berth here in Geelong? So as a pay back, I took a couple of mates out sailing after work last night. It was a perfect summer evening when we left, but half way across Corio Bay, we looked behing to see a wall of water coming with some thunder and lightning thronw in. The little yacht heaved and lurched as the strong wind pushed her around, and the rain soaked me right down to my undies while I stood holding the tiller and steered closer to the land to find calmer water.

It went as quickly as it came, and looking back behind us, we noticed one of the yachts from the local sailing club with her sails all ripped to shreds! We only had to contend with the floor of the main cabin which became piled up with beer bottles, eskies, food bags, fuel tanks, buckets and other assorted flotsen and jetsen that had migrated to the floor from the shelves and table. After cleaning this mess up, we relaxed in a perfect 8 knot cruising breeze back towards home. We even had a seal come and play beside the boat, swimming along and waving fins at us! Very Nice!!! It’s funny how quickly forget the bad bit when the storm hit, and with the warm breeze drying off our clothes we arrived back very happy!