STRANGE QUESTS

Hokitika Guardian, 11 June 1932, Page 6

STRANGE QUESTS

CABLE STEAMER’S WORK. OUT IN THE TASMAN. WELLINGTON, June 8. To steam out some hundreds of miles into the greenish-grey Tasman Sea, stopping almost fatalistically on a patch of water that looks like alI J r other for miles round, to let down a small grapnell 5000 feet or more to the sea-bed below, and, finally, to seize there a small cable a few iingerbreadths wido j is a performance that taken altogther smacks strongly of the miraculous. But it is tar liom being a miracle for those on board the cable steamer Recorder ; at present in Wellington. It is, in fact, an incident of their lives., But even/' they would admit that the actual ' finding of the cable while the vessel is slowly along with its grapnel hugging the oceanbed is something of an event. As one said: “You are going along gentry, wondering when you’ll pick it up. The dynamometer strain is going up and down with the rise and fall of the ship, and you think to yourself, ‘lts about time we hooked that cable,’ and all of a sudden she ceases to have that range. The dynamometer strain stops following the motion oi the ship. “It begins to stand still. You feel the grapnel rope. She’s like a bar. Hullo, you say, there’s something here! ’ You put speed gently, and as soon as she goes forward, suddenly the dynamometer strain jerks, up,up,up. That‘s all you want, it’e ‘Stop everything.’ You’ve hooked your cable.” This is the sort of thing that happens on board when cable is being picked up in deep-sea work. In “shallow” water, up to 600 feet, it is 'quite different. The grapnel rope leads in the "same way from the winding drum past the dynamometer, which indicates the tension at any moment, and up to the bow sheaves, over which the grapnel hangs prodigiously to the sea-bot-tom. But in'Shallow water work it is possible to adopt a rather special technique for determining ahead of the dynamometer when the cable has been hooked. This consists of sitting on the grapnel rope. “You can feel the grapnel jumping, or rather .stumbling, over rocks at the bottom. But when the cable is hooked it’s a different feel. You look at the dynamometer and sure enough in a couple of minutes up and up she goes.” The sea bottom matters a good deal; in fact that is why the ship he no use for the echo-sounding machine. An echo machine does not furnish samples of the sea bottom. For a cable lying on a hard or rocky bottom chain grapnels are used, but for a soft bottom Captain Larnder’e “flat-fish grapnel, or a spear-point grapnel, fills the bill. The flat-fish grapnel is the one that will probably be used when the Recorded . steams out again to finish the job it has been engaged on for some time—the diversion of the No. 2 Sydney-Titahi Bay cable to Muriwai, Auckland, Captain Larndei s grapnel ’i.s a flat one, rectangular in shape, with a projecting hook on one surface. ■

When grapnelling for the cable the Recorder steams on a course perpendicular to the supposed line of the cable at a speed of about threequarters of one mile an hour. To go faster would mean lifting the grapnel from the seabed. The grapnel rope will take a strain of about 18 tons, and with 1400 fathoms out—about the most they had to put out on the trip just completed—the strain as shown on the dynamometer while grapnelling ranges with the motion oi the ship from 35 to 50 hundredweight. When the cable has been caught and js being dragged to tbe surface tbe strain mas go up to seven or eight tons. It comes to the surface in a bight, and ■ the boatswain and cable foreman take it, one on each side of the how. If possible it is severed on deck, but it can be done at the bow if necessary. A joint and splice on deck takes about three hours to complete, and if it is between the ends of a cable that is to be let down, it is lowered away over the bow with ropes which are released from the cable when it is down some distance. Instead of piling up and going into bends on the sea bottom tbe action of the sea lets it sink to the bottom gently in a sort of circular oi spiral motion.

Picking up cable and stowing it oil board in one of the immense cable tanks is an art in itself. The ship takes it in the bow sheaves and it is wound in with the same machiiieiv used for grapnelling. But it is a matter for experts to pick up the cable with the ship going forward and so to regulate things that it comes up and is stowed in a straightforward fashion. Once on deck the cable is led to the tank below and laid coil upon coil in a huge spiral. When the Recorder steams out to mid-ocean one of the biggest jobs is to find the cable itself. The path ol the cable has been laid down on charts which the ship has on hoard, and it becomes a question of steaming to the exact point required. Navigation become a fine art under such circumstances. If everything goes well grapnelling may begin almost as soon as the ship arrives. This is done by steaming across the suppoed position of the cable from a point three or four miles on one side of it to a, point three or four miles the other. At less than a mile an hour this is a long job, perhaps nine or ten hours ol careful work.