Passing cargo. Part One
—Well, now we really have a lighter locomotive," smiles the captain of the raid boat that delivered the sailors to the bulk carrier.
A lighter truck is not a lighter truck, but something not quite ordinary caught my eye: a "multi-storey flotilla" of lighters — directly on the deck. However, is it really that unusual? After all, I have seen and even described something like this, telling about the ship Zadonsk, the captain and crew of which became pioneers of unusual, unusual, non-standard methods of transporting bulky heavyweights. And so...
— Hello, hello! - Adolf Vasilyevich Matyukhin, whom we met on board the Engineer Parkhonyuk, holds out his hand.
— By what fates?— I'm asking the captain of the Zadonsk.
"What do you mean, like what?" After all, heavyweights load, and even, one might say, in our "Zadonsky" way," says A. Matyukhin. — It's a sin not to look at this, not to observe at least once from the outside while on vacation.
— What's your impression?
— Monumental, to put it bluntly...
"He's being modest, he's shy," Nikolai Ivanovich Grishko, the "owner" of the bulk carrier, joins the conversation. — Matyukhin has experience, you know what it is! On large sizes, he ate his teeth, as they say...
This was not the first meeting between the two captains. The first one, which took place several years ago abroad, remained in their memory.
"We were standing in Korea then,— recalls N. Grishko. — It was there that Adolf Vasilyevich first expressed the idea of the most economical, from his point of view, the use of our bulk carrier. Having experience in delivering deck cargo, in particular large-diameter pipes on the Izgutty Aitykov and Ion Soltys bulk carriers, I became interested in Matyukhin's proposal.
Here, I think it would be appropriate to interrupt the captain's story for a while in order to mention him and the crew of the ship "Engineer Parkhonyuk".
N. Grishko is an experienced mariner. He started as a sailor in 1944, went through all the steps of the service ladder, and since 1960 he has been a long-distance captain. A veteran of labor, a participant in the Great Patriotic War, an honorary employee of the Navy, has been awarded a number of state awards on this vessel since the day of acceptance.
The bulk carrier's crew consists of 30 people, twelve of whom are the "backbone", as the captain likes to say, and have been working here since the first day. The mainstay of the entire team is the executive officer I. Khaziev, the boatswain S. Podolyan, the turner G. Petin, the second mechanic B. Chaika, the motor engineer I. Bolzhalatsky, the second navigator N. Strelnikov, the chef A. Tselmer.
They went through a good school on the "Engineer Parkhonyuk", grew up professionally, became captains V. Alexandrov and S. Usach, and V. Krasilnikov became the headmaster.
... — Our task is to deliver 12 lighters of the Danube—Sea type to Cuba, — N. Grishko continues. — Each of them is, in fact, an independent floating unit weighing 240-250 tons — a kind of hermetically sealed floating container.
Preparations for the flight were conducted carefully, perhaps even more meticulously than for previous expeditions. This is understandable; this is the first time such an operation has been performed since Zadonsk, and Engineer Parkhonyuk is a structurally different type of vessel with different characteristics and a different arrangement of deck mechanisms. https://xbae.ch/
