A lifeboat davit's winch counts every metre of wire it pays out, and the count is checked at the weekly drill because a boat that has not been lowered on schedule is a boat the inspector wants to see lowered. Number two's winch pays out twenty two metres on every night crossing, which is the height to the water, with the boat in its cradle and the gripes on, and winds it back.
I am the safety officer, which on a ferry means the lifeboats are my life.
How the winch is logged.
Each davit has a winch with a counter on the drum, so that a lowering shows as wire paid out and recovered, in metres, with a time. The height from the davit head to the water is known, and a full lowering is that number. The weekly drill lowers each boat to the embarkation deck and monthly to the water, and the counter confirms it.
With the boat in its cradle and the gripes on, which are the straps that hold it, the winch is braked and the counter does not move.
Number two's counter logs twenty two metres paid out on every night crossing, on the stretch, and twenty two recovered.
Twenty two metres is the water. The boat is in its cradle. I have stood beside it.
The winch does not turn. I have stood beside it with my hand on the drum on the stretch and it did not move under my hand, and the counter, which I could read by torchlight, went to twenty two and back.
What has been checked.
The counter, which is a sensor on the drum and which has been replaced. The winch, serviced, its brake tested, its motor tested.
The boat. In its cradle, gripes on, on the camera that watches the boat deck at night, for the whole stretch.
The wire. This is the check that made me write this down. A wire that is paid out is a wire that is unwound from the drum, and a wire that is recovered is wound back, and a wire that has been through the sheaves twenty two metres each way has a wear pattern on it.
Number two's wire is worn at twenty two metres. Bright metal at the sheave positions for a lowering to the water, on a wire that has, according to my hand on the drum and the camera on the boat, never left the drum on a night crossing.
I renewed the wire. The new wire was bright at twenty two metres within a month.
The falls.
When a boat is lowered, the falls, which are the wire ends that hold the boat, take its weight, and the davit's load cells read it.
On the stretch, with the boat in its cradle, the load cells read the boat's weight on the falls. Four tonnes, the way they read it when the boat is hanging, for the time it takes to lower and recover, and then nothing.
Something hangs on those falls for the time a lowering takes, at the weight of the boat, and the boat is in its cradle six feet from me.
What is done about it.
The winch log is annotated. The inspector has seen it and the wear on the wire and asked whether the boat was being lowered on the crossing, and I said the log suggested it was and the camera said it was not, and he looked at me for a while and wrote that the boat was being exercised in excess of the schedule.
The old ship had a number two boat too, and lost it, on the stretch, on a night crossing, with her crew in it, in the war, on a lowering that was ordered in an emergency that turned out not to be one, and the boat was never found, and I know that because I went looking for why twenty two, and the museum has the board of inquiry.
What I do.
I keep the boats.
The one thing I have changed is that on the night crossing I go up to number two on the stretch and I stand by the release.
The reason is not the log. It is a night in the spring when I was at the davit with the counter going to twenty two, and the load cells reading four tonnes on the falls, and I looked over the side, down the line the falls would take, twenty two metres to the water, and the water was lit by the deck lights and there was a boat on it. Our boat, number two, with her name on her bow, riding alongside on the falls at the length of the wire, with people in her, sitting quietly, as people do in a lifeboat, looking up at me, and one of them raised a hand.