The Whistle

So, it's the early nineties, and I'm chief on the M/V Rusty Flowers. We're locking down at Marseilles Lock in the late afternoon; I'm up and about, and visiting with Joe, our pilot, while the first cut is going through the lock.

The meandering conversation wasn't covering anything of any great importance until the upper gates opened for the second cut, and Joe gave a yank on the whistle cord to tell the deckhands to turn us loose. That yank on the whistle resulted in a really pitiful sound that was a bleat instead of a blast. Joe asked if I could look into what was going on with it; the law mandates that we have a whistle that can be heard for miles (it's a safety thing), and ours sounded like an old Japanese car horn, only good for scaring bugs and irritating dogs.

Even off watch, I was armed with a Leatherman multi tool and a pocket Crescent wrench, so I told him to pull the cord when I tapped on the pilothouse roof, and I went up top. Undoing the copper tubing air line to the whistle, the goal was to see if we had a sufficient volume of air making it to the whistle. I tapped, Joe pulled, and this minuscule amount of air escaped out of the fitting. Hmm. I put my thumb over the fitting and tapped again, there was barely enough pressure and flow to lift my thumb off of the fitting. OK, we're on to the problem here, something is restricting air flow.

I reconnected the copper tubing, and went back down below, and started taking down ceiling tiles around the whistle pull. The whistle valve is a lever operated affair, with the pull cord attached to the lever. On the air supply of the piping to the valve was a Y strainer, there to catch any pipe scale to protect the working parts of the whistle. OK, here's the likely trouble spot.

There was no shutoff valve for the whistle air in the overhead, so I went one deck down to the electronics room to look for it, and found it. Back upstairs, and pull the whistle cord till the bleating stopped, and it was safe to open up the Y strainer and see what was going on with it.

Sure enough, it was a near solid plug of wet rust flakes. Grabbing an ashtray to catch the mess, I managed to tease the cylindrical screen out of the strainer body, showed the whole mess to Joe, and went below to clean out the screen and cap in the laundry tub.

With everything clean, we put the strainer back together. Joe asked if I wanted to do the disconnected air line test again, and I told him no, it wouldn't be necessary as that “bleat” would almost certainly be gone.

What we didn't realize was just how gone the bleat would be; we had lived with the gradually decreasing volume of the whistle for so long. I turned the air back on at the shutoff valve in the electronics room, came back up to the pilothouse and told Joe, “Give it a good pull.” And this almighty blast emanated from the top of the wheelhouse that could be heard for miles!

The lock and the deckhands were walking all over each other on their radios, asking if anything was wrong. Joe got both parties calmed down, telling them that it was just a test after a repair. With that panic addressed, we heard the door on the second deck to the wheelhouse stairs slam, and frantic footsteps pounding up the steel stairs. Kenny, the captain, appeared at the top of the stairs, wild eyed, looking all around us, shirtless and hair all mussed up, hollering, “WHAT'S WRONG! WHAT'S WRONG!”. It was painfully obvious that he had been deep asleep and that the almighty blast of the whistle with it's throat cleared had rattled him wide awake two decks down, and his mind had immediately flown to some worst case scenario.

When he couldn't see any threat to the boat, he finally noticed Joe and I grinning at him. Not even cracking a smile, he harrumphed, “You two sumbitches”, and clomped back down the stairs to his cabin.

Just another day on the river, counting them down to crew change day and going home.