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Campbell Maritime specializes in ship & barge assist, escort services & the movement of project cargo in Puget Sound & the greater Seattle markets.
The tug RubyVIII, her captain, and crew are ready to move you and your ship or barge. In addition to our towing and ship assist services, we have a variety of small to medium sized spud and ramp barges available for rent or long term lease.
Call us today for scheduling, barge rentals or project brainstorming! We are available 24 hours by phone at 206.794.0232 or 206.794.0447 during business hours.
Additional marine services are provided in conjunction with and through Northern Marine Salvage, please visit their website for more information.
2/6/2010-Saturday update
We had a rather exciting Thursday, believe it or not. We got a call first thing in the morning for a barge that needed to get picked up in Seattle and delivered to Everett, a job that seemed well within our limited capabilities.
We elected to take the Blarney since we hadn't run her in a few weeks, this being her off-season and all. It's good to run your gear on a regular basis. Nothing worse for a machine than not getting used, that goes for boats, airplanes, trucks, you name it. Anyhow we no sooner got the boat warmed up than we uncovered a little problem; the hydraulic system was only delivering about half the pressure that it normal puts out!
I used an exclamation point because that's a fairly significant problem. Hydraulics are usually one of the more reliable systems on a boat. Once you get them set up right they typically work for years and years without much fuss, and when they do break it's usually an all or nothing kind of event. It was a little unusual to have it working, but only halfway.
Not that it was the end of the world, the hydraulic system on the Blarney runs the tow winch, the bow winch, and the bow thruster, all things we didn't really need for such a simple little job. If it had been a bigger deal we'd have just taken the 8 instead, but in this case we just kept moving with the Blarney. Once we'd picked up our barge and were underway for Everett we had plenty of time for troubleshooting, and we were able to narrow the problem down to one relief valve.
Our relief valve was relieving at too low of a pressure! Rather than letting the pumps build up 2000 psi before dumping pressure back to the tank out valve was opening up at about 1100 psi. Turns out the whole problem was caused by one torn 0-ring in an unloader valve. The unloader was leaking by, and tricking the relief valve into dumping fluid back to the tank. Kind of a weird chain of events, but it did highlight a weak spot in the system that none of us had noticed. At the end of the day it was probably a convenient time for it to act up. It would have been much more troublesome if the boat had been on it's way to Dutch when this O-ring went out.
Anyhow we got the bad valve fixed, and changed the system around a little bit so that we're now immune to this sort of problem. All's well that ends well. I took a couple photos on our job, but I haven't put them into my computo machine yet. That will have to wait until tomorrow. Or the next day. Talk to you then, Brian
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