A-Frame

Last week in my vessel operations class, my classmates and I went underway on our training boat Privateer. We went to the South Street Seaport because the tallship Pioneer had asked us to set a mooring buoy for them. They needed ot to be moved farther into the basin in which they were already docked. To do this, we had to use the A-frame on the Privateer which is the crane on the back of our boat specifically made for buoy tending. The tide was flooding, which means the water level was rising, making it hard to judge the distance between our hull and the seabed. To use the A-frame we all had to wear hard hats as a safety precaution. First, we had to move about 75 feet of chain from a floating container onto our boat. It took about 8 of us to move it and 3 of us to lay it down on the deck of the boat. Next, we attached the chain to our anchor by tying a series of knots to the topmost part of our anchor. We used the wire hooks of the A-frame to move the anchor into place so we could drop it off the stern of our boat. The levers in the wheelhouse control the hooks, therefore moving the anchor up, down, left, right, and backwards and forwards. Once we had it hanging over the water, we had to position our stern in the spot that the people from Pioneer wanted the mooring to be. This was troublesome because we kept trying to turn but our bow would get to close to the pier so it was difficult to make the full turn. It took us about an hour, but eventually we got it right and by that time it was time to leave, thus ending our day in vessel operations.