You guys aren't going to believe this. Yesterday, I was standing my first cargo watch where we were discharging cargo - normally this would have happened weeks ago but we've been having issues with local port state control. It was the first time I was running the pumps and I've been here almost three weeks!

The Chief Mate leaves me alone in the cargo control room and not even a half hour later we loose the plant and the ship goes dark.

Because everything is fully automated this means we lost control of the majority of our cargo valves - and obviously we lost control of the cargo pumps.

Long story short, it wasn't my fault - just an engine room mishap. One of the generators tripped offline and because we had such a large load it caused everything to trip offline.

I really believe that not so good things come in sets of three.

In just under a week I've participated in a near collision, a steering casualty, and a ship blackout.

I hope this means that I'm off the hook for at least a little while.....