Early on in my career I worked on a bunker barge. We refueled ships.
Ships don't pull into the corner Sunoco and stick the nozzle in the tank filler. The fuel is delivered to them. A barge comes alongside and ties up alongside, a barge hose is sent up, normally a 6 inch in diameter hose. The hose gets bolted to the manifold and the barge pumps the fuel into the ship.
Anyway, there was this Korean crewed ship and the crew was pretty lazy. They just wanted us to hang on with 2 lines which is illegal. we required at least six.
Most ships would throw down a heaving line and pull our deck lines up. These guys made us throw our heaving line up and then after they removed it they would throw the whole thing back instead of just the end with the weighted monkey's fist.
That angered me so I busted my ass to make them bust theirs by making them pull up at least 8 lines. The bastards could have tried to make it easier for both of us but tried to be lazy and wound up doing more work because of it.
They became a monthly customer and my pard and I decided that enough was enough. we decided to fix their ass good. We started to beg, borrow or steal all the 3/8s manila we could find and spliced into one long heaving line. It was at least an entire mile long but probably closer to a nautical mile of 6000 feet long. There was a monkey's fist on one end and the other end was back spliced.
We left the tail out of the humongous galvanized tub we coiled it up in and about 90 feet of the end with the monkey's fist out the other side. The tail we tied to the deck line and covered the tub the pile of line with a tarp to hide it from the ship's crew.
When we came alongside I threw the monkey's fist aloft and one of the deckhands caught it and started pulling it up. It went from the strange to the ridiculous to the sublime as they kept pulling more and more 3/8s inch line up. Finally they got well over a mile of heaving line up and the deck line came with it. They were rather exhausted.
They found the monkey's fist and threw it down and it was repeated that way until all six deck lines were made fast. They sure had a pile of manila line on deck.
The fueling went efficiently and flawlessly.
After everything was finished and we sailed they dropped our deck lines and we snapped them and they landed on deck. We'd coil them after we sailed.
When the last line was off a deckhand threw us our monkey's fist back and the crew gathered to watch me have to haul all 6000 feet of line back aboard.
I pulled back about 85 feet, pulled out my knife, cut it and we sailed off leaving them a huge rat's nest of line on their deck. Their jaws dropped.
A month later when we came up alongside them they threw a heaving line down to us made of the 3/8ths manila rat's nest we had left behind a month earlier and everything went smoothly thereafter. They probably had made about 50 to 60 heaving lines out of what we had left behind!
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