[Music plays]
(Stephen) This is the Southern Surveyor
out off the Great Barrier Reef.
This ship is the Marine National Facility
that means any Australian scientist
can ask to use the ship for research and it’s also managed by CSIRO.
Hello, I’m Stephen McCullum, people call me Rowdy.
I’m part of the CSIRO management team for the Southern Surveyor.
The Southern Surveyor is 66 metres long, 12 metres wide
and weighs about 2,000 tonnes
which is about the same as 34 semi-trailers fully laden.
When the ship goes into dry-dock for repairs
you can see another six metres below the waterline.
[Music plays]
At the front end of the ship or the bow as it’s known
we have great big anchors, they weight about two tonne each,
so I think we’re going to put one down now.
[Machine makes whirring noise]
[Chain clanks]
When the ship’s in port we need to test everything
to make sure it all works properly.
[Ships horn blows]
That’s Captain John Barr testing the horn.
Let’s go and meet him.
[Music plays]
Hi, John.
(John) Hi, Rowdy, how are you? How have you been?
(Stephen) Not bad. This is the bridge.
[Music plays]
(John) This is the Captain’s chair.
(Stephen) Have you ever been thrown out of your chair?
(John) Not for a while but I’ve been very close.
This is where I sit so I’m nice and close to the radar.
Yellow indicates the land, there’s the ship in the middle,
and over here we’ve got our electronic chart display.
We’ve got one of the GPS feeds there
and we’ve got four on the ship.
We steer it from over in the centre of the vessel.
Believe it or not this is the steering wheel,
and we have out pitch control here from full ahead to full astern,
and that’ll give us a speed of 12 knots
on a good day which is about 22 kilometres an hour.
We got past our electronic gyros here,
and our original magnetic compass which
tells us where we are if everything else fails.
And this is the old emergency steering wheel.
(Stephen) How do you look at what’s going on in the back deck?
(John) Well we have a series of cameras on the ship
and I can zoom in on the back deck, swing it around,
see who’s doing what making sure everybody’s safe
when we’re dropping over our science gear.
(Stephen) Thanks, John.
(John) My pleasure.
(Stephen) We’ll go to the engine room now.
Here’s the engine room, let’s go have a look.
[Music plays]
Hi, Fred.
(Fred) Hi, Rowdy.
(Stephen) How are you? OK.
Fred’s the chief engineer on the Southern Surveyor.
Now Fred, can you tell us a bit about the engines.
(Fred) Yeah, they’re six cylinder Wärtsilä four stroke engine.
It develops 2,640 kilowatts.
Each cylinder’s got a sweat volume of 28 litres
which is about the volume of a six and a bit Ford Falcon engines
and seven and a bit Holden engines.
[Music plays]
The ship holds all of about 250 cubic metres of fuel
that’s 250,000 litres.
[Music plays]
If we went from here to Melbourne say at 8 knots
we might burn 64,000 litres of fuel.
If we do the same trip at ten knots we’ll burn 100,000 litres of fuel,
so there’s a lot of extra fuel for a little bit of extra speed.
So we tend to try and balance what our need for speed is
to what our fuel consumption is, and try and keep it a bit more economical.
[Music plays]
(Stephen) And what sort of fuel do you use?
(Fred) Marine gas oil.
(Stephen) How fast does the fuel come on board from the tankers?
(Fred) Well we usually load it at about 10,000 litres a minute.
(Stephen) A minute?
(Fred) A minute. Yeah, so if you were filling your family car, five seconds.
(Stephen) Whoa, that’s quick.
(Fred) Yeah, you know, you’d have to put the hose in and
be careful or you’d have it all over the service station floor.
(Stephen) Right. 0:05:26.125,1193:02:47.295 [Music plays]
How many engines have we got?
(Fred) Well we’ve got the main engine which actually drives the ship
and I’ve got a shaft generator that produces the electricity
that we need when we’re at sea,
and then we have three
auxiliary diesel engines that produce electricity.
Without electricity this ship is as good as dead.
The propulsion will stop, making water stops,
the sewerage plant stops,
the galley stops,
the refrigeration plant stops
and the navigation gear, all the electronic navigation stops.
(Stephen) So without you, Fred, the whole show stops.
(Fred) Everybody’s got to play their part and we do our bit.
(Stephen) Thanks, Fred. (Fred) OK, Rowdy.
(Stephen) OK, we’re now going to go and have a look
on the back deck at the cranes in action.
The cranes on board the ship
lift huge heavy scientific equipment on and off the ship.
[Music plays]
See how the cranes are permanently fixed to the deck?
This crane can lift an equivalent of seven family cars.
The last thing I want to show you is up here.
[Music plays]
We have a rescue boat on the Southern Surveyor.
This is just in case someone falls overboard.
With the Southern Surveyor being so long
and hard to manoeuvre in a short time,
we use the rescue boat to get people out of the water quickly.
[Music plays]
In the 20 years the CSIRO has operated the Southern Surveyor
we’ve never had to use the rescue boat to rescue anyone yet.
Thanks for coming on board to see how the Southern Surveyor works.
[Music plays]