You know, I actually pity those poor fucks running the ship, by God I do. No-one ever when I was there, taught anyone else how to swim.
I never needed to know how; I knew from day one that, when the time came, I would be going down with the ship.
I had two posts, I.E. I was Port Watch Engineer on Site (there was never any Starboard Watch Engineer. The job was basically to go to the site of any emergency called and handle. If necessary calling to the E/R Control Room to coordinate the Engine Room’s response to the Emergency. For instance, if the ship was sinking it was my job to keep it afloat. OK, fine, I can do that.
Now, I was also the coxswain (i.e.,,Captain of lifeboat 9. I was responsible to see that the passengers made it off the ship alive.
However, for me at some point to leave my post of Engineer on Site to Abandon Ship meant for one thing, that the ship would sink or burn faster making it tougher to get the passengers off.
In the 16 years I was on the ship. No-one else worked this out with me.
I handled it myself. Basically by deciding to handle the leak, fire or whatever the problem was. If I could not handle the problem. then I would go down with the ship. It was much better than sitting in a lifeboat watching the ship go down when it was my job to keep it afloat

Dear Cindy.
No disrespect, but there IS a way off the ship.
I got off the ship after 23 years in the S.O.
No freeloader bill…..
All I had to do is die.
I do not really recommend it; there must be easier ways. But for me; I did it and it seems to have worked.

I would guess that they find devious ways to avoid all the ship inspections they can. They used to claim the Apollo was a research vessel or floating school, not a passenger ship. Though from what I could find in a quick attempt at fact-checking, the overhaul of just over a decade ago was partly to address structural deficiencies found in some sort of inspection at a wharf in Curaçao.

In looking at the history, I’ve observed that Scientology and its Sea Org once attracted people with higher levels of education, including some real professionals, or at least greater ability to figure things out for themselves. Our own Mike Rinder is a stellar example of the sort of highly capable individual they used to get, but can no longer come close to replacing. I doubt they’re doing much better at staffing the ship’s technical departments, than they are with their now-gutted PR operations.

An interesting comment you make, sir. I have a few relevant points to make regarding it.
As far as the area the ship is operating affecting inspections I believe that the vessel does not operate in the US so as to avoid inspections but I think the inspections they would avoid are more like Public Health inspections. Mechanical inspections are required by the Classification Societies. Without certification from the Classification Society, one cannot purchase insurance nor can a ship enter ports. If, for instance, they had no current Passenger Safety Certification, it would be illegal for them to sail.
As far as trained personnel, I had no ship training when I came aboard.
In the 16 years I was aboard, I received no real engineering training other than what I read in the manuals that were aboard, which did not cover everything by any means.
LRH said that “You know it now, trained or not, hatted or not.

Jere:
As my senior D/Chf Engineer Rod McNocher who got a wild hare up his ass one day and went around the ship chanting “Coming slow, coming fast DEATH will surely come at last”. I asked him where he got that line and he said a movie.
I went to dinner and ran into Laura Wolfe who I had not seen in over a year. She explained that she had just gotten back from Mexico being treated for cancer. I had no idea that she had cancer.
At that moment Rod McNocher came up to Laura and raved directly to her the above line.
Unfortunately, Rod was right, in her case. After I left the ship I ran into Milt Wolfe in LA and he told me that she had passed.
Their VFP is DEATH.

Bill, thanks for your experienced, expert opinion – no need for humility when you actually have the right stuff.

I suspect they never really did find new ‘die-hard recruits’ of sufficient ability to replace you, and muddled along with hacks and cross-trained old-timers until they finally ran out of luck. That would seem to be about how the orgs run these days.

You paint an interesting picture of just how laborious and demanding it is to keep such a ship seaworthy. Though isn’t the Freewinds currently based where it is, in part to avoid inspections as much as possible?

They might have screwed up something like oil pressure, or could just have had something old finally wear out beyond use. I would guess that having a new major part made would take a long time, requiring a special order based on old drawings if they even existed, or else pulling the part and sending it out to be duplicated or refurbished.

I poked around and found a video of a crankshaft being replaced on a ship built in 2000, which indeed looks like quite the process:

Crankshaft exchange on the MS Zaandam cruise ship -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2drej_qeRSA

And a professional cruise line had an engine become irreparably damaged on a ship also built just in 2000, which required all sorts of special preparation including cutting away pipes, before it could be swapped out through a hole cut in the hull of the ship:

How to replace a cruise ship engine – without using the front door – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw6-82YVIbE

I could also imagine that repairs, maybe even less major, are simply just stalled as they wait to figure out what to do, and actually move forward. They have a history of slow and inefficient decisionmaking and management including, if I recall, when they tried for several years to sell off the old Apollo.

Peacemaker:
In my maybe not so humble opinion of why the ship is not sailing I would say that there is a high probability that it is because it is in no shape to leave the dock. I did thousands of all-nighters to keep that vessel afloat and running. I am sure that they have found some die-hard recruits since I left there or it would have sunk already.
In order to sail, by law it must pass a “Passenger Safety Inspection” each year. In addition to that every piece of equipment in the Engine Room; i.e. Engines Pumps Electrical Equipment Boilers Propellors and shafts etc. ad infinitum must be inspected and certified.
For instance, if they ran a main engine without oil pressure, they could destroy the crankshaft. It would probably cost in excess of 10 million dollars to replace it. The top of the ship would have to be cut off to lower a new one into place.
I was told 5 years after I left there that I still had not been replaced on my post. I was told that ” Nobody could possibly replace you, Bill.”
I was the terminal personally responsible to keep the entire vessel operational. Unless they found someone to competently replace me I cannot imagine how the ship could still be operating.
I have generally tried not to inflate my own importance as it is bad manners; as LRH said “a dead cat at a wedding”.
I have not received a single comment from the Church or any hate website like some of you have earned. Maybe now I have earned a rebuttal or at least a Gold Stamp for my SP declare, which I have not even seen.
I can only hope.

Wow Pope!
Thank you for your reply. My meds have changed 3 or 4 times since 2003. They have all been effective for stopping the HIV but some had side effects which I never noticed. Like one of the 3 drugs in “Trizivir” is retrovir, more commonly known as AZT. This was likely prescribed because it passes the blood/brain barrier and I had AIDS Dementia complex at the time. There are four stages of ADC. My symptoms were common with symptoms from Stages 3 and 4. One of the symptoms listed for Stage 4 is called “Death”.
My heart has an ejection fraction of 14 percent currently. This is the percentage of blood pumped (ejected) with each beat. Normal EF is 55-70 percent. So my heart pumps less than a quarter of the normal amount of blood with each beat.
However, I have only a few symptoms of this because , as per my heart doctor I have a big heart. Having a big heart is not a good thing normally because the heart enlarges as the mustle stretches and it gets weaker. On the EchoCardiogram It looked like it was hardly moving at all; it just wiggles on the edges. But since the pump itself is bigger, it pumps more blood than if it was normal size with a low ejection fraction.
I also have a pacemaker because most of the electrical circuits were destroyed by the HIV. The survival statistics for Heart Failure is that half of them survive 5 years and a tenth survive 10 years.
But I knew I was on borrowed time in the SO before I was sent off to die.
So any time I have left is a bonus. To answer your question, I am taking Discovy and Tivicay.

Bill, I’d guess you’d have as much insight as anyone as to what might be going on with the ship.

From what I can tell, in its heyday Scientology recruited a lot of more competent people than they do know, because of its tapping into the idealism of more thoughtful and better educated demographics at the time. They are clearly having problems at the orgs, replacing old-timers with new people who are as capable, and I assume that the ship must be suffering from the same dilemmma – photos of the crew show a lot of old timers, and I’m guessing they continue to rely on them in part because they can’t find young blood capable of doing the same sort of work. At an org they can fudge stats and muddle along, but the complex mechanics of a ship are pretty unforgiving.

Hi Bill! Loved working with you on Karen DLC videos! Fortunately I am fine and the govt pays for my meds and healthcare. If I was HIV- I would be in big trouble. What a stupid system! What meds do you take? I am one pill a day BIKTARVY. $4,000 a bottle!