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Can we talk about how my gear went from looking brand new to looking like it survived a war in just 3 months?
I got hired on a dock job in Morgan City, Louisiana back in March and my harness and umbilical looked factory fresh the day I showed up. Three months of daily saltwater, mud, and getting dragged across barnacle covered pilings later and the whole thing looked like it had been through a wood chipper. The bright yellow webbing turned this gross gray brown and the coating on the umbilical was peeling off in chunks the size of my thumb. My supervisor Danny kept telling me the salt was the real killer but I figured he was just being dramatic. Then the corrosion finally ate through one of my carabiner gates and I had to swap it out on the boat mid job, which is a nightmare when the tide is running. Now I rinse everything with fresh water at the end of every shift even when I'm dead tired. Anyone else notice their gear aging faster than a rental truck out there or is it just the Gulf water being extra mean?
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thea_bell1mo ago
Did you try soaking the metal parts in vinegar overnight? That helped me a ton when my shackles started rusting up on a barge job near Dulac. I also started coating my carabiner gates with a thin layer of marine grease every week, which sounds like a pain but it saved me from swapping gear on deck in rough water. The vinegar soak breaks up the salt crust so you can actually see where the rust is starting before it eats all the way through.
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