The SS WESTERN SEA

In the early 1980s, while America was reeling from the chaos caused by the second major fabricated oil shortage in history, Tom Archer, climbed aboard the SS WESTERN SEA, the first and largest Ultra Large Crude Carrier in the American fleet. Displacing over 400,000 tons, she was designed to stockpile 3,000,000 barrels of crude oil in floating storage, starving the refineries and driving oil prices up. As the new second officer and navigator his job was to safely take this behemoth, too large and deep for any American port, to the worlds deep water refineries, storage facilities and production ports, often transferring the oil at anchor or underway at sea due to the lack of those facilities in most regions. The evidence of the manipulation of the U.S. oil supply can be found in the log books of these ships and in the personal logs of the officers. This is the story of those voyages, during the middle of the crisis, coming directly from the navigator's personal log.