Day 38 – Port Hedland

This morning we spent looking around Port Hedland. Firstly we headed over to Pretty Pool. This is a natural inlet right near our Caravan Park which is a favourite local swimming spot. The sea flows into a clear deep pool – great for fishing apparently. We also drove over to South Hedland (almost a separate town) to the shopping centre to pick up a few things (like a new outside mat that someone that isn’t me, left outside at our last stop!). We called in at the old fashioned Port Hedland Emporium, which like the name suggests, supplies everything in the one store – very like the general store of days gone by.

Port Hedland (the houses, roads, shops, footpaths) is covered in a layer of reddy brown dust. Every house has cyclone proof grills on their windows, and there are no tiles on the roofs to be seen, just colorbond. No gutters on the houses either, because when the wet season comes, the downpours are enormous.  Our caravan park even has tie down hooks with chains on every site for when the cyclones hit.

The massive BHP Billiton Iron Ore trains are just fascinating to watch. We watched the huge 3.75km long trains come in fully loaded with ore, headed for the BHP facility where a laser beam guided them along a track over a pit, and then two at a time the wagons were completely spun upside down taking their section of rail with them, and not even undoing the couplings. Very clever.

The ore is then sent through a series of crushers before being wetted down, then put on a conveyor belt out to the port, which drops it in the ship’s hoppers, carefully moving along on an arm, so that the huge weight is distributed evenly in the ship. Most impressive.

The locomotives are huge and very powerful – the new ones are 6000 horsepower each, and can pull a fully loaded iron ore train of 7km in length! They go in for maintenance every 90 days and have a complete strip down, and the wheels are ground to remove any flat spots. The ore cars are also looked after carefully, and usually last about 30 years before they need replacing. There are a few companies besides BHP that have their own railways and mines. Another one we watched today was the FMG trains (Fortescue Metal Group).

 

The other major industry here is salt. Rio Tinto pump the salt from 50km away to here, then  grow salt crystals to a crop of 50cm high, in a series of 9 huge salt evaporation ponds, allow it to crystallise for 6 months, then mechanically harvest it and truck it to the port to send all over the world. The salt can be seen stockpiled near the port, and is an impressive sight glistening in the sun. The amazing thing is that although it is a very pure product, and can be used as table salt, 99% of it is used in steel manufacturing.

 

Next, we dropped in at the local Mission to Seafarers building for our prebooked tour of the harbour. The man running it very kindly explained its purpose and showed us around. This is a entirely self funded venture run by the local Anglican church. They provide free  facilities for seafarers that call in at Port Hedland (off the many, many ships that call in at the port – sometimes up to 7 a day) such as a recreational lounge, food shop, Australian souvenir shop (tshirts, opal jewellery, kangaroo & sheep skins, wool doonas, baby formula (yes, apparently ours is highly sought after), email and telephone facilities, showers, and a few other things. They are very welcoming, and I’m sure the foreign crews really appreciate it. The centre here has 19 staff, with many volunteers.

There are so many ships visiting the port these days (mainly to fill up with iron ore), that the small boat that our tour was conducted on, runs out to pick up the seafarer crews up to 7 times a day – mostly 100 people a day. Most ships only stay in port for 30 hours or so. With anchorage fees at $100,000 a day (40km out at sea), and then $500,000 per day in port, its no wonder they don’t hang around long. There are often at least 40 ships out waiting at anchorage (40kms out), while there are 8 ships here berthed at a time loading, and Gina Rheinhart (Roy Hill Mines) is building four more berths at present (along with a new railway line to the mine).

The seafarers boat picks up both smaller fishing boat crews moored out in the harbour, as well as the huge ships. Today we went out and picked up crews from a number of ships (Chinese and Korean). Some of the crew were Philipino, Chinese, Ukrainian and Korean. We sidled up beside the immense, towering ships, while they let their crews down on a ladder, and we picked them up and off we went.

 

It was a fascinating tour, we got to see all the huge ships up close as we darted in and around them picking up seafarers and running them back to shore. We watched the iron ore coming in on conveyor belts, and being loaded into the ships.

 

We also watched the tugs push and pull ships around, turning them 360deg ready to head out again.

 

I asked the guide if there were ever any women brought in, but he said it was fairly rare, although sometimes the captains bring their wives on the voyages, and the Indian ships officers are allowed to bring their whole families, so there are women and children brought in.

The seafarers also often send a chaplain out to the ships to visit the crews that don’t get off the ship, and they take them out mobile phones so they can contact their families (who they often haven’t had any contact with for months). The seafarers must sign up for 2 years at a time, and are only paid a very lowly wage of $300-$500 per month, with pretty shocking conditions onboard. Of course, most of this wage is sent home to their families.

The customs officers go out to the anchorage section, and check their paperwork, and search the ships and crew. The harbour channel is 160m wide, and the ships are 50m wide, so when two pass each other in the channel going in and out, it takes very careful manoeuvring due to the currents and wind variations.

These are some of the biggest ships in the world, and are called Cape boats, as they need to go around the Cape, as they are too big to fit through the Suez and Panama Canals. They cost about 70 million to build and only last 25 years.

 

A truly fascinating tour – one of the best things we have done on the trip so far.