Mo, depending on the ship, the turn around could be as little as three days and as long as a week. If memory serves, the coal on board was generally good for a one way crossing. I'll have to check back into that. Of course, coaling was the worst part of it all. It had to be loaded manually and the dust which spread despite the very best efforts to contain it got into absolutely everything. So much so that cleaning it up was an all hands effort. Everything had to be clean and gleaming befor the passangers came on board.
Patches? Not with water coming in at seven tons a second you wouldn't. Think of a 49 inch diameter watermain under pressure being cracked wide open. That's what the crew was up against. I had the benefit of damage control training at Treasure Island in San Francisco and shoring/patching was one of the things we did in a simulator which was allowed to sink to the bottom of a (Fortunately) shallow tank. Patches on even the smallest holes had to be braced with a heavy wooden beam just to keep them from being forced out and just getting them in place on or over small holes took our team half an hour. It wouldn't take much to break it up and the water there wasn't even coming in under pressure.
Cordially,
Michael H. Standart
