Me watching the sunset on a quick stop during one of the many hikes that extended well into the evening along the AT (a new and improved version of this picture, thanks to Jeff)

Just to prove that there were no cars on Skyline Drive

Mom working on the Spirit of South Carolina with Elizabeth, a student at the College of Charleston who helps out at the Shipyard

I'm in the front left, having just come out from a smoke filled building.

The Great Unconformity

I realized that my blog had a great unconformity – It jumped from the beginning of October when I was starting my training in Houston to offshore India in the middle of December. Any geologist knows that time isn’t actually missing, its just not accounted for.

After Houston, Schlumberger sent me to New Orleans for BOSS / HUET training (basic offshore survival and helicopter underwater egress training). The best part of that training was we spent a whole day fighting fires – full fireman’s suit, complete with oxygen tanks. We actually put out big (hot) fires.

Then I actually found my way home – although home now means Charleston, SC (although, yes I work offshore and I am still a resident of VA). I spent 3 weeks there – helping mom pick things out for the house and helping to build the Spirit of South Carolina, a new tall ship they are building for the city.

Mom missed home (old home) so much that we went up to DC for Thanksgiving with Aunt Pat and Uncle Doe. The very next day however, I was off hiking on the Appalachian trail, with this guy, Jeff, who at the time was a friend of a friend, but after 2 weeks on the trail, would most definitely be considered a friend. He is thru hiking (for Backpacker Magazine!) and you can read about his adventures on his blog: www.trackjeff.com . And you can view some really great pictures of the 2 weeks by clicking here. The weather was crazy – the first week it was in the 60’s and the second week it was in the low teens at night. The last night out it actually snowed on us. The crazy thing is that we got the usually super busy Shenandoah national park all to ourselves. The day before Thanksgiving there was a large ice storm, prompting a closing of Skyline drive. Trees were down everywhere – all over the trail. It was more like an obstacle course, than the usually almost well-paved AT. That didn’t stop our friend Matt, however from hiking in the middle of the night, off of some side road to hang out with us for the day!

After that I was back in DC for a day and a half before shipping off to India. I did manage to go see the Revels though and get a little bit of Christmas spirit in.

Make sure you check out the AT pictures – Jeff is a great photographer!

What is a bird?

What is a bird you may ask? A bird is a 3 foot long tube with wings. Inside the tube is a motor, electoronics, a compass, and a battery. The bird is then attached to the cables. From the ship we can move the wings to change the depth of the cable.

This is what I did early Christmas morning - fix birds!

Click on the image to see the Night Before Christmas on Emerald

Christmas at Sea

Yes its Christmas and again I am not at home. This year though was really different from last year or any Christmas really. Last Year I spent Christmas with the Owen family in Saigon. While it was not Christmas with my family, it still felt like what I knew as Christmas. We went to bed that night watching a movie, we woke up super early, we spent hours opening gifts, we had a big breakfast. There were 2 kids.

This year…

I guess I’ll start with the similarities. At home I’m up at midnight, usually at church. I was up at midnight this morning, although that was only because my shift started then.

That might be it. I spent the first half of my shift in the bird shack repairing birds. Since the seas are still bad in the job block on the tip of India, we are back on the western side of the country in calmer weather, so we can go out in the work boats to fix the cables. I went out 2 days ago – there were 4 of us on the boat. One person driving, one person changing batteries and 2 of us holding up the cable. This may sound not too difficult. But if you remember that the cable is 6 km long (and thus very heavy) and the swells are most definitely topping 2 meters, it was quite a struggle to keep hold of the cable. It was two of us versus the vast Ocean. The work boat is just about the size of a motor boat on the lake. Then yesterday I was inside “driving the cables”. Usually the cables are kept between 7 meters (about 22 feet) and 14 meters (50feet) below the water surface, but I would monitor where the small boats were and bring up the necessary sections of cable and then check the devices to see if they were working. Some of the devices did not work yesterday, so today I got to fix them – changing batteries, calibrating them, changing motors and compasses. I managed to fix most of them. So that was the first fourth of my Christmas.

I spent the rest of my shift, helping drive the cables, working on some of my learning modules, and getting the final preparations ready for the Christmas activities after the big lunch. And big it was. They cooked a pig out on the boat deck during the morning, there was a huge ham, some sort of huge chunk of beef, prawns, king crab legs, some sort of stuffed lobster, and cakes galore. The real amusing kicker was the drinks – “wines”, really grape juice, as no alcohol is allowed on board.

After lunch, we all went to the day room, where I read the Geco Emerald “twas the night before Christmas that I had written (click on the graphic above). Just as I read “When what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature sleigh, and 8 tiny reindeer” Santa burst in. It was perfect timing and he was clanging a bell (okay, a pot lid with a spoon). After the reading was finished, everyone was called up, sat on Santa’s lap and got a gift. I don’t really think I’ve sat on Santa’s lap in quite a while. It was quite amusing watching some of the large engineers and mechanics sit in Santa’s lap.

And now its 3pm and its bed time. I guess I will have 2 Christmases, as I wake up for work at 10:30 pm and it will still be Christmas.

This is my vessel, although clearly at a distance. Since I missed crew change by a week and the Pacific Lion II, one of our chase boats which was also doing a resupply was going out, I got an overnight ride on it to get to the GECO EMERALD.

I'm all the way on the right. This is reel B out on the back deck. This was the start of bringing in all of the cables (look how clean we are).

Unexpected Findings

Guess what we found today! No not an old dead fish, no not some fishing line with hooks tangled in our cables (although we did find that 2 days ago), no not oil, but a… keep reading… We finished our job 3 days ago, and since then have spent our time bringing in 2 (of 8) 6km cables for repair. Yesterday we deployed the 2 cables (about 6 hours per cable to deploy). Now we are on our way to the new site. (our new site is located at the very tip of India. If you draw a line from the tip directly south and then a line from Columbo Sri Lanka due west, our new site is where they intersect.)

But what did we find? As we were streaming along, there was suddenly a lot of noise coming up from our cables. Think seismograph that just has straight lines and then suddenly there are a lot of up and down. First guess – earthquake, but looking at the lines and how they hit the cables, the arrival of the waves was not that of an earthquake. The choice – submarine! We called the bridge (where the captain and chief mate and all the steering equipment is) to ask (kind of jokingly) if they knew about the sub. They did, but for a different reason. On their radar they had seen a small blip and assumed it was a small fishing boat, however it was headed straight for our cables, so they sent one of our chase boats after it. By the time the chase boat got there, there was nothing and it had disappeared off of the radar screen. The sub thus dove under our cables!

Now we are about 45 km away and just hanging tight until we get there. We are moving at 4.5 knots, so we still have a bit of time (and its why I’m able to write this while I’m working!)

Entering India

I started my journey in DC, from where I flew to London, to Bahrain, to Kochi, India. Once arriving at 3:30 in the morning and waiting outside for quite awhile, I made it to the hotel by 5:15am. I crashed until I was awoken around 1:30 by a call from the ship’s port agent, telling me he was in the lobby, he needed my passport. He took it saying that my security clearance was not through, but he would be back by 4:30 / 5:00pm at the latest. I must have fallen back to sleep because at 4:47 I got another awakening phone call, this time to come down quickly, we had to go to the immigration office before it closed. Here is what I wrote in my journal:

“oh how I felt like I was back in Vietnam again – it was hot, the building was old plaster that was inevitably peeling, there were three people to do the job of one. Instead of shamrock green table clothes in Vietnam, there were floral vinyl coverings. I had to fill out a departures form. I vaguely remembered filling out an arrivals form only 13 hours before. This time for the vessel I wrote “ship” and destination “high seas”. There was another guy, a mechanic, also there going out too. He had had to come in on Thursday because his mother had died. I was really glad to have someone else there. After awhile I was whisked back to the hotel to pick up my bags, then off to a customs guy, but the customs guy was not there, so we had to drive to his home, but he was not there, so we had to drive back. Someone was found to sign off (although I’m not entirely sure money didn’t change hands) As we left the gate guy tried to get a bribe, but the agent told him that he would be back and the gate guy waved us through.
Again, like Vietnam, nothing is clean, there is just dust and stuff everywhere. And finally we made it to the boat – the Pacific Lion II (note this is not my vessel, it is our seismic vessel supply boat). Also, the mechanic told me that I still did not have Indian offshore clearance, but that the port agent had told the immigration officers that he would get it to them in a 2-3 weeks.

To be continued in a day or 2 – stay tuned.
I know most of you are probably wonder what in the world I was doing this fall, besides training in Houston - I'll get that next post, hopefully in a day or 2, along with pictures.

NY Times Article

Here is an Article from November 8th, 2006 talking about oil in the Gulf of Mexico. However, It highlights the Western Neptune, a vessel owned by Western Geco (Schlumberger) and its very similar to the Geco Topaz, which I will be on in India. I'm putting it up here, just to give you an idea of what I'll be doing.

Drilling Deep in the Gulf of Mexico

I am the girl in the middle. This was at the injury prevention class where we learned how to carry things in Tulsa, OK

New Jobs

I am in Tulsa right now and it is a direct consequence of taking a ferry ride last May from Pho Quoc Island to my Vietnamese town of Rach Gia. I had spent the previous rainy week alone on the island (alone meaning without Dan or my Vietnamese friends) pondering, no agonizing over whether I should go to Norway and become a data processor or jump on a seismic ship and look for oil. As I stood out on the bow of the ferry that day in May, looking out on the ocean, I knew – the boat.

I have now stepped into the “real world” and am now making more than $80 a month, much to my father’s delight. However, as many of you know I make this jump with trepidation. Trepidation because if two years ago when people learned that I was a geologist, they would remark – “oh so you are going to work for an oil company?” and I would respond with “oh course not” and that was a true fact.

Let me clarify exactly what my job is. My job title is Marine Seismic Acquisitions Engineer, which as the word marine implies, I will be working on seismic ships all over the world. Very simply, I will be looking for oil. That’ right I, Laura Smith will be looking for oil.

Preceding my starting the job I found it difficult to admit to people what I was about to do. I would hang my head and give a response such as “Well like any good environmentalist I am going to go look for oil and kill and deafen fish in the process”.

The thing is though, I am really excited about the job. My job will not be an ordinary job. My schedule is the following: I will spend 6 weeks on the boat. While on the boat I will work 12 hours on, 12 hours off, 12 hours on, 12 hours off, continuously for 6 weeks. Then I will work in the office closest to the boat for 3 weeks. Then 3 weeks off.

On the airplane down to Houston for training I brainstormed the following goals:

1. Gain more practical skills
2. Better understand the oil industry
3. Better understand for-profit companies in general
4. Learn new skills
5. Have fun
6. Enliven the lives of the people around me
7. Leave if I am in overall compromising situation
8. Do my job to the fullest of my capabilities
9. Continually ask questions

Now I am in Tulsa for the Schlumberger Injury Prevention program and defensive driving school. I spent all of last week in Houston learning about the company, getting my new laptop, 2 sets of fire retardant coveralls, and new steel toed boots (that look like cool cowboy boots). The diversity of people at training is shocking – in my class of 48 there are people from 15 countries and we are all going into different segments of Schlumberger. I was honestly expecting a group of 48 boring quiet engineers, instead I have been presented with 48 cool, fun, … engineers.

I’ll wrap this blog up for now – I’m already itching to write another one though about how much I have already learned.

I do need to clear one thing up though - I am not going to Norway for my first tirp, I am going to India. My vessel, the Geco Topaz is currently in Norway, but by the time that I board her in November, she will be in India. Rest assured though, in January I will go to Norway for my technical school.

I do want to end with one question though. Where ever you are or what ever you are doing, do you have clear goals for yourself? What are they? If not, then what are your goals?

I would love to hear from you.