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.