A Return to Normalcy

A return to normalcy. We returned to the back deck. Ports were behind us, south of us. We sailed into the open Barents Sea. For 6 months my vessel has been idle and without work. Our last production shot point was on December 26^th 2008. But now we sailed north – away from West Africa, towards a job north of Norway. There was a bit of dread – back to the back deck, a bit of excitement – long days out working north of the arctic circle, and the comfort of returning to the normal routine. But, I guess this begs the question of what is normal. I thought about this for awhile as I was on the back deck deploying and reconfiguring 10 streamers. So I decided to document one day. On June 7^th, I photographed what I did and recorded a pretty thorough record of how I spent my day. This is not the same every day, but it’s a good snap shot of what I do.

23:30 (6 June) - alarm goes off

23:40 - I actually got out of my bunk

23:50 – I went to the laudry to get my cold weather coveralls, only to find that no one had moved them from the washer to the dryer, so I put them into the dryer and put on my normal coveralls with long underwear and a fleece underneath.

23:55 – Onto the backdeck for the acquisition handover. The noon-midnight shift passed along what they had done and what we needed to do

0:15 (now 7 June) – we started moving sections around. We had to rebuild the front 600m of our streamers with new sections.

3:00 – we finished adding sections and
were able to deploy those 600m into the sea

4:00 – we had to move the streamer from the starboard side of the vessel to the port side, in order to change the leadin (the heavy duty cable that connects the streamer to the boat)

4:20 – we removed the adapter that goes from the cable to a large metal wing (this
is used to pull the cable out wide)

4:40 – I went to the bridge for my daily “lessons” each day, the chief officer and I teach exchange a lesson - seismic for maritime. Today I taught him about the effect of the sounds from the guns bouncing off the water surface and coming back down, which cancels out certain frequencies. He taught me what to do if you are in shallow water and suddenly you skim the bottom and get stuck.

5:00 – I went back to the back deck to help the gunners put a large piece of rubber on the lead-in so that when we attached floats to the leadin it does not bend too much

5:20 – I went to change for breakfast and then went to the mess room for breakfast

6:00 - I was back on the back deck preparing to change a leadin

6:45 – we started the operation of removing the old leadin.

8:00 – we finished spooling off the leadin and then we had to disconnect it from the reel

8:45 – we fed the new lead in down off an upper deck down to the reel and started spooling on all 900m of the new leadin

11:30 – we finished transferring the new leadin from the reel it was transported on, onto the actual winch it will tow from

11:55 – hand over.

12:15 lunch!

12:45 - a fire drill, so we all had to muster at the muster station just aft of the bridge and move our cards over to indicate we were present

13:00 – watch humpback whales about 100m off our port bow

13:30 – go out in the fast rescue boat (FRB) in order to run some tests for the engineers (going max speed to find max RPMs, checking temp) and for me and another guy to practice coming alongside the boat.

14:40 – we returned to the back to Western Pride

15:15 – I chatted with the medic for a bit

15:30 – a shower, especially to get the salt off my face – the rest of me had been covered in a waterproof work suit.

16:05 – go to the bridge to chat and end up learning some breakdancing

17:30 – go to bed

23:30 - alarm goes off…