Meet the Smith Family

“Meet the Parents” came out, then “Meet the Fockers”, now sit back, relax and get ready for “Meet the Smith Family”.

Fede came to the Lake for Christmas – his first time in the US, and more importantly his first time to meet my family. However, I must stop here and note that it was NOT his first time to interact with my family. He and my mom had been emailing almost daily for the past few months – which will come into play very soon in this “feature film”.

I had warned Fede that in the States its less common for boyfriends-girlfriends to share rooms in the parents house. So having heard this, he emailed my mom asking if there were any house rules. She responded with the usual Lake rules:

• No shoes in the house
• No boogers on the wall
• No Italian Hair in the bathroom
• No eating on the couch

He responded “great, Glad to hear you are so liberal and sharing a room is not a problem for you”. And thus started the beginning of the great series of “tests” that Fede would encounter. Also note at this point that my mom has always had a theoretical test up her sleeve for potential boyfriends. Her plan was - once they were at the Lake, she would go loosen a washer on the toilet or sink. Then a bit later complain of a leaking faucet. If the potential boyfriend said “Mrs. Smith let me go take a look” and then came back saying “oh, I tightened everything up, all should be ok”, then….thumbs up. If he said “you should call a plumber” then…thumbs down.

Back to the bed sharing. So after the series of emails my mom started to plan. The first of the plans involved a pillow case. She bought a pack of those iron on-print-off sheets that you can use to iron on a picture to a t-shirt. She found a picture of me sleeping, hair crazy, and drool dripping, and printed it. Then she ironed it onto a Pillow case, so that when Fede arrived, he would pull back the covers and find Laura seemingly with him in the bed. (note she found this so amusing that she carried the pillow case in her purse with her for weeks showing everyone)

Fede finally arrived the 18^th of December and there in the Bedroom was the pillow case, but also a warning. My mom had placed SPEARS on the ceiling fan above his bed. She informed him that should she need to, a quick door slam would easily bring them all down… luckily he laughed and noted that he would removed them before going to sleep.

And that was just the beginning. There was no leaky faucet, but the snow blower did break and luckily Fede fixed it (or knew what needed replacing) within minutes. He also got coerced into putting the (live) tree into the Christmas tree stand. After the third attempt at a straight fall-free tree, Fede exasperated, proclaimed with his head poking out from the tree “this is harder than sailing across the Atlantic alone (which he did a few years back)”.

On Christmas Eve, Eve my mother had a "Meet the Fede Party". I thought the name was just a joke and it was really just a chance for some family friends to come over before Christmas. However, I asked my mom about her planning and she said the whole get together started when my former piano teacher made a comment about wanting to meet Fede. Solution: throw a party and invite 10-14 guests!

Other tests around the house included playing the family card game “oh Hell” with the same consequences of losing as the rest of the family – cleaning the dishes. He not only did well, but WON 2 of the games. He also easily and happily played the whole gamut of Smith games, and did so with a smile.

And yes. He passed all of the tests. Two thumbs up from Mom. He fit in wonderfully with the Smith family. All those at the "Meet the Fede Party" also gave a thumbs up. The door never had to slam to drop the spears and he took the pillow case home to show his family. And he was even invited back.

High's and Low's

It’s a common tradition on Outdoor Action trips to reflect on the day or a trip with “highs and Lows”. Its’ been a while since I’ve blogged, so I’ll do a “highs and lows” of my past few months.

High:
Going home for Christmas. I had been out of the US for 13 months. Everyone came home for the snow that dumped on the East Coast this year: Tesia flying from Japan, I flying from India, and Federico, my Argentinian boyfriend also flying from India. All forms of winter were enjoyed – skating, sledding, downhill skiing, cross country skiing, a sleigh ride on Christmas eve. Fantastic. However Christmas deserves more of a description, so I promise to write more in a later post. It was Fede’s first time to meet the Family and I swear a movie could have been made about the 8 days he was there – I promise to expand…

Low:
My whole Fall. Well not the whole fall, but much of October and the beginning of November. I was somewhat forced to go early into the office and push going to Japan to the second half of my break. Somehow I’ve managed to become the ONLY person who can test our acquisition software. After a week of isolated testing, I had to help move our lab & equipment to our new building. This involved working 12 hour days in the basement of a building where no one else was working yet. So needless to say, I saw none of my friends. This may sound petty, but since I’m not around that much, people don’t know I’m in Oslo unless they see me, so this means, no one invites me on hiking trips, or picnics, or dinners. Its rough sometimes. The night before I left Oslo, I broke down crying and weeping that “I have no friends”. I even had to work one weekend. The Japan trip that was supposed to be 2-2.5 weeks was reduced to 5 days since I had been PROACTIVE and had actually gotten my Indian visa. So I had to return to the boat 9 days early.

High:
Last trip I officially became certified as a coxswain on the boats. For some reason this seems to mean a lot to me. I’m pretty proud of being a coxswain. Why I’m not sure – perhaps because not too many girls are? Perhaps because when I first joined I decided this was something that I wanted to do / achieve? However, I was certified at the end of the trip so it was only 5 days ago that I went out on my own for the first time. Trial by fire. Our first job of the day was to go back to a cable to investigate fishing gear. We had the cable in the arms of our work boat and I was dropping back along the cable. The crew was cutting off ropes and fishing gear. The next thing I hear is “we have a dolphin, we have a dolphin in the fishing gear”. Aye aye aye. I shout back “is it dead or alive?”. The respond “dead, very dead”. After 30 seconds or a minute, they managed to cut the ropes and it dropped off into the blue of the ocean. (note having a dead dolphin was NOT a high)

I also took out the Fast Rescue boat (FRB) for my first personnel transfer. Its usually the damsel in distress that gets rescued, but ha, here it’s the other way around!. Fede had had to go over to our supply boat to advise their captain when he came alongside our boat for bunkering of fuel and provisioning. Once the supply boat had been cast off, Fede needed to be brought back to our boat. So I was sent off on my first personnel transfer and I went to Pick up Fede!!! I just keep reminding him that I rescued him…

Small Boats

I just wanted to share this video of me driving our various small boats on board. Its also good if you have ever wondered how we pick the boats up out of the water. If you are patient enough, that comes towards the end of the video.

We have two types of small boats - the workboat and the FRB - fast rescue boat. The workboat is the workhorse of the small boats; it is what we use to go out on the cables and do work like changing sections or fixing other equipment attached the cable. The workboat actually has arms that can pick up the cable so that the crew of the boat can stand up and have the cable at hip level. The workboat is even capable of towing the whole cable itself if necessary.

The FRB meanwhile is the fun loving fast jet boat whose primary purpose is for Man overboard scenarios where you need a fast and safe response. We also use the FRB for personnel transfers between the chase boat and our boat. And once and a while for a few various cable work tasks.

Hopefully soon, once we get to warmer, calmer locations, and I get a few more trips under my belt - then I can get sign off as a coxswain!

A Shift Leader

The seismic world is 24 / 7. All time is money, so full time production is a must. Therefore our work is shift work. I passed the test to become a shift leader last October, but given the current economic climate, on our boat, by December we had 4 people qualified to be shift leaders, so I never got to take on that role. This trip, one of those 4 was laid off and I became a shift leader.

I learned this fact the day before joining and suddenly all the worries of incompetency for this role cycled through my thoughts. Luckily - its been a perfect trip to ease into the shift leader role. For one, I'm on the same boat I was before (it can be a pain to have to learn the role and a new boat on the same trip). Secondly, its been a quite calm trip - no major equipment failures, no major software failures. nice and quiet - production, production production. And I have had a fantastic set of people working with me in my department.

It was all perfect until I caused my first downtime 3 nights ago. We were about to do the near impossible - finish a job in the morning for one client and start another job for another client that same afternoon. Not impossible - it just would require alot of work - a new gun configuration from the gunners, reconfiguring all of our onboard software systems for a new client, new job, new job specifications... and finishing up everything from the last job - shipments, data QC, missed data...

Mid afternoon the gunners deployed the reconfigured guns and I started to enable them one by one (there are 24), so that once all were firing I could calibrate them and run some tests. Once about 75% of the guns were firing, it became clear that the air pressure was not holding on one array. After some confused investigating we discovered the cause to be a twisted hose. The solution meant one gun array must come back onboard, so my gun test had to be delayed.

Once the guns were back in the water, we were heading towards the first line of the new job. As usual, I had to start the guns one at a time - a process which takes between 20-30 minutes. By the time that had finished we were about 20 minutes away from the start of line. I had no time to do the test I needed to do, but I did have time to calibrate the guns. By this point we were in the "dummy shots". I went to calibrate the guns - it checks the signal that they are creating versus a known value of what they "should" be creating. I went to check and the known value was telling me "no reference". I tried to figure out why I had no reference - did I not put in gun volumes into the configuration? fine- okay? did I not put in gun types? no - so I put those in and still no luck. I went to check the directory where the files were. On a previous boat we did not have the files for each gun volume, but no those were there for each gun volume. Checking checking. Almost the start of line. I called my chief down (or rather woke him up, it was about 11pm). He came down - no ideas. Finally I looked at the files again and noticed that we did not have the files for the specified gun depth of 8m. The solution was to copy files from close depths and rename the file for the 8m depth we had, then the system could find them. Now everyone was there - the 2 clients, the party chief. Unfortunately we had already started the line - we had missed data and that data had uncalibrated guns and was therefore no good. We aborted the line and circled.

Unfortunately, I think about things too much, I run things through my head. Run the situation over and over and over again. What if this, what if that, next time this, next time that.

Conclusions:
- I should have slowed the boat down. That is the normal procedure. Why I didn't do this I'm still not sure - some sort of pressure of this being the first line? Me thinking I could solve it in the time allowed? I still do not know. Usually I slow the boat down if there is a problem.

- I can blame myself and say I should have checked the files, but these files are set for most standard configurations. This is only the second time in 3 years that I have had to interact with these files, so perhaps checking them should be on some checklist, but its not 100% standard procedure to check them. Trust me, I will ALWAYS check these files before a start of job from now on.

- Afterward the client said, that really a test of the guns should have been done before the real line and someone higher up should have delayed the first line so we could have done the test. Had we done the test we would have noticed the missing files immediately and fixed the problem miles from the start of line.

I will admit - I did cry that night when I got back to my room. Its still not fun to cause downtime. I'm sure there will be much more downtime in the future. Its inevitable I guess.

Welcome to being a Shift Leader.

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…

The English Channel

Last night was rough. Things were crashing in my room. The feeling of the bed falling out from under me, only to run up and meet me again. The boat vibrating with a loud thud. The English channel has its moments. I also discovered that at some point someone put a paper hole punch on one of my shelves. That fell off around 1:30am and I woke up to a floor covered in snow-like round white paper dots. My Chief looked shell shocked in the morning. It was quite bad yesterday afternoon as well. I made everyone in the instrument room watch the documentary "Around Cape Horn", a movie about a 1929 journey of a clipper ship around Cape Horn. It helps put the current weather into perspective.

Now we are in Den Helder. Flat. but windy. Typical Holland I guess.

An Evening Stroll

I just want to write about my walk tonight. Just a walk, after dinner, up on the Helideck around 9:30 as our boat enters the Bay of Biscay. The changes from west Africa to Europe are quite apparent. Yesterday I went for my nighttime star gazing walk at 8:30, only to find broad daylight – of course. Tonight, my walk at 9:30 was merely in dusk at best, and it stayed dusk for the entire walk. In West Africa (or any equatorial location), dark comes in an instant.

I joined the boat four days ago in Las Palmas in the Grand Canary islands, to continue Pride’s journey north from Namibia. A skeleton crew of us joined to take her north to Den Helder (and then onto Norway) – usually there is a full crew of 53 on board. Now only 36 and 6 of those are outside guys doing work around the boat. Everywhere is quiet and empty.

The transit north feels like we are going at light speed. When shooting seismic we usually trod along at a crawl of 4 knots. Now we are going 3-4 times faster. While walking tonight the helideck rocked – a lot. I got more of a hill walking experience, full of short ups and downs, than a flat, sea level plain.

Not only is this trip quiet, but its also uncertain. We’ve been told we have a job in the Barrents Sea, but no one knows for sure. And we may have a job before that. Or maybe not. The configuration may be our maximum number of streamers or it may not. So much uncertainty. But since today is Saturday, we won’t know anything at least until Monday. Life keeps going here, but the office stops. In some ways its nice.

On board, the few of us that are here, are doing jobs that need doing – removing old computers from the racks, installing new ones, preparing for the engineers who will join us in Den Helder. Yesterday we had a mid-day helideck-Hockey game. A few crew have gotten sea sick – the feel of the sea going this fast is much different. Its only the beginning as we head north through the north sea and then further north still. And thus we go further and further north…

(I’ve included some pictures from this past break of me in Scotland and Skiing over easter in Norway, in case I don’t write more about it later)

The End of a Quarter Century

I came back to the boat from Oslo and Western Pride was still in Dry dock. Our dry dock was a floating dry dock, so when our boat was out of the water it was still on the water and the dry dock could move. What happens is the sides of the dry dock fill up with water and the whole thing sinks. The boat then moves into the dock and slowly the water is let out of the sides and the whole dry dock rises up. Sadly I didn’t get to see Pride go into or out of dry dock, but the whole idea is pretty cool. Other dry docks work differently – some are carved into the land and work like a lock and get filled up with water.

Meanwhile – we came out of dry dock, and then had to start loading lots and lots and lots of gear back on board (and hopefully cleared out the mess while we were at it). This included loading everything that we had to take off so that the dock workers could safely access places they had to access (and so there would not be a fire hazard while they were doing hot work). I also worked on a lot of projects – I spent a lot of time trouble shooting the wiring of our new gun pressure monitoring display and alarm, I redid the day room complete with a new cabinet that we designed, new DVD cupboards, new carpeting on the riser, hanging instruments and a complete clean up. The change in the room is dramatic. Plus starting and stopping our computer systems a few times, due to switching between shore and ship power a few times.

Its also been a bit frustrating – things kept going a bit wrong. We were supposed to go to sea trials 3 times, with each time something breaking or going wrong. The pilot actually stopped coming on time, knowing that we probably wouldn’t actually go out.

At the moment we are still short one generator – due to the dock yard breaking one of ours. But thus is life. And I guess luckily or unluckily there has not been a job for us to go to, so we have been in no rush.

Some FAQ’s about being alongside (courtesy of questions from my dad and a few others)

1. When we are in Dry dock I do not work 9-5, but still a 12 hours shift. However, almost all of us are working together on a 7am -7pm shift

2. I do not get weekends off while in port – we still work the whole 5 weeks that we are onboard

3. Since we share cabins, I actually see my room mate, as opposed to usually we share, but are on opposite shifts. Its fun – its like being back at college.

Now we are at anchorage outside of Walvis Bay – waiting for a job. And there are seals everywhere. In fact we’ve had a few visitors coming up our gun slipway!

And finally to finish the quarter century – back when I was very young, the night before my birthday my parents would video tape me and ask me some questions about the previous year. About 5 years ago I resurrected this tradition for myself. And below are a few of this year’s favorites:

Favorite TV show: Seeing as though I have no recollection really of watching TV, I’ll have to go with the Nobel prize ceremony, that I watched. And watching The Office onboard.

Favorite mountain: Innerdalstårnet

Favorite food: passion fruit juice

Favorite song: Swedish drinking songs, seriously, I just think they are really fun

Favorite country: Norway

Favorite Animal: reindeer – they run ridiculously, whoever thought they might be able to fly? Or at least the reindeers in Finmark are uncoordinated.

Favorite word: abrigado – the only word I learned in Portuguese

Seasons

Seasons. There are 4. Well, at least in much of the developed world there are 4. In Vietnam students would love to ask me, hoping that I would respond incorrectly, “Teacher Teacher, do you know how many seasons there are in Vietnam? “ Since usually by this point either I had lived there for 8 months already and had experienced all the seasons to be experienced or because on my second day someone had told me, I would respond “ah in Vietnam, you have Two seasons, the rainy season and the dry season”. The eyes of the querying student would always open wide, shocked that I knew. Ah so easy to impress.

I returned last week from Tanzania, where I was visiting Susan, my room mate from Princeton. Just as I was leaving the short rains were starting to come, reminiscent of Vietnam. However, I was reminded that while there are only 2 seasons in Vietnam, and Tanzania, and only 2 in much of the developing world, which seems perhaps to make life simpler, seasons, and the food that is associated with those season is much more complex. When I arrived at Susan’s in the middle of January mangos, were in full swing. During the night they would drop and with a thud hit the roof above my head. In the morning we would go out, pick them off the ground (that is if the bush babies had not gotten there first), and have a wonderful breakfast of mangos and yogurt. And according to Susan, this had been her pattern for the previous 2 or 3 months. On my last day in Tanzania, I woke up and went out to gather mangos, only to find – there were none. Not a single mango on the ground or in the tree, at least as far as I could see. And thus ended that breakfast pattern. Its just a reminder how disconnected we can get from the actual food patterns, when in the super market we can get what we want when we want!

So the food that was in season was great – I had lots and lots of passion fruit juice. We made some great guacamole and a fantastic pineapple upside down cake. The cake was for the Inauguration party we went to. Which I found amusing, because having grown up in DC, I could not remember any inauguration. I have no idea if I even watched the others on TV (and its not that I don’t follow these things, they just must not have left much of an impression). However, there is something quite special about gathering around a TV in a very foreign country to celebrate with Americans and non-Americans the coming of a new president. Its also an opportunity to get to explain the way in which our government works.

The reason that Susan is in the town of Moshi, Tanzania is to do AIDS research in a collaboration project that the hospital there has with Duke. While I was visiting there was a monthly CAB meeting – Community Advisory Board, a forum with members of the community, high school students, nurses, and researchers. That month they were looking at issues surrounding recruiting people for the research. It was really interesting to hear some of the hurdles and issues- things that I would never have initially thought of (note they were talking about research involving expecting mothers with AIDS): in Tanzania it is the custom that mothers, once they have given birth stay home and rest for 30 days. So convincing the family to let the mothers go to the hospital for follow-ups turns out to be a challenge. Or other mothers were worried that their neighbors would see them “always” going to the hospital and think things were wrong. I guess back at home, where many times people don’t even know their neighbors this would not be an issue. It was just interesting to hear these concerns and then hope that they can get addressed somehow.

Ah yes, and while in Tanzania a friend of mine from Oslo, Michel, came down and together we climbed Kilimanjaro, via the LeMosho route, and then went on safari in Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Manyara National Parks. Both were quite fantastic.

Coming Ashore

Life at sea has a rhythm – its regular. There’s the night shift and day shift – midnight to noon, noon to midnight. The chiefs work six to six. Breakfast 5:30-6:30, lunch 11:30-12:30, dinner 5:30-6:30. Deck hockey at 10am M, W, F, and at 1pm on T, Th, Sat. For 35 days life keeps ticking.

Until, after I had been working at sea in Angola for 14 months, my boat had to go to dry dock. We came to port in Walvis Bay, Namibia. Then all regularity stopped. Suddenly everyone worked 7-7, except those who had to stand watch on the gangway through the night. Suddenly our family of 53 expanded daily with electricians, plumbers, engine guys, welders, flooring guys. The dock side was always full and active with crates and pallets coming on and off. Crew putting strops on, taking them off. Our normal seismic routine was turned upside down. No day seemed the same. Sometimes I was dockside recovering and preparing craned shipments, sometimes I was boxing up our gear, sometimes spooling sections, sometimes preparing paperwork for offgoing shipments, sometimes installing a new computer in the rack room. Then at 7 things stopped, usually. Sometimes we had to crane on a few last shipments. From 7pm until 7 the next morning we were free. We could go on land – how strange. We were no longer confined to 73 meters of space. At 8pm usually we gathered. Everyone freshly showered and wearing crew change clothes – a changed from their orange. Often we would head to the seaman’s mission. This made me feel like a real sailor. The first night I was the only woman there besides the old woman at the door making sure you signed in and the one behind the bar. We also explored Walvis Bay – it was the cleanest, safest, most functional place I have ever been in Africa – I can’t explain how amazing it is when things work – the port is clean, the sidewalks are clean(even the fact that there are sidewalks), there’s a nice beach and I saw people running along the beach, immigration was not an ordeal Even sailing in – it was a speck nestled into an endless coast of golden sand dunes. Sadly we crew changed before dry dock, so I didn’t get to see Pride out of the water. And surprisingly, the trip had gone so smoothly and was so much fun, that crew change rolled around and I was not even itching to get off!

Christmas in Angola (Offshore)

I never thought he would do it. But he did. Greg partially shaved his head to emulate the largely receded hairline of our party chief. All for a Christmas play.

Yesterday marked the 3^rd of the past 4 Christmases that I have spent far from home- in Saigon with another American family, in the Indian Ocean on my very first seismic vessel, now off the shores of Angola.

My first seismic Christmas, 2 years ago, I came on board and found that no one had stepped up to organize a Christmas celebration. So hastily, as a trainee, I tried to pull things together – a fun picture / global celebrity quiz, a rewriting of Twas the Night Before Christmas (see blog post 2 years ago). I did what I could with one week remaining before Christmas day.

This year I prepared. Out ship, in the middle of Angola, became the confluence of many ways to celebrate Christmas. For some it's a family event with gifts, for others it's a very religious holiday, and many on board had never celebrated Christmas I wanted to make it a Christmas to remember.

I started the Christmas Celebrations with a Playmobile advent calendar from my mom (which I hauled from the US to Norway, then to Angola). Much to my surprise, the crew loved it. Angola is one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, so we made the decision to follow GMT, thus the night shift had to wait until 1am to open the next day's addition. I will note though, that this year's Playmobile scene was less Christmas based and more pirate based, but it was perfect for a seismic vessel such as ours.

On Christmas eve I played Santa, delivering a card to each crew's cabin.

2008, however, will mark Western Pride's very first Christmas play. I rewrote (again) Twas the Night before Christmas. Instead of the father "springing from his bed to see what was the matter", it was our party chief. And thus to better "become the part", I convinced Greg, a crew member, to shave his head. As he "sprang from his bed to see what was the matter" he threw off his hat to the hysterical laughter of the crew. We also had 6 "live" reindeer, 1 donkey, and 1 "remote" reindeer from Norway. Santa was from Nigeria. And workboots were hung instead of stockings. And when Santa sprang to his sleigh to drive out of sight, he radioed in "Western Pride, Western Pride, this is sleigh…Merry Christmas to Pride and to Pride a Good Night". It was a success – the prancing reindeers stole the show, as did the freshly bald party chief.

I organized Christmas Carol singing, complete with Santa playing the keyboard. The karaoke skills of the Filipinos came in very handy to fill the room with song. And I must admit, we sounded quite good.

Each crew member also got a gift from Santa, as well as the requisite photo on Santa's lap. (my gift was a singing Elvis mug)

And the final touch was a viewing of Elf yourself with all our chiefs (see it here).

The galley crew produced quite a spread with lobster, 2 whole pigs, gingerbread cookies, and a decorated galley.

Now the crew is asking - "Laura what are you planning for New Years?" I think Christmas was a success.

In action - around kilometer 37 or so. I was easy to pick out with my pink - flowered children's bike helmet. Or perhaps it was the bright yellow-orange shorts that made it easy to pick me out?

Why Not?

It all started when a guy from Tasmania decided to run a marathon in Berlin. The medic on Emerald, who is Australian and friends with this guy, thought “hey we crew change through Brussels, Brussels is just a skip away from Berlin (especially compared to Australia), and the marathon is the weekend after crew change, ‘so Hey I should go run the marathon after crew change in September.” This was June. So Stru, the medic, went to sign up for the marathon, however all 40,000 spaces were full. Sadden, he told his friends of the misfortune, who lamented, but responded joking and laughing “ha there are still spaces in the rollerblade marathon”. Stru thought “hey why not”, then turned to me and said “Laura, you should totally do it too” and I thought “why not” and so we both signed up. Thus started the rollerblade escapade.

Minor details included:
- Neither of us had actually rollerbladed in the past 10 years
- I did not own rollerblades
- Stru had rollerblades buried in a closet in Cairns
- 42.2km is a long way whether by foot or by rollerblade

The next break, back in Oslo I went and bought a pair of rollerblades, telling the sales guy “I need a fast pair, you see I ‘m going to be in a marathon”. He just turned and raised one eyebrow. I practiced around Oslo a bit. My fear before buying the skates was whether or not I could go fast enough for the marathon. I figured that I could ice skate decently. However I soon learned and realized that ice skating is always done on a perfectly flat surface. Rollerblading, meanwhile has hills involved, however small. And stopping is a whole other ball game. This is unfortunate because Oslo is known for its hills. This is fortunate because Berlin is known for being flat.

Training (however limited it was) came to an abrupt stop when I returned to the vessel. I had thought through many possibilities, including tying myself to something and skating around the helideck, but I ultimately decided there was no way to actually train on the boat. Although I did manage to find some amusing looking exercises on the internet, which I did try to do on the helideck (much to the embarrassment of Stru).

I got off the vessel one week before heading to Berlin. However, between rain and traveling I was not able to get back on my skates before heading off. I met up with Stru in Berlin (who by the way purchased his skates in Berlin). We decided to take a train over to Poland in search of better training ground (ie no cars to hit) and to get in touch with my Polish roots. We went up to the Northwest corner, which is a nice beach area, as well a ferry point for going to Copenhagen and Sweden. Our new fear was getting picked up by the slow bus during the race. In fact we had no idea how fast we could actually go – could we do 2 min kilometers or 5 min kilometers? All we knew was that the bus picked you up at a few points if your time was clocking in slower than 2 hours 30 min and that the last person over the line last year timed in at 3 hours 9 minutes.

While exploring the area we found the perfect training grounds – the road from the ferry. Perfect – flat, straight and very little traffic (only when cars got off the ferry, so only once every 10 minutes). Now we could time ourselves. When going with the wind we clocked in at 2 min 20-30sec kms, while against the wind we were getting times of 3 min- 3 min 30 seconds. Finally we had a sense of our time. We just might be able to pull this stunt off with officially 2 days of training under our belts.

So back to Berlin we went, meeting up with the whole crew of Stru’s mates from Australia and then racing the next day. We both managed to finish- Stru with a time of 1 hour 54 minutes, I with a time of 2 hours 2 min 24 seconds (ah I think I could have made it under 2 hours, but oh well, at least I left the pickup bus in the dust). And we both had a fantastic time. We had hoped to “see Berlin” by skates, but instead we got the grand tour of Berlin pavement, so I can tell you much more about the sewer covers, and trams tracks rather than the sites, but so it goes. The Berlin inline marathon is the largest in the world, so there were heaps of spectators, bands on the streets and the final stretch took us right under the Brandenburg Gate. So overall a great time. I would definitely do another one in the future.

And to cap off the weekend, the next day, the running world record was broken – 2 hours 3 minutes and 59 seconds (yeap that’s right I skated it faster – my current claim to fame)

My middle name is Orzechowski and in Polish this means hazelnut. I went looking to buy a few candy bars with my name on them and this is the one that I found!

Stru's and my skills did not really hold up when we started falling while trying to take a picture of ourselves pre-race.