Norway

Here is an entry from my journal from my first day in Norway:

Yes it is Valentine’s Day. And here I am in Norway. Norway is meeting and exceeding my expectations so far. After all the hype I was worried that it would be dreary, not cute, no mountains. BUT. There are mountains, there is snow, it is beautiful out, the sea is right there. Buildings are cute. It’s a mix of all my passions and ideals. I love boats. There is water. I have seen more than 3 or 4 beautiful wooden boats in the harbor. I love mountains. There are mountains and rocks everywhere. The rocks and hills define the town and looking into the not so far distance I felt like I was in Anchorage looking at the Chugach Mountains at one point. Small compact town. In terms of city planning I have always said that I would rather live in a small house or apartment in town and near work rather than live in a larger house more in the countryside. The benefits of not driving to work far outweigh for me the benefits of driving. Here though, the houses are small and close – as they should be! Also while the town is cute, its not overly cute to the point where it is a tourist town that only has cafés and boutiques. Instead it is a real town. There are normal stores lining the streets. There is industry – ships are tied up right in town – large tankers and fishing vessels.

Today after I got to town and dropped my stuff at the hotel, I went for a walk. First point of note is that there are many people walking around town. (I also later saw that gas I about $7 a gallon, helping to explain this, although I think it goes much deeper into their culture. It hovers around freezing and people sit outside at street side cafes with blankets over them). This walking though, is in strong contrast to Vietnam where people could not understand why I would walk anywhere – I mean why not just take a motor bike? I walked for about 10 minutes and ended up on a trail through pine trees. Along the trail I passed a reservoir where kids were skating. The trail wound around and I soon stood atop a bluff looking out on the ocean, and off to the mountains. Snow covered mountains to be exact. I LOVED IT. Then I found my way back down and around to the rocky beach and I just watched the sun play off the mountains, the houses, and the bridge in the distance. Just as I had hoped.

Also of note. For some reason I have always wanted to actually see my own bags loaded onto the airplane. I know that at least once (and perhaps a few times), I have watched the people loading intently for perhaps 10 minutes, in hopes of seeing my own bag. Yesterday in New York City, I just happened to look out the window and there was my blue backpack, oh then followed by my black duffel.

Everyone keeps asking about my room on board. Here are 2 pictures. I shared with a polish girl, Anna, but we were on different shifts, so we were never in the room at the same time. if you look closely you can see Puff on my bed (my stuffed animal)

Muddy Creek Falls up at Deep Creek Lake - this was the snow and winter I was dreaming about on the boat and finally got. It was my first snow since May 2005.

The beach where we were in India

End of School - End of Shift

The last few days I felt like I was back in an elementary school classroom days before school lets out – desks have to be cleaned, blackboards washed, personal belongings taken home. On board Emerald the days before crew change– we cleaned the floors, finished up odd jobs, cleaned the tools, the bird shack, and created a detailed description of all the specifications for the job contract that the client kept changing. The 9-year-old child's pent up anticipation of summer holiday also struck the crew. Knowing that in a few days they would be on land, have beers in their hands and soon be on airplanes to see their families, brought smiles across their faces. The last few shifts seemed to take forever – we still were not shooting. Over the course of the week we would proceed south until the noise on the hydrophones was too much and then turn around north again. Only once did this work for us and we managed to shoot one line. Every other attempt was aborted.

Crew change lasted 2 days – because the helicopter flights were long enough that the pilots would run out of flight hours in one day. Suited up with my ear phones and life jacket, I boarded the first chopper out to Trivandrum - a town at the very tip of India (take a look on the map). For me, it was like taking a flight to another time zone. My midnight to noon working hours had to readjust to the rhythms of a normal human day (only to readjust 5 days later when flying to the States).

By 1 pm the second day, the off signers were onshore and the on signers were off shore. I and 4 other crew members headed 20 km down the coast to a beach where we hung out for a few days. I was amazed at how tired my body actually was after working 12 hours days 7 days a week for 5 weeks straight – that’s 84 hour weeks – or 2 plus work weeks in one.

Now I’m back in the states for a bit – until feb 13th when I leave for 2 months in Norway. I'll be in Norway for more training so that I actually know how to look for oil, as opposed to some great pretending.

What I do

If you click on the link to this Canadian oil company, they have a great animation on their homepage that shows what I do. Click on it and you can see a boat pulling a cable. There are guns located very near to the boat, that go off about every 10-15 seconds. On the cables there are hundreds of receivers (or hydrophones), that pick up or "hear" the sound of the guns. The receivers hear the direct sound, but also the sound that bounces off of the ocean bottom, and off of geological layers below the surface. The result is the black and white picture / diagram that you can also see in the animation. One difference though between the animation and us, is that we have 8 cables and not one.

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