On the west coast of Norway during a workboat course. We were practicing sharp fast turns on the jet boat.
The other observers on my shift on my new vessel.
This is the FPSO at night during a close pass.

Its good for me

The evenings are hauntingly beautiful from the helideck. Its still winter here, so there is a humid chill in the air as I take my midnight strolls. Our current prospect is a 4-D job, which means we are shooting seismic not to find oil, but to monitor wells that are already in production. 2 large FPSO’s (Floating Production storage and offloading vessels) hover in the center of our prospect – at night you could mistake them for cruise ships in full gaiety – lights coming out of every port hole, reflecting across the blackened ocean, multi-decks suggesting varying suites on each level, and oh - the large flame spouting out from one end of the vessel burning off H2S, which forces reality upon the situation. These 2 vessels pump out a quarter million barrels of oil a day each.

I’ve now moved to a different vessel. I spent the previous one and a half years on Geco Emerald as she searched for oil in India, Norway, and Angola. I didn’t want to open the email subject line: “Vessel Change”, I was so happy with my crew on Emerald – they were like family. I called a few of the crew “Cousin” or “Cus” (one of them actually shares the same middle name as me – Orzechowski – what are the odds?). I consoled myself with the knowledge that it was a temporary change and that it would be a good opportunity to meet more people, learn about a different boat, and then go back “home” to Emerald. Yesterday, I learned I would stay on Western Pride, my new vessel. It was one of those things in my gut I knew would happen. And, as much as I wanted to fight it and get back on Emerald, I know that logically this move makes sense. This boat uses a newer technology – one that all the future vessels of our company will have, and in 2 years time only a handful will have the old technology. And in the office I’m doing testing that is directly associated with the new technology – so the logic – yes keep Laura on Pride. Yesterday it was hard to face up to this fact. The new crew are very nice, although a bit on the mellow side. On Emerald I was used to basketball games, foosball tournaments, afternoon cricket and a pull up competition thrown in. Here – they watch movies and sometimes play the Wii. It will just take time – I have to remember I was on Emerald for a year and I developed relationships that one year ago I never thought possible. But now, here I am on Pride.

Our current job here in Angola is interesting because we literally must dodge the floating vessel / platforms. The trouble is that the most important part of what we want to visualize or “map” for the oil company is directly under the FPSO’s however for obvious reasons our, our vessel can not go directly over where the FPSO is. So we have to do 2 things – 1. Go as close as we possibly can. 2. Use a gun boat. This entails having one boat that has guns on one side of the platform and our recording vessel on the other. The midpoint between the 2 is directly under the FPSO – the target that the client wants. On these “close passes” sometimes I can feel the heat from the flame and see the people on the FPSO, watching us on the seismic vessel. The light from the H2S creates my shadow on the helideck at midnight.

Emerald in full glory. Immediately behind the vessel you can see the guns, spread out to the side are the cables. If you look closely you can see them trailing all the way back and out of the photo.


A close up of Emerald


An Oil Spill drill (the drill was pretending hydraulic oil was leaking from the crane). Can you find me?


Our end of trip helideck BBQ (again can you find me?). We had it in the evening and as soon as the sunset we were all huddled around the grill - in ANGOLA, only a few degrees south of the Equator!

A Simple Scan

Growing up, vacation planning started about 1 and a half years in advance and was tracked carefully on an excel spread sheet. About a year in advance, dad would make the key bookings and enter them onto the sheet and fill each column – location, contact details, price, website – as more information was known. As the months crept closer, dad filled in the details of each day – recommended restaurants, the activity of the day. And after each addition he would print out a new sheet and show it to Tesia and I. We would look at it, nod our heads in approval and wonder what exactly had changed (often it was the addition of a phone number or a price change).
Planning was of the essence (Dad we love you for all that planning).
Vietnam educated me in a more laidback approach to travel and seismic has taught me minute by minute flexibility is essential.

I thought this past crew change would be pretty normal – it would be my third time going to Angola, so I knew how it worked. A week before crew change I would get my flight details, 3 days before traveling I would get my visa. Once in Angola, I knew in immigration – go find the man in the white coat to show my yellow fever card, once through, I knew I would be herded into a waiting area while they processed by temporary 15 day visa, then transfer to the domestic airport for the helicopter. I was an old hand at entering Angola. As usual, I was supposed to travel on Saturday to Lisbon and then onto Luanda. On Thursday – I still had no visa. Friday morning at work – still no visa, so I started making phone calls. First, to our office in Gatwick, then to our shore representative in Angola. After a while I discovered that the Angola immigration officials had rejected my visa application because the scan / copy of my university diploma was bad. I found it interesting that the three times before when they issued me a visa this had not been an issue, but now it was. By this point it was about midday and the Angolan offices close at noon and then it was the weekend, so no there would be no action until at least Monday – I would not be crew changing on Saturday.

So the Angola officials wanted a good copy – I would give them everything I possibly could. First I sent them a copy of my transcript, then I faced the larger dilemma – I was in Oslo and my diploma was in Maryland. Luckily, my dad was able to take a picture of it, so that I had a color copy (the Princeton diploma is too large to put on a regular scanner). By mid afternoon on Friday I had all the necessary documents and emailed them off to Angola. Now I just had to wait. I couldn’t complain – the weekend in Oslo was fantastic – warm sun, a citywide music concert (versus being on the boat!). And the next week I just waited. Waited for news of a visa and finally it came on Thursday – I was given a visa and I would travel on Saturday (in Angola that you can’t enter the country until 3 days after the visa is issued). And so a week later I joined the vessel. Luckily it was raining that Saturday in Oslo, so warm and sunny Angola – here I come.

As for why it happened, many may chant “TIA” – This Is Africa as an excuse, others may point to the last minute nature of seismic. Me – while a Princeton diploma usually helps a situation, I don’t think Princeton’s decision to write their diploma in Latin helped.

The Houseboat / sauna that Rasmus' whole family went to over Easter. It was snowing and I think we all jumped into the lake around 6 times.


My mom said that fron the last post she did not get a good idea of what the barnacles here in Angola look like. This one is about 3-4 inches long, no hard shell, just one long slimy barnacle.


Working on the back deck deploying the cable at 23:00.

A Woman's Touch

Easter in Norway is sacred. Sacred, not because Christ was nailed on a cross and atoned for the sins of man-kind, but because it’s the last hurrah of winter before spring comes. Schools are closed for the week and the country shuts down – stores close, hotels close and all of Norway heads off to their family’s hytte (pronounced hut-a) in the mountains to ski.

For the sacred week I went to Sweden. In Sweden, Rasmus’ brother asked me to give a talk at the local Youth House, where they were having a theme night on Discrimination and Prejudice. Nikodemus invited me to talk, hoping I might talk about being an American in the many places that I have been. I agreed to talk, but then when I started to think, I felt I could give a better talk about being a female in a very male dominated job.

I titled the talk, “A Woman’s Touch” and introduced myself to the Swedish youth, telling them my name and where I was from. I then asked them to brainstorm what they thought my job was from that limited information and from what they saw of me standing there. I got many responses – a social worker, a teacher, a journalist, and even a comedian. I told them I worked off shore and all, were indeed shocked. I then showed them a loud music, fast paced 3 minute video about seismic. After introducing them to the offshore world I just wanted to share a few experiences. On the whole, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at how I’ve been treated off shore. Its much a more a family – with the guys acting as brothers, uncles or fatherly figures. However, I had one incident last fall that I shared with the crowd. Instead of recapping it, I’ll copy here what I wrote in my journal last October..

Today I had a pretty amazing conversation (this is amazing as in whoa - shocked, not whoa great). A trainee (mid-career hire, he is 35) George, from Romania. He is pretty quiet. The first part of the trip we talked some on the back deck, cracked some jokes. Everyone else was saying he was quiet, and I was sticking up for him. Over the last few days though he just wasn't talking to me and basically flat out ignoring me. Today we sort of confronted each other. and he basically flat out told me men are better than women and that no matter how hard a woman tries, as soon as she makes one mistake, that's it, she is not longer viewed as equal or able in a "man's" world. He also noted that smart women are the exception not the rule. He also noted that there may be a few high up women, but that people don't really respect them or view them as equal.

WHOA - I've never met anyone who actually thought this way. This whole conversation started when I said "thank you" to George for emptying a bucket of kerosene for me. He told me "you don't have to say thank you" I said “Oh why not" He said "because its not like this is a personal favor or anything".

whoa again. we also talked about how the trip was going. He doesn't think he will pass his appraisal. He rarely smiles, and doesn't really engage with people. This is a problem when the environment on the ship is really team oriented. He also says he has another job offer back in Romania. so he may not be back

An eye opener for sure. Thank goodness for Allan - I was able to talk to him about it. George is pretty cold to him as well.

The question to leave with is have you been discriminated against? In what way? How did you react. For me, my goal was to hear out George, I wanted to know why he thought this way. Me, arguing was only going to cement his beliefs even more.

Halfway between the coast and getting to Luanda via helicopter.



Helicopter view of Luanda on my way from the boat to the airport.


Me and the barnacles on the work boat. This was a brief break from hand ripping them off the tail end of our 8km cables. (for most of it we don't hand rip them off, we use tools we made, called the jaws of death)


Barnacles on the cable.

The Sea Life in Angola

Even with two Angolan stamps, one full page 15 day transit visa with a photo and a work visa is on the way, I have yet to step a foot further than the hot crumbling Lunada Airport. They started building a new airport with all the oil money, but they found diamonds as they were excavating, so that was halted. So it’s the old one. I’ve now been in and out of Angola twice, but only in her waters – south of Luanda. Visas have been an issue, so on the transit visa I wasn’t able to stay or go anywhere. Hopefully with the work visa (if it actually happens) I can see a bit more of Angola.

Here is what I can say about Angola:
There are lots of sharks, turtles, and barnacles and all three affect my everyday life here on board.
Sharks. They like to bite the cables (no kidding). And when they bite the cables, then sea water intrudes the cables and there are electrical faults. This unfortunately means that we have to stop production and either retrieve the cable(s) or go out in the work boat and change a cable section. If it’s in an easily accessible location and day light, this may only take an hour to rectify (although we have to stop production) however if its night or in a less accessible location, it could take a day or 2 (which equates to a lot of money lost).

Barnacles. Angola is barnacle heaven, or else the world’ breeding ground from barnacles. Fortunately for the barnacles we are going slow enough (less than 4.5 knots), that they can attach themselves to our streamers. Unfortunately for us, this causes us lots of problems. These problems include large amounts of drag, which creates large amounts of tension on the cables, and lots of noise on the hydrophones, which means lower data quality. Imagine 4 inch barnacle flowers flapping around on top of a microphone – its adds a lot of noise to the data. The tension is actually so great that we have to slow our speed down to 3.5 knots, which results in a loss of control of our cables and a tendency for them to cross each other, which as one might guess is not a good thing – 8 km spaghetti is never good.

Turtles. Turtles eat barnacles. So the turtles hang out around the cables and feast. Unfortunately they hit the cable when they eat the barnacles. It hits the cable and then the whole cable shakes and creates a lot of noise on the hydrophones. Its like a huge bang against a microphone. We can actually watch the turtles work their way down the streamer from our computer screens in the instrument room.

Of the three – sharks, barnacles, and turtles, barnacles are the most constant nuisance and they require us to go out and clean the streamers about 3-4 times a week. I love it, as I get to be out on the work boat, drive it sometimes and just spend the whole day outside. The smell though can get pretty bad – imagine lots of barnacles or any sea food sitting outside in the baking sun. Plus it’s a pretty messy job. We go along the cable at about 7 knots and the barnacles come flying off with our jaws of death tool. I think the pictures show just how many barnacles there are!

This is Sognefjorden where we sheltered from the storm.


This is a picture of my in Sognefjorden, the longest fjord in Norway. we came here to shelter from weather, although we hit the worst of it on our way to the fjord.

I had a few short clips of the weather on Emerald and put some really random melodramatic music to it so all could experience the joys of the North Sea.

Weather - Our Lives

In normal life, weather is the topic you turn to when there is nothing better to say. Here on Emerald it is always a topic – what is the weather going to be in a few days, what is it right now? Will it get worse? Did you feel that huge wave last night? Will we be able to crew change? But its not just small talk, it is what affects our lives.

Side seas mean the difference between sleeping and not sleeping. Rough weather means that we can or can not shoot, that we can or can not work on gear in sea, that we can or can’t go out in the work boat.

Imagine going into an office and everyone is sitting at the desks typing away, but with one hand bracing themselves. You would laugh. But in rough weather that is what we do. We are sitting in our chairs, one arm is always bracing. Or our legs are set as brackets against the swivel.

In the North Sea the weather dictates our lives. This summer has reportedly been the worst in 18 years. Low pressure after low pressure keeps sweeping through the region. It is exacerbated by the fact that we are in the northern part of the north sea – so the nearest shelter to the west is Greenland or Iceland. There is nothing stopping the low pressure systems from blasting on through.

The current job that we are working on was started at the end of July and was supposed to take about a month. It is now October and we are still here – this is a mix of weather, fishing activity, plus having an exceptionally large number of other seismic vessels in the region this summer. In Norway fishing takes priority over oil and if fishermen want to be in our area, then we must give way. This can be a problem as we tow over 6km of cables behind us. But I digress. The weather is our lives. As soon as it abates, it is quickly forgotten, but this summer it was rarely forgotten.

Our weather over the next 2 days is going to be crazy – click here and check out the graphs – (remember the wave height is in meters, not feet)

Kräftskiva

While in the US Rasmus got to experience a very Maryland tradition – Crabs and Old Bay. Actually twice. And everytime someone (or many people) would ask – “do you eat crabs in Sweden? Do you have crab fests?”. The answer was yes we eat crabs, but not like this, but we do have a crayfish party or Kräftskiva. And a few weekends ago one of our Swedish friends hosted one so that the displaced Swedes could have their crayfish and also share them with the rest of us here in Norway.

Is a Kräftskiva like a crab fest? At both you eat crustaceans. At both it takes a good bit of work to get any meat. And both are during the late summer. However. A crab fest is messier (thanks to the Old Bay). A Kräftskiva has funnier hats. A crab fest has newspaper on the table. A Kräftskiva has swedish drinking songs (about bumble bees of all things?). If there are any sides while eating crabs it may be something like corn on the cob. A Kräftskiva has sides of salads, bread, and cheese.

A Kräftskiva (pronounced kreft-hweeeva) started because early in 1900’s you could only harvest the crayfish in the fall. Often (and advisably) you have them outside (due to the smell). There are cray fish decorations – plates, napkins, bibs, hats, and man-in-the moon lanterns. When you eat the crayfish, you suck / slurp the juice out of the crayfish before eating it. And Swedes are really into their drinking songs, so there were plenty of those. My favorite one is sung to the song of popeye the sailor man and is translated something like
“we are small bees bzzz bzz, we are small bees bzzz bzzz, we are small bees, we drink the sting of a wasp, we are small bees bzzz bzzz”.

I was worried that because many people weren’t Swedish they wouldn’t get into the silliness of it – the hats, the bibs, the songs, but everyone did! Although we would have to sing each song 3-6 times just so everyone got it.

What's a fun summer tradition for your family?

The table before everyone arrived

The crayfish - ready to eat.

Pierre Loic and I with our funny hats.

Rasmus Shopping at Walmart

Rasmus, Me, and Tesia at Englanders

The Deomolition Derby

Personalized Hershey Bars. Rasmus is now a fan of hershey bars. It turns out the only place to get them here in Norway is at the Movie Theater.

What to show a Swede?

What is the American Experience? Rasmus, my Swedish boyfriend came home with me during my most recent break. What do we do here that I haven’t seen in Norway or Sweden? Rasmus had his own list (taken from watching American TV and Movies). This included:

-eating a Twinkie
-eating at a diner

The strange part about these two is that they were also on the list of a Norwegian friend of my Aunt’s.

I made sure we did both. At the diner (Englanders in Oakland, MD) Rasmus discovered Western Omelets and decided that they were good (actually he couldn’t stop talking about them) I tried to steer clear of the normal tourist things. Instead we did everything from going to a demolition derby to going to an Amish country fest to going to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water to playing miniature golf in a cave. Not to worry – we did do some normal stuff – hanging out at the lake, going swimming, going into DC for a day, and going shark tooth hunting down in southern MD.

What would you show to a Swede coming to the US? What is unique about where you live within the US?

Me, the photographer (aka MMO) and the assistant with the white screen (aka medical with dry erase board)

The photo shoot in action

one of the actual shots. I'm not sure what look I was going for?

The moment when I realized that Keith was watching.

The motley crew that did the photo shoot.

Spare Time

I am now back in the North Sea. Our current prospect straddles UK and Norwegian waters – we are just about due west of Bergen and North East of the Shetland Islands.

The boat is a limiting place (but potentially liberating?) – I only have 250 feet of space to move around in, therefore you get creative. Last trip our party chief had polo shirts made for everyone commemorating our vessel leaving Asia, as Emerald had been working in Asia since 1992 when she was launched, so it was quite momentous for her to come to Norway. In the instrument room I tried on the T-shirt and modeled it / walked around, pretending I was on the runway. Also – when our Helideck is folded up for bad weather, all that is left of the round deck is a rectangular runway, which I always thought was a hilarious image on a vessel like ours – a catwalk on a seismic ship.

The other day I was eating lunch with one of our MMO’s (marine mammal observers) and it turned out in his off time he does a lot of video-work, but has also done some fashion photography. Half joking, I said “we should do a photoshoot on the helideck with me in my coveralls” and thus our hilarious afternoon on the helideck was born. So we started planning. Sam, one MMO’s would be the photographer, Mark, the medic would hold a dry erase board as the white thing that reflects light onto the face, and Dougie, the other MMO would photograph us doing the Photoshoot. Now I knew this was utterly ridiculous, but I didn’t care, only, I didn’t want one person to stumble upon us and that was Keith, the party chief.

So off we went to the Helideck. Sam telling me where to stand and moving Mark for the perfect light angle. Dougie had his bandana on his head, making him look particularly artsy – photographer style. After a few shots in the middle of the helideck we moved in back towards the vessel. I was pretending to pull on this rope when I looked up, when who did I see staring down at us? Leaning over the railing – Keith - shaking his head saying “my my what do we have here?” in his strong British accent. I about died. I dropped down into the fetal position; however he wouldn’t leave until we continued, so we did. And to top it off, the next day as Sam and I were looking at the pictures, who is the ONE person to find us looking at the pictures. Yeap – Keith. You can believe that I will NEVER hear the end of this one.

The route that we took up Mount Little, one of the "Ten Peaks".


Me climbing Mount Little


Ondrej and I at the top of Mount Little

This is the snow covered valley.

Reliable Sources

Rarely do people go on vacation with someone that they have met for just an hour, but I did during my last break. After 2 weeks in Houston, I flew to Seattle to meet up with Ondrej, the UVA college room mate of my cousin Landon. We had met once briefly a few Christmases earlier at Landon’s house, but that was it, and now here I was flying to Seattle so that we could go on a mountaineering trip together in British Columbia in Yoho and Kootney parks (on the border between British Columbia and Alberta - just west of Banff National Park).

I arrived in Seattle on a Thursday evening and we spent the next day going over our gear, buying food and eating lunch with a girl that I had met at geology field camp3 years earlier. Then Saturday morning we were off. We had to rent a car, because neither of us had a car and in the previous year the total driving hours between the 2 of us was next to nothing. But off we went.

The Trans-Canada Highway through British Columbia is really amazing. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this much diversity. It went from rolling / flat farm land to high tree covered mountains to high dry desert hills and then to steep jagged peaks. We spent the night in Glacier national park giddy that we could see glaciers and continued on the next morning and that next morning happened to be Canada Day.

Like responsible hikers, we stopped in at the national park visitor center in Field (that’s the name of the town) to get current trail information. A WARNING – the Canadian Park service is not the place to get trail information. We asked about the trail to the first hut we were going to stay in. The first woman didn’t know, so she got someone who did. We told her our destination – Fay hut and she said “ Ooohhhh that trail is snowed in. winter conditions.”

“when you say ‘winter conditions’ what exactly do you mean?” we asked. She responded with, “At least knee, likely waist deep snow”. This was frustrating, because we knew we could do it, but it would be very slow going, and it was already noon and we still had a some driving before reaching the trail head. Then another woman came up and said “oh my friend’s parents did the hike 2 weeks ago – it was great. They started hiking at 5 am and with all the snow made it by dinner time, but it was beautiful”. Hmmm, just what we needed to hear as the minutes were ticking away. Then they brought out the binder with trail info to show us that the trail was indeed snow covered. We just looked at each other with frustrated faces. Then another woman came up and said “I think Fay hut burned down.” Just what I needed to hear. Luckily I knew that it had burned down in 2003, but it was rebuilt in 2005. Clearly the park did not have their facts straight. Meanwhile, the first woman, the one who couldn’t help us at all said, “Do you want some free Canada Day cake?”

We weren’t getting any closer to the hut by standing talking to the park service, so we continued on our way to Lake Louise and stopped in there, hoping for better information. None. I was given the safety warden’s phone number. I called. I asked about snow conditions. He said “the trails are clear to Fay hut”. I asked again, “so no snow?” he responded “if there is any snow its really small patches.”. My eyes were wide by this point. I said thank you and hung up. I went to tell Ondrej and we were off. We decided, what ever was there was there and we were going hiking. It was another 30 minutes of driving and as we were going down the valley towards the trail head, there was not a patch of snow to be seen. Anywhere. There were acres and acres of burned trees from the 2003 fire, but no snow. At 3:30pm we pulled into the parklot, tired from 2 days of driving and with 13 km of hiking ahead of us. All we could do was stare at the complete and utter lack of snow that had caused us sooooo much worry and frustration all day.

Over the course of the week, we ended up climbing 2 peaks that are featured on the back of the Canadian $20, which shows the “Valley of the Ten Peaks”. Four of those days in that area we saw no one but ourselves. On the second venture into the wilderness, we ended up meeting an amazing couple, who spent 20 of their years making films for National Geographic. They would do everything – propose the film, go shoot it, edit it, and then send the final thing to National Geographic. They said not once did any of their ideas get turned down.

We made it back to Seattle in one full day of driving. It was crazy to think that we started the day in a hut up in the mountains and ended the day in Ondrej’s apartment – a truly amazing contrast.