Not if you forget to put on your harness, it doesn't!
The completion of the Grane work in the early hours ended a six month contract with this client, so in we headed to Haugesund for demob.
A beautiful morning for a cruise...
We were headed pretty well due east...
... into the rising sun.
Land ahoy!
Haugesund... a wealthy town that made it's money from herring. The nearby Stavanger is more of an oil centre.
The shipyard in the distance is often busy building topsides and refurbishing drilling rigs. It used to rely heavily on Geordie welders but I don't know who they use now... probably Poles.
We berthed on the small island of Killingøy where these contractors have a base. It's also this vessel's home port. The island is joined to the mainland by a causeway.
The view from the offside of the boat looked nice and peaceful.
Not a lot going on at the dockside either.
Today almost the entire marine crew changed out, most of the ROV crew left apart from a few to carry out some maintenance, and the entire survey crew left apart from yours truly. Once things had quietened down I had a pokey about on the dockside.
The survey ROV had been temporarily removed to a warehouse where some maintenance was being carried out.
This was why the ROV was removed from the vessel for the maintenance (which would usually have been carried out in the ROV hangar). The umbilical needs changing out for the Black Sea work... the water depth is up to 2.2km and we need a longer and thinner umbilical... the thinner the better to reduce drag in the water column and increase speed and stability at those depths.
The old umbilical first needs to be spooled off before the new one is spooled on. And then connections made to the ROV.
All of which I am hoping will take a very long time.
Although I fear that this won't take as long as I need and the current estimated departure to the Black Sea is late Thursday/early Friday. My Covid vaccination is booked for 09:20am on Friday morning, which is a bit of a pisser (but I'm most definitely not moaning about it, I think it's great). Tomorrow morning I'll head off to the vaccination centre in Haugesund and see if I can get a 'drop in' jab, after which I will hopefully take a trip down memory lane and have a good wander around town... I spent a large part of the 90s working in this place. Sadly there will be no beer tomorrow (which I am very happy about) but I hope to have a look around some old haunts and do a bit of reminiscing.
But forget about all that... the high point of this trip so far has been a free T-shirt. Dirk mentioned how rare they are in the offshore industry these days but I've been lucky catching the end of a long contract.
In fact I've been doubly lucky... there were a few left over so I've also got one for the missus for her Christmas!