Same shit, different ship

[Reg Dingle]

Apologies to myself for going off topic.

Do you find your shipmates avoid you like the plague after working hours for getting a bit too engrossed in your job and constantly talking shop by any chance?

[Mendip]

^ Not at all.

They like me so much they've given me my own office.

[Reg Dingle]

^ And your own cabin... away from the glory erm portholes I see

[bsnub]

They like me so much they've given me my own office.

WTF?

You just shared a pic and stated that you shared an office.

[aging one]

WTF?

You just shared a pic and stated that you shared an office.

Never saw that. Saw that he has a double cabin but no room mate, he gets the lower bunk.

[bsnub]

Never saw that.

You are being lazy then.

[aging one]

^ Stand corrected.

[katie23]

^I remember that Mendy shares an office with another person. There were two desks/ computers.

Re: aircon, I don't have A/C in my flat or my parents' house. However, a fan (or fans) have always been enough. The average temp at night (recently) has been 26 to 28 C - so it's bearable with a fan. For daytime temps, the highest has been 33 C. From Thursday & until the weekend, it was cloudy or rainy, which was a surprise for April here.

[Edmond]

This isn't the forum for a BS artist, Mendy.


We want the truth. We want the truth.

[Mendip]

Ok, I am sharing an office. The comment about being given my own was a weak attempt at humour with Dill after he suggested I wasn't popular.

I wish I hadn't bothered now!

After that jolity I promise to get serious in a minute with some food pics.

[Mendip]

My shift starts at midnight (12-12 nights) so my alarm goes off at 21:40 and 10pm sees me in the gym, on my own, to watch the Sky News headlines while on the treadmill.

Just to be clear, I'm not always on my own in the gym but I am usually on my own because almost everyone else on the boat does a 6-6 shift, days or nights.

Meals are every six hours, 5:30 to 6:30 and 11:30 to 12:30 to cover all shifts and allow a meal before shift for on-coming personnel and after shift for off-going personnel.

So, after an energetic workout I am ready for some food at 23:30... but it's not often suitable for breakfast.

I like a slice of pizza as much as the next man, but not for brekkie. The food on the boat is pretty good but they don't take into account different shift patterns and the other night was pizza night, and not much else.



Luckily Randy, the nightshift cook, had made salmon head soup for his fellow Filipinos.



I surprise myself at times with my healthy eating.



There was a good variety last night, but not really what I wanted for breakfast... a chicken stir fry, a kind of macaroni carbonara kind of thing and a veggie stir fry.



Again, Randy came up trumps. I think he makes just the one soup but sticks different things in. Last night it was pork with lots of courgettes.



It went well with some veggie stir fry. I'll be pissed off if I don't lose any weight this trip with all the effort I'm making.

[david44]

Great stuff Mendy I he VFS cooperate considering what they charge.

I am adding this for a post of the year contender

This isn't the forum for a BS artist

[malmomike77]

I wish I hadn't bothered now!

its harder work than a dyke comedian in a northern mans working club on here at times

[malmomike77]

21:40 and 10pm sees me in the gym

1/2 hour walk on the treadmill watching the news

1/2 hour hand shandy and shower

1/2 hour nap and then

after an energetic workout I am ready for some food at 23:30

[katie23]

^Lol. You've got his schedule down to a T.

@mendy - nice food selection there. Thank goodness for Randy, the Filipino cook! Like you, I would've preferred the salmon soup over pizza. And the stir fried vegs over the carbonara - that carbonara looked a bit too "soupy" for me, though. Randy reminded me of someone - the husband of an ex-colleague. He was also a cook in one of the ships. One time, his wife celebrated her bday (and he was on home leave). They brought a lot of food to the office, which he cooked. It was enough to feed us (the whole department) . I think he's retired by now - enjoying the fruits of his labour.

[Mendip]

1
1/2 hour hand shandy and shower

Not at all. I'm practicing total abstinence this trip.

Starting tomorrow!


We've left the Gullfaks field for a while now and are heading in to an offshore base close to Bergen for a crew change. Just a couple of things from yesterday...

The Askeladden jack-up drill rig busy drilling the new satellite wells around the Gullfaks field centre. Templates will be installed close to the new wells and product transported by flowline back to the Gullfaks platforms for some processing and then transport to shore by export pipelines.



The wind turbines I mentioned that now power the Gullfaks field, and maybe several other nearby fields as well.



The Gullfaks field is up on the edge of the North Sea Plateau and a common fishing area. Yesterday there were a couple of pairs of trawlers, pair-trawling around the field.

Off the stern...



And off the port side...



These guys work in pairs and drag a trawl net between them. They have good sonar equipment and often target the subsea pipelines where the fish try to shelter... and then the fishermen complain when they snag their nets on the pipelines. They even get compensation.

Below the water it looks something like this.



The nets drag along the seabed being kept down by huge metal trawl boards and a string of nets... and destroy everything in their path. The seabed is churned up killing all the benthos for months to come... fish, shell fish, gastropods, bivalves, annelids... all killed. I've read that 4kg of marine organisms are killed for every kg of fish caught.

The majority of the seabed across the North Sea is just a lifeless underwater desert... apart from around the platforms. A 500m exclusion zone is in place around all offshore installations and as we survey a pipeline we don't need the navigation to know when we've entered a platform safety zone... the seabed becomes alive with mussels, shrimps, fanworms etc etc and there are so many fish we often have to stop the surveys. In my opinion the platform safety zones are the fish population's last chance to avoid complete collapse... and yet Greenpeace vilifies the oil industry without a murmour about the fishing industry. Bastards.

OK, so there have been a few major events, but the occasional small leakage or spillage is a drop in the ocean compared to the hydrocarbons that naturally seep and bubble out of the seabed. Vessels in the oil industry are modern and without fuel efficiency and low emissions, wouldn't even get on the bid list for work. One small spillage is subject to countless reports and there's no hiding anything. Compare that to the unregulated, ancient, rusty fishing boats belching out black smoke and leaving a trail of oil in their wake...

And don't get me started on the huge amount of dumped fish we sometimes find rotting on the seabed having washed up against pipelines...

But anyway, nothing will change.

No work thread would be complete without a pic of our survey ROV... this is the beast that wins this company so much work. Seabed mapping can be carried out at 4 kts (2 m/s) and pipeline inspection of trunk lines at 1.3 m/s (resolution of digital video is our limiting factor there). I could go on, but a picture will do.

[katie23]

^I don't know if this has been answered in this thread or the previous one, but is there a person inside the ROV during the surveys? (I purposely didn't use the word "manned", heh) And if there's no person (fully controlled by computer), who controls it - only 1 person or several persons? And what do you do with the data gathered? Is it analyzed by just 1 person or by several persons/ departments?


What started out as 1 question became a series of questions, Lol. TIA.

[malmomike77]

And don't get me started on the huge amount of dumped fish we sometimes find rotting on the seabed having washed up against pipelines...

But anyway, nothing will change.

yep its a disgrace, the practice and method should be banned imo. The factory fish boats also should be banned, just recently there have been rumours that mackerel are no longer sustainable, i would lay money on the cause.

[malmomike77]

What started out as 1 question became a series of questions, Lol. TIA.

you nearly went full OhOh there

[Edmond]

People deserve jobs and a way of life, Mike.

[Mendip]

^ So what jobs will they do once the fish stocks collapse? What jobs do the cod fishermen who worked the Grand Banks off Canada now do?

^I don't know if this has been answered in this thread or the previous one, but is there a person inside the ROV during the surveys?

No Katie, there's no-one inside the ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle), although there are some people I wouldn't mind strapping to it before it dives.

If there was a person inside they would drown, and also end up pretty flat when we're doing deep water work.

The ROV is attached to the vessel via an umbilical and is controlled completely remotely by a team of six (usually) ROV personnel, three on each shift. The data we acquire streams up the umbilical and is worked on by a team or people, my good self included. I can go into this a bit more with some pictures in due course.

[malmomike77]

^ So what jobs will they do once the fish stocks collapse? What jobs do the cod fishermen who worked the Grand Banks off Canada now do?

yep, there is nothing sustainable in the current quota system and fishing methods, they should move to smaller boats but then that won't happen as the EU factory boats have too much money and political clout.

[Edmond]

What jobs do the cod fishermen who worked the Grand Banks off Canada now do?

60 years later??

Mike, whatcha doing nowadays buddy?

[malmomike77]

Mike, whatcha doing nowadays buddy?

Not ruining bacon and egg sandwiches or following posters around trying but failing to get a rise

Anyway, Mendip how is the Filipino coming along

[Mendip]

^ Salamat!