Sturm und Drang

Well, today, anyhow. Lightning. Sheeting rain. More than 11 hours underway.

We headed out this morning with a larger-than-usual deck load and 15 passengers.

At the rig, the wind was out of the west-southwest, the current still pulling toward the east-southeast. Into the platform.

The rig called one of their supply boats over and thus began a complicated (but mostly time-consuming) cargo shuffle. Stuff from our deck to the rig floor. Stuff from our deck to the other boat's deck. Stuff from their deck to our deck. Stuff from the rig to our deck.

The supply vessel has dynamic positioning. We don't. But in the back-and-forth banter between the crane operator, the other boat and us I caught a fleeting, off-hand compliment from the crane operator: "Well, at least this guy can hold the boat in there. That makes a huge difference, believe me!"

I was being compared to the captain of the boat we replaced on this job. Then came a critical recollection of another captain who couldn't: "Had to chase him all over the Gulf with this crane ...."

Unfortunately, that guy was formerly on one of our other boats. He's "no longer with us," as they say.

Still, positive reinforcement is rare out here and I'll take what I can get.

Between cargo transfers, our engineer got some time on the sticks; he's off to school at the end of this hitch and hopes to come back as a training captain.

After nine years on deck and in the engine room, it's about time, and I look forward to working with him in the wheelhouse.

Almost three weeks down and just a little more than one to go. I don't really start counting the days until the weekend before crew change -- it's easier if I just don't think about it until I can count the wake-ups on one hand.

And not just because I'm bad at math.

Drilling for Dummies

Being trash strictly of the boat variety rather than the oilfied type, I'm constantly trying to assign the correct names to the equipment we carry out to the drilling rigs, and often find myself asking rig hands and company men "what's that?" and "what does that thing do?"

My buddy over at New England Waterman recently posted this link, sort of a "Drilling for Dummies" primer. Cool. I think I'll go and read it now.

In Which We Clear the Air, Encounter Reduced Visibility and Consider the (W)Retchedness of Passengers

I have a good friend who has just started a new job with a big consulting firm. He has been the number two guy at a smaller consulting company for years now, where he managed projects for one of the energy majors as well as a number of smaller organizations. It was pretty low-stress.

I asked him this week how the new gig is going.

"It's kicking my ass," he said. "The last two days I've worked 7:30 to midnight."

He told me earlier it's a steep learning curve, and moving faster than he's been used to in the past couple of years. It will undoubtedly, he said, get easier.

Not a lot unlike coming to a new company and a new boat in a new field working for a new customer.

The first nine days at my new job were pretty tough. The last five, much better.

A big part of that was a heart-to-heart with the first captain (post-g-d-coffeepot). Turns out he made some assumptions about what I was and wasn't willing to do on the boat and I made some assumptions about the way he wanted things done. We agreed to start over.

There's a lot to appreciate about this guy: he's an excellent boat handler and seems to be a very competent and knowledgeable mariner; he works and gets dirty with the crew; he has high standards and expects everyone else on the boat to meet them.

I'm sure I can learn some valuable things from him.

It probably helps our relationship that over the first hitch I didn't hit anything, didn't hurt anyone, and the job got done correctly and on-time. I stood my last five watches solo and without interference.

Over the weekend lower temps and higher dewpoints led do the development of patchy fog across our field. Fortunately, I didn't encounter any on my watch coming or going from the dock, but we were enveloped in the cold, damp, opaque mess one morning upon arrival to one of our drilling rigs.

At one point I had maybe a boat length of visibility. The answer: slow down, pay close attention to the radar, and use the radio a little more.

Monday, headed out on an evening run with six lifts and four passengers, I turned the helm over to my deckhand once we cleared the channel and ducked down to the galley for a cup of coffee.

On my way down, I noticed one of our passengers stand up unsteadily, sweat beading on his face. By the time I came back up the stairs he was loudly puking in the topside head.

I prefer passengers vomit outside, but this poor guy was non-stop and wouldn't have made it out the door to the back deck.

Through a process of elimination (he couldn't actually speak, just nod or shake his head between upchucks), I determined that he was going to a production platform and what his name was.

Unfortunately for him, drilling pays our bills and production is always the last stop. As the sounds of violent vomiting continued, I made some calls on the radio and altered course. We got him off first.

The deckhand and I did have some evil fun predicting which waves would set-off a new round: "Oh man, this one's going to get him ...." immediately followed by loud retching and the sound of the toilet flushing.

I've sometimes heard young guys boast they "never get seasick," as if it's some sort of test of manhood. And while I've never been more than a bit queasy myself, I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with an individual's own physiology (the inner ear and all that) and not much to do with experience, courage or fortitude.

In fact, I know a couple of men who are career mariners and boat owners who have, all their lives, become ill in a light chop. They deal with it pharmaceutically and carry on.

The new boat is busy, busy. We run as much as 20 hours some days, and in the two weeks I was aboard we never ran less than 10 hours in a day.

That's a change from my last job working production for Apache, where we rarely ran more than 10 hours a day and often less, except of course for the long trip out to the field and grocery deliveries at the beginning of the week.

Apache production typically works only during daylight hours, too, while drilling is around-the-clock and some rig crew changes occur at midnight.

Busy is good; it makes the hitch pass quickly.