'Pre-loading,' Funny Math and Other Stuff

We are bobbing around just offshore of Dauphin Island right now, on safety standby as the liftboat we are working with pre-loads.

There is a really detailed explanation of pre-loading (and some other interesting liftboat stuff) here, but basically it means that the ballasted liftboat is very slowly and carefully making the transition from vessel afloat to work platform.

Meanwhile, we drift with engines idling. The wind is out of the southwest at about 8 knots, the current is headed southeast at about 3 knots, and we're hanging between the two, slipping gently astern at about one-third of a knot.

Every hour or so I put the mains in gear for a couple of minutes and point us back toward the liftboat.

Last hitch we spent the last 10 days or so transferring cargo and pumping water. By the time we got back to the dock for crew change we were so light I felt like I was back on a crewboat when I looked over the bulwarks. Our laden freeboad of about two feet was suddenly about six feet.

Back home we had a nice mix of warm, sunny days and cool nights. I got the lawn mowed, we celebrated the teen son's 16th with family, we had company, and then had company again. In the second round the daddies took the youngsters down to the river while the ladies got pedicures. Followed by a double-date for German food and lounge time.

All in all, it was  a pretty satisfying two weeks off work.

My wife sent along a link to a news story yesterday: 5 reasons why you shouldn't work too hard. It got me thinking about my job, and I did a little math: on this new, and hopefully not temporary, schedule working 180 days/year, I end up working 2,160 hours/year.

That's equivalent to a full year's worth of 40-hour weeks plus two more. And I spend a minimum of another two weeks commuting or training.

So, 56 weeks of work every 12 months.

That's a lot better than a 240-day schedule (28 days on, 14 days off or 14/7), which totals 2,880 hours per year, or equivalent to 72 weeks of 9-to-5 labor.

In the context of the Washington Post article linked above, I wondered for a moment if I work "too hard."

Probably not.

A 12-hour watch in bad weather or with continuous cargo operations or a difficult approach in zero visibility is as draining as any physical labor I've every done, especially when there is only broken sleep between watches.

Shipyard is pretty hard. But other times -- tonight for instance -- those 12 hours are mostly just tedious. I'm more likely to die of boredom than heat stroke or mental stress.

On the other hand, and to the point of that article, when I am off I am really off. There are no emails to check or answer, no teleconferences, no quick trips back to the office for a can't-miss meeting or last-minute report.

Talking to a friend, another captain, about this earlier, he said: "So, have you broken that down to an hourly rate?"

No. No I haven't. I decided not to do a little more math at that point, because I figured the answer would depress me.

Earlier this morning I came across another maritime blog I had not yet seen -- it was linked on Lela Joy's site. The blogger, who lives on the West Coast, is about my age and, like me, made a dramatic career change a couple of years ago.

One of his posts, from February of last year, is called "Maritime Reality," and in it he touches on some of the same topics.

I guess some facets of this career are pretty universal, no matter which coast you're on or segment of the industry you work in.

Anyway, it's a great blog: Back to Sea With Me -- definitely worth a look. In his latest post, the writer mentions that his application for mate is being evaluated and wonders how long that might take.

I was pretty pleased with the turnaround time on my raise-in-grade application over the holidays: about a month from submission to my approval to test. Only, my evaluator missed a couple of important (to me, anyway) items on the application.

Some were fixed with an email and a phone call. One, though, was not. I think I've written before that I applied for both master and mate and hoped to test for both the same week.

My evaluator could not at first understand why I would want to do that ("But Master is the higher license!" she said.) and then told me she would have to check with management to see if it was even possible.

My view: Of course it's possible. Maybe not routine, but there is nothing in the CFRs that prohibits it. And if I qualify to test for master, then surely I qualify to test for mate as well.

Actually, I didn't come up with this all by myself. The fellow who writes merchant mariner credential policy for the Coast Guard heartily recommended it in a public forum -- both for efficiency, and to take advantage of the shrinking window of opportunity to be grandfathered under the rules pre-STCW 2010 implementation.

The efficiency part is that while master and mate exams involve some different modules, much of the material is the same or very similar. And while the exam for Master 500 GRT Oceans will get me to Master 1600 GRT Oceans and Master 500-3000 GT without further testing, the Mate exam will carry me all the way through 2nd Mate all gross tons.

Anyway, it's been six weeks since I sent in my letter requesting reconsideration of that decision and still no answer. I checked back earlier in the week and I received an emailed apology and assurances that I would have an answer on where my answer is and when I might expect it.

If my request is denied, the next step is an appeal, and that goes to the same guy who suggested we do this to begin with.

Meanwhile .... the clock is ticking, and I really should be studying. Harder. Or ... at all.

I've had time to reconsider my strategy, and to weigh whether I want to take a terrestrial navigation and review course and ask the Coast Guard to amend my application to Near Coastal, or if I want to take that course immediately followed by an approved celestial navigation course and ask the Coast Guard to amend my application to accept the course in lieu of testing at the Regional Exam Center.

I'm now leaning towards the former, because I'll test sooner and get the credential I need this year and I can always increase the scope later. Plus, a couple of my captain friends may be able to take the same course at the same time. Which would make things cheaper, if we could share accommodations. It would definitely make it more fun.

Either way, nowhere in my plans is the notion that I'm going to walk into the REC and take the celestial navigation exam cold.

Figuring this stuff out is some sort of analogue to the time-speed-distance formulae we use in plotting. Only this is a time-expense-opportunity formula.

The opportunity part is important, because the oil patch slowdown is now in full effect, with several hundred boats cold-stacked. Things are tight, and I'm happy my boat is working. Even if this particular watch this particular morning is a little bit tedious.

Hey, I just noticed: 17 seagulls on the starboard beam. Why 17, and not 16, or 18, or three or 30? The mystery ....

I left the boat ....

I left the boat in a cold rain on the heels of a sad, strange scene in the main deck lounge.

The off-signers were soaked after carrying supplies the length of the vessel, and secretly hoping to be gone before having to do the same with the grocery order still on its way. The routine of quiet consideration and self-abnegation that makes for good shipmates sometimes gets stretched to an equally quiet breaking point, and this was one of those times.

We were anxious to be off the boat, to be on our way to our respective homes, to escape the two minor crises then unfolding.

Crisis one: the vessel’s master explaining that the unlicensed crew would have to go to 14/14 schedules or one of the guys would have to go to another boat in order to reduce our manning from five to four.

Crisis two: the mystery of the displaced hydraulic steering fluid … one guy, the one no one is allowed to gainsay, mistaking the reflection of a gunmetal sky in the deck wells for a sheen and insisting there was a busted hose on deck.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, again, in all of its sly, smirking glory.

Another guy, the one with an extensive background in pumps and hoses and fluid dynamics, attempting a quiet interjection that all of the fluid was still in the reservoirs and that the mystery instead was that it had shifted from the port tank to the starboard tank.

We had been through this at least once before, but the memory had fled.

I left the boat with a cold that would make the drive home a nine-hour misery and my first three days with the family a blur of broken sleep and over-the-counter remedies.

In retrospect, it was, maybe, a blessing. For the past half year I’ve worked only the midnight-to-noon watch, and the exhaustion of crew change day – 12 hours of watchstanding followed by nine or 10 hours of driving notwithstanding -- getting back on the family schedule is usually a week-long struggle.

I left the boat questioning, yet again, if I’m in the wrong damned business. I have written, from time to time, about how much I love the actual work: the boat-handling, the age-old practice of seamanship, the mentoring of the younger guys, the interaction with the customers, the orderly grind of paperwork – yes, even the paperwork.

I have written, also, perhaps too often, of how heart-achingly lonesome the experience can be; of how keenly I feel the lack of adult conversation and the missing days with my family … the toddler’s firsts, the pre-schooler’s flashes of brilliance, the teen’s wry humor, quiet nights on the patio with the wife.

Here’s my secret fear: I will die on the boat, far from the people I love. Not in some dramatic disaster at sea – I worry more about my drive to and from work  than anything that happens on the water – but as a victim of fried pork chops or cigarettes or not enough sleep.

During this last hitch, two near-contemporaries reached the ends of their lives. 

One, a few years ahead of me in high school, was generous with his time and advice as I was contemplating a leap into the guide business. He was just getting out, then.

The other I knew not at all, but I attended college with his sweet and smart wife – now, astonishingly, his widow.

Both men were fathers, and I trust – I hope – they had time to teach and inspire and love their children in ways that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

In the quiet hours of my watch, the dark hours before dawn, more and more I find myself thinking that is the only work that really matters.

But of course we live in a world in which it is necessary for man (and woman) to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. That, too, I often reflect as I justify my long absences, is an important lesson for the boys.

This ambivalence about the legendary work-life balance is of course nothing new, and is perhaps near-universal in the western world anyway. The only people I know who have come close to negotiating it satisfactorily are self-employed and even that is no guarantee.

I left the boat two weeks early, in the middle of my regularly scheduled hitch. It was an opportunity that presented itself on the cusp of crew change.

With the price of oil half what it was six months ago, with exploration and production budgets being slashed across the board and day rates and utilization plunging, it’s no surprise that a couple of our boats are stacked.

The crews of those boats have not worked in more than a month. No work means no pay.

Cost-cutting at a boat company seems to go something like this: supply requisitions restricted to absolutely essential items, grocery budgets cut, manning reduced and vessel crew offered the opportunity (eventually mandated) to work even time (two weeks on, two weeks off; a month on, a month off).

That last strategy allows for one stacked boat’s licensed crew to be spread over three working boats, and everyone stays on the payroll, albeit making one-third less. This actually results in a marginal increase in payroll costs for the company: the same man-days, but a slight bump in benefits and travel costs, so it’s generally a good-faith effort to retain staff before taking more drastic measures.

Somewhere in the mix is a moratorium on raises, hiring freezes, pay cuts, and, when all of that isn’t enough, layoffs.

I am fortunate in that even time is a just-affordable option for me. My wife works, and we can make ends meet, most of the time, if I work a reduced schedule.

Some of the other guys … probably not so much. A month without work means the rent or mortgage goes unpaid, someone doesn’t go to the doctor or dentist or a worn pair of brake shoes or school shoes doesn’t get replaced.

So, not least because it was an easy thing for me to do, I was happy to give someone else my last two weeks.

But I left the boat angry. Seething, actually … a slow, steady burn. My efforts the previous hitch to get an evaluation out of the vessel master were rebuffed. 

Between hitches, the office informed me I would need evaluations from both the master and the relief master. My two weeks with the relief master, I passed on that information, and he was willing.

But just as he sat down to fill-out the form, it occurred to him that he might ought to touch base with the old man, who is known to be a bit touchy about what he views as the prerogatives of his position (i.e., everything from micromanaging the work schedules of both watches to never working midnight-to-noon to keeping every drawer and locker in his shared stateroom stuffed with his personal items to pencil-whipping every single drill ever submitted to declaring the entire boat a smoking area).

Sure ‘nuff, the old man told the relief master it was not his place to fill out an evaluation for me and forbade him to do it.

Thing is, there was – ostensibly, at least as of a month ago – a pay raise riding on that. And personalities aside, I’m pretty good at my job. The other thing is, it’s his f*cking job – one he should have done a month ago, and one he should not prevent someone else, whose job it also is, from doing.

Of course, none of this was communicated to me directly, because among other things the old man doesn’t do is this: talk to me. I mean, literally, does not talk to me. He passes orders through the deckhands and engineer; he grunts in my direction sometimes, but that’s about the extent of it.

Either the wrong sorts of people routinely (maybe even exclusively) rise to the top in this industry, or I’ve had a run of bad luck, or God is repeatedly giving me the opportunity to learn a lesson I haven’t yet adequately absorbed. 

If it's that last thing, and if I had to guess, it probably has something to do with humility.

In truth, the chances of a new guy getting assigned to a boat with a crackerjack master (as opposed to one who got his leadership skills – if not his license -- from a Crackerjack box) are slim. Those positions don’t often come open, because no one wants to leave those boats.

I left my boat, maybe, for the last time.

I said goodbye to her, just in case, and thanked her for keeping us safe through the winter. She’s not a bad old girl, and deserves better than she gets from us much of the time.

Leaving mad was impetus, finally, to ask the office for a change, a transfer to a different boat, when such an opportunity presents itself. As is often the case, my timing probably could have been better. We’ll see, I guess.

I left the boat without letting my wife know I’d be home early. We were on the phone when I jiggled the front door handle, so I got to hear her alarm at a possible intruder in stereo. 

When she let me in, I was met with children literally jumping up and down with joy, a happy, licky dog and a spouse who couldn’t stop laughing through her tears.

A minute through the door and I was sitting on the kitchen floor and the 2-year-old was in my arms, head on my chest, murmuring: “DaddyDaddyDaddyDaddy.” 

The 4-year-old was draped over my right shoulder and the 70-pound Labrador was attempting to crawl into my lap. My wife was still laughing. And crying.

At my lowest, and my lows are at least as often chemical as situational, I sometimes wonder if I don’t just gum up the works when I’m home, if they don’t prefer me gone.

This early homecoming put that question to rest, and for that, anyhow, I am grateful.

Voyaging

Mariners working in the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico rarely undertake voyages. We have trips, and make runs, but – even though the Coast Guard and our companies may require voyage planning – we typically don’t think of them as voyages.

Or I don’t, anyway.

Maybe that’s because we usually start and end at the same dock in the same port: Point A to Point B and, sooner or later, back to Point A. Within the context of those roundtrips, we sometimes stay at sea for days or even weeks at a time, but that’s just “standing by.”

Sand Island Light, at the entrance to Mobile Bay.

A recent job took us from Port Fourchon, La., to the Theodore Industrial Port near Mobile, Ala., (two entire states east!), and then to Amelia, near Morgan City, La. Point A to Point B to Point C before returning to Point A.

It was something like 620 nautical miles round-trip. Days of the week changed while we were en route. It felt like a voyage. A short one, by most standards, but a voyage nonetheless.

There is history everywhere, but it’s more obvious in some places than in others. Coast Pilot Vol. 5 warns vessels to proceed at slow speed through the entrance channel to Mobile Bay so as not to disturb the wreck of the USS Tecumseh, a Union ironclad sunk when it struck a mine beneath the guns of Fort Morgan during the Civil War.

This impressive cumulonimbus cloud over the eastern
shore of Mobile Bay made good on its promise of a rain and
lightning later that night.

The Tecumseh is presumed still to have live munitions aboard, and the wreck is marked with a yellow buoy. I figure the danger is long past, but the government’s warning is an exciting note in a pretty staid publication.

When the ship blew up, the other ships in Admiral David Farragut’s flotilla began to turn back. This occasioned his famous order, today remembered as: “Damn the torpedoes (mines), full speed ahead!”*

Theodore Industrial Port is a tidy (and quiet) little deepwater facility that probably deserves more business than it apparently has. It’s about 20 minutes from the home of the other captain on the boat, and I had the benefit of his local knowledge and stories as we sailed up the Mobile Ship Channel.

Our deck cargo on this job came from
the Big & Tall section of the store.

We picked-up about 200 tons of reel-lay equipment and set out for Amelia. There are three possible routes to Amelia, but the Intracoastal Waterway route didn’t make much sense for our vessel or our schedule so we shaped our course south, back around the Mississippi passes and across the northern Gulf to the Eugene Island Channel.

I spent the better part of a year navigating the 50+ miles from the Eugene Island 1&2 up the Atchafalaya River to Morgan City, most often in the dark and sometimes in lousy weather. It is no one’s favorite approach, and it is burned into my brain.

The more direct route to Amelia, and one that would allow us to bypass both Vessel Traffic Service and the Bayou Boeuf Locks, is to take the cutoff up the Bayou Chene** just above the Horseshoe (or just above Crewboat Cut, if you come that way) not far north of where the river enters Atchafalaya Bay.

Unlike the river channel proper, Bayou Chene is haphazardly and indifferently buoyed (though if you can stay in the center of the channel, there’s plenty of water). The other captain hadn’t been up the Chene in 17 years, and I transited it several times last summer, so I got up early to keep him company.

We made it to the dock without incident, got unloaded before noon, and headed back downstream for our return to Port Fourchon.

'Murica! A pair of bald eagles on Bayou Chene.

In an episode that hearkened back to my days guiding birding trips in South Texas, I told the other fellows on the boat that there was a good chance we would see some bald eagles on the daylight trip back down the bayou. About a minute after I said that, an eagle flew across our bow.

I counted six between the ICW and the cofferdam --  I’m guessing they were three, resident breeding pairs, and no doubt will be joined by many more birds as we move deeper into fall.

This trip – this voyage, if you will – also gave me an opportunity to reflect on the state of our industry in the Gulf of Mexico. The signs are mixed, and troubling.

These two Seadrill drillships were anchored and idle. Maybe
waiting on customs or something else, maybe just waiting
for a job.

We saw two drilling ships anchored and apparently idle just seaward of the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (or LOOP facility).***

This comes a year after I read that the big oil companies couldn’t get enough drilling units into the Gulf fast enough for all the work they had lined-up. 

Day rates for the most advanced units last year were up around $675,000. Today the same units are going for just a little more than half that.

On the way back to Fourchon, we noted that the number of ENSCO jack-up drilling rigs – used on the shelf -- now stacked west of Belle Pass has risen to five. Last time I went by and counted, there were just three.

A Seadrill executive noted just last week that market conditions are bad are projected to get worse next year before stabilizing in 2016.

And one can’t help noticing all of the idle steel in Fourchon itself.

This is a busy port – in terms of vessel movements, it must be the busiest in the Gulf of Mexico and perhaps one of the busiest in the world. At any given time there are well over 300 targets showing on my AIS and it’s hard to get a word in edgewise on Channel 13, the VHF frequency used for bridge-to-bridge communications within the port.

Chouest and Gulfmark boats tied-up in Slip A in Port Fourchon.

Of those 300-plus AIS targets, a whole bunch of them represent boats waiting on work. On the west bank of Bayou Lafourche right now there are upwards of 30 boats pushed up in the mud. On the opposite side of the bayou, a number of large liftboats remain idled. Some have been there at least six months.

In Flotation Canal, I was shocked at the number of large OSVs tied-up three abreast on the pilings and in Slip A and Slip B. These boats belong to companies I usually think of as always busy with long-term contracts.

Meanwhile, some of those same companies (and a lot of smaller ones, too) continue to build new, larger vessels at a prodigious rate.

On the other hand … the past two years have seen record lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, increased success in the deepwater and ultra-deepwater sector and a wholesale reshuffling of owners and operators in established fields on the shelf.

At the same time, the door has been opened to exploration in the nearshore Atlantic off the U.S. East Coast, and Mexico’s government has, at last, invited greater involvement of foreign companies in exploiting its rich fields in the Gulf.

So it’s a mixed picture, and one I don’t understand well enough to decipher.

Everyone else's boats pushed up in the mud north
of Flotation Canal, Port Fourchon.

Taken together, all of this looks like a major (but perhaps temporary?) slowdown in the Gulf of Mexico. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean my job is in danger – and nothing I've heard or seen at this company suggests that it is (we get mechanics and supplies and groceries promptly and without argument – there’s no sense that budgets are being squeezed)  – but if I understand the law of supply and demand,  more boats and less work means lower day rates, at the least.

And I’m guessing lower rates for the boats effectively caps or puts downward pressure on rates for the mariners who man them.

My impression – and it’s just an impression, not supported by any hard data – is that hiring has slowed and much of the company-hopping for ever-increasing day rates has pretty much come to a halt recently.

I’m happy where I am and not planning on changing jobs anytime soon. I also have the luxury – blessing, really – of a wife who has her own, very good career. So whichever way the industry is going the kids will still have shoes and we’ll still eat.

If I were just entering the field though, or a young man contemplating a first career, I’d be giving this some serious thought.

*What he actually said, according to the Wikipedia entry (which I read as I was at or near the spot where Farragut said the words almost exactly 140 years earlier – ain’t technology wonderful?) was: "Damn the torpedoes.Four bells, Captain Drayton, go ahead. Jouett, full speed."

**It’s amusing, how pedestrian – and repetitive – the names of waterways can be. If my slipshod translation is correct, Boeuf means “cow,” and Chene comes from the French for “dog” – So Cow Bayou and Dog Bayou, respectively. Near Theodore, three rivers or bayous enter Mobile Bay on its western shore: Fowl River, Deer River and Dog River. There probably are analogues where you live.

***Upon further investigation ... Seadrill's website says both of the ships we saw are under contract through 2020. So maybe they were just hanging out waiting to get started.