Tag Archives: #working offshore Africa

Been Busy!

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been so busy! I left the ship (LATE). I finally got off on Thursday, got to Luanda around noon. Had just enough time for lunch at the hotel and a beer out by the pool with a few of my shipmates. YES! First beer after 2+ months tastes soooo good! 🙂

Headed to the airport at 1500. Got on the plane at around 1800. Had about a 10 hour flight to Dubai, a 4 hour layover there, and a 16 hour flight to Houston. Instead of my previous flight with KLM through Amsterdam which was much shorter AND I paid for an upgrade to business so I would have been able to sleep, I was stuck flying coach in a packed full plane for 2 days. Talk about tired!!

I got home about 9 PM Friday night. Fell asleep immediately.

This crew change was SO screwed up! Because I got home so late on Friday, I couldn’t make any of the phone calls I needed to. Like try to set up appointments for Monday, etc. I was WAY too tired to wake up Saturday morning to go sailing that afternoon, so those plans were ruined.

All I managed to do was to catch up on sleep a little bit and get through the humongous piles of mail!

I had a bunch of errands to run today, phone calls to make and get ready for my vacation tomorrow. I sure hope it goes better than the last few days have been going.

I tried to get a rental car today to take to the airport so I wouldn’t spend so much money on parking. Even with the huge rip-off charges for ‘drop fees’ (when I bring the same car back and forth every month), it’s still cheaper to rent a car to and from the airport than to park my car there for 3-4 weeks. So, I tried to get a car this morning.

They called me back around noon (when I was supposed to get the car) to tell me they didn’t have any cars yet. They expected them by closing. I had so much to do and couldn’t wait around til closing, so I figured I’d go ahead and use my truck (even tho it needs some work right now). Couldn’t get it started. 🙁

I had to rummage around for the battery charger, clean up the battery and let it charge for a couple of hours. I finally got it started and was able to run some errands.

Good thing too, since they never did come up with a car they could give me today. Maybe tomorrow they said. Lot of good that’ll do when my flight leaves at 0800!

I should be somewhere in Nicaragua by this time tomorrow. 🙂

This is Messed Up!

Posted on by
Reply

Here I was this morning, feeling good and all ready to go home. I even managed to get an upgrade to business class for the 10+ hour flight from Amsterdam. It was expensive but I thought it was worth it for a 10+ hour long flight. I just HOPE they’ll give me a refund! Continue reading →

Cheesecake

Posted on by
Reply

PHILADELPHIA Classic Cheesecake Recipe – Kraft Recipes.

I don’t know about you, but I LOVE cheesecake! I have a cookbook at home with recipes for about 100 different kinds and I could eat it every day. 🙂

I haven’t been too impressed with the cooking over here offshore Africa. I thought at first it was because it must be really hard to get good ingredients. I’ve heard since that other rigs do manage somehow to have the usual excellent food we’re used to working out here, so now I’m not sure what to think.

Our cooks here have been making a dessert lately. It is like cheesecake in a pan. It doesn’t have a crust, which IMHO is no great loss. Probably saves some calories even. It doesn’t look anywhere near as impressive as the picture at the top of the post, but it does taste just like a classic cheesecake. 🙂

Mauritius!

Posted on by
Reply

Amazing! I only got home from Angola late Thursday, and Friday I got an email from work asking me to go to Mauritius!

I’ve never been there before. I LOVE going to new places. I just hope to have at least a little bit of time to see something of Mauritius. I’d hate to go straight from the airport to the ship. The pictures look gorgeous! Here’s one I found on google.

I’m going to meet one of our new drillships and bring it around to the other side of Africa and hopefully stay to get it started on its’ first contract. This will be the first time I’ve actually gone anywhere on a ship for months. That will be a nice change.

I’m excited to be able to sail a ship again, instead of just keep it sitting in one place, which is what I’ve mostly been doing for the last few years. Here’s a map of Africa. You can get an idea of where we’ll be going. Just find Mauritius (East of Madagascar) and head South around the tip of South Africa and then back up North to Congo on the West Coast.

Looks like we’ll wind up not too far from where I’ve been working off Angola for the last few months.

Writing 101: An Interesting Character

Posted on by
Reply

I met Capt Hugh a few months back at one of the weekly meetings I go to whenever I’m home. The Campaign for Liberty is an offshoot of Ron Paul’s Presidential campaign and I’m a big supporter of his views. So is Capt Hugh.

I still don’t know Capt Hugh very well. We haven’t both been home off our ships at the same time very often. He looks like an ordinary guy. Comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt. Middle aged, average height and weight, nothing really special about his looks. But it all comes out when you talk to him. His passion for life and liberty, his sense of adventure, his determination to do whatever it takes to further his goals.

He doesn’t live near here. He lives up near Dallas somewhere, I think. That’s a few hours drive from here. He comes all the way down to our meetings when he’s home from work. It shows a high level of commitment to the goals we’re working toward (increasing freedom and liberty).

He works offshore like I do. He’s working as captain on some kind of oilfield support vessel. Recently he’s been working out of Africa (me too). I’m working off the Congo River, Hugh is working further north. He’s on a much smaller vessel than I am and so he gets to go into port occasionally.

If you’ve never worked out of Africa, you have no idea what that entails. It’s very chaotic and can be extremely frustrating. It takes a really special person to not only go there and do the work that needs to be done, but to ENJOY it. I’ve only met a couple of people like that so far and each of them was full of great stories and a love of life that showed through.

I follow Capt Hugh on Facebook. He’s quite an adventurer. He’s planning a vacation in Africa whenever he gets off work (who knows when). With everything going on over there, including an epidemic of Ebola, he doesn’t let it stop him. He takes the opportunity when it’s offered. A ‘free’ trip to Africa! What a deal!

Capt Hugh is not only captain of the supply vessel he is employed on, he has his own little sailboat too. That’s another feather in his cap! He’s willing to put everything he has on the line, buy a boat, fix up what he can, and then take off for parts unknown. That all shows a real spirit of adventure, love for the ocean, and a desire to find the freedom we’ve lost here.

I hope he is able to sail off soon. I’ll keep track on Facebook. It’ll inspire me to see where he winds up. I know it’ll be somewhere worth going.

Almost Home!

Posted on by
Reply

I made it off the ship and an 8 hour flight from Luanda to Paris. Now I’m almost ready to jump on the 10 1/2 hour flight from Paris to Houston.

Here’s to hoping my luggage makes the same journey I do this time. 😉

Long Time Lost (Luggage)

Posted on by
Reply

In case you’re wondering, this is not a repeat of my earlier post(s) about my lost luggage. 🙁

This trip to work was also totally screwed up. It started in Houston. The original flight was so late getting to London that I missed all my connections. I had tried to make arrangements while still in Houston to make the rest of the trip go smoothly but that effort did not bear fruit.

You can read more about that disastrous trip to get here in an earlier post here.

I arrived in Luanda early in the morning of August 14. I was promised that my luggage would arrive on the next Air France flight into Luanda and the latest would be Tuesday the 19th. I have had a claim out since I arrived. I have been checking online every day for a week now and STILL no trace of my bag!

It’s been missing for a total of 2 weeks now. I really would like to see it again before I have to leave here to go home again in 2 more weeks.

I have been trying for the last couple of days to find a phone number to call so I can talk to a real person (rather than file a form on the computer that refuses to accept the information I need to input).

I finally succeeded in finding a phone number last night and tried to call but the first time there was an estimated waiting period of 20 minutes. The second time the waiting period was 30 minutes. Since I am at work on the ship, I really can not sit on the phone and WAIT for 20+ minutes.

Tonight the wait was ‘only’ estimated at 13 minutes so I took a chance and hung on the line. After listening to the same insipid elevator music repeat for 18 minutes a real live person finally came on the line. 🙂

Unfortunately, since my luggage has now been missing for almost 2 weeks, she could not help me at all since it didn’t show up in her system any more. 🙁

All I could get out of her was that my luggage was ‘scheduled’ to go on a Lufthansa flight on August 14th. WHY Lufthansa? It was supposed to follow me on the next Air France flight!

She couldn’t even tell me where that Lufthansa flight was going to, or where my luggage was supposed to go after it got there, or if it was eventually going to go to Luanda, or even if they had put a new baggage tag on it so I could trace it or if everyone was looking for a no longer in existence baggage tag?

So, what do I do now?

United Nations Meets At Sea

Posted on by
Reply

   It’s like the UN out here on these rigs.

When working for American companies, there are usually only Americans on board. Every once in a while you might see a Brit or a Filipino. Probably because of the Jones Act and other rules and regulations.

The Jones Act is one of the most important of the laws regulating the American Merchant Marine. One of the provisions of this law for US vessels is that the Master and crew must be Americans. Of course, there are exemptions. Lots of them, really probably too many.

But that’s another story for another post.

The ship I’m on now is not American. The company I’m working for is based out of Athens. It was out of Norway but it has been taken over by the Greeks. I’m not sure yet how that is going to work out. It seems already to be bringing unwelcome changes.

But it is a nice change to have people from all over the world to work with instead of mostly just from the southern US. When I’m working in the Gulf of Mexico, most of the people I work with are from Louisiana, Texas, Alabama and Mississippi. Maybe we get a few from Florida and Georgia. A very few from the other states.

The reason for that is that the companies we work for do not want to pay for our transportation to and from the boats/rigs so most people they hire have to live close enough to drive to/from work in a reasonable* amount of time.(*What the companies think is reasonable is not necessarily what any reasonable person would think is reasonable.)

Since I’m now working for a company which is not based in the USA and we’re not working in the Gulf of Mexico, there is no restriction on who they can hire or where they can come from. I really like that. I love meeting people from all over the world. 🙂

On my last rig, the DPOs were from Ireland, Croatia and the Netherlands. Here, they are from Poland and Canada. The last rig had lots of Brits. There were people from Ireland, Scotland, England. There were people from South Africa and from all over Europe (Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Belgium, Lithuania, Italy, France, Spain).

Here, we have lots of people from Poland. We have people from Portugal, Brazil, Croatia, France, etc. We have lots of Canadians. We even have a couple of other Americans. I’ve met a guy from Azerbaijan and another from India. Some from the Philippines.

Of course, we have people on both rigs from Angola and all over Africa (Ghana, S. Africa, Liberia, Guinea, Libya). We are required to have a certain amount of our crew hired locally. We are supposed to train them up to take over eventually. I’m not sure of the time frame for that but it will probably take a while.

So I hope that will allow me to keep my job and they won’t take over from me for a while. Let me keep doing my job here a few more years til I’m ready to retire. 😉

So much of what goes on out here now is extremely complicated and complex. It takes a long time to learn the things we need to know to do our jobs. I know I am always having to go to classes. This place will probably be sending me to classes every time I get off the ship for the next year or so.

I’m not really looking forward to that. I used to really look forward to going to work. I used to really enjoy my work and loved looking forward to joining a new ship and seeing all the new places we would go. But they’ve taken all the fun out of the job. It’s not at all like it used to be out here. To me, at this point, the best part of the job is the time off!

Yep, let me keep working overseas until I’m ready to retire, that idea is getting better looking every day.