zzzzz

I'll soon write anecdotes about my second hitch in NL, but not now I'm dead tired!
Got home yesterday, and sleeping for about 3 days sounds just right...

In the meantime, enjoy the pics I posted in the album section...

Sea Day

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

that was NOT fun!!! ok, maybe just a little...

It was a beautiful, sunny day, 15c, calm sea and very little wind... and even so, it was SO F****** COOOOOOLD!!!!!!

and of course I managed to sunburned my face in a great, round pattern, like this:

The program of the morning was:
climbing a 20' net from the water to the deck on the side of a boat that swings and roll
go up and down a ladder on the same side of boat as the net about 8 times, to get in water, back on boat, down in life raft, etc.,
spend 20 minutes floating in below freezing water (it was officially -1c...) and swim in single file, then double, then make a circle
spend 15min in a life raft which was long enough for 4 of the 11 guys to be sea sick and throw up, plus 2 more turning a bit green, rescuing a person from the water
and FINALLY go back on the boat and to the marina....

all the while wearing a neoprene suit stiff as a board, that weights about 40lbs and is one size fits nobody so your feet end up lost outside the boots while you swim.. try climbing a ladder like that :S

Ho and add being lifted from the water on a rescue boat by an aluminium net stiff enough to knock your face off and you have my day! :S

.................
horrible survival suits that leak / feet to armpit and let's synchronize swim!

The Titanic...

... sank on April 14th, 1912...

that's tonight....

and tonight, I'll be sailing almost right above it, going back to the oil field... passing the same kind of icebergs that were its downfall...

But these days we have radar/sonar/satellites that tell the captain exactly where the ice is...
We shouldn't be joining the famous wreck any time soon ;)

I made a whip today...

and all I have to say is: heat shrink tubes are so f***** cool!!!

I never get tired of playing with that...

pack ice

or packed ice? anyway... this is what was blocking the Narrow for the past few weeks.. and why we ended up stuck in Argentia for so long.

Not much of it left, though still cool to look at :)

See... told ya you could run all the way to the castle on this thing...

mom nature's ice sculpture :)

and when you're lucky you see seals gambolling through it too!

The boat's crane broke...

so we were back in St.John's for the day to fix it, leaving again tonight... at some point...

We need the crane to lower some massive parts to the work site (100m under water) they are too heavy for the rovs to do it..

We can't just throw them overboard and place them after of course I asked! cause even though they are monstrous yellow metal trees, they are very touchy feely and stop working when bumped or shocked :P

my first iceberg

coming around the south-eastern corner of Newfoundland, heading north... there it was... massive piece of ice!!!

I asked if I had the right to be excited to see my first berg, they said yes... "so no one will laugh at me?" "not to your face anyway" ... good bunch... really... they are...

Notice the seagulls taking a free ride there, on the left?

There was also a couple of seals playing in the waves, and a massive flock of birds (little duck-like cuties, black and white... I forget the name :P).
Too bad it wasn't sunny though.. the white/blue/pink of the icebergs would have popped out more... still 2 weeks to go and plenty of floating ice around now that were back on the east coast... I'll keep an eye open for it :)

when you're a girl....

... and you say you just got off a ship, people assume you were on a cruise :S

yes... even in St.John's... I have no credibility :S ...

when working on the Atlantic Osprey...

the only absolute is that nothing is certain!

Since 2pm, sailing time has gone from "has soon has we're done filling up", to "any minute now", to "around dinner time", to 8pm, to midnight, to 9pm and has just now been pushed back to 11pm...

that's just "when are we leaving?"

Imagine now when the question is "when are we going back to port?" "how long will we be out?" "when will we reach the work site and actually work?"

pit stop!

We're finally in St.John's, after two weeks out there, but leaving again this evening.

Out of the previous possibilities, almost all of them actually happened!

-We did many passengers runs, from Argentia to the Grand Banks rig

-We towed the rig for a couple of days, because the fishermen were complaining of the anchors...
fishing season is on, and the rig, plus its many giant anchors, is right in the middle of the fishing grounds... so we took all the anchors off, and towed the rig around, going nowhere, so the fishermen could drag their nets all over the place without getting stuck... yeah, I learned diplomacy (or how to just shut it and sulk) the hard way... stuck between an oil company and fisheries... *sigh*

-the pack ice finally cleared and we came back to St.John's this afternoon (after giving the rig's bridle to another ship who is now running in circle in our place). On the way here we passed 3 massive icebergs... some pics are posted up there, more will come once I'm back in Montreal (April 24th).

All this time we didn't do s***. We brought GAMMA (the daily maintenance) up to date and then I did inventory, re labeling all the cabinets and drawers properly *ho yeah! I'm living the dream baby!!!*

When we got the rig on tow, we were not allowed outside anymore, so I read about one book a day and watch movies, hockey games when the goddamned sat dish was working >:/ and ran up and down the stairs to keep from going insane I also remind myself hourly how much I was getting paid to do squat :P... the inside of a ship shrinks as the days go by...

Luckily, the second half of the hitch should be much more interesting... no more passengers runs, and we have real jobs to do. We're going on 24h rotations, meaning teams of 3 divided like so: 6am-6pm, 6pm-6am, 12am-12pm, 12pm-12am... I got the 6am-6pm shift...
bad side: I have to wake up at 5am, to be on deck around 5:30am
good side: I wont miss the playoffs if I sleep before and after the games (because of time difference, the games come on at 9pm here :S)

There's a lot more people on board now.. the "company men", meaning the guys who hired us to do the job, are here to make sure we don't screw up... I don't care about it, cause I'm a dumb SSE short service employee aka junior tech aka new girl who doesn't know anything and thus am not responsible for anything that could go wrong :P surprisingly enough some of these guys are young and do not have a mustache! they even seem nice! that should make for an interesting trip.

anyway, that's it for now, don't know when I'll be back in St.John's again.. at the latest it should be on the 22nd, just in time for crew change...

all aboard!!!