Off the boat at 1200: Check
On a plane at 1645: not yet
Wheels Down in Boston at 0140: getting there
Town car waiting for me: fantastic
First rum and coke off the boat: Priceless
Shippin’ up to Boston!
Driving by the other day while I was off watch I snapped a couple good pictures of Crowley’s new generation of ocean towing monsters. This one is DP1, in addition to being 10,880 hp. For a full list of specs see Crowley’s website here
Here are the pictures:
What most of us in the gulf wish we were doing.
I should probably change the name of this section, but I saw this contraption the other night and just had to find out what it was.
It’s name is the VB 10,000 and as you can see its one big bad ass lifting derrick. The fully gimbaled legs sit upon two 300′x72′ barges that each have four 1,000hp thrusters and the entire rig is DP 3 capable in 35′ of water or greater. It’s two 240′ tall gantries hold four 2,000 ton lifting blocks coupled to hydraulically powered winches each rated at 400 tons. The winches can be controlled individually or in sync, and all said and done this bad boy is rated for 7,500 tons of lifting capacity. I can tell you that offshore at night, it looks like E.T. Has landed on a platform.
It was a nice morning this morning, came on watch with the boat already tied up in flotation, and it was looking like a good day to get a little maintenance done. Seeing as we don’t have a cook on right now, and one of the AB’s does a knock up job in the galley I decided to go take his place doing some grinding on the side of the boat so he could cook us lunch again today. Solid plan right? I proceeded to borrow a second grinder from the engine room, to be more efficient you know? Then when my self and one of the other deckhands were almost done, I for some unknown reason placed the grinder on the cap rail…….and then after I brushed off the spot I was going to next I reached for the grinder and knocked it off of the cap rail and into the water.
And today started so well……….
A day early but I couldn’t wait. This is off the Facebook of my good friend Kyle Mathieu, and all I’ve got to say is, spelling is not a job requirement on boats.
A couple minutes into my watch this morning one of the engineers told me to come down on the bow and check something out. When I got down there were a couple guys leaning over the rail and I figured it was especially bright phosphorescences. What I saw was that and even better, we had a group of dolphins in the bow wave and they were ghostly green speckled outlines from the phosphorescence, the closest thing I can image them is almost like comets, complete with glowing green trails merging into our bright blue and green bow wave. Every time they jumped there was a resulting shower of green and blue points of light, like a handful of stars just tossed into the sky. I’ve got to say it was one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time.
We had a pretty nice sunrise coming in the Halliburton slip as well….
