"Allatsea", on the road with Britain's most popular marine warranty surveyor.

Steer north

Today is monday and the destination is ..... Darlington. More precisely, Stokesley. An odd location perhaps for an offshore HAZID but it's all surprises and new experiences in this game.

I've just read the installation procedure for all 100 Transition pieces (these are 210 tonne £1 million bits of kit) that will be installed over the full coming year.It took me nearly four minutes.

It was nine pages long, and seemingly written by a dyslexic drunk. We'll put a 'Hold' on that one then and insist on something better. A manual with something in it would be nice. The company responsible for this, briefest of offerings, charges us £60,000 a month consutancy and £100,000 a day for their boat. Seems we're in the wrong business.

I tell no lies, a friend of mine has just turned down the chance to work under the world of farce remit on the pretext that he's found a better job elsewhere. What? I can't believe my ears!! Well put the following words in order.

Haven, pilot, at, Milford

Then add the following: 70 days work, £70,000 a year.

Hmmm, where do I join please?

If anyone out there is feeling particularly magnan...

If anyone out there is feeling particularly magnanimous then please send advice and guidance with respect to positive thinking etc to allatsea at the usual address.

On second thoughts don't, I like being missers and negative, besides, the point of this post is simply to prove to myself that it's possible to 'post' directly from Hotmail.

Honest your honour. _________________________________________________________________

Jack be nimble Jack be quick

Last night the wind got up to gale force and I have to confess to being a tadge worried about monopiles rolling off saddles and into the briny deep. Thus, when ken rang at dindins time and said they’d arrived in field and all was well, I felt relieved. The whole monopile transport/installtion ethos was set up to be serviced from Ramsgate and the idea of bringing stuff over from the other side of the North Sea relying on friction saddles, in March, doesn’t do my already nervous disposition much good at all. No wonder I’ve gone grey and lost my natural good looks. (ahem ).

The weather here at Thanet is absolutely gawjis today, but my mucker in Nigg reports gales, 3 metre seas and sub-zero temperatures. Ouch. Steve in reading, come to the sunny sarf and join the Fannit frolics.

It’s mid afternoon and I’m severely tempted to visit the hostelry over the road and have a few pints of the finest Nelson. If I lean out over the verandah I can just about see the Sea Jack’s crane. Take a pair of binos and I might even claim to be there on board offering my finest warranty services. It’s a thought.

Put your left leg....

Last night at Margate railway station, allatsea and the dozen or so other hapless commuters who got off the 1646 from Cannon Street were met by around 3 dozen battle dressed quasi moronic yobbos dressed as policemen. They herded us into a line and insisted that we passed through a metal detector prior to getting out of the ticket office and into the arms of our loved ones. The same metal detector was being used to 'scan' any poor sod who was trying to get into the station to catch a train. Chaos ensued.

It was unnecessary, laughable, irritating and humiliating, all at the same time.

Here is a comment from me to the officer in charge of the debacle ..."You are a facist CRETIN and I refuse to contribute to your wages  anymore"

On a lighter note,

There was a great loss recently in the entertainment world. Larry La Prise, the man who wrote the "Hokey Kokey", died last week at 83. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin. They put his left leg in and things just started to go downhill from there.

Age

I don’t know if it’s the time of year, point in the project, my age or general malaise but can’t seem to get going this afternoon. It might even be a mild dose of disappointment as I was kind of expecting to go to Great Yarmouth tomorrow to look at one of those fast catamaran crew boat thingys. Despite the owners saying that said lovely new boat was going to be ready this week, nothing’s been heard. Maybe it’s sunk? Or been abducted by east coast pirates?

 

 

There’s a rumour going round that the office will be closed next week (just for the day I hasten to add), to avoid hassles from the G20 tossbag-predictably twattish angry sanctimonious nauseatingly pious bumclinging anarKKKISSSSTS. Hmm. Sounds good to me, delicate flowers like allatsea are easily upset and miffed at the slightest of deviations from etiquette normality. That said, I’ve also heard that large groups of Essex working boys are coming to town dressed as city slickers in order to give the (mainly) middle class anarkkkissssts a good bashing. It may be worth coming to town after all, Essex tantrums and yobbo idignation. An eclectic mix.

The 4^th loadout of monopiles is due to go ahead at Kats on Monday. That’ll be number 4 of……50. There’s a long road ahead.

Camouflage

To keep us from being targeted by  G20 anarchists thinking that we're bankers, us workers wot work in the City, are being advised to camouflage ourselves by 'dressing down' next week.

Dressing down?

Do they know what I wear normally. You can't get much more down I can assure you. I look very much the Wan..., rather than a Banker.

With a bit of luck the wind off Ijmuiden will ease in the next hour or so, the waves will diminish and they'll let the good barge JacK sail. They managed to get a couple of piles on last night, in a break between squalls, so all is not lost. Well, not lost so much as a bit stalled. March and Wind, they go hand in hand and it's a bit naive to expect otherwise. That said, if I had a cazillion Euros tied up in a project I'd expect to see something happening too.

Darlington on Monday, by choo choo. There's a HAZID to be attended and we're all going. A dozen of us or so anyway. I'll be the only mariner on the way up there, coo, 11 engineers to keep me company, that will be fun. Think I'll pop onto Amazon and order a self help book to get me through the ordeal. 'Technical Bollockspeak' or some such title should do the trick, that or 'Predictive modelling, the answers you've always wanted'. Nope, maybe not. I'll just revert to type instead with, 'Big Ones and Corsets.....the butler's tale'

Not another..?

The Times was trumpetting the end of the wind farm industry in Britain this  morning. As usual with these scurrilous rags, it was a whole heap of tosh wrapped up in a tiny snippet of truth. Don't you just love them. Anyway it is a bit more evidence that wind energy on the scale that the UK is proposing and at the financial cost it requires (seemingly) is quite simply, impractical. The next 24 months or so may see a huge about turn wrt sea based wind farms. I can almost feel the share price dropping (of Vestas etc) from here.

On a happier note this bit of London is going to be under siege next week it seems. All the great unwashed and terminally violent will be up here threatening to job the G20 brigade. What fun, I can hardly wait. If they're the same breed of anarchist (bumholes) that regularly hurtle about on cycles at 9000mph here in town, judiciously ignoring all road signals and any sense of road courtesy, then I hope PC plod will be suitably armed with large bulldozers (or similar) and simply push them out of the way. It's a thought, one I'd rather like to see come to fruition too. Ghastly oiks.

 

Un-crunched.

At the risk of bringing catastrophe and damnation opon our heads I'm going to say that it's too busy here in world farce. The Middle East lot  are in today saying they're run off their feet. The Aberdeen lot were having a moan yesterday saying that the art of 'Jack Up' rig shifting is die-ing and they're looking for masters of said art with a vengeance cos' they've got a 'to shift' list as long as your arm. In all fairness, being Scotsmen it's likely to be a very short arm, certainly too short to reach a wallet in their trouser pockets, but the point wasn't lost on me. We need folks and we need them fast. Anyone out there willing to help?

In the case of Jack up movers a complete lack of fear and imganiation would help. No-one  with a 'right' mind would go near the job. They're nerveless and completely lacking in knowledge of the word 'worry'. I'm very envious of them.

Oops, just realised that I haven't mentioned the N America lot, the Far East lot or the Urals based lot. There's good reason, there's nothing to say................except 'come on???'.

Windy March is being very un-supportive of our efforts to harness that wind energy and do something useful with it, such as watch daytime television or charge an electric car so that we drive to Tesco Express instead of walking there. The gusty blowy stuff is preventing the Sea Jack from loading the next two monopiles in Ijmuiden. Must be one hell of agale there then? Well no. It's barely above a stiff (ooh madam) breeze but the soppy limp wristed crane on the thing can't be used in a breeze over 10 m/s (20 knots to us sailors). Who in their right mind would have approved such a low limitation?

Errrr... it was me. I'll get my coat then, as they say.

 

Another way...maybe

The RSPB, have changed there minds wrt to land based wind turbines. There is, they say, more harm to dickybirds from global warming than there is from land mounted windmilly things. They are seeking to encourage a rapid growth in the number of the things.

Soso cost of a 3MW WTG built offshore UK £8.5 million   ish

Soso cost of a 3MW WTG built onshore UK  £ 2.0 million  ish

Total WTGs UKGOV are committed to (allegedly) building is 7000 Hmmmmm. Now call me old fashioned but that really would be an awfully large amount of wonga to save if we shifted from sea to land. Anyone complaining about the beautiful countryside being ruined by the presence of all these new windythings could be threatened with having a nuclear power station built in their back garden instead. Sorted.

 

On the Fannit offshore windy thing front, it's still all steam ahead (so to speak). Long may it continue.

Should I sell my shares in UK Coal now or later? Pessimist I may be but I'm going to hang onto them and hope for the worst.

Another's view on windpower

I quote.............................................

The case for producing more of our power through renewable means is well-made. Even without the threat from climate change, the pollution and waste thatgoes with burning fossil fuels is not sustainable in the long term. A more varied mix of generating options must be sought, as we move through the 21st century.

But wind energy, particularly when generated using marine wind turbines  is a controversial answer to the question of how we keep the lights on when traditional forms of powergeneration are no longer considered viable. And today’s report from the Renewable Energy Foundationdetailing the subsidies and the shortcomings of wind turbines, ought to make everyone who is concerned about the environment and our power needs sit up and take notice.

It shows, in very stark terms, the shortcomings of wind turbines and makes a compelling case to suggest that but for the very generous subsidies available, no one would be investing in wind because it simply does not make sense to do so. The subsidies skew the energy market place and actually discourage funding for other, potentially more effective forms of renewable power.

At the heart of this argument, which has been raging for several years, is the relative inefficiency of harnessing the wind for energy. Impressive claims about the generating capacity of the average turbine begin to look decidedly shaky when average wind speeds are factored into the equation. Most turbines operate at just 27 per cent of full power, slashing a potential generating capacity of one turbine from 3 MW  down to little more than 800kW

When you add in the fact that in 2006-07 subsidies totalling more than £217 million were paid to wind farm developersand operators, a picture begins to emerge of an industry supported not by the brilliance of its technology and the effectiveness of its generating capacity but by handouts that, ultimately, push up the cost of electricity to all of us.

Of course the Renewable Energy Foundation, (REF) which carried out the research and produced this report, is not entirely unbiased and nor, it has to be said, is the Council for the Protection of Rural England, which helped to write it and publicise its findings. REF has been opposed to wind energy and specifically to new turbines in attractive parts of the Westcountry for several years; the CPRE sees protecting the rural landscape as its raison d’etre.

But the figures are hard to deny and the big danger is that while wind energy is attracting all the cash, because of the subsidy available, other forms of renewable energy, plus the potential to develop better nuclear powerplants, are being overlooked. The stark truth from this report is that if we had to rely on wind to keep us powered we would soon be in trouble. That’s not a happy position to be in. It is surely time to take a more realistic attitude towards whatis beginning to look like an energy con-trick.

 

Tch thch tch tch, strong language indeed. There are many that agree though.