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

Lurg

More piglet than swine but unleasant enough, two days of flu-lurg have been and gone. Hooray.

Back in the office after 48 hours of bedrest and general work avoidance. The wall of doccs on HOLD seems to be higher than ever. I hate it, really hate it, when asked if it's all right to exceed a 100% utilisation. The answer, when lifting, is always always always going to be no......in the first instance :o)

Fannit's installation schedule, substation wise, is looking ominously like Xmas will be spent on the Stanislav Yudin. I can think of worse places to be, death row springs to mind of course, or a hospice or being surrounded by socialists (anywhere) but somehow being on a Russian manned crane ship doesn't really, forgive the expression, float my boat, even it floats theirs.

Working days

After a very squally and unpleasant night of weather woes we now have a few hours of absolute gorgousness. No wind, blue skies, smooth water. Sigh.

The UR101 is still anchored in Margate Roads opposite the allatsea residence. A quick look at the old diary seems to suggest that since her arrival  in field on Oct 27th, she's installed errrrr ........... one cable. Or is it two? The hectic pace of non working days has left us all a bit confused. When I say 'all' I refer of course to those of us in this particular part of Fannit, not the project boys of course.

The great challenge of the day, instigated by the safety concious (not commercially focussed of course) but thoroughly limp wristed Dutch installers, is to find an...ahem...'independent' munitons expert to advise the course of action when the magnetometer survey reveals that there's something magnetic on the seabed. I have a nasty suspicion that all the experts ( a drip under pressure when all said and done) will have links to moralfree ripoff 'Munition Removal' companies. It doesn't bode well.

One of the installer's reps, at the RA meeting, when questioned as to the vialbility of such seabed surveys, responded, rather too triumphantly I thought, that on a similar project the expert had identified and removed a 100kg piece of metal from the seabed within the anchor pattern. Hmm. I asked him if subsequent investigation of the metal recovered had revealed any threat of explosion or emission? He declined to answer. The words big, girl's and blouse springs to mind.

UXO and other huff and puff

HAZID, Zoetermeer, substation installer.

All went well until we got on to the subject of UXO, or unexploded ordnance. The installer wants the entire anchor area surveyed by magentometer in 5m strips. Hmm. They've decided it's far too dangerous to anchor there until the survey's done. I pointed out that the whole of the North Sea and all the esturaries and water ways attached to it have uncharted and copious amounts of discarded world war 1 and 2 munitions laying on the seabed. So why oh why has such a survey to such a high spec never been requested for all other locations. Methinks they just want to be silly billies. Watch this space.

Mundee after sundee and the day before toosdee

Monday night, London City airport again. Much smaller queues today, hooray. Off to Rotterdam and then to Zoetermeer to see SHL the substation installers. Their documentation is good but there are nearly a dozen Holds outstanding, they need to be cleared.
Weather's complete pooh again installtion wise and is forecast to remain that way all week. The project people still maintain they're on track for forecast milestones. I admire their optimism.
It's not a place to gloat or an item to thumbnose at but, the near fatality (fall from height) the other day on a certain 6 legged jackup comes as no surprise to astute observers. The riggers on there were all too full of their own self importance and over confident of their 'skills' for my liking. When they 'banned' MWS and the site manager from 'dangerous' parts of the deck during TP installation operations, a first in offshore operarions in the known world, it didn't bode well for their grip on reality.
Well, professional riggers, who weren't clipped on and fell through an open grating, perhaps you could learn from us silly old codgers, especially those of us that survived 10 years of anchor handling without a scratch (thankfully).

In the meantime happy bone mending.

Billy Billund

Billund, central Jutland. Remote but handy for Leggo Land. Also hand y for all day meetings with the windfarm brigade about the impending turbine installtion phase. It’ll be late starting, Ican feel it in my water. As to finishing on time, July 2010? Well, time will tell. Peeps are optimistic though.
It’s only just gone 4 in the afternoon bit it’s pretty dark and has just started raining. If you weren’t tired before you looked out of the window you certainly are once you have. An odd time of year, beautiful one minute, acutely depressing the next. The trick is in the timing, get it wrong and it’s very very long season of gloom.
As meetings go, today’s was ‘useful’ if a little bad tempered at times and by a long stretch, convenient. I Arrived at Billund airport, walked 300 metres and checked into the Zleep hotel. It’s cheap, quiet and handy. Breakafast was good and the meeting was back at the airport so just another 300 metres to walk back to. Once the squabbling, sorry meeting, finished it was but a short hop to the departure lounge (having been issued with a boarding pass the previous day there was no need to check in) where, thank you Lord of frequent flyers, the lounge let me in on the strength of the old BA silver card. Safely esconced in a soft and overly comfortable seat the cabsav can be quaffed liberally and in dizzying quantities. Life’s not so bad.

Travel

I must, really must, take this opportunity to thank Southeastern trains and  their partners in crime, Network Rail for the special journey I enjoyed yesterday. The normal journey time from Victoria to Margate is around 1 hour 47 minutes and you only get to sit on one train. Long but 'do-able'. Yesterday however the parties named above conspired with great skill and ingenuity to spin that out to 3 hours and ten minutes and involve three different trains and a bus. Wonderful stuff!! British public transport in the 21st century. Doesn't it make you proud.

Just to make the point at how absolute #+ite they are at being in touch with their customers they put the 'Revenue Enforcement' blackshirts on at Whitstable to make sure we'd all paid our £27 to be humiliated and treated like dung. No apologies, no help at Faversham with boarding instructions (three trains to choose from and not ONE WORD to let any of the bemused and lost hundreds know which one went where and when) and more importantly no resignations from the incompetents that 'run' the service. Bless.

What's going on in Anglia?

What on earth is going on in East Anglia? Other than the usual rural crime and sleeping with close family members I mean.

Hotel rooms in this fine but otherwise tranquil and normally deserted part of the world were harder to find today than a cold pint of Lager in a Saudi Arabian mosque. Every room, everywhere was booked. Gave up with Lowestoft and surrounds and decided to try Norwich, no luck there until a last minute room release at the city centre Premiere Inn. Thank you Reed and Mackay. A battle well fought.

For a sleepy town on the east coast, Lowestoft has certainly got a busy old building yard. The Thanet substation Topside for a start, no mean bit of kit at 1200 tonnes and this dwarfed by two Valhall monsters for BP. Impressive skyline. Sadly once all is complete, May 2010 for Valhall and December this year for Fannit there's no more work in the pipeline. There'll be a lot of men laid off. Hundreds.

Just off the coast,to my surprise, were dozens of laid up tankers. All waiting for cargos. Why surprised, well why off Lowestoft? It's open to the weather from all directions except West. There's obviously a good reason, it's just passed me by. Perhaps handy for the busy spot markets of Rotterdam and Antwerp? Aaah, just answered my own question. Doh!!

Hospital for more blood tests tomorrow, tedious and time consuming but mustn't moan, think of all the poor sods in the world that die for want of the most basic medical care. Ghastly state of affairs really. Especially when one thinks of the vast resources that us Europeans consume keeping great hoardes of home grown oxygen thieves going. The luck of where you're born eh, it's a sobering thought.

Screwfix

I did my first deletion the other day. Coo. Self censorship, alive and well.

 

Wrote a bit about the folks at work, no holds barred and with no little passion. It’d been a long and irritatingly complex day and all for the silliest reasons.  I was unfairly rude about some peep and then, having thought about it carefully, deleted the rant. I can be a twat too at times so there’s no need to be holier than ‘thow’ just cos other’s are having a twat day too. Twattishness is noticeably more common though lately, especially from the err umm, mmm ‘overheads’.

 

Lowestoft tomorrow, an overnight stay too if the timetable works. London Wednesday, Ramsgate Thursday, Billund Friday. Holland the following Monday. Blimey, a social whirl and no mistake. Passport and foreign wonga packed, taxi!!

The roof nearly blew off 143 last weekend. Not the house itself but the, smug melodramatic pause for effect, the outbuildings in the, even more smug, orchard. However, this wasn’t the bad news it might have been ordinarily (thankfully) because it gave a heaven sent opportunity to break out the emergency plywood and much coveted but seriously under-used Makita power tool. Ahh, a chap’s never so happy as when when he’s making things out of wood and stuff. Or, is it because I’m just a sad old sod who wants to go back to basics and do something ‘honest’ for a change.  Or, more likely, a chap that regards the Screwfix catalogue as his Bible and wants to find a use for the 900 thousands pounds worth of tools and bits he’s bought over the last 14 years?

 

Shrinks to the front of the queue please, answers sought.

 

On a sad note. The wind farm industry has claimed its first (that I'm aware of)marine victim. A chap on a Dutch tug working the Gabbard field was killed by a parting chain last Thursday. No further details for now but watch this space.

I get this condition every Monday

Hot off the intra-office-gossip-should be doing something more constructive with my time-email thingy. "I went to a dinner party last night, where I and other guests enjoyed copious amounts of alcohol.  I awoke this morning with flu-like symptoms; headache, nausea, chills, sore eyes.  As a result, I have unfortunately tested positive for what a cadre of experts are now calling Wine Flu.  This debilitating condition is serious - and it appears this is NOT an isolated case.  Reports are flooding in from across the country of others now being diagnosed with Wine Flu.  To anyone exhibiting the aforementioned symptoms, experts recommend a cup of tea and a bit of a lie down.  However, should your condition worsen, you should immediately rent a DVD and call in sick. Then take the only drug proven to combat this usual type of flu - a "Full English" Breakfast.  If that doesn't work, further application of the original liquid, in familiar quantities, has been shown to do the trick.  Wine Flu does not NEED to be life threatening!  If treated early, it can be eradicated within a 24-48 hour period.    NOTE If you find you are complaining a lot, it may be that the virus has mutated into Whine Flu.  This is particularly common in women and can spread to their partners whose symptoms may include a serious case of eye-rolling."

 

 

Paper wall

It resembles the Berlin wall only it's more difficult to knock down and is made of paper. Fannit has gone mad. There's a vast mountain of documentation as far as the eye can see, there's no end in sight. Uuuurgh. Well there is an end in sight but it involves a car, a hose pipe and sealed windows. Not to be contemplated.

It's a bright but foggy morning (is that not a paradox) in Margitt and allatsea has found himself in the GP's waiting room along with 7 million of the town's less desirable peeps. The joys of  universal benefits for the totally un-worthy. Will it ever dawn on the political classes that crap simply begats crap. Stop it breeding and you solve a problem. But hey, that's just allatsea's liberal streak coming to the fore. Down you limp wristed bleeding heart, back to your bed of altruism and compassion. Looking around at the encamped hoardes there's a very good chance that the only one present actually paying anything into the system is the one writing this. It's a pretty frightening thought. I wondered what they did with that wadge of tax last year.

Anyone got a boat handy that could bring three reels of export cable up to Fannit from Italy without imparting vertical accelerations of more than 0.3G in seas of up to Hsig 5m? Please drop us a line. Oh, they'll want it in around a week. The suspense is killing me. I think it's intriguing the client too.

A check of the diary shows allatsea hasn't been to foreign parts for nearly 3 months. That's a bit of a record. A very welcome one. Sadly all good things have to come to an end and starting next tuesday  it's ramping up again. Denmark and Holland (hardly far flung travel I admit but irritatingly 'overseas' none the less) next week and Italy the week after. Aaah the delights of the airport..... it's almost enough to make a chap contemplate that car and hose pipe again.