Christmas Offshore

This has been the first Christmas I’ve spent at home in 5 years and it has been fantastic. December is a busy month for us, last year while I was away I missed,(In order) My son’s birthday, our twentieth wedding anniversary, Christmas day, boxing day, my birthday, New years eve, and new years day. The worst thing was, the weather was so bad we didn’t do anything.

But it’s not all doom and gloom off-shore at Christmas, everybody knows that we are all stuck out there so we make the most of it, movies and games, go to the gym or just chill.

Christmas day lunch is to die for, last year we had two sittings, we were on the first, we took our seats, read the menu, had a choice of starters, followed by a large choice of main dishes, deserts were out of this world, all washed down with non alcohol beer and wine.

But the evening meal is when the staff onboard really go to town, it’s a cold buffet, I won’t tell you about it because I wouldn’t be able to give it justice, here is a shot of part of it.

This all goes on during 128 knot winds, 10 meter waves. now we are on a jack-up so we don’t move around that much but the noise from the wind whistling through the legs was really loud.

This photo shows the weather, these waves are suppose to be 10 meters high but the wind is so strong it’s keeping them down around 7 meters. I took this shot from the pilot house which is about 7 stories up.

After doing nothing for 28 days we were allowed to go home, the day after we left they decided to move, as they started to jack down into the water a weld on one of the legs failed, properly due to the very high winds and stress of the legs flexing. The jack-up was immediately towed to shallow water for repairs and checks on all the legs, a big job, here is part of one leg.

A month later and guess where I was, yeah back onboard, we towed it to where it should of gone and sat it on the seabed. Job done.

We have a fiftieth birthday party tonight (not mine) My birthday tomorrow (not fifty yet) then New Years eve, so have a great new year and I’ll post again next year.