Well, tonight is midsummers night, the shortest night, the middle of summer… not that you’d know it here! Where the ship is at the moment is quite far North, not quite the land of the mid-night sun, but not far from it. Unfortunately it has been very overcast and miserable the last couple of days, so that even now at 2am it’s not very dark, but it isn’t as light as I would have expected it to be. (and HAVE seen it in past years) It’s been a week since my last up-date and it’s been a busy time for us on the Perseus. We completed the mobilisation of the equipment and ran a lot of tests on the new control system. We arrived on location in the Snorre B field and have now completed the recovery of the faulty control umbilical. This was a job that we had started to do last year, until a mechanical failure caused by a design flaw in the ubilical head caused it to drop 300meters to the sea-bed. (And I do believe that we were the second company to have tried to recover this umbilical!) Needless to say, owing to the history of this job, there were a lot of relieved and happy people when the final end of the umbilical was secured onto it’s transportation reel. Tonight we’re now starting the preparations for the installation of it’s replacement, and that should start sometime later today, though I don’t think it’ll be under way before I get off shift at 8am. The new control system has worked well. There have been one or two potental improvements that we’ve picked up, but I wouldn’t have expected otherwise. It’s very difficult to think of all permutations and possibilities at the design and engineering stage, it’s only when you use things operationally that you can really find all (or most!) of the oversights. We’ve had a change of faces on-board, with a crew-change for the other shift. It’s a bit depressing at the moment as the crew-changes aren’t staggered evenly. New faces used to mean that we were half way through our trip, but this time the change out happened only a week into our trip, so that we still had four weeks to go, instead of being well on the down-hill side of the trip. Still, at least with the wonders of modern technology, I can keep up to date with the world through e-mail, the world wide web and (as we are so close to the platform) at the moment, even my mobile phone still works!
