It’s the early hours of friday morning here, and the Ship is almost at Pointe Noire (Republic of Congo). We should be in port around noon. Some of the lads are due off for their leave, and their replacements should have arrived there last night. They’ll be joining as soon as we are along side, along with the rest of the project crew, and we will be starting the mobilisation for Lobito-Tomboco (I kid you not!) project. After the first mobilisation here, we will be sailing a little further south, into Angola waters to start the project proper. The Perseus crossed the equator the other day, but with no celebration apart from a wee toot of the ships horn. It’s been a poor transit from that point of view really (even the captain thinks so, as one of the guys found out) There are too many people on-board who aren’t really doing anything. We’re always busy on the transits as it’s the best chance we have to catch up with maintenance that can’t be done when we’re operational, and thats the same with the ROV crew. The ROV’s are busy all the time, so the transits are the only times that they can get stuff done as well. So us and ROV are working our usual 12 hours a day, and then there are all these passengers swanning around saying how easy the transits are, because they’re doing next to nothing. Needless to say that atitude tends to rile our guys a bit. If we hadn’t had the passengers on we probably would have had a barbeque when we crossed the equator, maybe even a few “initiations”, with ‘king neptune’ making an appearance! I get the impression that as we were so close, they might even have altered the course slightly so that we crossed the equator at 0 degrees longditude too. (ships position 0N 0E, would have been really cool) We’re all just hoping that this won’t become the norm for transits, and it only happen this time because its a ‘short’ one of only 8-9 days. What with it taking an extra day to get them home, and about three days to get people out to the boat again the extra bodies would only be off pay for four days, and the saving for those four days would have been swollowed up by the cost of flights and accomodation. So that from the company’s point of view it made economic sense just to leave them onboard (which would be a first for forward thinking on their part! hahaha) Anyway, enough of my complaining! The good news from here is that our dates and tickets home have been confirmed, so I’ve been able to go ahead and book my tickets over to the US. The bad news is that I have a course to go on in Norway just before I’m due back on the ship, so I’ll have to come back to the UK earlier than I would have liked. With all the travelling I’m going to be doing, there are two things that are certain.
1: The Frequent Flyer points are going to start accumulating really quickly
2: I’m going to be really sick of airline food!
