Well it seems that every time that I fall behind with my journal, so much happens that it’s hard to catch up again… I guess that there is a message in there somewhere ❗ hahah Where was I ❓ Oh yes, straight back to the boat instead of going home after our Colorado trip. Okay, well, I got back to the boat, which was in Panama City, FL., by way of Dallas and Pensacola. The umbilical cables that we had onboard for the Thunderhorse field were off-loaded there for storage until next year, when hopefully we’ll be fitting the installation of them into the rest of the scheduled work that we have in the GoM. Then, once the majority of the project crew had left the vessel, we started our transit back to Europe. Originally we were supposed to be going to Newcastle, but as it was decided to fit in a dry-dock session for the ship before it started on the next project, the only available, accessible, dry-dock was in Rotterdam. So our initial destination changed, but that was something that would have little significance to us mere plebs on-board (after all, we can only go where the boat goes 😉 ! ahha) The transit went well in many ways, I think it took us 19 days from Panama City to Rotterdam. Our route took us round Florida and up the east coast of the US and Canada, then level with Newfoundland we headed east across the Atlantic towards the English channel. Once we left the coast at Newfoundland we also lost our satellite communication link. This meant a few things.. but most importantly no e-mails or internet. 🙁 The plus side of that was that we had a nice, peaceful time, with no emails or questions from the office, so that we could just plod on with our work and maintenance lists keeping our selves busy. The down side, of course, was no emails from Dazzle. 🙁 🙁 Of course, none of the other guys had emails either (but they weren’t expecting any emails from Dazzle! hahaa) We kept ourselves busy and managed to get a lot of jobs done. When we reached the English channel and got our cell-phones working, I found that Dazzle had some news for me….. to be continued….
