September, 2006

Back on the Global Producer III for the 3rd time in a month! Those guys are utterly useless. But we finally finished the job after much back and forth.

August, 2006

Got home from Newcastle evening on the 5th of August. I'm now enjoying a 3 week vacation. Just got home from a little trip to Germany and Denmark. Just cruising around. It was really fun to drive my car on the Autobahn! I put the pedal to the medal and maxed out at 232km/h.  FUN!!. Had another trip to Global Producer to finish the job. We were promised full cooperation and access to the cranes. This didn't happen and we had to return back home and wait for another posibility to do the job. The good thing was that we went home with full pay for 10days since they messed up the job.

July, 2006

Was 16 days in Newcastle on a vessel called Global Producer III, which is owned by Maersk. The vessel had 3 cranes on board, 2 which was delivered by Hydralift (now known as National Oilwell). The 2 cranes had to be controlled and checked against DNV's (Det Norske Veritas) requirements. Me and a colleague, Jan Erik Mjaavatn, where up for the job.

 The vessel was in dock for repairs when we started the job so there was plenty of time to check out Newcastle city during the evenings. Newcastle is a great city that offers a vivid nightlife not often seen other places. It's really wild! I never thought England had any beautiful girls, but BOY was I wrong!! I have never seen so many beautiful creatures during 2 weeks! So if you are single, this is the place to be for partying... BTW! I'm not single, so I didn't get myself in trouble hehe...

June, 2006

June 15th
There is a lot of barracudas around the rig and I can actually see them hunting. Sometimes there is a bunch of fish jumping out of the water trying to escape the barracudas.Not easy to get good shots of them from the rig but this picture turned out pretty good. It would be nice to get a shot of them under water, but of course that was not possible...
 

June 5th
I've been on DD1 for 12 days today. It's actually pretty allright.  Nice people and good food. And the weather is perfect. Usually temperatures of 30°+ celcius which is very comfortable

May, 2006

3 weeks off this month just chilling and working with the Cold West project as much as I can. Left for the semisubmergible rig Global Santa Fe DD1 on the 24th.

April, 2006

April 20th:
I'm currently in a little town called Galliano in Louisiana waiting to get onboard a boat. It's actually the Northern Canyon which was the first assignement I had in my job. Pretty cool!  I left Houston on wednesday being told I had to get over there ASAP because the boat had trouble with the Hydralift crane. But as it turns out, the boat is not arriving until monday (today is thursday).
So I'm pretty pissed of after driving like a madman for 8 hours into a land of nowhere just to find out that there was no rush!! I could have enjoyed the weekend in Houston with lots of beer and friends! I'm not very keen on driving to houston and driving back here on manday. No fu**ing way! It's 370miles one way... Thats 1200km back and forth!

 

April 16th
Just got back from an offshore drillingvessel in the Mexican gulf. Had to drive all the way(from Houston) to Morgan City in Louisiana and take a helicopter from there. They had an incident onboard a few weeks ago, where one of the cranes dropped the whole load overboard. This was caused by an operator failure. So my job this time was to install new software to the vessels 4 cranes to make sure that it is not possible to do the same mistake again.. The job went very smooth with absolutely no problems. So I got away with just 2 days onboard. In addition I installed an software update to smooth the operation of the crane

April 1th:
In march, I got a call from my boss saying thay he wanted me and a colleague to travel to Houston for 4 weeks. Sweet! The company has this exchange thing going on. People from Houston come to Norway to learn our equipment, and we're sending our guys to Houston to learn the american equipment. Pretty good deal since Houston is a great place to be. The weather is just fantastic in April. So here I am in Houston, enjoying the good life. Nothing has really gone as planned since there has been no information exchange! So I'm basically on a payed vacation. It's not bad to get payed to lie by the pool and enjoy a cold beer :)
But what a waste of money and resources! But I've let them how things are going so I don't really feel guilty about relaxing in the sun.

March, 2006

Had one week off this month. In mid march I was sent back to Azerbaijan to do another job on the DBA barge. I was not looking forward to going back!

February, 2006

Had 4 weeks off! Just relaxing playing my brand new Xbox 360 and working on the Cold West project. Wohoo! Just perfect!
 

January, 2006

Spent 4 weeks in Baku, Azerbaijan working on a jackup rig called Shah Deniz.

2005

May

Azerbaijan: Next trip I did was to Azerbaijan. I didn't know anything about the assignement before I left, which turned out to be a pretty bad experience. After a 16 hour flight (including waiting at airports), I arrived in Baku, Azerbaijan early in the morning. It took an additional hour and a half to get the Visa in order before I could finally leave for the hotel. I was BEAT!! An agent was waiting for me outside and drove me to the hotel. I got 3hours of rest before the phone rang and I had to pack my things again had head out to the heliport. Still very tired, I reached the heliport with help of the agent. There I had to wait for 2,5 hours before finally getting on a helicopter. Damn I hate all this waiting! The reason for travelling to Baku was to replace one of my colleagues which had been the for over 2 weeks.

When I arrived at the vessel, my colleague got on the helicopter and did not give me any handover. Which was not a good thing because I didn't know anything about the equipment that I was supposed to be an expert on! I had never seen it before! I didn't really know why they wanted to send me down here, but I took my chances. After a few hours onboard, I was called to the bridge to address a problem with the equipment that my company had delivered. One of the 8 winches, was not working correctly and they wanted me to find the problem. Fuck, shit, ass! I really wish I was somewhere else at that moment because I didn't know anything. Might as well asked my mother to fix my computer! My only option was to phone my colleague at the hotel in Baku (he had a flight next morning). And after many phone calls, we decided to put the winch in manual mode and not use the bridge's computer to control it. I worked 20 hours that day... I was at the vessel for 16 days before I finally got home again. Phew!!

Cypros: The first trip I had was to Cypros. This was just a small job.

 I flew down on friday and arrived at the hotel in the evening. Next morning I was driven to a boat called Nothern Canyon which was a kind of supply boat. The crane onboard had lost its program due to some eager hands on the crane's computer. It took me about 2 hours to fix the problem. I was back at the hotel before noon. Then I spent the rest of the day in the sun by the pool. Oh, what a great trip! :)

 

 

 

 

March 29, 2005

I started working on a crane in Søgne today. This is a crane that has been ordered by Stolt Offshore. What I do is basicly a lot of loop testing in the crane's cabinet. The cabinet contains power supplies, PLC and different modules that, in brief, makes the crane work. My job is to test that the cables are connected at the correct place. For this job I use a multimeter to messure the resistance in the cables. If the cable is correct, a beep will sound from the instrument.