Offshore on the West Setia

I have been on this rig for about 2 weeks now and have gotten into a dangerous routine. The saying on the ship is, “You eat until your tired, and you sleep until your hungry.” Something that will not be very good for my Everest Base Camp trek. To make matters worse, I had worked out too hard and temporarily hurt my knee, it feels like arthritus would feel but I will give it a rest and see how it is in a couple of days.

I now have 7 days left on my hitch and 6 days out here on the West Setia. I have done 4 jobs out here with a tool that I did not previously have a lot of experience. So it is good for learning and I am now by myself to do one last run in 2-3 days. I am excited to get home  and see Chelsea, see Matt in Nepal, and check Mt. Everest off the bucket list. On that note, Matt and I originally wanted to do the whole hike to the top of Mt. Everest, but seeing as 33% of people die on the mountain to conditions and things not their fault we decided against it… Everest Base Camp will do.

I have taken many pictures out here and I would love to share them with you. As you can see the living quarters are quite nice, there are a few TV rooms, and a Service engineer room that has two phones and two computers for calling home and checking emails. (Or writing blogs =) I unlucked out, and my bunk is the one in the upper left. The guy underneath of me told me a few days ago, that he says his prayers every night that I don’t fall through. LOL. That would not be good.

Only in Africa would they have Acid Bugs...

Mess Hall

My Room - Im in the upper left bunk.

Bathroom and lockers

Game room - mainly locals hang out here.

The Rig (in the middle) is what pays for the party.

Everything else is for support - lots of stuff is needed

The Helideck

This guy is going to have a long trip back to land.

View of the platform

Yes, I have to hike all those stairs 2-3 times a day! FML.

The bridge to cross from the floating West Setia to the rigid Tambula Landana Platform

The deck of the West Setia

The lifeboats, hopefully I wont see the inside of those.

I am sitting right were the guy in the red is sitting now.

Pilots - Please dont kill us.

Best picture showing the layout of the West Setia and TL Platform

Another view

Malongo - the main city/base of Chevron

We are in the middle of the jungle.

On land again.

The bridge to cross and the West Setia in the background

The flare at night, you can feel its heat 100yds away!

The bridge

The rig at night

Working out on the Helideck

Hello Cabinda, Goodbye Freetime.

It has been a while since my last post and lots has happened. For that reason I will be sparing you a lot of the details and mainly give an overview. I got my receipt on Friday Sept 23 at 8pm, and by 6am the next morning I was on a plane to go to my new semi-permanent home – Cabinda. I flew from the domestic airport in Luanda on a Chevron chartered flight. Then took a bus to the Chevron base Malongo. The base is huge and when I arrived I tried calling both of my managers and no one answered. Fortunately, my friend Jing was walking by and helped take care of me. My badge that I needed to sign in was at a different gate 2-3 miles away. I had all of my luggage with me, and no vehicle to help carry it. They told me to go eat and that they would be back with my badge and a vehicle and sure enough after I had a bite to eat, they came back with a truck. After arriving at the base I met with my bosses boss, the guy who had brought me into Angola and we had an interesting talk.

Previous to coming to Angola I had met three people. All of which were pretty high ranking. The country manager, the BSM (local manager), and another one of my direct managers. However, since I accepted the position ALL of these managers, who made “promises” have left. I now know no one, and worse, no one knows me…

The BSM, Rick, who I was talking to spent about 45 minutes talking with me. We talked about everything pertinent to working in this location. We talked about the food, the hours, the people, the camp, the staff houses, etc… In short, we stay off the base at a staff house 30 minutes away and are transported by bus at 5am and 6pm daily. There are no other cars or ways to get back besides them. So we work 13.5 hours a day minimum. Lunch is served everyday in a facility 2 miles away from my office and its ok. There is normally sandwiches and soup and a variety of cafeteria food. The downside is that we have no vehicles so we have to walk. The people here now are friendly and pretty knowledgeable; but, I guess that they had a “house cleaning” back in January when they got rid of many engineers and managers because of tools breaking and personnel errors that cost us $17 million.

From first impressions on the few days that I spent at the shop and from talks that I have had with people. Everything here is extremely disorganized to add to the confusion everyone is on a back-to-back schedule (35 on/35 off) there is poor transfer of information. So when one boss comes on, he has no idea of the promises/talks you had with the other manger he was replacing. But everything in general is a mess… On top of that, the hours are crazy!!! By the time that you wake up at 4am, shower, eat, bus to work, bus back from work at 6:30pm, eat, then get to your room it is already it is 8pm. Just enough time to get 8 hours of sleep and repeat the schedule again. No time for working out, no time for reading, doing anything personal, etc… Also, the fact that we have to walk everyday to and from the cafeteria is ridiculous… Well see how everything pans out.

I spent the rest of the next two days helping my friend Jing get equipment ready for going offshore and jump through about a million hoops to get badges, access, safety classes, etc. That night I went back to our staff house in Futilla. As we passed a huge-nice house up on a hill the guys said, “There’s our staff house, and there it goes” as we passed it by and kept driving 10 minutes away. I wanted that mansion to be our staff house! It was impressive with many rooms, a pool, a driveway with a guard, but we were still driving… Then we made a U-turn and started driving the other way. I thought to myself. CRAP, there were no nice places that we passed. Then we pulled up to the Impressive Mansion that will be my home for the next many years! SWEET!!! I will take some pictures and upload them later…

The next day I was around the shop getting paperwork ready to go offshore. I would be leaving the morning after next on Wednesday. Wednesday came around and we went to the docks where the helicopters fly us out to the rigs. The rigs are approx. 20-30 miles offshore, a ~20 minute chopper ride.

As we arrive to the rig it is exactly how you imagine it. We landed on the top deck of the housing quarters. (The West Setia) I was shown to my room and met my four roommates. The rooms are decent size for being on a ship, but the ship and drilling platform is HUGE HUGE HUGE. I will take some pictures and post them when I get back because the internet here is very slow. I will also post the remainder of my time offshore, but right now I need to catch a chopper off this place.