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Stories taken from my life experiences.
In November 1996, in response to the ending my ostensibly secure diving job with Oceaneering in Angola, I developed a profoundly fuzzy plan involving ROV’s and working with them offshore, this despite my having almost no real knowledge of their operation or their inner workings.
The acronym ROV stands for Remotely Operated Vehicle, uniquely those used in water.
Continue reading “ROV Course Fortwilliam Scotland.”Going home from Baku.
From March 2003 to September 2015, once every four weeks, I got to go home for a month on leave.
Most of that time was spent working in Azerbaijan’ s bit of the Caspian Sea, on a big red boat called the DSV Akademic Tofiq Ismayilov, operating out of Baku. DSV is an acronym for Diving Support Vessel, and that’s exactly what it did, everything on board was directed at supporting the saturation diving efforts of various companies over that period, but mainly McDermott’s.
Continue reading “Going Home from Baku.”An Surprise Trip to Paris in 1979.
It was in October 1979, that over a foggy winter weekend I drove my bosses, 80% seatless Peugeot 604, crammed to the roof with dress jewellery, from A Ltd., the consignor, to A SARL , the consignee, in Rantigny, France about 60 km north of Paris.
I was the manager of the Ro-Ro and Deep Sea Export Department in R Ltd., based in South West Dublin.
Continue reading “A Surprise Trip to Paris.”Diving
Some fifty five years ago, I was seven, and while on a family holiday in Killala Co Mayo, my parents bought me, after much whining on my part, a full diving kit consisting of snorkel, mask and fins.
The memory of my first diving equipment is clear. Blue rubbery type plastic, but not modern pliable rubbery plastic, the old stuff, that was almost as unflinchingly non-malleable as the material used in the making of buckets.
Continue reading “The early days and my nascent Diving career.”In July 1989 the diving company Algosaibi, asked me to take a diving team to the Red Sea, for a civil engineering job. I readily agreed because a new environment would break up those excruciatingly long 110 day trips.
My day rate was increased as I would be supervising the job.
Continue reading “Shuaibah.”In 1988, whilst home on leave from Saudi Arabia I did a very well paid two and a half week ‘nixer’ for Oceaneering International, on the Marathon gas Platforms in Kinsale.
Continue reading “Oceaneering Aberdeen job in Kinsale & going home from Saudi Arabia.”In 1990 I became the victim of an idiot who couldn’t count and who didn’t understand Nitrox decompression tables. The consequences of which, was that I got a rather serious bend, and my diving medical, which was in effect my permit to dive, was revoked for two years.
Continue reading “Bend and end of Saudi job.”The neurologist showed me the scans and the lesions, and for the first time I fully understood what a bend was, there were physiological consequences!
The gas forced into solution in the tissue of my spinal-cord during the dive, had not been given time to come out in decompression, so it expanded where it was, forming tiny bubbles, which caused lesions in my central nervous system (CNS) and some reduction in faculty, even though that reduction was so tiny as to go completely unnoticed.
Continue reading “Algosaibi Agreement, two years off Diving & Starting With Oceaneering in Angola.”One morning at 6:32 AM as we pulled up outside the workshop, Kenny was gone home so Al, his back to back, had replaced him.
We exited the truck every morning in the same way, almost like zombies.
Continue reading “Cobra at workshop Wamba A Blowout”It’s probably best not to try to examine two closely, Central and West African politics through the prism of European understanding. What passes as acceptable political behaviour in the sense of what that phrase means in Europe, cannot be applied in Africa.
Continue reading “West Africa Sperm whale at deepwater SPM”