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Saudi Arabia June 1988 A Shark Tale

Every diver has one, this is mine.

For the five or so years that I worked for Algosaibi in Saudi Arabia, pretty much everywhere I dived; there were sharks in reasonably close proximity to me.

Mostly I didn’t bother them, and they didn’t bother me.

However there are no divers, amateur or professional, who do not keep a wary eye out for that distinctive shape – made universally known from watching the TV show Flipper – when they venture below the surface.

The main varieties in the Persian Gulf and the red Sea; were Bull Sharks, White and Black Tipped reef sharks, there were also Tigers and Hammerheads, but not in the same numbers.

Great Whites were the bad boys, but we consoled ourselves with the factoid that they didn’t like warm water.

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Saudi Arabia & going home from Saudi Arabia.

Most of the time that I worked in Saudi Arabia, there was a war being fought between Iraq and Iran, and much of the action laid out not very far from where we were.

There were always a lot of American warships moving around in the Gulf , and fighter aircraft regularly screamed past us responding to tankers under attack in the Straits of Hormuz.

One of our captains was not a dour Hull trawler skipper, he was an extrovert Swede and his name was Sven.

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Malongo Oceaneering; Angola West Africa

Almost contemporaneously with the re-instatement of my Professional Divers License,  an acquaintance of mine asked me if I would be interested in working for Oceaneering International in Houston, on a Chevron installation in Angola, where he worked.

The timing could not have been more opportune, I told him yes, very much so, and lickety-split, in August 1992 I was off to Malongo in the Cabinda province of Angola, in deepest darkest sub-Saharan Africa.

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Malongo April 1993 Banana Base, Zaire.

Malongo in the enclave of Cabinda was Chevron’s operational base for their offshore oil and gas production in Angola. Cabinda, while geographically within the Congo had been historically part of Angola.

Apart from the camp there is nothing in Malongo except jungle.

Cabinda is a ten minute helicopter trip away, and Luanda is an hour and a half south down the coast, by Fokker fifty.

The mouth of the Congo River is only three hours steaming south.

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Malongo, Guinea current.

Ninety percent of the diving work carried out by us during my time in Malongo, was inshore, within ten miles of the coast, and as such hugely influenced by the Congo/Zaire River emptying into the Atlantic just south of where we worked.

Specific adaptations, horrific to some people, had become routine to the diving team and we dealt with the current and the sometimes almost zero visibility.

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Malongo Christmas 1995 The Night before Christmas

With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore

Written in Malongo December 1995

It was the night before Christmas and all through the camp.

It was bucketing rain and all things were damp.

The cicadas and crickets were making such noise.

No kids in this place, just a lot of big boys.

Then a flash and a whoosh, up in the sky.

A bright sleigh and reindeer is passing close by.

The bar had been closed for three hours or more.

While the rain in deluge from the sky it did pour.

The sleigh came in safely, I’m glad to report.

And made a beautiful landing in the heliport.

Not a soul stirred, no one had seen him arrive.

Except the mosquitoes, he was being eaten alive.

Of course it was Santa who’d just found that berth.

And of course it’s Malongo, the end of the earth.

He looked quickly round and thought what a hole.

Come  Dacher and Dancer, get us back to the North Pole.

They sped away quickly away from that area.

And after twenty-one days he came down with malaria.

But on that rainy night as they sped away North.

Santa looked back and he issued forth.

This place that you work, it fills me with grief.

I’m sorry my visit of necessity was brief.

But on this Christmas day, with this wish I will go.

Soon you’ll be back with your loved ones I know.

So just for the present make the most of your plight.

And to you all Happy Christmas, and a very good night.

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Malongo Mortar Attack on Chevron CampNew Years day 1996

On 1 January 1996, the camp in Malongo was attacked by FLEC, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, just one of the dizzying arrays of acronyms, created during the war waged by various Angolan sects, against their Portuguese occupiers.

Cabinda was not part of the deal finally worked out with Portugal. At one stage it was part of the Congo and then Zaire, another name for the Congo on the south bank of the Congo/Zaire River, and not the other one, whose capital Kinshasa is on the North Bank.

Amid all the confusion in that part of the world, the ordinary people just wanted to have enough to eat and a reasonable assurance that they would not suffer genocide, or be shot by their own police men or soldiers.

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Malongo Sperm Whale Calf at the Deep Water SBM.

During the 1990s I worked as a professional diver in Cabinda, Angola West Africa.

Cabinda while geographically in the Congo (Zaire as it was at the time) historically had been an enclave of Angola, and as the Atlantic ocean off shore from Cabinda was rich in oil, Angola was unlikely to give it up.

The Cabinda diving team worked out of and Malongo, a ten minute helicopter ride from the airport in Cabinda.

There was nothing in Malongo except the camp and jungle.

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