Walk-a-bout at work with a camera. No more off shore for me.

[edz]

Reality and training .... At least they can say " you were trained ". Enjoy 

[ironcobra]

I just went through this whole thread as well... Amazing job! Good stuff, thanks for sharing...


Cheers, ironcobra

[DaveR]

I got a bit more to share now.
The offshore Oil and Gas industry has many and varied support industries, such as Seismic Survey as a fellow Swagger mentioned already.
Another area is Anchor Handling. These vessels go about the oceans deploying anchors for various purposes and then recovering them for inspections.
The anchors can be the size of a small home.
The Black and Yellow vessels shown are from one company which specialise in this field.



The vessel is built around a series of winches, these are of varied sizes and purposes with one being a very powerful and large capacity type. I have no specs on hand for these just now. Here is what the deck looks like, sorry about the  poor pic....



The vessels can recover very long lengths of very large chain and store the chain in special holds below deck. I can assure you, you will have trouble thinking straight with the sound throughout these vessels of the chains being moved about the place.

The following is the same pic, 2nd is where I have tried to zoom in to show the chain being recovered from below deck.




When these are unloaded from the vessel, the anchors and chain are being kept in a specialists yard where they are checked for servicability etc.
These pics are to try to show the size of the gear they are dealing with. Look at the yellow container and the chain behind it.





Now a close up of the above pic to show the heavy low loader semis in the back, look at the size of the 2 x anchors on it.



In need of some CT security?
Just hook one of these chain links to the front, they'll never be able to nick it... 

[DaveR]

This round of updates is at a close. Heading home soon.
Here's the first light (not that it stopped from day before) at 02:30. Just before the storm rolled in.   



In Lerwick now



The Shetland Islands is not the place to go for a "Tree Change".




Its FREEEEZZZZING here.
Last time my flight was cancelled, thanks to the great weather.

[DaveR]

Back at it again.
Got a few different things on the go here now.
No Diving, well, with the Human type anyway. Got the ROV's in the drink doing the work and us dive Techs are busy with maintenance whilst we're diver free   

Here is where we are.



What we're doing is placing a new manifold 120 meters down on the sea bad, it is the Yellow structure in the next pic.
The structure gets nailed down to the seabed with some piles that are inserted into the 4 corners. The piles ae the rusty looking cylinders on the right.
A Hydraulic Hammer is used to drive the piles in, this is in the lower left of the pic below the crane hooks.



When the structure is in place, some control umbilicals are connected to other existing structures, these are the Yellow Hose looking thing in the next pic.



All of this work was done with the ROV, Remote opperated vehicles, I'll go and get pics of them soon.

That task is done, now we're on a job with our Sister Ship removing old structures from the sea bed. Yep, old disused gear is pulled out.
This is the sister ship in the back ground.



We're removing concrete mattresses, they are used to burry the gas pipes etc.





The sister ship is moving along behind us cutting the pipes up and lifting them to surface. They are using an over size pair of garden Shears to do this.

In the mean time, yours trully is on a most glamorous job with a needle gun inside the chamber...... Well, just for the one day, got it painted now.



I'll find some more pics now of the ROV's.

[KingBilly]

As always, super interesting Dave.  Thanks for taking the time to share 

KB

[duncan]

Yes another great story. I have been looking forward to the email notification of an update. It is all very interesting work. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

[DaveR]

Not a nice day today.







If you look on the horizon, the Sister ship is parked there, the above 3 pics show a bit of the bouncing around we're getting today.



In weather such as this, we have the wonderful experience of rocking and rolling, with a bonus that normal vessels don't have.
As this is a dive ship, we have 2 large holes through it which the dive system is wrapped around, each of these holes (Moonpools) are about 4 x 4 meters. The swell is moving up and down 4 to 5 meters at the moment inside the moonpools.
This means we have approximately 130 - 160 cubic meters of water drawing and pushing the same volume of air around the dive system every few seconds. When walking around, we need to wait for the swell to allow the door to be opened, and also, for the pressure differential to equalise also.

Love my job.......   

[McTavish]

Again - thanks for updating - amazing stuff.

[mjharps]

This means we have approximately 130 - 160 cubic meters of water drawing and pushing the same volume of air around the dive system every few seconds. When walking around, we need to wait for the swell to allow the door to be opened, and also, for the pressure differential to equalise also.

I would never have thought of that. Amazing. Certainly a different experience!! Thanks for sharing.

[lochgilphead]

Yep, amazing stuff.  Thanks for sharing, I always look forward to this thread.
 

[DaveR]

I got a few more pics to share.

I just got home from Trinidad, normally I update this when at work but the internet was real bad for some reason when there.
Anyway...
Here is where we were working (Red Square lower right), also in close to the sth east coast. Actually, we went to many locations but in that general area.



The diving I have mentioned so far has been the Saturation Diving, some times our vessel is used for surface supplied diving which can be either air or Nitrox.
Nitrox is the same ingredients as Air, but in altered ratios.

We did some shallow air diving for a few weeks adding some protection strips for corrosion monitoring.



Here it up close.



The shallow diving we did uses a "Wet Bell".
Here is a pic which looks along the side of the ship whilst sitting alongside the platform, we stay in position with the DP System, no mooring ropes.



The bright ligths in the water are the lights on the Wet Bell. It is from there the divers swim over to the platform to do the work required.



Here is the Wet Bell. It is a cage of sorts which 3 divers are lowered into the water, there is a space at the top which can be flooded with a breathable mix if there are any problems, a diver can be helped in the water, a helmet can be take of his head. From the shoulders up there is a cover over head with controls, communication and lights.
This next pic shows the frame it is lifted with and lowered into the water.



Now inside



Now the control panel.



On the deck below the launching equipment is a garage door that can be opened, here is where the divers get on or off the stages to get to the water. This pic shows the door closed, to the left is the entrences to the 2 decompression chambers.



Here is the chamber looking inside the entry lock, behind the door is the main lock.



There is a main frame for the Wet Bell which 3 divers go into the water with, there is also a back up cage for a 4th diver to go in and assist if there is something wrong.
It can be seen on the right here.



More to come soon.........

[DaveR]

Here is a few action shots of yours truly, hanging out almost over the side sorting out the main umbilical for the wet Bell.





More later....

[oldmate]

COOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL 

[raider]

Why three divers ? Does one distract the sharks ?

[DaveR]

Why three divers ? Does one distract the sharks ?

Yep.
Well, the Barracuda's in this case.
They keep 1 guy in the Wet Bell, and 2 leave to go onto the job, the guy in the wet bell tends their umbilical s. Have to be cautious of the big things underneath the ship which turn around, can't be letting the divers near them....

Speaking of which.
We have had a slight miss hap with the big things that turn around, 1 of them stopped turning....

more to come with pics

[DaveR]

A job we were getting ready to do in close to the coast was to work on this yellow thing.
It is a SPM, Single Point Mooring.



Here is a borrowed pic from the net to explain what it is.



The yellow float is an over sized buoy, there are anchor chains below keeping it in place, then there is a PLEM (pipe line end manifold) on the sea bed, from the PLEM is a riser hose which flexes with the SPM movement connecting the 2. The SPM can rotate around 360 degrees and still have the gas or oil passing. On the surface is a floating hose which connects to the vessel for loading. Also is the floating mooring line.

We went in side the anchor pattern to do some position testing to see if we could squeeze our 120 meters in between two chains close to the SPM sideways.

It kind of went wrong.....

The top pic which I took a few hours before it went tits up shows a small orange thing floating to the left, this is the mooring line which the ships tie up to.
The small Grey Vessel had the task of holding that mooring line and the hose out of our way.
They kind of ..... ummm....... let the mooring line go and it floated around and wrapped around 1 of the 2 main stern thrusters.

The fun bit is, we lost a thruster as it tripped out. That makes it hard to keep in position, but, we had to stay in position precisely to cut ourselves away from the mooring line.
The mooring line is 8 strand rope about 150mm dia.

The guys on the bridge managed to keep us in position so that the rest of the surface lines could be recovered, and we then cut ourselves away and move out.

We moved into sheltered waters and dropped anchor. The ROV went for a swim to have a good look about.



The Propeller is in a Round housing called a nozzle.
Here is some of the rope leading down to the Prop.



And now showing the prop and its housing that holds it to the vessel. It is shaped like the lower end of your typical outboard motor with a ring around the Prop.





We had to put the divers in to cut it away, took a large chunk of the day to do it.
Thankfully no damage, and we went back to work.

[edz]

150mm dia heavy steel cable wrapped around the shaft ..Wooaahhh and here we get blokes complaining about mongrels cutting fishing line loose and having to cut it away from around the prop on the outboard mtr.. I know wich one I'd rather cut loose ..

[Bill]

This is my favourite thread.
Thankyou for sharing.
Bill

[DaveR]

150mm dia heavy steel cable wrapped around the shaft ..

Not steel wire rope, normal rope. There was about 30 - 40 wraps around the shaft, plus some wedged between the tip of the blade and inside face of the nozzle.
There is chain and shackles which make up the mooring line, thankfully we missed that. The chain links are about 180mm long, each link. If we got that it would have been a trip to Curacao for dry dock.

[Vitara_JaycoSwift_Outback]

The most stressful thing about my job is writing report cards twice a year. I look forward to these updates Dave. Keep them coming.

[Spada]

Glad your back at it Dave, I've been missing your regular updates. It's nice to be interested in someone else's work, cause my job is boring as batcrap.

[WilSurf]

I hated those SBMs and SPMs.
Close to shore but too far away to get ashore.   
Our vessel was too large to get closer.
Brings back good memories, especially the Caribbean.
Did one trip there: Trinidad, Jamaica, Ponta Cardon, Willemstad, Havanah, Mantanzas......
Nice rum there.

[duncan]

Another great story. Always very interesting.

Thanks

[ldsparrow]

Awesome updates.