Almost Crew Change.

Well we are almost there, because on Wednesday early morning I shall be heading into La Cruz on our Crew Change Boat, and from there, a Mini Bus will take us to Piura airport, and away back to Arbroath, via Lima and Amsterdam.
As always towards the end of trip, time just flies by, and you find all the work you have been putting off to the last minute, now comes back to bite you in the ass as you start running out of hours. This is also complicated by the fact that something always goes wrong in the last few days, so your attention is diverted elsewhere sorting that out, and dealing with various inane emails emanating from the Office.
The Big (Its certainly BIG in my case, as i am getting off !) issue we are dealing with right now, is that allegedly the Fishermen in the area are currently blocking roads and Ports, apparently in protest at some type of Government census that is due to take place in the coming days, over which period of time their Vessels have to remain in Port, and not out on the Prospect area interfering with our operation........ Wonderful !
Our poor Agent is running up and down the coast right now, trying to find a jetty sticking out of somewhere which will allow us to get off the Crew boat, and where in addition the road is not blocked for our onward travel. His job needless to say is just made a teensy bit harder, as he keeps running into the various road blocks as he tries to travel round. We are obviously not putting him under any pressure to find a solution....he just better had by Wednesday !

For the last week we have been sailing close to shore, well 5 miles from it, but that's close enough for thrills in a Boat like this, trying to avoid the various obstructions in the area such Oil platforms (Working or abandoned), small Tankers and various mooring buoys that are scattered around  in no apparent order, or pattern. So that's at least enabled me to get some pictures of the Coastline itself, and the Cloud formations we have been seeing. So for now I shall leave you, and say good bye to Peru with two contrasting Cloud pictures, and you will next hear from Me in April, by which time I had better be back in the UK.........or the Agent will be feeding the Fishes (Just kidding......Not).

Later.....

No Mores....

Its the last weekend of this trip, so in offshore parlance its generally referred to as "No Mores" ie no more Fridays left, no more Saturdays left and so on and so forth until you get off, which in my case happens to be next Thursday 19th January.....reminder to Myself,  "Must tell the Wife I am on my way Home".
The words "get off", sound pretty damn innocuous to most people, unless of course you are an acne laden Teenager, who thinks your lucks in, after you've made the target of your affection drink 10 Vodka Red Bulls, whils't clubbing to the deafening sound of Chase and Status going through that vacuum held between your ears by your skull.

Dawn over Biscay

However, to us normal sane folks offshore, instead of a bus ride, train ride or car journey to and from work, we utillise a unique form of transport called a Helicopter, to "get off".
Now to actually get to the stage where you are thought of by your Company, worthy, deserving and damn well grown up enough to be able to use one of these wretched things, you have to do a Helicopter Underwater Escape Training course somewhere nice and cold like Aberdeen or St Johns in Newfoundland, preferably between the months of November and March.

Entrance to Las Palmas Port

 The HUET is a fairly basic drowning type of exercise, where you are strapped on a plastic chair (no luxuries for the condemned), in a metal tube with a window beside you half the size of a postage stamp, through which you are jokingly meant to extricate Yourselves, while the aforementioned Tube is chucked into the deep end of a water filled Tank, after first cracking through the layer of ice on its surface.
To complicate things further, and increase the pucker value of the exercise, they sometimes give you a bag to laughably blow into, as they turn you upside down, underwater, and strapped down in a seat inside this metal Tube. This Bag, allegedly give's you more time to get yourself out of your teeny window, as you (allegedly)can suck frantically on the diminishing atoms of Oxygen that you are frantically breathing in and out of this bag.
Now believe, and trust me on this, the last damn thing you want to do when you go underwater is to breath out, I am sorry, but there are a few rules in life which must be obeyed, and keeping your mouth shut under water, and not breathing out is pretty high up on my list of these.
They say by using this Rebreather apparatus bag, it can give you 5 minutes more time, or hope underwater....They are a fecking bunch of lying twats; as I emptied my bag in 10 seconds flat !

Early morning Ferry leaving Las Palmas

Anyway...to the Photos. The first is of a pretty dramatically coloured dawn over an absolutely flat Bay of Biscay, on our transit to Las Palmas, I didn't do anything to this picture except straighten it. The colours were amazing.
The 2nd two photos were taken in the early morning light, on the day of our entry into Las Palmas Port. There was a delicate pink hue to the sky which i tried to capture, not particularly successfully unfortunately, as all you get in the pictures is just a hint of the pinkness in the clouds. Again I had to raise the ISO a few notches as it really was an early dawn.

What to photograph from a Boat in the middle of Nowhere.

Well what can i say, its certainly been an interesting few days exploring the blog, playing with the design, trying to understand the new buttons and gizmo's etc and basically catching up a little.....it all makes you feel a little inadequate. I thought frikking technology was meant to make your life easier for Christs sake; feck knows what would happen if i turned on one of these new "dynamic" templates they (Blogger), offer by mistake. There must be a heck of a lot of seriously clever people out there to design this shit is all I can say, or there's a lot of people with a fair amount of time on their hands.....nice work if you can get it, or in my case understand it.

So what have I been doing these last 2 years you may (or most probably not) ask yourselves, firstly, no I have not been spending time at Her Majesty's Pleasure, but thanks for asking anyway....I have however continued to sail around in this wonderful world of Seismic that I have unfortunately found Myself unable to escape from. But hey, who would, when you can travel to such exotic locations as Gabon (Corrupt and ruled by a Dictator) , Cabinda (Completely corrupt and ruled by who the Feck knows), Guinea Conakry (Trainee corrupt as the Officials still smile as they rob you blind), and finally Norway (Tax Thieving Bastards). Norway gets the special mention, as they consider Foreigners who have the misfortune of sailing in their waters, should for that privilege pay their Countries NI contributions, which are set at something like 130% of your salary. Remember that when you vote for the buggers at next years Eurovision Contest, that's if you rather sadly watch it of course.

Anyway, photography....You are on a Boat, you don't see land, there's not a lot of Wildlife, especially if you are in the North Sea....so what the hell do you photograph apart from the Muppets you work with. Sunsets and Sunrises thats what. For me its a bit of a challenge, as you are on a moving boat ,so shutter speed has to be quite fast (that's as technical as I get), there's no point having a tripod either as you are going up and down; and to try and get a half way decent shot of some spectacular clouds and light you normally are shooting at either end of the day and therefore the ISO is up, which can create a graininess, which sometimes adds to the feel of the Photo.

The 1st Photo should be titled "Polution can be pretty" and is of an FPSO at Sunset about 100 miles offshore Aberdeen, on a fairly rare calm day. The 2nd is an early morning shot in the Moray Firth when we were sheltering from some bad weather....Yup the Bird was a fluke, and No it wasn't added in later as I am not clever enough for that shite; and the final picture was taken at the end of some fairly heavy weather we had had, which made for a pretty dramatic skyscape....just a pity the Tanker is not on the left of the picture, as that would have helped the composition a little.