A strange sort of trip this time.
I had plans to do all sorts of things, but in the end didn’t get as much done as I wanted.
The most notable event of the trip was a storm that came through at the end of April.
It cost us a couple of days down and the crew lost around 50 FDUs due to lightning.
This is not many considering there is around 25000 out on the spread, but was a bit of a wakeup call to the contractor. My only surprise was that it hadn’t happened earlier. In Saudi, every crew, every year suffered from lightning strikes and it was not unusual to loose 100s of FDUs at a time. And that with a much smaller spread.
I have been asking Sercel for years to introduce cheap fibre optic isolating sections that can be inserted at various points in the line. Sadly, they don’t seem all that interested and the currently available Fiber optic extention cables are far too expensive to use considering the number required.
The rain produced an interesting effect out in the subkha:
These are salt formations created by the wind picking up saturated salt water. Almost plantlike.
The crew commissioned 5 new 380 Vibs. This makes 21 on crew now, with another 6 arriving soon.
The acceptance tests were a bit painful. I really wish BGP would learn to look at the results of tests before passing them on. We seem to go through this every time.
We also suffered from earthquakes in Iran. These were quite a problem for some time, maybe still are. I was pointed to a useful website that displays the location and magnitude of earthquakes in a specified area, maybe useful to someone else:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/
I do tend to criticize Americans a lot, and it is justified of course – they are largely (very large) morons, but to give them their due they have made some amazing resources available to all, and for free. So I will take a day off from knocking them.
Back to normal tomorrow though.