a few random photos from the Falklands

 So here are some pictures I found in Eric Maspers Collection... Here we are in the Victory Pub in Stanley just before Christmas 2010... It proves we don't always work... infact who am I kidding we really don't work at all...

 Me and Simon on deck between Snow Storms in December to help replace the broken Lead-in Cables.

 A bunch of us getting ready to load out the ships provisions because the small crane had broken...

Here is how we dress when we have to do small boat transfers in cold weather... Cold or not your sweating pretty hard once you get all this on.

Just like the olden-days we still walk up the gangway to get on the boat...

 Here is Kevin and Ian at the Chilean Brasserie...

 and Kevin and Ian exercising the Brasserie calories off...

 Jake walking up the gangway after a long cold night in Stanley.

 Here we are at the Brasserie.... It seems we go there alot... it is the only "nice" place for dinner on the island with the exception of the hotel.

 Dorian after a 6 week trip... was glad to be back here... Dorian served here in Stanley during the offensive...

 Here's a bunch of trouble at the Brasserie... god is my hair really that gray..?

 The crew dinner in the Chilean joint... Excellent food all around... and so much Chilean wine.

 Kevin and Ian with the manager of the Brasserie.... I'm fairly certain we spent more in there than she would have made in a month.

Here is the sleet and ice accumulation on the bridge window yesterday morning... Now...

Hows that for a random assortment...

I tried to include some pictures of fun we had... to show its not all boring depressing cold bleak awful disgusting and miserable... hahaha its really not all that bad.  Definitely the top of my location options during the coming zombie apocalypse.

Again thanks for the pictures Eric..!

Y'allhavagud'un!

...and were down for weather!

Good old NOGAPs has what we're in at present, turning into this... Our boat is under the dark red blob in the middle of the bullseye... Weather is gone now... Current Forcast of +70knot winds and 15 meter seas... woohoo... I think we can safely say the winter weather pattern is upon us and what was 3-5 day periods between subsequent storms is now 1-2 days. In fact according to the current forcast we have approximately 10 hours under 5 meter seas.

Thanks to the weather, I did have plenty of time to talk to Melanie today about the intricacies of cicada molting in Starkville.  Apparently it takes roughly 30 minutes from the time the bug glues its shell to the wall until it pops out, and then an additional 30 minutes for it to dry out enough to fly away.  If you can imagine Walker had to stay and watch the whole process because as we say... "science... its what he does".  Glad Walker got to see them come out though... its something neat to see.

Tangles, Chocolate and Other Stuff

 Okay so... some boats have chocolate on holidays and some boats have chocolate on steak days... but everyday is chocolate day on the Nadia.  I personally loaded 4 pallets of chocolate bars and 6 pallets of various coke products onto the boat during provisioning.  Here is a picture of a particularly devastated chocolate basket after dinner, but not to worry it will be full before breakfast..!

 Here is my porthole... This is in my cabin and is as good a view as we had on our Mexican Cruise. Just a little colder... notice the frost on the bottom corners...

 You find random happys all over the boat.

 Here is a small spaghetti monster... note that the cables are not supposed to do that and cost about 5000 per foot... also the two diving birds (orange things) should not be stuck into the mass like Chinese hair pins.

That's Ian... he's always happy....

Heres a good one!

So... Remember how I said the gundeck floods... now mind you its still 20 feet above the water... take a look at one of the photos of the back of the boat from the last couple of posts to get perspective... the gundeck is the opening closest to the water... below is a picture taken from the gundeck video system in a storm when we first got down here... Sorry its a little blurry...

Some more Nadia in the Falklands...

 Here are the tow point fairleads... this is where the streamers go into the water... not very good scale so imagine that that "block" is roughly the size of my torso...

 My instrument room again...

My cabin... Ive actually had to move in with my buddy Simon now though... because there is a large contingent of Indian Shipfitters on board doing repairs so they took over a lot of the extra space.  Usually you would have a private room but sharing happens sometimes...

 We have a decent gym onboard with weights and machines and such... this comes in handy down here where its too cold to go outside most of the time...

 Weights and a rowing machine...

 The heavy bag... It gets a fairly regular beating if you can imagine... usually around crew change or when things aren't going "smoothly"

 This is our day room... TVs, sofas, musical instruments... its where we hang out most of the time...

 We also have a game room with every videogame system ever made...

 Here is a random picture of the mizzen mast of the HMS Great Brittan... one of the significant shipwrecks of the Falklands.  It is right outside of the company house on the waterfront.

 Signal Cannons in the watetrfront park at Port Stanley... They use these to welcome the cruise ships into the harbor...

 This was just too funny not to take a picture of... This is on the wall of the Gun Club in Stanley...

 Here we are catching a small boat transfer (kind of a water taxi) to our vessel.  We have to wear survival suits and life jackets... boy its fun...

 The wall of a small pub (The Globe) in Stanley... kind of reminds me of the pub in "Shaun of the Dead" except instead of a Winchester it has an assault rifle and some rocket launchers from the war.... Lookout zombies...








a nice warm fire in a pub (the Globe) there is nothing better than a pub with a fireplace on the waterfront in the winter.

and I had to add this because I'm tired of looking at boats today... The two hottest girls I know... Me and Jamie's Wives in New Orleans on New Years Eve...

Y'all have fun... I hope you like these... Im sorry I don't post more often I actually didn't know anyone looked at these pages...

We're down for weather... imagine that so I had some time today...

Y'allhav'agudun

Falkland Islands Shifts

So after the holidays I shifted over to the M/V Asima for one rotation.  She was operating in the Falkland Islands as well so it wasn't much different but a change of food and crew made it interesting and I did get to meet a bunch of new folks. Now I'm back aboard the M/V Nadia and still in the Falklands... The Southern Ocean gets pretty tedious after 6 months let me tell you I'm just a little ready for some tropical sun.  We are supposed to be transiting the ship back north soon, so another crossing of the equator is in order... In the mean while I'll put in some images of our boat... 

so this kind of reminds me of the old Sid and Marty Croft series from the 70s "Sigmund the Sea Monster"... you just need to add some big googly eyes... Kelp is a real issue down here in the southern ocean... we typically pick up 2-5 tons per streamer.

Here are our streamers being deployed... these things hang out the back of the boat for 5 kilometers so you can imagine when I start talking about a tangle or a spaghetti monster... that it can be quite ugly...

 A view of the Streamer Deck... Notice the horizon

 Here is the Nadia with the full towed array deployed and collecting data.  When deployed these boats are the largest moving objects on the planet.

 This is looking into the streamer deck forward from the back... This is where we spend most of our "outdoor" time... deploying and recovering streamers.

 Here are the tailbouys for our streamers... These provide navigational data for the tail of the streamer cable so that we always know where the cables are in relation to one another. These little buggers look like little yellow submarines... in fact I sing that alot when working with them...

 Here is the birds eye view from the top forward mast looking aft...

 Again the full spread deployed we have the ability to pull 12 streamers up to 10km each...

 These are "birds" like little diving wings... these control the depth of the streamers and allow us to keep them vertically separated...

 These are the tow points looking into the giant winch drums on the streamer deck.  If you can imagine giant levelwind open fishing reels... here they are... look out for the Kraken...

 This is the tailbouy section of the gun deck... this is really close to the water and always floods in rough weather...

 The gun deck looking aft... where the seismic sources are (bolt guns)... this area like I said before floods quite regularly...

 The gun deck looking forward...

 The instrument room looking at Navigation on the right and Observers on the left.

The instrument room from the far end... my workspace is behind the stairs on the left.