Hello dear visitor, welcome to Jim Nelson's blog.
For better or worse,everything on this site is original. My cartoons just randomly occur to me, and my writing comes from my life experience. I hope that you have a pleasurable visit, perhaps a smile or a feeling of pleasant nostalgia, if my experiences mirror your own in some way. I am open for business, my contact details are on the contact page and I welcome any offers of publication or purchase. Thank you for visiting. |
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. Once in a blue moon, a very weak current to the north, the Guinea current, would for some reason unknown, dominate the Congo current and push it to the south. These periods would only last a matter of days, and would happen maybe twice a year. During these hiatus’s, all became calm. The water around Malongo cleared and the current from the south disappeared. There was no need for the head first entry and as soon as the diver left surface he could see the jacket and the seabed. There was a lot of marine life that we never got to see because of the usual poor visibility, manta rays, hammerhead sharks, tuna, the venomous lionfish and the painful nuisance spiny sea urchins that could fire their spines straight through mainframe and into the knee. When you can see them you can avoid them, but we all got speared at one time or another. In the murk that usually pervaded, nobody would stick an unprotected hand under a pipe or a piece of debris. Fire Worms: they look like a centipede and they hang around legs embraces of jackets doing whatever centipede -like worm would do. I was unlucky enough to get one stuck up the sleeve of my coveralls when I was working. In the water the pain was tolerable, but when I came out it became excruciating and I went into shock necessitating my medevaced by helicopter to the Malongo medical centre where I was given steroids. The worms leave their hairs in the skin; I could see them clearly, quite against my tanned skin. We didn’t realise at that time that the best way to deal with them is to scrape a knife blade over the affected area that will take a lot of the venomous barbs out. It’s a similar treatment for bee sting. As it was, mine were left in and active, pumping venom into me even though there was no venom sac obvious. Anyway I wasn’t in any state to debate the vebom delivery of Atlantic fire Worms. When the Geordie nurse who worked in the medical centre injected me with the steroid, my legs literally buckled, so I lay down for half an hour so and then I was grand. Advice for anybody working in an environment where fire Worms are found, bear in mind the knife blade along the hairs, it’ll save you a lot of pain. But like spiny urchins, rockfish and lionfish, avoid them if you can. After a day or two, the river would come back our world would become murky again. . Out at Takula however, the water was always clear and we didn’t need to torpedo headfirst through the top layer of fresh Congo River water. Unless of course we were dealing with a wild well. As Part of our overall maintenance schedule we dived every couple of weeks on the GOSP (Gas Oil Separation Plant) which, like subsea structures anywhere become artificial reefs and attract all sorts of marine life to them. It’s 150 feet to the bottom on the GOSP so as well as indulging my passion for marine life watching, I was getting paid depth pay as well. Just about everything from the smallest to largest was represented. In my early days in Malongo, all waste, edible and general debris was just dumped into the sea to be eaten by marine life, including sharks. On the first dive that I did there, I gave up counting at twenty and you could bet that there was a lot more than that. I often wondered whether Great Whites ever visited. After all they were ocean wanderers and Takula was over one hundred miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. I never saw one and I’m pretty glad that I didn’t. However out at Takula I saw the most amazing things. There was just so much marine life and at that time there was no fishing to speak of, only Congolese and Angolan fishermen in small boats fishing with line and hook. At different times great shoals of manta or leopard rays fly through the clear water like flocks of birds. Whale sharks, giant sunfish, barracuda, swordfish, grouper and hammerheads, all were visitors or residents. Many times I watched yellow fin tuna and barracuda round up tight shoals of fry, corralling them like sheep dogs and then darting in to feed like streaks of silver into the roiling mass, that folded around them like a living thing. The shoal rolled and swirled in three dimensions as the predators ate their fill. The predatory fish seemed to work cooperatively but I doubt that, and the millions of fry act like a single organism, which is an evolutionary adaptation. The Tuna grab individuals as they streak through the tight shoal, and barracuda slash left and right with their long sharp teeth, lacerating and ripping through the dense mass, hardly able to miss as they flash through the packed school. Whether the barracuda and yellow fin work in tandem or not, the event is truly a thing of breath taking beauty. To watch a whale shark pass over head or a shoal of ray fly by in the clear water, reminds one of one’s size and importance. One time I was working very, very hard trying to physically pull a drill head into a well casing. The rig had sent its string down to me to guide it in to the concave concrete entrance to the conductor. Unfortunately when they pulled the casing out and grouted the well they left a lip around the conductor upon which the drill head kept getting stuck. I had tried three or four times to take the string back up and down again, but every time the same thing happened. There was nothing else for it but to try to pull the drill head into the hole myself. So here was this hundreds of thousands of tonnes of metal drilling rig, dependent on little old me. I got them to pull the string back about a metre, I wrapped a webbing strap around the drill head and then around me. I braced my feet against the concave side of the chute, one leg either side of the string. Then instructing them to come down while I pulled like fuck. Just then a whale shark glided effortlessly past me, the drill string plopped into the hole at the same time, I think it was the shark ‘what did it’. Working for Oceaneering in Malongo was great, I loved it, and if the contract had lasted as long as everybody expected it to, I would have been still there.
0 Comments
Banana base, Zaire.
Malongo was Chevron's operational base for their offshore oil and gas production in 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. The unique diving conditions that we worked in everyday, was entirely down to the mighty River pouring into the Atlantic just south of us. The almost constant surface current and the brown water, through which we had to dive to get to our job, was caused by the freshwater Congo river, skimming over the salt water Atlantic Ocean, for many miles out to sea. In the 90s when I worked in Malongo, the kleptocratic dictator of what was in the past, and would be again in the future, the Congo; Joseph-Désiré Mobutu decided to change the name of the country and the name of the river, to Zaire. He told the world that he was changing the names to "de- Belgianize" his country. In effect the only two things that he did, was thoroughly confuse his own people and rob them blind. Notwithstanding all that, the name of the country and the name of the river was Zaire while I was there. There was an SPM almost full in the middle of the mouth of the Zaire River, and it fell within Chevron's remit in terms of maintenance, for some reason not known to us. This meant that every six weeks, we were required to go and ensure that all was well, and every two years, change the four huge shackles that held the chains which secured the Single-Point Mooring to the PLEM on the seabed. Normally those shackles would last many years, but because of the battering that the SPM took, Chevron's engineers figured that they would need to be changed so regularly. The routine inspection took 2 days; we would leave Malongo at 7 AM, arrive at Banana Base at 10 AM, steam up the river to the Customs headquarters, spend all that day trading with the poverty stricken local Congolese, and if we were clear to go to work for the following morning, we could be back in Malongo by 4:30 PM that afternoon. The customs post at Banana Base was a crumbling, Belgian colonial era series of continental style red tiled buildings, set on a spit of land on the north bank of the Congo/ Zaire River. There was a concrete quay, as poorly maintained as the surrounding buildings, with a rusting and dilapidated crane topping off the general look of decrepitude. As we turned in to the river pushing against the surge of it, the breeze died and an oppressive heat descended upon us. Great islands of vegetation skimmed swiftly past, rended from jungle somewhere upstream, now to be delivered into the Atlantic Ocean to wither and die. There have been stories of large animals inhabiting these islands, being swept out to sea, and seeing their size firsthand, I could believe it. The color of the water was so dark brown as to be almost black, filled as it was with the soil of the Congo. Out there on the seabed there must be a vast plain of rich alluvial dirt, built up over eons of deposits, where the river slows and releases its cargo. My colleagues had been here before, so they knew to have a few empty 45 gallon drums, old boots and old coveralls to trade with the people. I left them to it, not feeling terribly comfortable haggling with the impoverished population. I sat instead on the starboard aft Bullard, sketching. While I sat there, a dugout canoe with three young boys paddling, appeared suddenly out of the pervading browness of the river, they expertly brought the canoe alongside with their carved leaf shaped paddles. All three were naked except for old and faded shorts, and they offered ripe ears of corn and other vegetables eagerly to me. The scene would not have been strange to the protagonists of Heart of Darkness in the early nineteenth century. I indicated to them to "attendre" while I went to the galley and filled a sack with cartons of fruit juice and yoghurts, commodities which I was sure that those children had never seen, I didn't want anyone to see what I was doing so, I surreptitiously sneaked back out on deck and gave the bag of swag to the first young boy. I also fished out three five dollar bills from my wallet and gave one each to the three boys. Their leader again offered his produce to me, but I told him it wasn't necessary and they paddled away, blending quickly with the brown of the river. The trading on the port side of the vessel went very well. Four empty 45 gallon drums, a number of empty paint and mayonnaise tubs, and a selection of hardhats coveralls and boots had netted us three twenty-four bottle crates of hot Primus beer. The beer went in the deep freeze for an hour to cool it down and we went back to people watching. A young boy with a machete in his teeth climbed a Palm tree like an acrobat. He climbed right to the top, at least 60 feet off the ground to hack some of the broad fronds, for what was anyone's guess, a new roof for his house maybe? Then a surreal scene unfolded in front of us. The divers had conducted their business with this guy in a shiny shell suit. He seemed to be the man in charge and he was certainly the man with the beer. However, about an hour after the deal was done another guy, in an ill fitting khaki uniform showed up, and a very loud argument ensued between the two of them. I caught scraps of the rapidfire French and translated as best I could for the diving team, while the beer cooled. Monsieur uniform complained loudly to Monsieur shellsuit that it was he who should have done the trading with us. Monsieur shellsuit rebuffed this claim saying that Monsieur uniform was not there to make the deal. Monsieur uniform retorted that Monsieur shellsuit should have waited. Monsieur shellsuit told Monsieur uniform to fuck off, at which time M uniform began removing his, uniform, handing it to a boy next to him. Seeing this, M. Shellsuit did likewise, and surrounded by a cheering mob, the two Monsieur. Underpants' began to fight like schoolboys, with much attempted head locking and kicking, raising a great cloud of dust around them and the spectators. I suppose it was easy for us to smile wryly at this childish behavior, but that spectacle could have been fight for supremacy, a fight for survival. There was no real damage done to either fighter and when the winner began to dress after the contest, it turned out that it was Monsieur Uniform, who had re-established the status quo. Fully dressed, he came over to the quayside and with as much dignity as he could summon up, dusty and bloodied as he was, in French he addressed me, and once I had asked him to speak simply and slowly, he asked could we please drink all the beer as soon as possible and give the empty bottles and crates back to him. Sixty bottles of beer, how long would it take us to drink all that? Between the five of us that was twelve bottles to be consumed between that afternoon and the following morning at 6 AM. I told M. Uniform that we would try, and we certainly did. By the time our clearance came the following morning we were able to give all sixty bottles, empty back to M. Uniform. We hadn't actually drank it all, Jake our cook had given us a very large pot into which we emptied twenty-four bottles. We had a nice evening, Jake made a special dinner and the crew and the dive team, all had one or two bottles each. Customs clearance was a bit of a spectacle in itself. An army of customs clearance offices came on board to eat. Jake knew the drill, plenty of French fries and chicken nuggets. Large bowls of grub was served to the customs men who filled the galley. They all had leather satchels containing official -looking forms for filling out and stamping. They also had small carvings in their bags which they sold to us. Having emptied the bowls and sold their goods, they gave us clearance to go to work. The SPM was about a mile offshore, slightly towards the north bank of the river. When we got there, there was a lot of vegetation wrapped around the railings, but the current was so strong that any islands of vegetation sweeping down upon the SPM would simply be deflected around to continue its journey. The skipper brought us in on the lee side and backed up to the SPM, so that I could step across and secure our mooring line to the mooring bollards. J was the first diver and he would establish a downline to one of the chains, I was to be a diver number two and I was mighty glad that I wasn't diver number one. He went off head first with our downline and then did an inspection of two of the chains, leaving two for me. It was only 45 feet to the bottom, so there was no decompression time. Joe came back up the downline and before he managed to get himself onto the ladder, he was being violently washed under the boat by the current. I was advised to go headfirst, not bothering with the downline, so that's what I did. I launched myself like an arrow towards the underside of the SPM and after the initial push of the Congo against me; I came out in clear calm water below. I could still feel my umbilical being snatched at, but I was clear and in the beam of my hat light, I could clearly see all four chains and our downline. It was one of the easiest dives that I ever did in Angola. I could look up at the muddy water and ranging the current, racing across the top of the Atlantic, it was amazing. The bottom, known as a skirt, of the SPM was in this clear calm water and incredibly the large Bat Fish, who inhabit the underside of all the SPMs in Angola, on this one, swam upside down, as if the skirt was the seabed. It was a bizarre sight; I wondered was something to do with the darkness down there. We were done by lunchtime and back in Malongo by 4 PM. 7 August 1995.
I was on a boat called the Bay Service in Accra, Ghana to dive on a Chevron storage tanker anchored about 100 km offshore. From my diary It took us five days to steam up here from Malongo. On the way we passed Pointe Noire the coastal city of all the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Libreville in Gabon, Douala in Cameroon, Port Harcourt Nigeria, Benin, Togo and finally Accra. We steamed between the islands Sao Tome and Principe and the coast of Gabon. At the time I don’t recall Nigerian pirates being a great issue for us. Apart from our diving equipment chamber I don’t believe that we have anything attractive to pirates on board. Maybe we would have been worth something on the white slave market, but after three days bronzing we were not even very white. I think that Gene (the Queen) our captain, may have had a treasure chest somewhere with which to pay for bunkering and resupply, but how much would that be? Would we be worth attacking? We are taking fuel and supplies here in Accra as a first time that we have had to work since leaving Malongo. The weather is magnificent, not too humid and about 30° with a slight breeze. It’s a pity that we won’t get a chance to go ashore, we don’t have Visa’s. Ghana is one of the least dangerous of West Africa’s countries. We have taken on new deckhands for the job. They are Frankie and Seth Odati. I have written “the coolest Ghanaian deckhands in West Africa. Thinking back I remember them both very well, monsters of men in black as coal. Their first instinct for anything was to laugh and show their whiter than white teeth. They were good men but proved a little slow for Sid our diving superintendent. He lost his temper with them one day after a clamp had become wedged under our boat and the winch was tearing it in half, quite an achievement Kenny who was the diver in the water was well clear, so Sid took matters into his own hands and as was his usual M.O. came with his book knife slashing at the guide ropes attaching to the clamp. The situation was well under control long before Sid came out but, that was how Sid did things. I heard him angrily proclaim to the Odati brothers, between his slashing left and right, that this was why West Africa was three hundred years behind everyone else. Sid was “army barmy” and a great racist. I doubt that he is still alive but if he is he would struggle with the PC environment existing today. We did well out of that ten days, everyone got a few Mixed Gas bounce dives to just under 400 feet, for which we were paid $1.75 per foot. One of our number, Dave developed a throat and ear infection and couldn’t equalise, so Al and I did his dives, and split the $693.00 with him. Diving on this new site, where the ‘vis’ was very good, meant that I could keep my eyes peeled and indulge my obsession with sharks, and there were plenty of them, smallish reef and bull sharks and biggish, hammer heads. Professional divers were inculcated with the belief that hammerheads, no matter how big they were, had small mouths, and so couldn’t take a big bite out of something the size of the diver. I knew from my exposure to white tips and reef sharks the Persian Gulf that they were pussies; you just have to face them down. There was also the old wives tale that had stood me in good stead under the tanker in Ras Tanura, that sharks used an extra sensory power to determine that professional divers were a yellow headed, primarily metal animal, and so of no interest. As far as I know, that belief has never been challenged successfully, so it kept us as safe as a work basket or anti-shark cage. While we were working down from the surface within the air range (120 feet) we could look down at the circling sharks, barracuda and yellow fin tuna. And when working from the bottom we could look up at them. There were a lot of fish to look at. In terms of the job, it was pretty standard fare. Chevron in their rapacious greed, wanted to install a new riser for a well that they were planning to drill, and it was our job to install the riser clamps that would accommodate it. Sidney Grounsell loved jobs involving heavy lift winches and large pieces of metal. The clamps weighed in at 3000 kg and the idea was for a winch on the tanker to drag them off our deck while our deck winch acted as a ‘hold back’ wire, preventing the clamp from violently coming in contact with the existing risers. Those existing risers were clamped in place at 40 feet intervals, so we knew exactly where to fit the nine new riser clamps. Sidney was not one for delicacy so for the first clamp installation with Kenny Watts in the water, we simply hung the clamp on the two wires as per instructions from Sid. It’s not my intention to get into details about the job. Readers might find it interesting for thirty seconds, but it’s really only for divers. The first clamp became a cluster fuck very quickly, leading to the incident referred to above. Cluster fuck is one thing; dangerous cluster fuck is something very different. Kenny could have been killed when the clamp became hopelessly entangled in both wires and we cluster fuckidly attempted to recover it to our boat for re-rigging. It took a whole day, we destroyed one of the clamps, but no one was killed and we eventually came up with a method of rigging that would allow one diver to manoeuvre 3000 kg into position without killing himself. We did a lot of this sort of work in West Africa. It was inherently dangerous, but without paying attention and being aware of the dangers, it could very quickly become deadly. We spent a week there, we all made a tidy sum. 18th of August 1995. Malongo, Cabinda, West Africa. We finished in Ghana and we went back to base in Malongo. 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 and what 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 the 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. It was around midnight, with the rain was pelting down, that FLEC decided to lob some mortar rounds in on top of us. Make no mistake, this was a serious attack, the rounds were real and the shrapnel was hard. They landed near the heliport, in the upper part of the camp, behind the last accommodation block. The screaming of the mortar bombs as they travel through the air woke me up, and then I heard the crump, crump, crump as they exploded. Those of you who have read my rather long short story ‘My Military Career ‘will know that I am familiar with the noise that mortar bombs make when they hit the ground, so when I was assured that I hadn’t dreamt what I’d just heard, I woke Joe in the other side of the bungalow, told him what had happened and suggested that he get ready for a shout by somebody, so we got dressed in coveralls and boots, I fastened my belt with the multitool Leather Man pouch around my waist. Not much of a weapon, but I wasn’t intending to have to fight anyone, I then sat down to wait. There was no follow-up small weapons noise, so whether the camp was under sustained attack or not, I wasn’t sure. I smoked a couple of cigarettes before we heard movement outside and then came an insistent knocking on our door. I jumped up and opened it to one of the English security guys (mercenaries) who pretended to be boat drivers. I can’t remember which of them it was, but he was now armed with some small sub machine gun, and he was dressed in flak jacket and military field uniform. “We are evacuating the camp down to the dock, there are boats waiting to take everyone offshore”. “You pair are dressed already that’s fine, just take your cigarettes and something to read maybe, and then follow us” I remember the surreal feeling as I grabbed a couple of packs of cigarettes, and stuck my book down the front of my coveralls, after which I stepped out into torrential, rainy season, downpour, to follow this proponent of derring-do, with his machine gun and flak jacket. Driving to the dock down the hill, took a minute. However, running, semi-hunched over down that long winding hill, literally soaked to the skin, joining the general exodus of personnel, was a completely different ball game. On the way down, we met with all our colleagues, all of them were mystified as I was, all that is except our boss, who being 100% army barmy, and was loving it. Down past the football pitch, we went, past the racquetball courts, past the police barracks, past the lake that wasn’t there yesterday. It took fifteen or twenty minutes to get to the dock where the boats and pandemonium awaited. There were usually around three hundred and fifty people living on the camp at any given time, but in the darkness and torrential rain of that scary night, there seemed that everyone had brought three or four guests. There was only room for two boats at the jetty at any one time, and embarkation was possible only by man basket, there were no ladders and the boats were too far down to jump. Witches hat man baskets, can safely handle six people at one time, and the transfer of personnel had already begun when we arrived, but there was a lot of people waiting. It took several hours to transfer everyone from the dock to the four boats, and things were crowded on board. However there had been no further indications of an attack, so we steamed out and waited for the all clear to go back in. When everything had settled down and it was considered safe for us to go back, it was 11:30 AM, the emergency had lasted almost 12 hours. We were given the day off and the caterers somehow managed to resume normal mess hall services at 2 PM. We never really got a report on what had happened, so of course rumours abounded. Three mortar bombs had been fired from outside the perimeter wire into the heliport. There had been no deaths or injuries, and hardly any damage because the bombs landed on an area of wet grass. Shrapnel had rattled against the outsides of the chalets nearest to where they landed, but that was about it. The oil company’s response to FLEC’s quasi attack on the camp was immediate. Within days of the event a high-tech security intercom and alarm system had been installed, which would, in the event of any future attacks, not only alert us with its air raid warning type siren, but also tell us what to do; stay in place, evacuate et cetera. We were also issued with Kevlar blankets, Kevlar being the material that flak jackets are made from, the idea being that if we were told to stay in place, we should cover ourselves with the blanket, like a tent. As you can imagine there was much hilarity and guffawing surrounding these particular items. In the remaining years that I spent working there, there were no further attacks and the only time that the ‘incursion alarm’ was used was during drills, and one sultry Sunday afternoon when somebody spied a shark near the beach adjacent to the jetty. I’m not sure if it was designed as an anti-shark warning, but when the sirens went off, I was playing football and there was baseball, cricket, golf, tennis, bodybuilding, racquetball, drinking and sleeping ongoing. Of course everyone stopped what they were doing and looked quizzically at the nearest conical shaped speaker to them. When the announcement came that it was a shark in the water near the jetty, we quickly resumed whatever we were doing, knowing full well, that of all the activities being pursued that afternoon, swimming in the oil scummed, murderous surf at the beach, was the least likely. West Africa
Sperm whale at deepwater SPM It’s probably best not to try to examine two closely, Central and West African politics through the prism of European understanding. What passes as acceptable political behaviour in the sense of what that phrase means in Europe, cannot be applied in Africa. Colonial powers left the African continent in such a mess, that it may well take hundreds of years to clear up. Power in Angola, DRC or any West or Central African country is not decided upon by election, because the losers simply reject the result of any quasi democratic selection process and call upon their supporters, often numbering in the millions, to take up weapons and go to war. Few commentators consider the history of Africa when the contemporary situation is under discussion. Before the British, the French, the Belgians, the Germans, the Portuguese, and even the Italians arrived to rape every resource that Africa had to offer including its people, there was already a system in place. Tribal politics had been the norm for thousands of years, it was a system that the people understood. It could be harsh, there were wars, there was slavery and there was cruelty, but it was understood and it worked after a fashion. The lines delineating national borders on today’s maps of Africa, were put there by the colonial powers to carve things up like a pie between them, they mean absolutely nothing to the African people. The massacre in Rwanda and the tribal violence happening today in both Congo’s has its Genesis in the determination of one tribe or group to dominate another. Just as in Rwanda the violence originated because of the mutual suspicion and hatred between the Hutu elite and their Tutsi neighbours. Imagine if both the Tories and labour in Britain had huge well armed armies at their disposal, and after each election a bloodbath ensued, carried out by the loser’s supporters. These bitter civil wars are a seemingly integral part of life in Africa. No matter what brokering is offered by Russia, the united states, Europe or China, there will always be a proliferation of weapons from gun dealers with the ethics of slime mould, plying their trade on both sides of the line, and opposing vested interests, to keep the melting pot properly stirred up. Africa is rich in natural resources, oil, precious metals and gem stones, and everybody wants a piece of the action. The colonial powers, despite their vociferous protestations to the contrary, were not there to bring civilisation to the heathen; they were there because of these resources. And the oil, telecommunications, fish, precious metals and gem traders are out there now for the same reason. Corruption is the only political ideology in Africa, and whosoever controls those resources on the ground, gets to enrich themselves and their followers beyond their wildest dreams. When i worked in Angola it was well known that Mabuto’s regime in neighbouring Zaire was nothing more than a kleptocracy. Colonial infrastructure in his country collapsed while he chartered concord for shopping trips to Paris and his many wives travelled the world in chartered 747’s, buying things and bringing them back to his palaces, while his people starved. He kept himself in power by paying and equipping his presidential guard, and allowing his tribal relatives who occupied all the key posts in his administration to enrich themselves in turn. Under Jonas Savimbi in Angola, the annual rate of inflation was in the multiple thousands of percent. I have in my collection, of foreign paper money, a million Kwanza note. These were printed in a desperate attempt at quantitative easing without knowing what it was. I offered my friend Pedro five dollars for a million Kwanzaa note and he told me that it wasn’t even worth ten cents. I bought the note for five dollars anyway, the equivalent of fifty million Kwanzaa’s, at that moment’s exchange rate. Money was printed by the planeload in Belgium and sent to Angola for distribution, every week a higher denomination note until the World Bank stepped in and stopped the insanity. Ex-patriot workers for chevron and contractors were paid in dollars and a fixed rate, however Angolan workers, by law, had to be paid in Kwanzaa’s. On Friday afternoons they left the pay office with boxes of notes and went straight to chevron commissary to buy, cooking pots, plastic water containers, cups and maybe some electrical goods, anything that could be resold quickly in the market in Cabinda. The price in the commissary was fixed and exchange rate between Kwanzaa and dollar set each day. By the time they came to sell their fridge or whatever the following day it had doubled in price, so in effect they had doubled their wages in one day. The commissary must have been losing money hand over fist, but i suppose chevron felt that it was a way of keeping their Angolan workers relatively happy with their pay. Foreign currency and consumer goods was king. Pedro was my guy for African art and carvings. I was happy to pay twenty-five or thirty dollars for a nice hand carved mask, a painting or a statue, they made exotic gifts for Elaine and our wider family’s. Pedro probably paid five dollars or even less from the market in Cabinda, but that’s what trade is. Each Angolan worker was a point of contact for any number of expatriates and the trade was in practically everything. There were riskier commodities to be traded. African grey parrots were available for fifty dollars in Angola and could be sold in the UK for five times that amount. Baby monkeys were bought on the camp and sold to pet stores in Europe or sold on exotic pet websites for large amounts of money. Uncut gemstones were also available from the locals for a pittance compared to their worth in Europe. Some ex-patriot workers made a lot of money from their trades, but there was a huge risk involved. If caught with live animals in a European or American airport, of course the animal was confiscated but the fines for smuggling were huge, and there was a risk of arrest and incarceration. The same went for uncut gemstones, but the danger with them was being caught in angola or any of the African countries, if they had you for that, and it didn’t matter where the stones came from, you were going to pay a lot, and you were going to a hellhole prison, possibly for months, or until your embassy managed to secure your freedom. Parrots and monkeys were smuggled in the hard cardboard tubes that maps or posters were stored in. The poor creatures were dosed with Valium to keep them quiet for the flights home. I knew people who engaged in this cruel trade for profit, and I would have reported them to customs if the penalties had not been so severe. Even if customs police found African goods like masks in your bag upon which there was no export duty, they tried to extort something from you. A trick for travelling in west Africa was to keep single dollar bills in every pocket for ‘bribes’, because whatever you took out of your pocket to ‘dropsy’ ‘to ‘’ grease the rails’, whether it was fifty, twenty, ten, five dollars or one dollar, that was the amount, there was no change given. Also another trick was to leave something new but cheap on top of your clothes and goods in your bag, so that when they opened it the first thing they saw was the item, which they invariably admired, and which you then offered as a ‘cadeau pour vous’ ‘presente para você’ Or ‘a gift for you’ depending on where you were, and which ensured that the contents of your bag would not be scrutinised further. Another trick was to leave something new, but cheap on top of your clothes in your bag. When the ‘customs guy’ opened your bag the first thing he saw was the item, which was invariably admired, and which you then offered as a ‘cadeau pour vous’ or ‘presente para voce’ or ‘a gift for you’ depending on where you wear, and which ensured the contents of your bag would not be scrutinised further. Those at the top in many of the West and M sorry length and adopted for standard so your posts that fully in their) there are the car parking for the shame he took to warm them thank you shift that, this can id African countries gorged themselves on the riches given them by those who wanted the natural resources of their country. Whilst building palaces and buying the latest high-performance cars and weapons for the armies that kept them in power, pretty much ignored the plight of their own people and much of the country. The result being, that whatever infrastructure was put in place by the colonial powers was falling apart and the vast majority of their people were living in abject poverty. The city of Cabinda was a typical African shit hole were 99% of the people lived in hovels of breezeblock and rusting corrugated iron, cooking on open fires, without electricity, water or sewage. The only buildings with services were those built and maintained by chevron or the governor’s palace, the administrative buildings and the mayor’s official residence. The big flashy 4x4 cars in the city were invariably associated with those who occupied or ‘worked’ in those buildings. These functionaries swanned around in their big cars wearing flashy suits, ray ban sunglasses, gold Rolex watches and sharp shoes, doing absolutely nothing. If they were doing something, the place would not be a shit hole. One time, when our Fokker fifty was delayed in Luanda, we spent several hours waiting in Cabinda. A shipment of food aid arrived on a huge Russian cargo plane; there were pallets of what seemed to be cabbage, unloaded nearest the terminal building. Outside behind wrought iron gates there was a large crowd of women, most with babies wrapped in shawls clinging close to their mothers. Soldiers with lengths of hose, beat these women and babies mercilessly if they tried to get in through the narrow gap in the side of the main gate. It was insane for foreign nationals to stand by while such barbarity took place, but we had no choice, there was many soldiers and they were all armed with ak-47s. I often suffer bouts of PTSD concerning that scene, starving women and children desperate to get access to the food on the runway, being beaten by their own armed forces. Some bureaucrat’s party arrived in several shiny black SUVs and were ushered into the airport by these heavily armed soldiers. A gold bejewelled guy in a sharp snow-white short sleeved shirt, Gucci belt, Armani suit trousers and at least Gucci, sharp toed and gleaming black shoes, alighted from one of the vehicles, smiled at us expats as if we were in some way supporting what was happening there, cast a cursory glance over the pallets of aid, remounted his car and disappeared. Our Fokker fifty arrived shortly thereafter, so we never got to see what happened to the food. Another time Pedro told me that his wife had had a baby, of course i was delighted for him and when i came back to work I brought a suitcase full of baby clothes that our children had used, thinking that he would be pleased to have them. When i gave him the suitcase, he did look delighted but when he opened it and saw that it was all baby clothes, his delight turned to obvious disappointment, and he asked in French. “ah jimmy, où est ma ceinture, mes lunettes de soleil” I said “pour la bebe.” He said “la bebe et mort” I later heard that he sold the baby clothes at a market in Cabinda. The corruption at the top and the subsequent collapse of normal governance encourages corruption at all levels. The ordinary people of Africa have to scrabble hard, just to stay alive and of course looking sharp is part of that. This story is about diving, not about governance in West Africa. I had my most amazing underwater experience whilst working for Oceaneering in Angola. Part of our job as the Malongo diving team was maintenance of the deep water SPM’s and PLEM’s (pipe line end manifold) these dives were big payers for us because they were deeper than 120 feet, so we used mixed gas, replacing the nitrogen naturally occurring in air with helium and we got paid £ Stg 1.62 per foot from the surface, so one of the SPM’s at 305 feet was worth £ Stg 400.00 sterling and the other at 375 feet, just over £ Stg 600.00. Under normal circumstances we checked them every two weeks, but if a tanker was coming in to load we would have to go and open the valve on the seabed. Indeed that was the circumstances that found me at 375 feet breathing Heliox and talking like Donald duck opening the gate valve in preparation for loading. As i recall it took one hundred turns on a large wheel to ensure that the gate was fully open. To make sure, of the count, we had blue polypropylene rope tied at one point on the wheel so that we could count each turn as the rope passed the 12 o’clock position. It was a big wheel, so it took quite an expending of energy to put it through one hundred turns, and by the time I had, I was breathing heavily, and so I took a few moments to catch my breath. At that depth, the water is very clear, and because sun light has long since been filtered out, there is little or no marine growth or fish life. As I sat there on the edge of the PLEM, blowing bubbles, i became aware of something other than me in the water. My hat light penetrated about six or 8 feet so I looked towards where I felt the other something to be and thought that i could see something. In hindsight all through the dive i could hear the clicks of what could be dolphins or whales as they communicated with each other. Now i could hear very distinct and very close clicks. I had to do something quickly because Sid would soon call upon me to get ready to leave bottom and on a mixed gas dive seconds counted. I was afraid that I went too far from the PLEM that I would get lost and those the only safe way I had of ascending, so I looped my umbilical around the valve wheel and went towards the shape. I had barely left the PLEM when i could see clearly that it was a sperm whale, a baby sperm whale, it was only about 10 feet long and it was lying on the bottom, not moving. Its great saucer of an eye followed me as I moved towards it, and I could immediately see that it had a piece of old-fashioned hemp netting, around its left ventral fluke, with a buoy keeping the irritant tight under where it joined the whales skin. It was a simple task for me to reach up, pull the scrap of net down and release it and as soon as I had done so the magnificent animal, without effort, left me. As I lost sight of it, the call came from above “okay Jimbo, get ready to leave bottom” I just had time to scramble back to the PLEM when he said “leave bottom” As I ascended and while I did my long water stops, I wondered about that strange encounter between whale and human. Sperm whales have large brains even in comparison to their huge bodies, and we know virtually nothing about how sophisticated their thinking is. Perhaps they know who we are and without getting very close they, could know about our humanity. Maybe they observe, invisible to us in the darkness down there, and wonder about these yellow headed black bodied animals who occasionally visit their world , but who never stay long. Was I observed as I ascended? Out in that great blue world that we barely comprehend, never mind, understand. Are there “Mind’s immeasurably superior to ours” Did that young sperm whale take a gamble, that with my dexterity I could rid it of an irritating piece of flotsam, or did it know somehow that I would? Its eye as it followed me had real intelligence behind it. I know that that story is not readily believable, my own family have difficulty believing me, but it’s true. Capt Ahab’s white whale had vengeful intelligence; my whale had compassion and gambled on mine. After our early morning call to Chevron, we drove to the dock to board our diving boat, at that time an anchor handler called the Sutton Tide, on to which the diving containers, compressors and diving gas were craned on and off as required.
As we steamed out of Malongo dock, Joe and Dave explained our daily dive routine. Normally we would be engaged in an ongoing debris removal and inspection program on each one of the hundreds of Chevron jackets and platforms. There were only three of us who dived, and repet diving was not allowed by Oceaneering, so that was three air dives a day, two in the morning and one after a pretty long, up to 3 hours, lunch from 11:30 AM. That was bronzing or sleeping, or both, time. n ‘Normally’ meant about 60% to 70 of the time, but as we were the only Chevron diving team, between Zaire and Ghana, there were times when we could be sent anywhere, do anything, underwater. That first day, Sid excused me from diving, so that I could watch how Dave and Joe went about it. I would be standby diver for the day. The water was warm down to 60 or 70 feet at that time of year so they wore coveralls instead of wetsuits, just making sure that gloves and cuffs were taped up, there was some nasty stinging beasts, jellyfish, bearded fireworms, stonefish, lionfish, cone snails and spiny sea urchins in these waters and ‘vis’ was not always something to be dependent upon. The water was a dirty brown and seemed to be travelling very fast even when we were stopped and tied up to the first platform of the day. Actually, the first time I saw platform in Angola, I thought that somehow it was moving because the current was so strong, it appeared that the structure had a bow wave. I watched, aghast as Kenny first, Dave second and the Joe launched themselves, Mark Spitz like into the fast flowing soup. Each held tightly onto the brass handle on top of the helmet with their right hand, and the neck yoke with their left, and away they went. I was assured that once you broke through that top 10 feet of Congo River water, that all will become clear. Once your initial dive was in the direction of the structure, then you would see it once you come into the calm water below. Joe told me that he was horrified when he saw it first as well. Okay I could see how it was done, grasp the mechanics of it, and I hoped that tomorrow I would be able to emulate my colleagues, choking down twelve years of doing it differently. We did some mad stuff in Malongo, like diving in headfirst, so that your downward momentum would overcome the surface current from the Congo River, not far south of us. Oceaneering regulations stipulated that divers use a work basket to travel to and from the job, but that was just not practicable in the waters around Cabinda. Baskets and divers going in feet first were just washed away like a piece of flotsam. Headfirst was the only way stop Once you burst through the top 10 feet, which was actually mostly freshwater skimming over the salt water beneath, you emerged into relatively clear, but dark and calm water below. With a hat light, there is wasn’t brilliant, but it wasn’t zero either. Several times, while I worked there between 1992 and 1996, the Oceaneering safety guy came to visit, and wagged his head resignedly, when he witnessed our unique mode of entry. In 1993, Oceaneering Aberdeen won a very large contract for inspection and MPI on a selection of jackets and platforms on the inshore fields operated by Chevron. The contract was worth millions to Oceaneering, and despite us technically working for the same company, Aberdeen didn’t ask us about conditions. They sent one of their all singing all dancing diving boats down from the North Sea, with the intention being that it would act as ‘Mother Ship’ to a fleet of smaller boats that would tie up to the platforms or jackets, and deploy their inspection divers from them. Apparently, after overcoming some logistical problems tying up to the boat landings of the structures, the current was deemed as too strong to put divers in, so the job went into ‘Waiting for Current’ mode, as would be normal if the tide was lunar, it wasn’t. After two days with no abatement, and no diving, Chevron demanded to know when they were going to start work; Oceaneering told them that they would start diving operations once the tide had slacked off. Chevron sacked them, and gave the job to a South African company, whose divers were even more cavalier than we were. Aberdeen should have asked us, not everywhere is the North Sea. That was the beginning of the end for our contract; once Chevron found that the Yarpies would do anything, and for a fraction of what Oceaneering Houston were charging for us. the writing was on the wall. It took Chevron a couple of years to end the longest running diving contract in the world, but September 1996, end it they did. My four years there was nothing compared to Sid’s, Dave’s and Kenny Watts twenty-five years, Brian had nineteen years, Stuart fifteen, Joe ten, and Dave seven. It didn’t take very long for me to settle in to life in Malongo. I started to run up and down the hill after work on my second day there, but apart from that the schedule was as described earlier, always the same, familiar, comforting. There was a surveyor; Tony who worked for Fugro in the next workshop to ours. He had a huge interest in football and ran irregular football matches on Sundays when he could form an ex-Patriot team to play the Angolan police based on the camp to protect us from FARC, the local rebels determined to achieve independence from Angola, for Cabinda, or a team of locals from those who worked on the camp. Tony had, some years previously, convinced Chevron to build a floodlit football pitch down there the squash court and the police barracks. He even got them to build bleachers. When he heard that there was a new diver, he came into enquire whether I played football, and as football would be my preferred way of keeping fit, I signed up immediately. He had organised a match for the coming Sunday at 3 PM and had printed off flyers which he distributed throughout the complex, seeking players and supporters. There was a core of about six guys who played regularly, with me it was seven and hopefully three or four more would show on the day. Saturday nights and all day Sunday marched to a different drumbeat in Malongo. Chevron was unbelievably generous with prizes and beer for any social activity outside of work hours Tennis, squash, darts, pool, baseball, cricket, basketball tournaments received the same largess as did our football, indeed any activity was generously bestowed with prizes and ice cold beer. The last dive on Friday afternoon was usually to catch enough Atlantic crayfish to constitute a crayfish boil up at our workshop on Saturday night. The company provided several cooler chests full of cold beer. Sid would invite all his mates, and the Americans that we dealt with on a daily basis, all from Louisiana and all delighted to partake in pulling crayfish apart and sucking the meat from their legs and antennae. Eight crayfish was enough to feed everyone likely to attend and fat Charlie. Sid had this huge pot in the shop, which held enough water into which eight big crayfish could be comfortably immersed, once the water was boiling. For this he employed the oxyacetylene torch. He would stand, army surplus shirt open to the navel, whitish grey body hair bristling out from his torso, army shorts bare legs similarly hirsute, beer in one hand, yarning to everyone, torch in the other, blazing away against the side of this stainless steel cauldron full of rapidly boiling water. When boiling, the crayfish were unceremoniously tumbled in out of the ‘lobby bag’, the briefest hiss of escaping gas, the only indication that they had gone from living and inedible to dead and delicious. Our Saturday evening soirée’s usually broke up around 10 PM. Sunday started at the same time as every other day but when we went to the workshop shortly after 6:30 AM we stayed there until noon when we knocked off. If there was something to do such as chip and paint a compressor (again) or carry out maintenance on diving equipment. Then Sunday morning was the time for it. Usually it was pretty relaxed and laid back. Lunch on Sundays was served in a smaller mess hall and consisted mainly of salads and cold cuts of meat. The jolly Lebanese barman acted as MC, announcing that the best Caesar salad this side of New York was being served. On my first Sunday in Malongo, in blazing hot conditions I played three sets of tennis with Dave my fellow diver, and then another three sets as a doubles team against Kenny and Steve, Sparrows crane mechanics. By the time we were finished tennis, it was time for football for Dave and I with a beer and a cigarette at half time and quite a few beers and more cigarettes after the final whistle. I was exhausted! I went back to the room, had a shower and slept from 5 PM until Joe woke me up at 7:45 PM when he was going out to dinner. Dinner on Sunday the barbecue, steaks and jacket potatoes, followed by a couple of beers in the bar and bed by 11 PM. Chevron was unbelievably generous with beer for any social activity outside of work hours. There was a nine-hole golf course for instance, where a golf tournament was held every Sunday afternoon sponsored by Chevron, who also donated two cooler chests of beer per hole for competitors. Golf didn’t really interest me, but there was a set of clubs in the room left over from some previous occupant, and once or twice if there was no football, I did play nine holes and drank a great deal of beer. The first time I played, I was dreadful, scuttering every drive and utterly hopeless from the fairway and on the green (although for the last four holes, I thought that I was getting better, but in fact I was just getting drunker) The second time I was a bit better and I suppose in the four years I might have played eight or nine times, and I became, not too bad. Whilst on the subject golf, there were two hazards of the course and I don’t mean golfing ones. The first was a flare on the fairway, between the eighth and the ninth hole, which intermittently blazed an angry mix of flame, gas and oil. When the flare was in spate, it was necessary to play through it, blackening your ball and making it difficult to find on the other side. The second hazard was snakes. West Africa has quite a few of the most venomous snakes on earth, Gabon vipers, black mamba and hooded Cobra, to mention just a few. One time while playing late on Sunday afternoon, and raking through undergrowth looking for my ball, I hooked out a very angry serpent, its species I did not hang around to determine. The neurologist showed me the scans and the lesions, and for the first time I luckily shipping experience fully understood what a bend was. There were physiological consequences.
He explained that over time, the tissue would repair itself and scar over, but until then, there could be no diving. Luckily I could fall back on my shipping experience and I very quickly job in Kertsten Hunik, a shipping company very similar to the one that I had left to switch careers, Reindear Shipping. After about six months, my Neurologist gave Algosaibi the final report on my injuries and very soon after that, I was contacted by a firm of solicitors in Rathgar, telling me that they had been authorised to give me a cheque for 25,000 pounds, Irish pounds, on receipt of my agreeing, by appending my signature to a contract, indemnifying Algosaibi against any further claim. I had expected to go back to work with them after two years, and to be honest I hadn’t even considered legal action or compensation. Obviously they had had other ideas. I signed the paper and took the cheque. So ended my association with Algosaibi and Saudi Arabia, mostly it had been a reasonably pleasant experience. Certainly underwater, I saw things there that other places in the world would struggle to compete with. They had been very fair with me, there was even a clause in the termination contract which stated, that they would pay for the MRI scan in two years time, and that they would contact me to arrange it. They paid all the medical expenses, and MRI scans in those days were expensive, very expensive. They even kept me on salary for all the time that I was home, up to the final neurology report. I would certainly have gone back after my time off. Some of their methods were amateurish, and quite a few of their personnel were incompetent. I was at leading driver/supervisor rank, so pretty soon; I would have gotten my own inspection crew and boat, which I would have run professionally. Of course it was a very long time away from home, but decent money and for every year you spent working in Saudi Arabia, the government gave you five thousand dollars, payable when you’ve finished your last contract, so it could build up into a sizeable pot over the years. It didn’t happen though. The two years ‘on the beach’ flew in. With the settlement from Algosaibi, we moved house, to a new build, three bed semi, again in Palmerstown, and we had another baby, Caoimhe, a daughter. Unfortunately the builder of Palmerstown Manor, ran into financial trouble and left us living on a building site for a while. The houses that he finished were fine, but we were surrounded by, what amounted to a ghost estate. Eventually another builder took over and finished the job, but by which time we were gone down to Wexford. Towards the end of the two years, Algosaibi true to their word, arranged another MRI scan, which conclusively showed the lesions as having scarred over, and my Divers Medical was reinstated. Almost contemporaneously 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 Cabinda. In those days Sabena, Belgium’s state airline, flew daily to Luanda, the old capital of the Belgian Congo. My erstwhile colleague told me where I might meet the crowd (none of them divers) of Irish mechanics, air-conditioning and electrical technicians in Brussels airport. It was a bar of course, and a more convivial group one could not meet. By the time we boarded the Sabena flight to Luanda, I knew most of the ins and outs of the camp in Malongo. It was important that one did not check ones bags through in the normal way because nobody went into the arrivals building in Luanda. Chevron had their own Fokker fifty or Learjet sitting on the runway, waiting for the international flight to arrive. Oh fuck how hot it was in Luanda, it was the middle of the night but it felt like precipitation of 200%, and the mosquitoes. Cabinda bound passengers transferred from one flight directly to the other; there were no customs or immigration formalities. Oh fuck, fuck, how hot it was in Luanda was that anything to how hot it was in Cabinda. There it was early morning, the mosquitoes were still on shift and precipitation felt something around 800%. It was a different heat to Saudi Arabia; this was full of water. The airport, what I saw that on my first arrival, it looked like an abandoned building surrounded by jungle and the huge palm fronds that one sees; in jungles. There were two, Vietnam era helicopters sitting on the tarmac. They weren’t painted in camouflage colors, they were painted yellow which was the color for the company, I think it was northern helicopters, Canadian. The pilots were Vietnam era, and no question! Mike recognized me as a new body and welcomed me with a hearty handshake. Our gear went into one of the choppers, and bodies into the other, and In what seemed a whirlwind time, the helicopters took off for the fifteen minute ride to the camp in Malongo. I had no seniority whatsoever, so I was in the middle, barely able to see anything of the countryside over which we flew. I did see a broad horseshoe Bay flanked with jungle on one side and dirty Brown Ocean on the other, and then as the helicopters banked to make their approach, I could see something of the tidy arrangement of Chevron’s installation, but mostly more jungle dense and green as far as the eye could see. As we came into land it was hard not to make a direct comparison to Vietnam. With the chopping sound of the rotors and the flattening of those green jungle fronds by their down draft, we could have been landing on a, coolish LZ. Listening closely, one could almost make out the strains Die Valkyrie. Both helicopters landed together, and while we disembarked from ours, the bags were being thrown out of the other. Aussie Michael, a diesel mechanic from Australia and Naas, my guide thus far, told me that my back to back, Stuart will collect me from the heliport. True enough, a mullet-haired, unbelievably freckly, taciturn and sloppily dressed diver sat in a Ford double cabbed V something ridiculous, making no effort to identify himself, or me. By process of elimination, I worked out that he was there for me. I introduced myself and my hand, which he limply took in his. I found out later that he was a bad humor, because he had been expecting another week on over time. The fact that I was recruited and dispatched so quickly did not suit his plan. He brought me to the mess hall for lunch after which we drove down to the dock from where I would pick up the rest of the team when the boat came in at 4:30 PM. He then showed me where I would live for the next six weeks. Chalet 15A, each cabin divided into two one-man berths, sharing a bathroom, not too shabby at all. The air-conditioning unit worked very well, and there was a fridge. The only criticism that I could find was that it was plastered in motorcycle photographs. I just could not understand the obsession that many of the men offshore had with cars and motorcycles. I made a mental note they had to be either taken down or covered up, maybe not this trip that would be a bit pushy, but soon. Stuart, for that was his name, instructed me, that once I was appropriately dressed in shorts, T-shirt and the safety shoes that had been sent me at home. We will then drive to the workshop. Then I will drop in back here to make ready to go home, and then at 3:30 PM come back and pick him up to drop in to the heliport. Then back to the workshop, to wait until 4:27 PM when I should go and pick up the rest of the team from the port. I dropped Stuart to the heliport, just as the helicopters were loading for the return trip to Cabinda. Then I went to the workshop, most importantly made a part of Kona coffee, and had a mooch around for an hour. At 4:30 PM I was waiting at the dock when the diving boat came in and I met for the first time the diving crew. All nut brown and dressed as I was in shorts, T-shirts and safety shoes. It was like meeting old friends, there was much backslapping and handshaking. Sid, Joe and Dave. It didn’t take me long to fit in, first I had to get a tan. They were great guys, very friendly and welcoming. Back in the workshop on that day one, we drank coffee and ate Saltine crackers and tinned sardines from the store in the huge American refrigerator, which was crowned full of food and fruit drinks. At 6 PM, Sid, the superintendent, stuck his head around the door and said “Right lads” at which point we all rose, took our shoulder bags and tripped out to the Ford pickup by the drive up to our rooms. Joe was Spanish, and I shared chalet fifteen, me in A and Joe in B. There was now a two hour wait for dinner, during which time the personnel went to the gym, played tennis, ran or walked the road down the steep hill to the port and back up, played squash or just chilled. That first evening I chose just to chill. Joe explained that it was normal for the outgoing person to leave a few beers in the fridge, but Stuart never did, so Joe, who didn’t drink or smoke, had bought some for me. So after my shower, I sipped a cold Carlsberg beer, listened to some music old Maxell magnetic tapes, a shopping bag of which I had brought out with me, and wrote a letter home. At 8 o’clock, Joe accompanied me to the big Mess Hall where dinner and breakfast was served and it was big! Dinner was served from eight until ten and the hall could accommodate a hundred people, maybe even more. All the different groups tended to eat at different times so there was never a huge congestion. There was always a menu on the entrance door, and there was always three choices of three course dinners every day, plus a huge salad bar. The food was wonderful. The divers, the Irish mechanics and techs and the crane mechanics always ate together, so again another round of introductions to people whose name I immediately forgot. After dinner, we all repaired to the bar, adjacent to the Mess Hall where four beers per person, per evening was available for two dollars, from the ever jolly Lebanese man who tended bar. As many cartons as you wished, of American cigarettes were sold here, for a few dollars, also. Darts and pool were available for those who wished to partake. And there was a piano at which Sparky, an American Chevron electrician and excellent honky-tonk piano player, gave impromptu recitals. Mostly we all sat around in the comfortable chairs and chatted. That pretty much was the day time drill for every day but Sunday. Tuesday was the arrival day so I had another four days to find out what happened then. Breakfast was served between 4:30 AM and 6:30 AM. We were expected at the truck with our day gear, ready to go offshore at 6:30 AM, so that first morning, I ate breakfast at 5 AM, when nobody that I knew was in the mess. The breakfast menu was again, vast. From full English, American, Mexican to European, it was all there. I went back to the room, where Joe was just getting up and heading out for breakfast. I was a bit early, but it was my first full day. 6:30 AM at the truck, 6:32 AM at the workshop, another pot of Kona coffee, not much chatter, sit quietly drinking and smoking until Sid, stuck his head around the door and said “right lads” at which we all trooped out to the truck for the drive down to the port. Cabinda is just 5° south of the equator so there’s no change in the length of day and night, year-round. When we trooped out to the truck, it was always dark, and by the time we would get to the Chevron operations office, three or four minutes later, it was always bright, and, when it wasn’t the rainy season, the big orange orb of the sun would have popped up above the horizon behind us. The Chevron office was where the superintendent received his orders of the day from ‘Fat Charlie Wampaugh’ or ‘Hank Yagger’ two of the most Louisiana, coon assed, tobacco chewing, disgustingly spitting, good old boys, imaginable. As well as orders of the day, the boss would pick up any mail for the team that had come in from London. My head was swimming just a little. After all that I had experienced (mostly unbelievably good) in my new environment that I had experienced since leaving home two days ago. Everyone I met, with the exception of my back-to-back, whom I would not have to interact with, apart from the couple of hours on crew change days, was so friendly and welcoming. The living conditions in the camp were almost too good to believe, it’s like I had died and gone to offshore heaven. In 1987 we bought our first house, using the proceeds of the Juaymah trestle windfall to secure a mortgage.
Elaine was in late pregnancy with our first child, so I did a very well paid nixer for Oceaneering International, while home on leave from Saudi Arabia. My day rate while with them leapt to 850 pounds sterling day, this was the big-pay packets rumored at when I trained for the profession initially; very handy money if I could do my shift in a month. A huge pod of dolphins skimmed the surface below us on the way out in the helicopter, it’s hard not to feel uplifted in the presence of these ever smiling cetaceans. That job was a totally different ball game (I was going to say kettle of fish, but). When working we wore hot water suits, and Oceaneering was all together, much more professional than Algosaibi Diving and Marine Services. The diver was delivered directly to the job via a basket lowered from the surface, and instead of being festooned with tools hanging from every available D-ring of his waistcoat; everything needed came down separately in a work basket. The water was still crystal clear, but very cold; those hot water suits were needed. As in the Persian Gulf, marine life abounded around the Marathon Alpha and Bravo platforms about 30 miles off the coast. Our job was to clean both platforms followed by an inspection programme of critical nodes, from the surface down to the seabed at 370 feet below. From the surface down to 10 m of any structure in water, is known as the Splash Zone. It’s the most difficult area to work in for divers. The swell and heave , even in relatively flat conditions, will make life very difficult and uncomfortable as you hang on for dear life, while trying to do your job. Because sunlight it is strong at the surface and penetrates to a depth of about 20 feet, it is also the area of most marine growth buildup. Mussels proliferate in colder water and even in the short space of a year since the last cleaning programme; every brace and leg was covered in about 500 mm of them, from the Splash Zone down to 20 Ft depth. Ha ha Because the platforms had to be cleaned to relieve them of the weight and drag of hundreds of tonnes of mussels, we had a ‘mussel bashing’ team and an inspection team. I was one of the inspectors so I got to wait while the heavy cleaning was going on. We could watch from the surface as, just like in the Persian Gulf, a rare feast was provided for the local marine inhabitants of these artificial reefs. Shoals of mackerel, cod, halibut and sea trout appeared, from our vantage point to be attacking the diver as he cleaned, smashing up the colonies of crustaceans. Big crabs and Atlantic lobsters came from every nook and cranny to partake of the unexpected feast. A pilot whale showed up a few times, coming in very close to the diver, perhaps attracted by the light or the noise or the food in the water, or maybe just having a look-see. It took about a week before things were ready for the inspection part of the programme, and on my first dive the beautiful animal came in around the diagonal and horizontal braces, to have a look at me and me at it. There was a lot of talk about pods of killer whales in the area, but we never saw any. I worked there for three weeks, earned a lot of money, enjoyed the experience but I went home when the expected day of the birth of our baby arrived. Daire was born a couple of days later and I was lucky enough to be there for the birth, which was jaw droppingly incredible. A week after, his birth I went back to Saudi Arabia for another one hundred and ten day trip. When I left home, Daire was a tiny baby, but one hundred and twelve days later, he was sitting on my wife’s knee, entertaining those waiting at the old arrivals area Dublin airport with his winning ways, smiling and waving. In 1990 I became the victim of an idiot who couldn’t count and who didn’t understand Nitrox decompression tables. The consequences of which, was that I got a rather serious bend, and my diving medical, which was in effect my permit to dive, was revoked for two years. I had been engaged in an MPI survey on Zuluf gas separation platform GOSP. It was summer, so too bright to carry out MPI during the day. It was a succession of unfortunate events that led to me suffering the decompression incident. The weld that I was inspecting was on an X node at 75 feet. The first part of my dive went without incident. I cleaned the weld and set up the magnetic measuring tape and idents for my datum points. When all was ready I called for my permanent magnet and the ink bag to be sent down via the work line. However, when my gear arrived the heavy magnet had become wrapped around the bag, squeezing it empty and useless. I reported this to the surface, but instead of just taking the bag back up on the downline to refill it, my supervisor ‘Mac’ ordered me back to the surface with the bag to have it refilled. There is a danger here that I could get overly technical in explaining ‘No Decompression Time’ ‘Nitrox tables ‘and ‘Surface Interval’ but I’m not going to. In professional diving one must have absolute faith in one’s supervisor, whether or not you like them as a person has nothing to do with it. Your life is in their hands and that is not an over dramatization, if he on the radio gets it wrong, the diver could literally pay with his life. I have named my antagonist here, but I will probably take the name out as I edit this manuscript. I didn’t like him, he was an arse, and I suspected that he was taking steroids to bulk up during his time offshore. However he was running the dive, he had the decompression tables and the stopwatch, so while I felt maybe that I had been in the water longer than the ‘no deco’ time, I trusted him. That was the first of the unfortunate events. I came up to the surface and tried to hand the bag to the deck diver who met me at the ladder. Unfortunately his glasses were completely fogged over, because of the almost 100% humidity in the heat of a Saudi night at sea, made a wild grab for the bag and pulled the nozzle off. The bag had to be repaired and refilled while I waited on the dive ladder. I did ask more than once about my surface interval and no decompression time, but he became short tempered with me and dismissed my reservations. It seemed like an hour to be standing on a ladder, but was probably something like ten or fifteen minutes. He should have known that I was out of time and not, as he accused me of trying to get out of doing any work. He didn’t like me either. My protestations were overruled and I was sent back down with the now repaired and refilled bag. Decompression sickness is insidious and slow. I felt fine and got on with the job, and I saw the most incredible spectacle while I worked. Before I turned my hat light out to take my readings by blacklight, a Manta Ray gave me an extraordinary exhibition of flying through the members below me, weaving left and right up and down through the forest of steel work, an incredible feat of manoeuvrability as a solo participant, but this one had a small replica of itself mimic and mirror the exact moves of the adult without being in contact with her back. It was a staggering exhibition of coordinated movement. I have often wondered since if that was a mother Manta Ray taking junior through his paces. I don’t know much about Manta Ray behavior, do they tend their young? I still don’t know, but that’s what I saw. Even though the consequences of those unfortunate incidences were quite dark for me, I did get to see something amazing. I’ll flip quickly through what happened next. I finished the job and did a decompression stop at 10 feet on the way up and I was back in the chamber at 40 feet within the three minute allowance. I did a normal decompression for my time and depth, but I should have done an omitted decompression treatment table, because of the time I spent on the surface mid-dive. There is irony here because the treatment table was not appreciably longer than the normal decompression. The upshot was, that after a night of fitful sleep, I woke up feeling shit and I was beginning to lose sensation in my lower legs. And so I found myself back in the chamber, then in a TUP (Transfer Under Pressure) module on the back of a pickup truck being driven to Algosaibi’s operations base in Tanajib near the Kuwaiti border, with Martin Peters, one of the few people in the company who actually knew what he was doing, astride the module speaking to me on the telephone. I was inside a pressurized 8 foot length of 30 inch diameter pipe with bolt on flanges at both ends and a Plexiglas port roughly in line with my eyes, breathing oxygen through bibs. I had been slid, craned, forklifted and finally strapped down for a drive across the desert. I knew that if my module lost pressure for any reason, I would be dead, what’s to worry about? There followed a two-week treatment table, created especially for me by the hyperbaric Centre, Aberdeen. In the Pressurized Habitat, in the warehouse. It was pretty big compared to the chambers on the boats, but I could not stand up and the air conditioning unit struggled to cope with the Saudi Arabian summer heat, so sweat poured off me; I was skinny going in and like a skeleton coming out. Mac had done a real number on me, and then attempted to falsify records to exonerate himself, but he was caught and sacked. Then there was the neurologist in demand every day testing reflexes and sensation et cetera et cetera. Then the decision to send me home to have an MRI scans. Then the nineteen ninety World Cup where are Ireland got to the quarter-finals and I saw the penalty shootout in Dhahran airport, knowing that it was Ireland but not knowing the context. And then there was the huge long line of military vehicles on the highway to Kuwait. Initially I thought it was the Saudis showing off, but a lot of the vehicles had small pennant American flags flying from there their aerials. Ireland kicked their penalties into the quarter-finals of Italia ninety and I watched the buildup for the first Gulf War right there. In both instances not having a clue as to the momentousness of what I was seeing. Saudi Arabia is a closed country, full of foreign workers from home they withheld news of the outside world. The only thing on the TV whilst I waited for a decision on my future, was the king whoever, meeting this guy and that guy in his sumptuous palace somewhere. The narration was in Arabic with subtitles in Arabic, accompanied by John Paul Sousa or Monty Python martial marching music. I arrived home from almost the centre of the Gulf conflict, without having a clue about it and to Ireland in the quarter-finals of the World Cup, incredible! Two MRI scans confirmed that there were several lesions in my spinal cord and in the occipital lobe of my brain; these lesions are caused by nitrogen bubbles, trapped in the fibers of my spinal-cord, weeks ago when the person that I trusted with my life, messed up. |
AuthorJim Nelson is a sixty-two year old, wheelchair bound, incomplete tetraplegic, following a DIY accident in April 2016. ArchivesCategories |