last day in the Gulf

I spent my last day in the Gulf of Mexico with a northern front bearing down on C Port II, in what's known around Port Fourchon as "Halliburton Slip". It was probably the busiest slip in the busiest port in the world, at least in terms of number of boats and not tonnage, although you wouldn't have guessed it at the time. Traffic had dried up incrementally since the end of the BP clean-up efforts, the recession finally asserting itself upon the oil and gas industry. Locals blamed the government and new regulations in place since the failure of the Macondo well, and they still do; but it was also the tightening of money in a sluggish economy, companies with less to borrow, less capable of expanding operations. Instead, many fled the Gulf for international markets, South America and west Africa, southeast Asia. Much of it went to Brazil, and so did I.

Awake from the nightshift, sunrise brings a substantial still, a false calm as winds subside and white-caps dissolve. It's a delusion of peace, however, an ephemeral guise of serenity, a momentary lapse of elemental force, and soon the maelstrom returns. My bags packed, the radio remained silent until noon, and I dodged another trip offshore, one final winter-pounding in the churning Gulf. I would get my share in Brazil although I didn't know it at the time, in the South Atlantic, the high seas, in one of the roughest places in the world--along with the North Sea--for offshore supply vessels. I learned that after I took the job.

I'll try to post a few things for anyone interested... guanabaraswell.blogspot.com

bayou lore

Offshore for multiple days, insomnia is no longer an issue. I sleep deep and dream wild, awake unsure of truth or fiction. Is that an actual development, a new predicament? A real woman I met on vacation? By the time the coffee pot is full and fresh, consciousness returns and illusions fade. I assume the watch at 0600, we're standing by on location, a dense field 20 miles due south of Grand Isle, La., where tar balls made their first landfall during this summer's BP oil spew.

Production platforms may stand alone but usually appear in packs all along the Gulf coast, mostly inside the 10-fathom curve and atop the continental shelf. A 3-mile radar scan can produce hundreds of dots, mostly random and haphazard, sometimes in geometrically recognizable patterns. The most populous fields, the ones closest to Belle Pass and Port Fourchon, have names, Bay Marchan, the Rabbit Field--I can't be sure from where that name hails. I've been told the perplexing mass used to look like a rabbit on the radar screen, although today so many platforms and satellites exist in the few square miles that identifying a rabbit is like picking an item from an ink blot, a face from a cloud. Perhaps it's origin is a simile, platforms reproducing in hordes, replicating like rabbits.

A gap between the two massive fields, a thoroughfare for boat traffic, is known colloquially as "the hole in the wall". In the daytime it's an innocuous setting for navigation. At night or in restricted visibility, it's a danger zone, nearly impossible to distinguish the fixed from the moving, another vessel underway. We have an AIS to alert us to the position of other boats, but only if they have an AIS, too, and unfortunately, it's not required. Some advanced radars are capable of distinguishing fixed targets from moving, but only after a 6-minute interval of data has been collected and only provided your vessel doesn't change course--in other words, still useless.

We're offshore to transport a construction crew of a dozen men as they work their way through the field repairing aging structures, sandblasting and painting and welding new handrails. I see land only once in 10 days. The Apache Energy Corp. has been fined $10,000 by MMS for the condition of a platform, but that's less than the daily budget for this construction crew, which I'm told is 12 grand. We mostly stand-by watching thunderstorms and water spouts, rainbows and lightning. The platforms are mostly un-manned and the crew uses rope swings to get from the boat to the landings, a bit unnerving in choppy seas.

We arrive at GI 47H just in time for a passing storm, water pellets emerging from gray. The crew wants to wait it out. They come to the bridge to check the radar, observe the weather, a vacant horizon. We listen to local news, the anniversary of Katrina, reflections and recollections. Rain stills the sea and removes white caps, a sea turtle drifts by, the first I've seen in some time, droplets like pin pricks onto the skin of the sea. It doesn't take long before the guys pipe in with reminiscence and story-telling ensues. The company man says they lost 16 platforms during Katrina, just in the Grand Isle area. His first post-hurricane excursion via helicopter led to a set of coordinates and to an empty patch of sea. Another worker shares a tale of inspecting a platform when a tremendous impact shook the structure. "We was lookin' over the side for the boat that hit us, but there wudn't one." He says a dive team told them later that another platform had rolled into the base of the one they were on.

It's like any unforgettable development, a spell of heightened awareness, a blend of anxiety and adrenalin. Given the right circumstances, recollections becomes nostalgic. Time at sea is good for that and other things, introspection and inspiration. Bayou lore says that Kris Kristoferson wrote "Me & Bobby McGee" on his way home from a stint offshore. Mr. Kristoferson was a helicopter pilot in the Gulf, flew for Kerr-McGee to service the oil field. Maybe it was the view from above, the expanse of sea below, the open road and satisfaction of a paycheck with the coming of vacation--instant freedom, reduced stress. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to do, he wrote. At least it is for those who grasp it, for those who find clarity in motion, the pilot or mariner, the cowboy or indian on a horse, at harmony with the spinning axis, spatial limitations overcome by psychology, sense of wonder, the realization of freedom.

insomnia, the oil sands

Another advantage of life at sea is time off, vacation, weeks of it at once, here on terra firma where surroundings sometimes spin when sitting still, although I know I'm not moving and haven't been drinking. And while the mind adapts and synapses reconcile, I remain confined to earthly predicaments, the same daily shit as everyone else, but I'm free at least to address entirety at my own pace, if not my own terms. I'm in possession of free will.

Yet a long haul on the night watch will sabotage circadian rhythms and deal you insomnia, wake you at 2 am. I've never been a night owl, prefer to wake with the sun, to bed under stars, leave twilight to the vampires and deviants. But there is an odd clarity to the afterlight, an enhanced consciousness, a visceral calm. There is amplified hearing, the slight sounds of insects and distant traffic, the creaking of old wood. Still for long enough, I crank the radio and clean house, purge closets and rearrange.

There's tons of energy talk on all the news outlets these days, and I listen to a report on the Alberta Oil Sands, where a mixture of sand, clay and a dense and viscous petroleum occurs naturally, and then is rather unnaturally expunged by huge machines. Early man reportedly used the mixture, called bitumen, for water-proofing and on stone tools as lubrication. Today, bitumen is blasted by hot-water canons and "upgraded" to produce a synthetic oil, which will eventually burn and release its carbon. To heat the water, producers burn natural gas, a relatively clean fuel. The entire process, given the eventual combustion of the oil, emits up to 45% more greenhouse gases than conventional oil drilling. Roughly half the oil produced in Canada, America's largest supplier, comes from the manipulation of butiminous sands. Surely, not the answer to our energy needs. Somewhat like growing corn to make ethanol, robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's hardly technology.

I mop floors and dust baseboards, eventually sit--and for a split second, everything spins. I'm reminded again of the great 921 earthquake in Taiwan, when the ground shook for a full week, more than 11 hundred aftershocks following a 7.6. I could put a glass of water on the coffee table in my fourth-story apartment, and it would never settle, a constant ripple, the earth moving every three or four seconds. It was like getting sea legs, and much like tonight, a bout of insomnia. I hear the first chirps of birds, open blinds to a lavender dawn, a sunrise obscured by neighborhood trees and houses.

bloody mary

Returning from even a few days at sea, it's not pleasant to find lots of telephone messages, that type of thing only reminds the mind of things unattended, removes focus from the task at hand, making it through another watch, another hitch, getting the boat from the Mississippi and through Venice Jump, Tiger Pass, and then into slip one, two or three knots of current astern. Part of the attraction to life on a boat is a postponement of exterior, excess stimuli, concentration on survival and a focus on the immediate, not making a mistake with the boat, or god forbid, getting someone hurt.

I make it back to the dock for the final time this hitch. I know I'm good for midnight crew change, money in the bank, will get a ride to the Satchmo Airport and be on the east coast by noon tomorrow. I've got multiple friends who wanna know about media reports that 75% of the ruptured oil is gone, eaten by bacteria, evaporated by sunbeams. It seems absurd to me, not just the estimate, but that a figure is published and dispersed to the masses, the only people having a possible clue, a still-wild guess, being obscure scientists, the type who don't get quoted. Nobody at NOAA or anywhere in our government has any clue how much oil went into the Gulf, is still in the Gulf--and therefore--how much is gone.

I pick up a morning paper in the airport, the Times-Picayune, review a map furnished by NOAA that shows boundaries of fisheries still closed by the Federal Government. Ridiculous. I've seen dozens of boats fishing those waters in the past weeks, even talked to one on VHF. It says NOAA is opening an area of the Florida Panhandle this weekend, will open more soon, further west. It says they'll open waters reaching 30 days oil-free. It will all be a failure of history. The moratorium is still being pushed by the current administration, although oddly enough it's been overturned by a local judge. But the Federal/State argument, the legal wrangling makes no difference because the drilling companies have basically agreed to suspended deep-water operations, although they are still free legally to continue drilling. They would have difficulty with certain permits, but it's the uncertainty, the gray area itself that keeps them from doing it. They're going to bide their time until a day in November, when Obama has agreed to let them continue.

Bumped to first class, a frequent flyer, a bloody mary at 0700. From the window of the plane, the carvings of man, the rare, unspoilt woods, the great oceans our sponges--the greatest trash bins we've got, all of it filtered by a brownish troposphere, the exhaust of the modern world, a perpetuating haze that's the essence of who we are, a tribute to our successes, a dark reminder, an eventual death. It's the gist of consumer culture, the economy, it's everything, most of us have our hands in it, every one of us has--or wants--some material, potentially meaningless piece of crap, a device containing plastic perhaps, or even intellectual property, a machine to get us around. But it's a guarantee, a slam-dunk that that device is somehow related to the burning of fossil fuels, to oil, to a conspicuous consumption, a diversion from mortality. I once read a quote from historian and social anthropologist John Collier, a scholarly white man who lived among the Native Americans in the 1920s and 30s. He said of their spirit, "Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace." Well, who really wants to live that way, anyway? An incredible minority... another bloody mary.

fear and fascination

Back in Venice Sunday afternoon, word spreads along the docks that the moratorium has lifted. I check on-line but find no corroboration, but the vibe in Venice is upbeat and somebody must know something. It's the next step, a logical progression for the return to normalcy. We're to run a crew change during the night to Visca Knoll, due south of Mobile, taking a dozen guys to an offshore construction site where they'll spend the next two weeks working hard to kill time. I watch from the bridge as they arrive through the night, dropped off by wives or girlfriends; one car has tired-looking kids in the back seat, but they hug their dad and wave from the window pulling away. It's midnight.

We're to leave the dock at 0400, but until then, I'm left alone with study materials, still working to upgrade my license, to pass a written test in navigational competence. The discipline of navigation, like that of any science, is a considerable compilation, a mountain of miscellany amassed over millennia, an accumulation both linked and unlinked, methodical and erratic, one that's consumed heaps of resources, spent millions of lives and deaths each lived to the utmost and pushed to the extreme, both blessed and cursed by fear and fascination, terror and bliss.

Underway and offshore, fish and shrimp boats have returned to litter the night radar screen with excessive florescence, a smattering of obstacles each claiming its right of way. I spin the wheel back and forth, dodge right and left to give them a wide-enough berth. Their catch will continue to be "nose-tested", as it has been for months. According to a fisheries spokesperson on the radio the other day, no seafood caught since the well blew has failed the nose test. It's all been safe, the whole time. Somehow, that just doesn't seem likely, but Americans continue to consume literal tons of Louisiana seafood--although perhaps unknowingly--and they're paying more for it than ever.

I check instruments and waypoints, two radars, an electronic gps plotter and depth sounder, an old-school compass and binnacle, but I know where I am. Navigation in these parts is done primarily by memory, enough recognizable platforms and coastal sea buoys to keep most vessels on course. I know now that the planet may be perfectly dissected into mathematical divisions and that visual clues exist in the cosmos to help us determine where we are, to plot a fix and a course, to help keep our ass off the beach. I've learned that the nautical mile is exactly one minute of angle along a meridian of Earth and that an azimuth applied to certain equations, formulae discovered and extracted by obsessively smart people, may be plugged into tables from the nautical almanac, and that the result will make terrifying sense. I know that it's all beautiful. By the time we reach Visca Knoll, a slither of red moon has appeared and crawled southward. It rests just above our destination.

Port Fourchon

We load after midnight, leave Venice at 0200, down river and offshore before dawn. This time we hang a right and head west toward the Texas border, bound for the Eugene Island block, the first of multiple stops that will have us crisscrossing the Gulf before day's end. It's still flat-ass calm and sometime after sunrise--for the first time in months--the water turns a beautiful blue. We're the furthest west we've been in some time, in 700 feet of water. Upon closer inspection at first location, it's still covered by a sheen, a thin, diesel-like skin, a diaphanous membrane. Tiny particles sweep by with the current, but no thick globules of orange goo. I guess that's what the Coast Guard, NOAA and BP mean by "no more oil offshore". It must be too thin to skim or burn, but it's most certainly there. Staring at it for long enough, some of the particles move against the current, then dart every which way. There are bugs on the surface.

At the end of the day, we've covered more than two hundred miles, nearly all of it veiled by the sheen. We're bound for Port Fourchon (pronounced Foo-Shon), the heart of oil field operations, the busiest port in the world in terms of boat traffic--not tonnage. Ports along the Gulf coast are largely a rag-tag affair of run-down and worn-out facilities. From Venice on the Mississippi to Port Aransas, TX, docks are eroding and collapsing, creating hazards for boat operators. I could hardly believe the condition of the docks when I first arrived. With all the money the oil field generates, it's baffling that facilities are this run-down. Apparently profits go into pockets, not upkeep. Port Aransas is the worst. It's a constant battle to place fenders, to keep jagged and rusty metal beams from tearing up the hull or random debris from getting sucked into a propeller. I've seen nicer docks in third-world countries.

But Port Fourchon is the exception, the jewel of the oil field. At the terminus of Bayou Lafourche (pronounced La-Foosh), an industrial metropolis reigns, and it's a city that never sleeps. Literally thousands of boats are loading, unloading, transiting in and out of Belle Pass at any given time. It's like rush-hour traffic in Los Angeles or Atlanta except with big boats--and no brakes. It's impossible to describe how frustrating and nerve-racking it can be to maneuver a 165-foot boat in dense traffic, the VHF radio a cacophony of transmissions all stepping on each other. But tonight, it's not so bad.

We're bound for C-Port One, a cavernous, open-air building, a modern megalith visible for 30 or 40 miles on a clear day. It contains nine slips of equal size, each fitting two crewboats or one larger supply vessel where the aft deck can be loaded or unloaded out of the rain. It's a nice facility really, the entire floor--acres and acres--all covered in brick, each slip with its own fuel and water station.

It can still be a bitch getting into the slip, depending on wind and current, and especially if it's already occupied. We're to pull into slip 5 and drifting into view, of course there's already a boat there. It's the Anna Mae, a well-run crewboat, friends of ours. The tide's flooding so I top around, crank the bow thruster, let it warm. I haven't done this in awhile, been in Venice for some time. With the slip occupied, it leaves me about two feet on either side of the boat, not much for a vessel this size. I spin the rudder to starboard and begin to bump the #1 and #4 engines into a pivot, moving slowly, tucking the port quarter just under the bow of the Anna Mae, letting the current bring our bow around. I don't need the thruster and soon we're secure. I make a head call, catch up the logs, take a sounding stick to the fuel tank. We've burned 3,500 gallons.

summer job

This morning, South Pass Floating City sends a responder speed boat to inspect the skimmer-boat operations. He finds a bunch of the fish and shrimp boats tied up in the bayou just hanging out, apparently doing nothing for those BP checks, which run several thousand dollars a day. He comes back with the names of 75 boats and they're all fired. In addition and possibly as a result, the number of Task Forces under crew boat command is reduced from five to three. The number of deepwater skimmers is also reduced, according to radio news, and reports circulate that there's not much oil left offshore.

"Dat ain't too smart, yeah." Its Clem the dispatcher with his odd cajun brogue which varies from Parish to Parish. We're huddled just aft of the wheelhouse and out of the sun while the crane slings containers and pallet material onto deck. It's the boat crew, the dock hands, passengers awaiting transportation, smoke 'em if you got 'em. Conversations typically begin with a light and center on recreational fishing, but things have been a little different this summer. "I mean, dey had a pretty good job, yeah." It's like Canadians dropping an "ay" at the end of sentences. Its peculiar to a certain area, somewhere between here and Lafayette, as far I can tell. You won't hear it in New Orleans. Alex says he has a friend on the Florida panhandle who got on with the cleanup driving his family boat. He says they sit around a lot, then cruise a bit and make deliveries. He's a college student on summer break and says he'll bank about $60,000 from BP. Not a bad take for a college kid with a summer job.

We spend the afternoon shuffling around slip one, under the crane then out of the way as cargo arrives intermittently. At one point, we get underway and into the river, downbound past West Point Light, approaching Cupid's Gap when the dispatcher calls on a company frequency and turns us around, a typical occurrence in the oil field. More stuff has arrived in Venice, back under the crane.

When they kick us off again it's late afternoon, and we make it offshore by sunset. It's flat calm, finally true summer weather in the Gulf, and we traverse the surface without lateral motion. A flat sea is another oddity, and the antonym of storm has confounded sailors since the dawn of ocean exploration. It has likewise inspired poets, a painted ship upon a painted sea, a reflective expanse endlessly visible save restrictions of luminosity and the curvature of the earth, a calculable distance, the square root of height of eye multiplied by 1.17, the answer nautical miles. "Do you see this?" Alex is at the port side windows. Sunbeams penetrate the sea to reveal an orange-brown hue, a non-particulate presence but an unnatural manifestation of color nonetheless. The sea has changed. It's only then I notice surface rippling and the lack thereof. We're in a huge sheen.