Sometimes...

Sometimes you end up feeling like something else. And that's not in the most positive meaning of them words, mind you. Like an idiot, for instance.
Like an hour or two ago, more or less, as I was making my move towards the church I told you a little bit about a couple of days ago. Camera in the bag and all. Well, that's what I thought I had anyway. I did not even check, because I was absolutely 100% sure. I just grabbed the old bag and went on, by foot as you do when you're working on a ship. Nothing wrong with the old walking on your old feet, by all means, but when you're walking to get something done you wish you ended up having something else in your bag other than this rotten digipixelatorthing I found laying there when I opened said bag. And hey, guess what... the battery was drained as well! I need to quote good old Alanis Morisette... Isn't it Ironic?! 
Oh and yes, just to make it absolutely brilliant I should be the one to know there was no battery, because it drained out just at the end of the FRC trip a couple of evenings ago. The trip I have yet to tell you all about, as a matter of fact. Read further, friends.

Well, I thought the M6 kind of RF camera was in that bag, full of quite fresh film and all. Truth is that it wasn't even though I looked twice. 
There was a few lenses fitting the thing, and a couple of rolls of film for sure, but no decent camera. Only the pixelrenderer with no good batteries inside. No german rangefinder number M6, though. 

Just found I had thrown it out of the bag some time yesterday and put it to rest in that other corner of my cabin. I'm back now, you see. Back on the ship with no film at all wasted.
Good thing is we're still staying around this place for a couple of weeks, meaning I will get another chance tomorrow afternoon some time. It's a nice spot you see, over there on the other side of this bay.  

The FRC trip? Oh, it was nice thank you! 
FRC means Fast Rescue Craft, by the way, and all them offshore ships should have one on board. Them orange small ones, you know. We threw our FRC overboard just before we arrived here, because my department got some work to be done on the thing during the next couple of weeks. 
Before one starts working on plastic stuff like that it needs to be tested, of course. So I called the captain just before dinner a couple of days ago just to check if he wanted to join me. As I suspected he was thrilled to bits, and out we went some time in the evening. We also brought along one of the two ROV tech's on board as well, just in case any subsea operation should be needed at some point. Luckily we got no good use of him other than being good ballast and counterweight on board. This guy is from the Aberdeen area, and has claimed for years that Norway is his old fatherland. At least that's what he keep saying. He's not too sure if that's the case, but I'm quite sure he feels that way. I mean he is rather serious about it. 
So we took him by sea, just to show him the town of Haugesund here one the west coast of the country. We also managed to have a good look on the new FPSO, the Glen Lyon, which just now as I write this is on it's way over to the fields west of Shetland where we used to stay. It was strung up alongside inside this town to get the last few things sorted out before they went west to what would be it's home for a good number of years. 
It's that same FPSO we were supposed to help installing during the months to come. Before they threw us out of the contract for unknown reasons, as you of course would know by now. 

An enourmous amount of 0's and 1's was used to make this snap. Luckily the Fujifilm camera is able to count fast. Why is this company called FujiFILM these days, anyway? Well, I might better leave that be, for the moment. This is the new one, the Glen Lyon, snapped from distance using an old Nikon lens. It's massive, that new orange bunch of steel going to be moored out there in the North Atlantic Ocean. The town of Haugesund in the background, and a few normal sized offshore vessels and tuggers gathered around it to help them make their way across the sea. 

And another one, a bit closer this time.

It's a big lump of steel, as you might notice. They were having a fire drill just as we were passing by. I can now be the first one to inform you that they had used this one single item from the old FPSO, the Schiehallion... it's the fire and gas alarm bell believe it or not. We are talking about exactly the same bloody annoying sound of this one as on the old vessel. 

Here she is, the old one, the Schiehallion as she used to appear from the fog in the district of Schiehallion field west of Shetland until some time in the summer of 2014. Right now there's nothing located at this very spot, but in a few days there will be the new Glen Lyon attached to them old moorings for some 20 years, or probably even more. I can do nothing but wish it some good old luck. It will need it, because it's not the most pleasant place to be anchored. I know a couple of few things about it, as it happens. As you see, this scene was seen through a decent camera. It was probably about time they decided to change that old thing out. I have to say I'm quite happy I did not work onboard this one through it's last couple of years out there. 

If I had some brains this evening a couple of days ago when we went testing that old FRC, I would think of bringing some kind of film camera. I would then probably be the last one having film snaps of the old Schiehallion vessel, and the first one having the same stuff taken of the new one. Maybe even one snap would be enough to be both the first and the last snap taken on film of the new thing, for all we know. Can't see there's any chance of having people onboard that big thing bothering too much about wasting film and things these days, or what do you think?
I missed the opportunity, to be honest, and now it's too late as I probably never will see the thing again. Ever. 

OK, one more. This is from "Smedasundet" in the inner harbor of Haugesund. It's a nice place, believe me. I might need to test the FRC some other day as well, and could try to take a few snaps a tad more to the left then. There's a lot of stuff going on there, as you would guess. Bars and stuff there on the waterfront of town. There's houses and sea houses in this area, as you see. I noticed my friend Michael over in Ireland was a bit anxious about this fact that we got wooden things spread around our coastline standing on stilts and stuff. I might need to post something on just that, as there's probably a few people from the other side of the sea wondering about this strange way to build these things. Wind and sea and such, you know. Weather we are used to struggle with over here as well. There's probably some differences anyway. I hope to be able to say something wise about it some day soon :) Watch this space...!