E6 development, offshore style

Among all the rolls of film I brought on board for this trip to work there was also a few rolls of Fuji Velvia 50. I'm not exactly known to be the most serious snapper-up of colours as you all know well enough by now, but I used to grow up in a household where quite a few dias were shot and viewed on the big screen during the long and dark northern wintery nights. That's from back in the days way before computers, smart phones and other time thieves went into our lives, if you still can recall that sort of state.
My father never bothered with developing his slides himself, meaning I grew up without knowing this could even be done at home. I don't know if there actually were any E6 kits around for darkroom use back in the 70's, but I'm quite sure someone who knows all about that will throw in a comment about it soon.
I need to alert you right here and now about the appearance of the pixelated snaps of the negatives as they all are very much out of focus. That's only due to the rather lousy and worthless lens on my mobile phone camera which obviously has a fair bit to go until we can call it a macro lens! Sorry about that, but at least I give you colours for once. I promise they are as sharp as they ever will get, whatever that might be worth...

Here you go! More or less the entire roll of Velvia snaps in one go... just to show you an overview of what it's like to walk around the ship with only one goal, to finish off a roll of Velvia in a very small amount of time. 

Anyway, I brought a few rolls of Velvia on board the ship for some reason, and in addition I actually got a third engineer who's also acting as some sort of self-appointed walking chemical guru... or something like that.
He's quite good at it as well you see, but don't your dare tell him I just said that. He has also been honing his skills in E6 developing lately, so I was a bit curious about this little project.
Basically he had a plan to get my roll of Velvia 50 developed if I did the job myself, and I also would have to shoot the pictures. So the film went inside the Leica M6, and I went for a walk around the vessel with only one goal, to end it off as soon as possible. The pictures are nothing to really look at, but they were shot only to test if the E6 division of our new on-board lab was working as intended.
I have owned this camera for a lot of years now, and this was only the second roll of colour film ever to find it's way inside this camera since I became the owner. One roll of Ektar 100 in the summer of 2014, and this roll of Velvia 50 I just shot. 
It should be added that this roll went out of date some time in 2013, but no measures were done to adjust for this in the camera. It seems like all of the frames are a bit under exposed, but I'm not sure if it's the film itself or our very sloppy development to blame for that. 

Just a couple of examples you know... not exactly great photographic art, I know!

What's used to get the fantastic results, you may ask?! Well, to tell you the truth I missed a few (most likely quite essential) points on the way, but what I know is that we started off with a simple Fomadon Excel B&W developer (X-tol equal), as that's what we had readily available on the shelf at that moment. We ran a pretty much standard development with that one, but added a bit of time for film age and ended up developing it for about 15-16 minutes or so. Then it was the light (or UV actually) treatment as we were lacking the right chemicals or substitutes of it to the right things with the film (and yes, at this point I was starting to fall out of the loop. The film was picked out of the tank and physically treated with the light from a few standard fluorescent light tubes in the engine control room. 

Proper UV treatment under fluorescent light. A couple of minutes of this thing, then hang to dry in light conditions before spooling it back on to the spool and into the tank it goes again.

This is how the film should look after B&W development and getting "treated" with light. Basically it looks and feels like very thick and un-fixed B&W negs, which they actually are as well.

Then the film went back into the Paterson tank and other chemicals was added together with some Alkalinity Control fluid (taken from the bilge water separator on board to adjust the pH to the right level...). Some sort of powder was also added to one of the baths, I think some sort of replenisher stuff but I'm not sure. I think it goes without saying that I was no longer in charge of this developing process. In fact I think it goes without saying that I never ever was...!
Anyway, the film was fixed and flushed with water before the lid was opened and the film was checked. 
Heck...!! It really looks good to be honest. I'll probably send all my undeveloped E6 films south to this guy if I ever get home from this place. On the other hand it might as well just have been some good old plain luck. I really don't know. 

What I do know is that it's the best looking dias film developed on board any sea going vessel I have ever seen so far. 

OK, so Velvia is Velvia with all it's good and bads... I never was a real fan of this film due to it's quite extreme colours and also it's ability to turn blueish things into violet or something close to it, which seems to have happened with the ship deck which was light grey the last time I checked. I have to say that my mobile phone camera made it quite a bit worse than it is in real life, but I see the tendency on the original positive as well.