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Capt. Daley's Sea Stories
Dalfrey Tide Kribi & Douala, Cameroon
M/V Menendez Tide
17 May 2011
Dalfrey Tide serviced the jackup rig Pride Cabinda, FSPO La Lobe and the jackup production facility Ebomi for our client, Perenco. The field is located only five miles offshore Kribi, Cameroon and our Cameroon cell phones worked perfectly. Perenco bought the field from Total a French company, which did the initial exploration and development.
The voyage from Douala to the Ebomi field lasts nine hours. We were escorted by a military boat to and from the field which I sincerely appreciated. Boat docks were welded alongside our vessels to enable crew changes for the rig using “Surfers”, very small, very fast crew boats. In Douala we were based out of both the SDV dock and the old Total dock (aka UIC dock or Perenco dock), both very shallow water areas. We had a lightning strike while in the field which damaged much of our electronic equipment. These six sea stories show some of the highlights of my six week stay as Master of the Dalfrey Tide.
These photos have been resized up from their original images. The original images are 5616 pixels by 3744 pixels with higher resolution. If you would like a copy for your personal use, please email me and I will email the original image to you at no charge. If you wish to purchase an image for commercial use, the charge is $ 100 USD per image. Contact me at [email protected]
(c) Capt. Gregory C. Daley, 2011 [email protected]
http://www.captaingreg.net
Rarely am I able to shoot photos of my vessel. Usually the work shots are of other vessels in the area. These are a series of photos of the Menendez Tide with Capt. Kosta as Master. Capt Kosta was my Chief mate on the Gubert Tide in Côte d’Voire and Moçambique. It is very satisfying to see the people you mentor be promoted.
The Menendez Tide is a 10,000 HP AHTS (Anchor Handling Tug Supply Vessel). She is being used primarily as a supply vessel, though she has the power to tow the small jackup rig Pride Cabinda.
The sun rarely gives us an opportunity like this. Lighting makes the difference in photos.
Menendez Tide was low on fuel. Plan A was to go stern to stern for bunkering. Her strong prop wash made that difficult.
I really like the idea of marking each of the interior tanks on the outside so you know what you are pushing against.
As the wind and sea was calm, Plan B brought Menendez Tide alongside of us for bunkering. It is very difficult for deck crews to understand that a vertical line provides no force to moor vessels.
Finally, I was able to have them move the line from my starboard stern bitt to my port stern bitt. (Remember you are looking aft on my vessel.) Now the line can provide adequate force to keep the two vessels together.
Here she is hard at work
It must take a lot of skill, practice and guts to land a helicopter that close to the huge steel legs sticking up.
The flare boom was in a difficult location for cargo operations. The boom was sticking out over some portion of my deck most of the time. It did make a nice reference marker to accurately gauge where the boat was in reference to the rig.
As calm as the water is, I would have given the jack up a bit more freeboard than what they did. I guess I’m getting a bit conservative as time goes on, but you just never know when the sea might kick up worse than expected.
