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That one Thursday in the Gulf where everything went sideways
Had a 14-hour day last April near Port Fourchon where the current was ripping so bad we lost three hours just trying to get a clamp on a riser (the surface guys kept yelling at us over the comms). Has anyone else dealt with a job where the conditions just made you question why you picked this trade?
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rileyw721mo ago
16 years in the Gulf and that April current around Port Fourchon is no joke. I was on a job near there in 2019 where we had to abandon a subsea tie-in because the ROV couldn't hold station, we lost a whole spool piece to the bottom. Conditions are part of the deal, we all know what we signed up for when we started.
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brookekelly1mo ago
Yeah but here's something people don't really talk about (and rileyw72 might back me up on this) - it's not just the currents themselves, it's how they mess with the sonar and acoustics down there. When you've got that much sediment moving through the water column from the Mississippi outflow, your positioning systems start getting noisy as hell. We ran a survey job off Port Fourchon in 2021 and the USBL kept dropping lock every 15 minutes. It's like trying to navigate through a snowstorm blindfolded. The current is bad enough on its own, but the combo of current plus zero visibility plus unreliable nav data is what really makes those April jobs a nightmare. Nobody talks about that part in the safety briefings, you know?
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