The Sea Daddy Saga: OSHA Would have Executed our Asses

Conclusion of the Sea Daddy Saga

And we would have deserved it. We went over the line, but that is what those lines are for.

The Wachs saw is a hydraulically driven circular saw that ran on a geared track that went around the pipe and would drag the thing along this cutter. There was another cutter that you could use in a non-flammable situation that had a burning torch. They walk around a section of pipe underwater and do a very precise cut, such clean cuts that you can almost see your reflection off of them.

The diver had made the final hookup [on the articulated “stinger” pipe which trailed the barge], had burned a couple of holes at the end of the pipe that he could rig so they could hook up the crane and start recovering the section of pipe. Then they lashed it to the side of the barge with chains and they went to cut off the first stick and made the cut, when they should have deployed the Wachs saw, but they decided to use the burner and the fire got good enough inside of the pipe—this is an oilfield pipe-laying barge—and coughs this ugly shot of flaming phlegm and the genius hoses it off the deck into the water, which had a quarter to half inch of live oil floating on the surface. Of course all the wooden bumpers on the barge are all burning, the water is burning.

We are 20-30 miles of the coast, in sight.

It’s flaming up and the fire we were interested in, which was the barge fire, was basically in the middle of the barge. We were in the rear of the barge so the fire had to work its way to us. There is the little control shack in which I’m sitting, next to hundreds and hundreds of pressurized gas bottles, which would all explode, flammable and non- flammable and you’d blow a chunk out of the barge, You would lose structure, the crane might collapse, the potential for real disaster was there.

All of the ship personnel are running for the standby boat and almost capsizing that. The standby boat is a tugboat and a lifeboat. We were short-handed, any one you are calling for assistance is piling on this boat, which is likely to sink.

I’ve got all the divers in the rescue capsule, looking out through their port at the flames coming at them and they were very quiet, had nothing to say, all these atheists in the fox hole suddenly seeing Jesus. It wasn’t going to go quick.

They’re in a rescue chamber which had flotation on it and you crane it over the side, assuming the crane was still working. So what you wind up with is they are floating around in this thing and they would have to stay at pressure.

They can’t come up quick, so they’re there for the ride, since the standby boat, which would ordinarily save it, was fixing to get capsized. Very likely they could have been left there alone with us in the bottom and/or swimming for our lives.

The Boss generally sat in the captain’s office, with a huge picture window so he could see the deck. He was sitting there reading something. He had this huge, native-made, ornate chair that he sat in, kind of like a throne, in his underwear and t-shirt in the AC. He’s the skipper. The various supervisors would come up into the office and sit in these inquisition chairs and ask for permission to do what they wanted to do and he would yay or nay it. He was a petroleum pontiff.

Now this situation was so bad, that Silas, his servant came to him and said, “Boss, your better put your pants on for this one.”

The skipper was a large individual, a big guy. I could just picture him in his britches. The sight had to be far more egregious than that Brit in the daisy dukes.

The tenders are going around getting the missing hoses that had been being used to run an air-powered water pump. They recovered the hoses and setup and were fighting the fire on these batter boards from the deck. I was just monitoring the presence of the fire. It had gotten to us—just about time to kick them [the divers in the pressurized habitat] over the side and start worrying about us surviving.

At home I have these little tags that are all shriveled from fire, which were all attached to oxygen hoses. The tags were melting and the hose was next and then you would have had a horrible explosion.

I kept the duct-tape tags, with a flag sticking out. Those were our tags, little chunks of duct tape were melted and burned on one end of our tags, the melting and burning that would have melted the jacket of the high pressure hose that the gas was traveling through and that would have led from one thing to another. Once the outer jacket was burned away the hose would begin to loose integrity and burn and that would have been the point of no return. We didn’t quite get there and I didn’t want to forget that, so kept my trophies to this day.

But the tenders put it out.

I can laugh about it now.

We were all glad to see it put out.

I can’t think of a single extreme sport that would get that extreme for you. You could go out on a mountain bike and scare yourself to death—but this was some big monster-piece-of-shit that could eat you.

But there was still the fire on the water.

The coon-ass guy in the anchor tower recognized that the barge was blocking the wind, so he started cranking the barge and we pulled away and the big pile of oil fire sailed away. You can’t make this blanket condemnation of coon-asses, because some of them are pretty slick. The guy that decided to burn the pipe instead of using the Wachs saw was a coon-ass, and the guy that read the wind and got us out of there was a coon-ass.

The wind was blowing in the right direction and just wasn’t quite our time, I guess.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

The Sea-Daddy Saga: The Canoe Desruction Team

The Soldiers

The soldiers were up on the helideck so they could see the entire vessel. They were national troops, not elite troops. I imagine they were useless troops that they sent out there. But they had real guns with real bullets and they played with them, so they were actually a danger. They were stoned all the time and had Walkmans they would listen to. I almost had them talked into letting me fire the [30 caliber machine] gun a few times. But they must have had to count their ammunition, so I never got to do that. There were four of these soldiers. They never caused any damage, but they injected this attitude into the situation that there was this loose-cocked cannon that could go off anytime. The security they were providing wouldn’t have worked out very good if it was needed. There was a ticking time bomb effect and I was glad to see them off, because they weren’t there all the time. But the canoe killers were.

The Stinger

This is a large, articulated device made of steel tubing, a large welded assembly. Picture a finger that had, instead of two joints, maybe eight and all were movable. You could cause this thing to achieve the proper angle to contact the seabed. If you get the angle wrong it could break, a really important device and you need people working on it that really know what they are doing, a lot of potential for disaster. The stinger trails the barge and may be curled up like scorpion’s tail or floated in the water.

There was one small boat, similar to the canoe people—pirates, basically—who had attempted to come abreast when the barge was moving. There had been people in it. But as we sailed along the empty boat was twirling around the stinger as it dragged along in our wake, not a soul in sight.

The Shackles

There were at least three or four canoe killers on any shift, all big goons, anyone of them could have gone into the NFL. They had authority over any national on board [meaning the deckhands]. There were probably eight of the warriors from the tribe we had hired—and what better job for a warrior generally just kept order among the nationals.

The nationals did all the hard work, dragging the big cables, rigging the crane loads, welding, burning, the duties any seaman would do on a vessel.

The shackle is a U-shaped implement that has a straight pin across the bottom that closes and you use it to attach two cables together. These are made from good steel and the size depends on their rating. When you get up to a fifty-ton shackle, they weigh several pounds, some of them weighed 30-40 pounds so the small size to weight ratio made them a very good missile.

The canoes were wood dugouts, powered by paddles [an engine is the kind of thing the government would have], water-logged, so the hulls were actually soft, so when you dropped a heavy weight on them it would punch through them like paper. They were strong from the bottom, but weak from above. They would usually come out in pairs, grapple onto the side of the ship and the boarders would swarm up to grab some things. The other canoe would hang back and see if all went well. If it did, they would swarm in also and grab everything that was not nailed down. But if they saw a shackle attack they were gone. The larger shackles were used by the Canoe Destruction Team to sink the dugouts, which would go right to the bottom.

Some of these people could not swim. For those who could swim, there were smaller steel shackles to drop on them and send them to the bottom. I witnessed one shackle attack and heard of others. Once you are at a certain location, word gets around and the pirates come out, but once you kill a few of them they don’t come back.

If you kill them right out of the gate that just discourages people. The actual valuation of human life is not really there. They were using an old Russian cargo plane and the maintenance wasn’t there. They were using it for passengers and the hydraulics failed, causing the back loading door to open, and 80 of these people were dumped into the jungle. It was just a blurb in the newspaper. Imagine if that happened in the United States, dumping 80 innocent citizens across the landscape—so there’s the upside of civilization.

You might ask why the soldiers wouldn’t take care of these canoes with their 30 caliber machine gun. But it was actually just an intimidator. When it came down to killing people they preferred doing it with shackles.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

The Sea-Daddy Saga: Working off the African Coast

The Obnoxious African American

You would always have one of these guys that would be over the top and seemed to get off lording it over these [African] people who had nothing. He would have photographs on him so that he could show someone a picture of his car, or house, something they would never have and he treasured so little that he kept the picture in his sweaty coveralls—hideous, directed bigotry, picking on people that were weaker than you.

They had segregated eating areas. He went down to eat with his brothers and found out they were eating things he could not eat and, more to the point, they all wanted to kill him. These [deckhand] riggers are eating with their work knives and the place is filled with guys with daggers by their plates.

Once, we brought in a different tribe to work, and they ate with us, because if they went into the indigenous galley, they would literally kill each other. That was just the way it was. So these guys would have to eat in the white side. I saw very little hatred of black people over there. We didn’t mind them eating with us, but our food didn’t suit them. It was segregated but it wasn’t. It was not from segregationalist feeling, but just because it wasn’t practical.

There was absolutely no theft [by indigenous deckhands] on the barge, not so much as a bar of soap. The captain ruled that village and they saw what happened to the guys in the canoes.

The one African American comes upstairs, a tall, noble-looking and loud person. He couldn’t operate quietly, so he came into our galley and says that they’re are eating shit down there. He was so unpleasant that you couldn’t talk to him. He managed to insult the black men in the kitchen, telling them they should be working on their own, not slaving away for The Man, basically a racial agitator. There is no sense in sending him home, for he would be replaced by another like him. The majority are just making money, but some brought their attitude with them and all the Africans hated the black Americans and found them intolerable—jumped up too much by half. That particular fellow stayed in the wheelhouse, because he wasn’t safe anywhere and he would play solitaire on the computer. If he had to work on his gear, he’d run down and tell his assistant to finish it and run back up, hoping no one would ambush him.

Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea

The Brits, the first thing they do, any time they find themselves in a tropical environment, is take their britches off. Bioko Island is where the first King Kong movie was made, one of the homes of the Mountain Gorilla. The island itself is a series of volcanic cones. One top of the major volcano was blown off in antiquity and there is a beautiful lake in this crater. The Russians used to use it as a beach area. They will give you a gorilla tour and part of the tour was this recreational place, a nice building, where you could walk through these echoing corridors, like the final scene of a movie where you’re walking through these abandoned halls, haunted by the spirits of these isolated Russians, a psychically powerful place to be, a gorgeous beauty and this decay. The trail of another bunch of white guys that pulled some crap off and went on home and all is left is their spore. There are rotting planes the Russians left at the end of the strip—pretty historic.

The British guy: he was a typical, cocky diver, good shape, strong guy, with his daisy duke shorts and hiking boots—they just do that, put on shorts. He was outraging public decency, acting like he was on the Riviera. You can’t do that—probably never met a religious person in his life so he didn’t understand it.

We were walking around the town in these Daisy Dukes. We turn up a street. The dwellings are better, a nice view, you can see the Ocean. We are passing this particularly large, freshly-painted place with a tall wall, with a large central gate, big enough for a limo to pull through. There was a sub door down in the corner and these four elite looking soldiers come out. They were snappily uniformed, berets, all had identical Rayban sunglasses, pressed uniforms, brass and boots shined, obviously security troops, not field troops, armed with the latest in “rattle” guns, H&Ks, I think.

They are expressionless, not mad, not sad, totally expressionless and they snatched him up and marched him out of there quick. I started to say something and one of them looked at me and I stopped saying. They kept him for two days for outraging the public decency. The company went and paid some money and promised he’d learned his lesson and wouldn’t wear Daisy Dukes no more.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

The Sea-Daddy Saga: The King Barge

Sea-Daddy is a senior gentleman from Faulkner’s country, who speaks with the considered cadence of Shelby Foote and the wit of George Carlin.

Boutique Companies and Texas Hats

It’s a thing, where pampered wealthy guys stand around and compare their holdings, so to speak, what they own and how cool it is. The smart ones would sell out immediately. The dumb ones would hang on and be exploited for a year or two and then sell to one of their friends.

The divers, the rules of diving, “if I ever had one like it, it’s mine.” Divers will steal and they do it instinctively and feel no guilt. They can rationalize any reason for stealing that you can imagine. They are ruthless and there is a competition as to who can steal the most. It’s like a gonif, [a Yiddish] word, a thief and dishonest, but kind of cute, so it’s okay, an interesting word that describes those guys.

The Barge

It’s 400' by 80' and most of the living quarters are below waterline. It is where the lower level workers stayed. If you had a little rank, you could get above deck accommodations, for lack of a better term, “officers,” company men. The engine rooms, galleys, recreation rooms, showers, all that stuff, is below the waterline and we called it steerage. The people that lived there didn’t call it steerage, they called the people that didn’t live their assholes.

I was an LST, Life Support Technician, responsible for the welfare of the divers when they were stored in the system and in the water, that they had the right breathing media. Temperature and humidity had to be controlled very closely. If you took a thermal image of a guy breathing helium, you will see that he’s expelling a lot of heat. One or two degrees one way or the other and he might freeze or burn up. If you let the humidity get high you can have skin conditions. Then there is the carbon dioxide that had to be controlled, tracking and controlling that trend.

The hardest thing of it all was to picture the actual universe you were controlling and the idea of controlling these spaces with different pressures, how you bring them together and separate them. The manipulation of space is hard to wrap your head around. You have this semi god-like attitude where you can make it rain or snow and you have to keep these people alive as you watch their mental degradation as the days stack up, and you might have to talk to their supervisor about giving them a day off. You might have a horrible home situation that factors into their attitude, so you have to be very conscious of your tone of voice. You are one of only one or two people they will talk to. The voice coming through the speaker tube has to be just right or it will piss them off—have to be like a smoothed-voice FM jockey, a tech/shrink/medical observer—and you have to be able to entertain them, be able to tell them something ridiculous that will make them laugh. They know you’re manipulating them, but if you do it with finesse they appreciate that. You have to sell yourself while you are saving them. I guess the only good thing about it is you got paid well enough and had the opportunity to save someone’s life, more important than anyone, a genuine change of value, timeless value, unaffected by the customs of society. You have totally left that beach society and are in this highly concentrated, exotic society. Not an elite group but a competent group, and mere competence can be elite these days.

Being a Sea-Daddy

Well, it’s an actual recognized position that’s not written down anywhere, a traditional thing. If you are somebody’s sea-daddy there is a certain amount of responsibility laid on you for that kid, because some people are so horrible you don’t want to be in that position, don’t want that weight on their head. But if he’s a good kid with potential and you think you can steer him, it is to your advantage to help him become more competent, and if he is a good one that looks likely, you best befriend him and help him out, because he might be signing your check in five years. These tenders had a habit of rising in the business—if you couldn’t save their life you could maybe save their career. Maybe when you’re old and grey he’ll say, “He wasn’t so bad, I’ll give that old fucker a job.”

It’s an extra duty and I can take it or leave it depending on my mood.

The Crew

Superintendent, in charge of job: this fellow was an old Southern boy who lived in the adjacent coastal village. The entire village was essentially his. He was the bwana.

Each shift, day and night, will have a supervisor running the dive. You are running the system and are limited to helping the supervisor.

The divers are all actually your superior, but they’ll lay respect on you because you’re wedded to the hip of the supervisor.

The tenders are the bottom of the list. Divers may or may not be valued more than the techs. More important than anyone is the equipment technician.

Servants

I think it’s a hopeful thing that people can buy servants in this day. I was never anything more than a servant. In some parts of the world you can buy a servant to do laundry and get your meals, check for mail, plus they clean up your room.

Silas and the Boss

In Africa, in the village, the Boss has a mansion, the whole village depends on this guy, has a mansion with servants, joy girls, and he has Silas. He was the Boss’s servant and would lord it over the crew and be obvious about it. They all hated him, he was like a caricature of a sneaky house servant. He treated everybody with contempt, white, black, German, French, American, a wicked little man. If he was being nice to you, you knew he was moving into position to screw you over. He got people fired off the deck.

(c) 2017 James LaFond