[QUOTE=Kougar018;129697]Met some Brits in the NOLA airport that work on a Stena drillship drilling for Statoil in the US GOM. The guys I talked to said that the only Americans on board were 3rd party service hands. How come some GOM rigs have full American crews and others don’t? They said that most of the drilling folks were from the UK and the mariners were all Eastern European or Swedish.[/QUOTE]
because of a loophole in 33CFRpart141 that allows foreign owned vessels/rigs that do not have US offices to keep their foreign crews supposedly because their countries offer US vessels reciprocity to keep US manning on a US vessel working in their waters but this is BULLSHIT because they DON’T!