i’m not sure what your getting at?
yes DPO job can be mind numbing
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It sure wasn’t sailing. When you go on a DP unit as a new 3/M, you literally don’t know what you don’t know.
How to stand a watch, how to read the weather, how to maintain a plot or even the basics of coastal navigation…and don’t start on basic cel nav and determining gyro error. There were no guarantees then, nor now, that the cushy oil field / DP job would last and if you aren’t a competent officer you are going to struggle on a real ship (that moves). When a simple crossing situation causes anxiety, I would guess all the money from DP didn’t really help.
It is not only 3M that don’t know what they don’t know. In my experience back when the drillship folks were hiring anyone with a license in many cases even the master didn’t know what they didn’t know. Masters with zero sailing experience past the training ship and zero 3M, 2M or 1M experience on a ship that actually sails into different ports? The only qualification was being DP certified for a few years? It was scary at times. Yet many of them thought they were Magellan. There was a reason voyage planning from Korea or Singapore to US waters was handled by people on shore with actual sailing experience who knew weather, currents and things that these “masters” had only experienced in class. The captains of these drillships in transit were great at running endless drills to satisfy the oil company requirements but otherwise were clueless mariners, with a few notable exceptions.
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how about a former subsea engineer becomes rig superintendent and then starts planning a voyage he wanted us to do on a semi, like wtf?
Scary part is he thinks thats ok when there was an experienced MM in the office
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As interesting as the technology was, the whole oil & gas thing lost the shine for me once I began to poke around and look “behind the curtain” in financing and upper management. Milk it for every penny, cozy up to the majors, run the unit until it won’t, then build/but/acquire a new rig.
I like my car, I like the my outboard on the duck boat, I have a use for a quad at camp, and I certainly like heat and light…but I drive a 4cyl Rav4, run a low emission 4 stroke, heat primarily with wood, and put a sweater on when it cools off in the fall. We can use fossil fuels for our life (it is everywhere in almost everything), but use it responsibly, and, at lesst for me, to give the money grubbing, to-heck-with-the-rules exploration side of Big Oil as little of my money as possible.
Drilling companies have cycled through men and machines with little regard for the future. The heck with them.
(Nope, not bitter at all…just frustrated lol)
GOM has always been hit or miss. No secret here, pay cash for your shit when the money is there. That F250 will not wait for you otherwise. Wait for it, wait for it. Bazonga, took another shit.
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Not being an American it took a bit to get your head around that most of the guys I worked with had more value in their garage than their house and its wasnt vintage collectables.
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In the USA we call that white people bling 
Interesting to see Transocean was even considering a consortium play…their last acquisitions saddled them with debt and short on cash, obviously their proposed partners would have been the cash side, with them offering a shite share dilution to their shareholders. I feel like I’ve seen this film before…
Broke people bling.
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