On the night shift

Last Sunday, the 7th, I arrived back in Mobile from a short, wonderful trip home to Jackson around 7:20pm. At 7:26pm I got a call from my supervisor asking me if I was in town and wanted a couple of hours overtime. Sure, why not?! He told me to be at the shipyard at 8. AM? Nope. PM! I had 30 minutes to eat, change clothes and make it to work. Thankfully, I only live 10-15 minutes from work and he lives 45. I got there a little late but he was still a good bit away. I have never been in the shipyard at night. Honestly, it was kind of creepy how quiet everything was but I loved the way the shipyard was lit up. Granted, it was a Sunday night and most night shifts(including ours) are off on the weekends unless they are working on a special project. This being the case we had to modify a scaffold for the machinists so that they could reach ONE bolt. The modification didn't even end up reaching it, so my supervisor gave up hooked his harness to the highest point possible and stood up on the handrails of the scaffold to the job. We were all satisfied. The machinists got their bolt in place and we got 4 hours on the clock for about an hour and a half of work. ;)

I really wish I could take my camera into work. iPhone 3 quality photos just don't seem to do it justice.

That is the Gulmar Falcon. We really haven't done much work on it. It's a tiny boat compared to the ones we normally work on. Here is a shot of it during the daytime.

Sorry for the blurry mess at the bottom of the picture. I was trying to take the picture through bars on the Abraham. Ha, I'll try better next time.

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Views from Work (Part 2)

By now I am at work ready to "work on" for my 8 days. 

A couple of weeks ago we had several rainy, nasty days at work. On one of these days, I ended up having to work in the yard. When you are in the yard, you are basically left to unstack and reorganize material that has been brought back from the boats. It means a lot of lifting and packing material across the yard to the appropriate rack.

But, because of the rain, I found myself hiding here...

These are 2 steel pieces set on top of each other creating the perfect hiding place. And obviously I wasn't the first person to hide here because there was a chair in there just calling my name. That is a rack of material that you can see through the opening.

Normally the skyline is beautiful in the morning, just glowing and bright. Instead, it looked like this...

Kind of depressing. Notice that you can't even see the top of the buildings through the clouds.

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Views from Work

If you are friends with me on facebook you probably already saw these pictures.

I love my job. No, it isn't easy. Yes, it is physically exhausting. But I love it and it is just what I needed at this time of my life. My favorite part of the mornings are between 6-7am. The first thing we do in the morning is do our stretches as a group then we head onto our respective boats and do "housekeeping". Basically, cleaning and straightening our materials up while the tags get signed and we wait for the welders and other departments to get there.

Here are some pictures I took from the boat I have been working on the most recently, the Aban Abraham.

I love looking at downtown Mobile in the early morning. It's beautiful!

This is the Aban Abraham. I have climbed around this boat so much in the last month. It's killer on my thigh muscles. ;)

Another boat came in to be decontaminated from the oil spill. It was huge. Unfortunately I can't find any pictures of it. It was a Helix boat. We built several scaffold off the sides of the boat and down in holes in the side. But unlike most boats, this one did not have railings on the ledges of the starboard or port sides.

That line you see on the floor is a rat tail. We hook our harness to it as we walk back and forth with material. The wall on the left is the dry dock, which is a dock that sinks down into the water and raises back up after the boat is steered onto it. So the only thing holding you onto the boat is that cable. Otherwise you have a 60-80 drop onto a steel dry dock. Ouch! I tried to get a good picture of the drop but because of where the sun was this is the only picture that even really turned out.

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