I can only apologise for the recent radio silence, my friends. I’ve been a busy boy of late. It’s a bit of a shame that the cooler the stuff I do, the more NDAs and social media disclaimers I have to sign. I don’t think many of you have a spare $800M lying around that would allow you to reverse-engineer a little offshore cable-laying company from a few pictures of subsea robots that I might share. But still.
I’ve just submitted my first set of accounts for my limited company, and my accountant said I’ve had a good first year. In the UK you get six month’s grace after your initial twelve months of trading before you have to submit your accounts to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. My accountant is probably correct by contractor standards. However, it didn’t feel that way in the moment.
I took a calculated risk in the summer which involved burning through all of my cash reserves for several months, in order to do some training, spend some more time ashore with my wife and kids, and reposition myself to offer some new services. Cashflow control was giving my abdominal muscles the best workout they’ve had since, well, possibly ever.
My personal reading has stalled, my neck is goosed, and my waistline has expanded. The cashflow went right down to the wire. However, it has paid off well. Since the end of the summer the Marine Warranty Surveys have been coming thick and fast. I am now engaged in ongoing projects with two major MWS firms as an approved surveyor. I’m also working with four maritime training centres in Scotland and England, and a marine risk analysis firm with an impressive worldwide list of clients that include tech giants.
This time last year I was desperately wondering where the money was going to come from, as the offshore energy industry went into it’s seasonal slumber. I was grateful for some tough old jobs on dodgy little boats, operating in severe situations. This year it’s a different story. I’m now rejecting well paid jobs at least once a week. If this keeps up for another year, I might even be able to take someone on and move towards my long term goals sooner than expected.
The first MWS job was offshore from Rügen in Germany. I joined a solid Norwegian vessel in the port of Mukran as she was being battered by a nor ’easterly storm. She made it out of the harbour with a squeaky close call. The wind was blowing off the berth so strongly she was forced to depart just before the peak of the storm before her mooring lines snapped and she’d be set onto other ships in port. The captain was Faeroese, so he was a proper salt.
On departure, we just barely scraped past another ship and avoided colliding with the pier end and several buoys – with a horizontal clearance of barely 1 metre. When we pulled out into the short wavelengths of an angry Baltic Sea, the skipper looked at me with a bemused and understated smile, shrugged, and said “Lucky again”!
I loved that ship. Older vessels tend to have real wood carpentry throughout, and Norwegian ships built during the peak of the last oil boom in the late 90’s early 2000s have a build quality that reassures. She was old, and some of the equipment rooms looked like exhibits at Aberdeen Maritime Museum. Although her deck was fitted with some serious kit. A subsea trenching robot, 8 metres (26 ft) x 7 m (23 ft) x 5 m (16 ft), lowered over the side and remotely controlled by an umbilical. An ROV with multi-beam survey equipment. A hangar with a moonpool, and workshops with all the toys. Futuristic gear, on a seasoned old girl. The wear and tear on a twenty-plus-year-old vessel reminds you that she’s seen it all before. The woodwork shows you its memories.
Evidently, when it comes to shipbuilding, the Vikings never lost their touch.
I spent about two weeks there. I signed off via crew transfer vessel (CTV) back to Mukran. I travelled out on a weekend, and back on a weekend. While the Deutsche Bahn train service is truly outstanding, Sunday trains remain a bit of a pickle, no matter which country you’re in. Particularly in remote corners of rural areas. Like my Muslim stepmother, when I’m really exhausted and lonely, I will on occasion pray while travelling.
I close my eyes and do it privately, in light of the sermon on the mount. However, one woman must have realised what I was doing. I think she took pity on my exhausted and un-centred self. She then initiated a conversation with me, and google translate, as her English was even poorer than my high school German. It seems that in rural east Germany, more people may have learned Russian in high school, than English. In any case, she did help me catch a substitute train in Stralsund, which saved the day.
Germany has been growing on me since the mask nazis have lost their grip on power.
I then went up to Aberdeen to touch base with the marine risk analysis firm, where I started as an Automatic Identification System (AIS) technician after I finished university there in 2007.
It was weird sitting behind a desk again after nearly two years offshore. You get more used to working with rapists, than scientists, offshore. However, I was clearly useful to them. (The scientists). Most maritime consulting companies or shoreside firms have a ratio of about ten or twenty shoreside workers per mariner. That resident mariner is usually fairly out of touch, having been ashore for several years. As such, aside from the Navigation Risk Assessment I was doing for them (on behalf of a major freeport expansion project in England), I was quizzed on everything from towing, to anchor patterns, to CATZOCs, to navigation software. They seemed perplexed by unusual ship tracks recorded offshore. I had to point out that when Dynamic Positioning Operators (DPOs) are stuck on the nightshift for 12 hours they sometimes get bored and draw shapes with the ship’s track through the night. In this case, it was a kind of smiley face. Hard to see unless you zoom in to the right scale. These DPO-drawings have the sort of scribble-like quality that my two-year-old would be ashamed to put on the fridge. Silly, although, I was relieved that this drawing was less phallic than the ones we used to draw.
The good thing about having more work than you can handle is that there is no incentive to sit camping out on a day rate, like most contractors. I finished that job early and under-budget. They’ve called me back for more work this month, and I’m flying down to London tonight with one of their directors for a major stakeholder consultation. Should be fun.
[Update – I finished this article on the plane to Stanstead. Uploading now from the hotel].
On my way home from Aberdeen I got a phone call from my old mentor and teacher (The Peacock guy). A Turkish Bulk Carrier had been detained (arrested) by the coastguard after failing to pass inspection. They needed someone to go and give these guys some remedial training so that they could be released.
The crew ere entirely Turkish, and the ship was like something Jason Bourne would escape the authorities on. I gave them some training and put them through their paces with three or four fire drills, and a couple of boat drills. By the end, I think they were pretty emotional. The entire crew of 20 actually gave me a round of applause and thanked me for teaching them “everything”.
So that was nice.
The captain of that vessel, who was suffering from terminal cancer, was very happy when the ship was released. He got to proceed up the Clyde and go out in Glasgow for a night of Whisky tasting with his long lost cousin, who lives in Port Glasgow.
My experience as a DPO was then further in demand. The project in the Baltic had an incident. The cable-lay vessel (CLV) dropped a subsea power cable. That’s not good. These things are expensive, and are no longer usable if they’ve exceeded their breaking strain during installation. It would have to be cut. These kinds of incidents are denting the relatively thin (compared to oil & gas) profit margin in the offshore wind sector. Insurers are now beginning to pass a lot of fresh air over their top gums when thinking about the lifespan and profitability of these offshore structures. Particularly given the fact that the landscape for institutional investors is staring down an imminent global financial reset/collapse, just like the rest of us. What was worse on board however, was that they couldn’t figure out why the equipment had decided to drop the cable over the side.
Repeatable errors can be engineered around. Phantom errors are trickier.
They asked for me to go back out to Germany and join the CLV in question. I was there to witness that the mitigations put in place to prevent re-occurrence would be effective on behalf of the underwriters. This was really cool and interesting for a shipping geek. You learn so much more when things go wrong!
But first, let me say one thing. If you decide to go from Edinburgh to Copenhagen or Stockholm, you’ll be there in a couple of hours. If you decide to get from Edinburgh to Sassnitz, it takes two days. Most of my weekends seem to have been spent travelling recently. Tonight is different. My flight isn’t until late, so I’ve had one of the nicest days at home with my wife and kids than we’ve had in a long time. But boy, can travelling get tedious. Even when you have plenty of work to keep you busy. It’s not natural to be alone.
The cable drop job was a little surreal. One of the other projects I’ve been working involves generative AI, so I’ve been using tools like Chat GPT more and more. It’s very good for overcoming any lost time that may be caused by writers block, or writers hesitation. Simply type in a question that you’re trying to answer, then get angry at it’s vaguely non-specific response and let your urge to correct it flow to your fingertips.
AI writes technical maritime content like a first trip cadet who wasn’t paying attention at sea. ‘Safety related noises’ would be an adequate description.
I’m a fan of AI because it will eventually release human potential from mundane things like research and referencing. Objectivism has run it’s course. The generation coming up behind us is already outsourcing that. In fact they seem to be outsourcing all memory and literacy as well. The key to the future (I think) lies in integrating the subjective and the objective. Both modernity, and post-modernity are dead. Ai will never be a threat to human writers because what we can then write about is what it is like to experience becoming or being. A cannibalistic hive mind without a body can never achieve that.
Human beings can detect an AI presence. It’s called ‘the uncanny valley’. The phenomenon whereby people can intuitively detect a non-human presence behind a chat window, piece of text or other verbal interaction. Evolutionary science tells us that we must have evolved this ability to detect a human spirit because at some point in our evolutionary history there must have been an existential threat to human beings that looked precisely human – but was not human.
We can all detect inhuman spirits behind our screens because our human ancestors who did not have that ability were taken out by this predatory force.
Ponder that for as long as you dare.
When you are placed between various energy companies, shipping companies, contractors and insurers, there is a similar feeling. The hive mind is tangible in every interaction. These big corporations do seem to be the exclusive spawning ground of human beings who possess the ability to channel the hive mind in real time. They become vessels. Their every utterance is guarded and carefully coded. The host vessel is a borg-like masterpiece of management engineering. Part Human, Part Corporate Interpreter.
The job was pretty straightforward despite a lot of fatigued nerves and wary darting eyes visible among the crew and the project team. The ship was amazing. A ten-year-old Dutch-built CLV, with all the bells and whistles. The closest thing any of us will ever get to a sci-fi-style spaceship. DP2, cabins nicer than most hotels, and built with power and precision in mind. I even had my own office, with Starlink, and my own coffee machine.
The nice thing about elevating yourself in the maritime profession, is that you get access to cooler and cooler toys.
The strangest thing though, was turning on the TV in my cabin. Some fancy ships like cruise vessels – and this CLV – have their own ship’s TV network. Basically, a satellite TV subscription, with a few channels showing safety videos on a loop, or a little map like the one you get on an airplane to show you where you are when you wake up in the morning. This one was exceptional, however. Flicking through the channels revealed I had at least 3 pornographic channels included in my cabin’s subscription. Vixen, Penthouse, BangBros. I didn’t even know they had a satellite channel.
When I asked if this was for real, the consensus seemed to be that some time ago, the shipping company got sick of the lads devouring the entirety of the bandwidth on the ship’s satellite internet connection to download pornography. So, the enlightened Dutch approach was simply to give the people what they wanted, but on a separate network.
All I can say is that their accountant is either a lot more creative than mine, or the Dutch government take a very broad view on what constitutes a legitimate business expense!
We spent several days on dynamic positioning (DP), affectionately referred to as the electronic anchor on that ship.
It was dark all the time, and very cold, wet, and windy. My prison-walks around the foc’sle required me to dress like the Michelin Man. The most I could endure the entire week was 45 minutes in one outing.
When I signed off, I spent the night in Binz, and then another night in Berlin before coming home.
Germany is a beautiful place. My Scottish brain finds the vast stretches of relatively flat countryside in the North-East quite disorienting (you can’t walk for more than 10 minutes in Edinburghshire without crampons at this time of year). But the built environment there is really impressively beautiful. They say strong fences make good neighbours. Well, they build really strong fences in Germany.
And paving!
The paving in Germany, from Rügen to Berlin, is simply amazing.
Something you really begin to appreciate a lot more as you get older, and you actually try to do things in the world for yourself, is how absolutely insanely difficult it can be to build something with enough precision to make it straight, flat and level.
Paving in Germany possesses all of these those qualities, over wide open public spaces, platforms, around city halls, churches, stations, and, well, virtually everywhere. The entire built environment is a work of art in the purest most ancient sense of the word.
The Israel-Hamas war still sat uneasily in my guts, as I walked past Holocaust memorials, giving body to the guilt of the angels of C20th national socialism.
My suitcase suitably stuffed with Kümmelkäse, I flew home in time to complete the leadership course I’ve been writing for a training centre in Southampton ahead of schedule.
This past week I’ve been helping another training centre in Scotland get coastguard approval for their ECDIS simulator course (that I also wrote and delivered). This has grown arms and legs, as one coastguard in particular proved to be a little incompetent, and difficult to please. We narrowly avoided the business project being shut down by reducing student numbers. Advocacy and argument with the civil service is easier after you’ve been given permission to operate your business, rathe rather than before.
The whole experience had me railing against the blind corruption of an incompetent civil service, once again, but for an entirely fresh set of reasons.
But we got there.
I helped my client get over the line. We live to fight another day. And it has reminded me never to be tempted to construct my business around an element that needs permission from a bureaucratic agency, if it can at all be helped.
I’ve been flat out crushing work. But what I’m most proud of in the last few weeks, since the Israel Hamas war began on the 7th of October, is that my little clan hasn’t been fractured by the ‘current thing’.
If we’d been listening to what the mainstream media wanted us to, my kitchen table should look a lot like the Gaza strip right now. But thankfully, love conquers propaganda.
Deleting social media apps and avoiding the propaganda outlets has allowed me to focus my attention on the real world. My days have been spent working hard. My 65 mile morning drive has been through snow, and freezing fog, and watching the little red blood cells of commerce pump through the highways and byways of Scotland despite flooding and crashes, and LEZ traffic. I listen to Heterodoxy and Orthodoxy, and A Secular Age on Audible while making the 1.5-2 hr drive each way. That slog has kept me out of trouble.
My dad’s dad used to say, ‘It’s better to burn out, than to rust up’. I think that’s right. Being self employed and slogging your guts out may not sound like a good idea to most people, but, like seafaring, I find that it’s what I need. I’d be an ox without a cart if I weren’t working toward something in this way. It’s harder to succumb to my passions if I’m too busy being productive to think about them. It sorts me out.
Climbing the Jacob’s ladder of self-improvement reminded me to buy Snakes and Ladders for my kids this Christmas. I can’t believe I’ve neglected to buy that one until now. We have Candyland, which is similar, but it lacks the dramatic mystagogy of the serpent motif. Avoiding snakes seems like such an important lesson for a 3 year old, don’t you think?
My recent dreams have been vivid, and sometimes frightening. I’ve been living out visions of trench warfare, and sailing on overloaded ships, going further down into the deep than any sailor ever should.
The cable ship had a man overboard incident that week. The chief electrician who was signing off to go home after 6 weeks on board slipped from the ladder on the landing platform and fell down between the ship’s side and the CTV. The guy survived, but these are things none of us want to see happen. Especially in the Baltic, in winter. To survive that slip without being crushed or getting hypothermia is nothing short of a minor miracle.
My focus has been on my own ladder. But what I’ve realised is that my next step involves dissolving some of my identity, and giving it over to the people in my life. I think it’s something we all need to think about just now. Traditional identities are being weaponised, with a clear attempt being made by some to erase all traditional identities.
The globalist 2030 conspiracy is in full swing. It is both a centralised and decentralised conspiratorial effort. What I think all of my favourite podcasters are still failing to understand is that conspiracies are ubiquitous. The podcast circuit have the attention of so many people but they are still pointed towards tribalism. I think this is a trap created not just by habitual thinking, but by the way attention is harvested by internet clickbait and algorithms that favour outrage.
I think redirecting our attention to what binds us together is the only solution. This is the religious impulse, and it is universal. It’s purpose is to unite.
In my house, Jews and Muslims and Christians ignore the calls toward division and sit down to play scrabble and drink tea. Personally, I think that is far more productive than any internet flame wars.
When I was in the Gulf of Aden with those ex-Mossad guys, they advised us on how to humanise yourself to captors, if held hostage. I would urge us all to recognise that, like a ship’s crew on a voyage – we are all held captive here on earth together. It may be a very good time to start to humanise ourselves to our neighbours. We’re living in very dangerous times, where trust in any traditional hierarchy or governance is at an absolute low point, we need to build societal trust back from the ground up. And that begins by spending face time with your neighbours.
My efforts to be a better friend and companion to my wife, kids, brother, childhood, and college friends have been paying dividends. I’ve been deeply saddened to hear of their vax injured loved ones, and of recent suicide attempts. More on that another time, I hope.
Yes, the economy is broken, and breaking. Yes, our attention and incentives are perverted by the forces of darkness at every level. Yes, in many ways, technology has never been so dangerous to humanity.
But as I walked around the deck of that cable layer spaceship at e-anchor in the Baltic, I did marvel at how the tools we’ve been given to protect us in this world are being used in ways that could never have been foretold.
When the US military launched the constellation of 24 satellites that form the GPS network, I doubt they could envisage the gift of effortless and precise navigation that they would soon be providing free of charge to the entire world. Or it’s value to commerce in general. Their dark constellation of death has become more reliable than the real stars we used to navigate by. Their network allows us to sit in our sophisticated steel bubble, waiting on weather. Surrounded by the chaos of leviathan, without the need to be physically chained and anchored to the tyranny of the beast that is the seabed.
The world may be worse than ever. Maybe. But my life is better than ever. And so are all of my relationships and opportunities. As I find myself in demand on all sides, I find relief and joy, knowing that I am needed, in this strange little corner of the world that I’m in.
Like the ship, technology doesn’t have to be our prison guard. It can liberate us, and give us flexibility that people facing tyranny have never had before. But only if we are conscious about how we use it.
That’s the solution to all of this noise. Pay attention to the people in front of you. Only that can bring unity out of diversity. Only that kind of love and service can counter the logorrheic demands for uniformity and ‘progress’, that are constantly thrust upon us by governments, activists and true believers.
We know they don’t love us. It’s time to focus on the people who do.