Now that you’ve gotten a sense from past blogposts of the work aboard the Triad, I want to give you a better sense of life aboard the Triad. While the Triad is a great dive boat, her initial purpose with MMT was as a survey vessel and most of the year, the Triad is out on survey projects.
The Triad is smaller than the Icebeam, 26m compared to Icebeam’s 40m. The Icebeam can sleep about 20 people, with pretty luxurious cabins, compared to the 12 on the Triad in cosier accommodations. Most of the time during the Mars project, there were about 9 of us on board: Captain, Chief Officer, Second Officer/Engineer, Cook, 3 Divers, ROV Pilot/Online Guy, and me. This gave us plenty of space to ourselves, but sometimes resulted in lines to the 2 toilets on board (in this case, it can be convenient that guys can just pee over the side of the deck).
Now my cabin was on the lower level, port side. There are two beds, and a sink. My cabin was located conveniently behind the anchor box, which I didn’t realize until we set off from Böda harbor the first morning that I was on board, when I awoke at 6am to extremely loud noises and clanging against the the side of the vessel. Concerned that the ship was sinking, I ran up the stairs, to only discover that they were hoisting the anchor and setting sail to the wreck site for the day. Don’t worry, I got used to it, and after that, we didn’t anchor during the Mars expedition.
On the main level, the mess room has two tables with comfy couches instead of chairs, and doubles as the TV room during the evenings, when we would relax and watch movies. The kitchen is adjacent to the mess. During my time on the Triad, we had two chefs – first Linda, then Daniel. Now I’ve heard rumors that these two are some of the best chefs, and I would say I have to agree with that. The food we had onboard was always DELICIOUS, from traditional Swedish sausages, to rice and salmon, or greek kebabs and salad. Part of the offshore life is that the outside world doesn’t really exist – so to pass the time, the options are eat, sleep, work, watch tv, and eat some more. Therefore good food becomes integral to our experience, and our stomachs grumble like clockwork at the assigned mealtimes of 7:30am breakfast, 11:30am lunch, and 5:30pm dinner.
When the weather was good (which was often), we would take our meals out on the aft deck, or sit out in the sun with a cup of coffee or a soda. Due to the nature of the project, we spent a lot of time out on the decks, either preparing for divers to enter the water, or watching the water for signs of surfacing divers or salvaged objects.
Since all the work happened during the day, there wasn’t a night and day shift, people just worked as necessary. The captain and officers did their 24/7 watches, but other than that, we all pitched in as necessary or appropriate. So in the evenings, most of us would relax to a movie or some satellite television. One of the really neat perks of working with a Swedish company, is that they are part of the Swedish Seaman’s Service, an organization dedicated to making life offshore more enjoyable (among other responsibilites). One of the perks that I enjoyed was the movie subscriptions; every few month’s the Seaman’s Service sends about 5 or 6 of the most recent movie releases, Hollywood and Swedish to the vessels and over the year the accumulate a fair number of really good movies. Since most offshore workers tend to be guys, the selection of romantic comedies is limited, but there are a lot of comedies, thrillers, action movies, and documentaries.
Overall, the life on the Triad was really fun! Between the different groups involved, and then learning how to be a (somewhat) competent member of the crew, the different days passed with adventure and learning, and I’d like to think I became a part of the Triad family.
After the end of the project on Sunday, the Triad went north to the port at Västervik, where the crew offloaded the kanon. After spending the night in the summer town of Västervik, the now small crew (down to 5 after the divers, and surveyors went home) transited south to a shipyard in Hasslö on Tuesday to do some general repairs and summer time cleaning. I joined in with the rest cleaning, washing, and painting.
On Thursday, I (sadly) left the crew of the Triad to return to Göteborg, to continue my last few days in the office. Now back in Göteborg, it’s weird to not be sleeping in a bed the sways slightly with the motion of the waves, but I have to say my time offshore was pretty spectacular, if not at all what I was expecting.