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| For about a year I worked on a shallow water job in Brunei, equiping, operating and maintaining a funny looking vessel called "The frog". The real name was "The Western Ranger", but Frog sounded better. It was an aluminum boat, with two six cylinder, turbocharged Caterpillar engines powering Hamilton jet drives. It carried twelve airguns, hanging out the sides on davits. She is pictured below, hanging from a crane in Singapore, before being towed to Brunei. |
| The Western Ranger aka "The Frog" |
| Due to managerial planning, the boatyard decided to use a 1500 ton capacity floating crane to launch the Ranger. Thing is, the Ranger only weighs sixty tons. Go figure. |
| This vehicle is one of the beach buggy type transporters that was used to carry supplies and people across the soft sand, and into shallow water. Yes, those tyres are as big as they look, and are more commonly seen on Big Foot type trucks. |
| This is me onboard the Western Horizon, several years ago, and a few pounds lighter!. |
| This shot was captured in Burma, in '94, at the mouth of the Yangon river. The small boat is full of Burmese whores trying to sell themselves and their wares. They had a good supply of imported whiskey, beer, geese and even a pig!. Everything they had was for sale, or hire! |
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| In the summer of '99 I spent a couple of months on the Jeff Chouest, a scruffy old gun boat in the Gulf of Mexico, but I ended up back at the Horizon. Sadly though the Western Horizon reached her 20th birthday in late 2001 and was sold, to be cut about and used as some supply boat or other. She was never a glamorous, top of the line boat, but she had character and I do miss her in some daft way. |
| Now I'm working on some ex Russian boat called the MV Baki. She's big, heavy and tired, but mainly unloved and left to get old. Lord knows how long I'll be on here. I did spend two trips on the Angler, a three year old Norwegian boat, before coming here, so it's a bit of a step down to tell the truth. |
| At some stage of 2000, the 'Western Geophysical Company' became 'WesternGeco', though it is all a mystery to most people, bearing in mind the promises and stories we were told when under Baker Hughes influence. Baker Hughes? Oh yes, they were some other crowd who bought into a piece of the action at some stage. |