Schrodinger's Grocery Box

The other day I promised to wake up early and take photos of us getting the grocery box from the drill ship. Luckily, I did not have to wake up early since they called us just as I was about to get off watch at midnight. Unfortunately, this meant that it was dark out so my photos aren't the greatest.

This is the FPSO that now has our grocery box. At this point, I'm really jonesing for a diet coke.

So, we start moving up to the FPSO (floating production, storage and offloading vessel). There's all sorts of protocol that you're supposed to follow, like move to 500m away from the FPSO or rig, then do a drift test and make sure that everything is working. Then, while using the dynamic positioning system, move into the 250m zone, do some more of the making sure everything's okay, and then move closer.

This is the DP station.

So we did everything we're supposed to and then moved in up to the FPSO. I had to take pictures from inside the boat because every time I went outside my lens would fog up. You'd think I'd have remembered that from when I was in the Middle East.

Look! A drill ship! The windows on this part of the bridge are all scratched up.

The guys on the FPSO were a bit impatient to get things done. It was midnight, they'd been taking stuff off the supply boat before us and they had plenty of grocery boxes to go.

Egads, impatient much, guys?

They had the grocery box swinging over the water by the time we got close enough for them to put it on the boat. Eventually, they got it on the boat and we moved away.

I expected the AB's to start putting the groceries away immediately, but when I went down to help they had a chain around the door of the grocery box so no one could get in. I dubbed the grocery box "Schrodinger's Grocery Box" because, well, the box may or may not have had groceries in it.

Thankfully it did. I really do hate it when the boat runs out of food.