North Sea Tales

Adventurous Departure from Aberdeen Harbour

The forecast was bloody awful, but the guys in the office had planned a weekend of piss ups and merriment, and didn't want a ship in the harbour giving them any grief. So our vessel was ordered out of the port of Aberdeen into the teeth of a force 10 North Easterly gale.

We had only one "Hotshot shipping container "on deck, i.e. a piece of equipment that was urgently required for drilling or production offshore in the middle of the N Sea.

The guys offshore knew it was bogus, but were hardly in a position to point this out, and we knew it was bogus, but this was after all the 80's where there was a very active employment blacklist for all North Sea operations, and if your name was on it, you were NRB's "Not Required Back", i.e. sacked, no arbitration, no questions about right of appeal, you were just barred from gaining employment.

So there we were, in our heavy weather gear and gloves and stupid bloody helmets, retreiving the mooring lines.

The wee guys on the dockside, struggling with the heavy 3 and 4 inch ropes, trying to get enough slack to just push and cajole these bloody ropes off the bollards, with the wind howling, and the sleet biting into their faces.

They knew we shouldn't be sailing, and you could see it on their faces, but it didn't stop the banter.

"You fuckin eedjiots, picked a great night for a cruise!"

Which afforded the rapier sharp wit of the crew to reply with...?

"Fuck the fuck off you wee "alchy" bastard, its bad enough putting up with this shite, without you cunts taking the piss".

We will have the windows knocked in, and be in deep shite the minute we pass the breakwaters, so don't bother getting out of your oilies, you will be taking the lines back from us before midnight.

If only that had been the truth, it was in fact going to be a whole lot worse.

We were down to just two ropes keeping us moored, and the Skipper was keeping us alongside with the engines, and thrusters, which were small sideways facing propellers in tunnels running from side to side of the vessel, at the bow and stern of the ship, making her very manoeuvrable in port, but more importantly letting her be very useful offshore, keeping position under the cranes of the offshore installations and oil rigs, plus allowing towing and anchor handling operations to be carried out in dangerous sea conditions, that were often encountered offshore in the North Sea, and in the Atlantic on the West Coast of Scotland.

The pilot came on board, nipping over the bulwarks, the low outer "walls " of the main deck, always at last minute, with the vessel, hanging on with a couple of mooring lines till his Highness (The Pilot) made his appearance.

To be truthful, the pilots did a great job, jumping on and off their tiny wee pilot boats in all weathers, onto rope ladders hung over the side.

One slip, and they were in the oggin (The Sea), and probably crushed between their own pilot boat, and the unforgiving cold steel hull of the ship, their bodies, crushed and battered and split, then sucked down into the huge propellers, to be chewed up, and washed away like some old trawlers gutted fish, discarded, finished....

The irony was that in all probability, he would be found in one of the usual harbour holes (Deeper places in the harbour) by their fellow pilots and crew of the pilot boats, who had a habit of fishing bodies out of the harbour, due to their boats being low in the water, and out and about at all hours.

The pilot was escorted to the wheelhouse, on old tradition stemming from the fact that most of the crews and officers of the UK North Sea supply vessels were left overs from the old defunct British deep-sea merchant navy.