It has been wonderful to be in the UK for a day. I can drink tap water and fresh vegetables and have real coffee. Upon my arrival I walked around the area near my hotel and in the afternoon took a rail to York, where I spent the rest of the day walking around and taking in the sights. York has lots of brick-paved streets closed to cars you can walk around and go in the shops. Lots of history everywhere you look.
When I arrived at the training facility I was sent straight upstairs to a “canteen” which I would have called a kitchen or even a galley. There were about 25 men there sitting around and talking or watching the BBC. At 8:30 someone came in and asked for all the renewals who were taking the one day training to come with him, and some people got up and left with him. Now we were 16.
We went into a classroom and had a basic safety introduction course and exam, not unlike a defensive driving course. The course is geared towards the UK and we talked mostly about working in the North Sea. We also talked about the lessons learned from a big platform disaster in the 80s called Piper Alpha. After lunch we had more lecture and discussion, then the “fun” began.
First we changed into a thermal suit that they wear in the UK when travelling over water. It’s supposed to protect you from hypothermia if you get dropped into the ice cold waters of the North Sea. (You don’t get these suits in Ghana!). Then we went into a room with a large swimming pool and put on life vests. We jumped into the pool and bobbed about like corks. We learned how to swim around in these life vests, then the exercises got more intense. You can’t see around you or turn your head very well from the position the life vest puts you in. We had to find a diver who was calling out to us and swim over to him. We experienced both calm conditions and a rough sea at evening with spray getting in our faces. After that we learned how to get into the life raft that resembled a floating tent, and paddle away to safety. The instructor had told us good morale was important in these situations and that we could not be rescued until he knew we had achieved it. So we would be rescued only after he could hear us singing. So we sixteen men are all in a small life raft piled on top of one another, the air is stifling because we are enclosed inside the raft, and we are up and down in rough water. I have no idea how they agreed to do it but all at once they started singing “You’ve got to look on the bright side of life” from the movie Life of Brian. Too funny. A winch with a loop at the end simulated a helicopter rescue and each of us was pulled out of the raft up about 10 feet to a platform. That was Day 1.
cool!!!
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