Last Sunday I must have got up early for something. Here's another beautiful sunrise here on KAAOT, this one looking south from our berthing complex and out over South Beach, with one of the coalition ships in the picture, as well. I'm pretty sure that was our Royal Navy ship. Some Royal Marines 'came ashore' for a live fire later in the week, as you'll read later.
Before heading over to ABOT on Monday, I took a few more interesting photos of KAAOT. One of our U.S. Navy Patrol Class ships came alongside, which is fairly unusual. Not that they can't do it, especially in calm seas, I just hadn't seen it done. Usually they are busy patrolling, so they just put their small boat in the water and send it in drop off or pick up passengers (pax). On this occasion, I think it was more than partly for morale and to let their whole crew step foot on the oil platform they are defending. I took their ship's photographer to get a better vantage spot and this is what we got. Notice the Iraqi flag on top of the tower. A couple of South Oil Company workers just put that up earlier in the day. Taking some pride in THEIR oil platform. I think that's a good thing. We're supposed to be turning things over to the Iraqis. Hopefully their Navy and Marines have the same sense of pride in defending these oil platforms, THE major source of money for Iraq.
This week I learned that American's built KAAOT back in the 1960's. Not surprising, considering that era. Not surprising, either, that a lot of the equipment is American and still working. Someone told me this crane, the biggest one on the platform, is original equipment. With a name like Manitowic on the back, you can be sure it came from the U.S. originally. And I actually saw it working later in the week, offloading stores from a couple of tugs.
Al Basra Oil Terminal, or ABOT, is KAAOT's much larger, younger brother. Built in the 1980s, it handles the vast majority of the tanker traffic up here. Its farther south, in deeper water. It's also much higher off the water, as you might be able to tell. Platform 5, or 'Papa 5' is downright scary to climb up. You can just make out the extremely exposed, external ladder in the photo below. That was our first order of business on our tour of the platform. I was tagging along with a bunch of SeaBees who were looking at ongoing construction projects and refurbishing the living units.
The super-tankers that come to ABOT are the biggest in the world. This one is 113,000 tons, according to our security det officer-in-charge. On the side of the ship they list the draft in meters. Fully loaded, this one should be near the 33 meter mark. That's means it has a draft of about 100 feet! It has an appropriate name, ANDROMEDA, which is the largest galaxy of the 'local group' which includes the Milky Way.
The perspective looking up mooring lines always makes for a cool photo. I had seen these sabre tooth-looking things all over KAAOT and knew they were for mooring. Typically we call such things cleats or bollards. So I'm not sure the official name for this particular design, but you can see they wrap the lines around each one to ensure they stay in place. I think there is some sort of spring tension on the lines, as well.
Speaking of things very large, ABOT must go on for about a mile. It also has hills, for some reason they couldn't engineer it to be flat. So walking from one platform to the next is quite the work out. Not to mention everything is a metal grate, so you're looking down about 100 feet to the water on average. KAAOT, by comparison, is much closer to the water.
We have another security detachment on ABOT, pretty much the same as on KAAOT. The main difference is they are the only coalition forces over there. So the OIC is basically the mayor as far as Americans go. They have nearly the same Containerized Living Units, or CLUs (pronounced "clues"), but theirs aren't arranged as creatively. But this leaves more open deck space, so they have room for a basketball court to go along with their outdoor gym.
Ever wonder where your gas comes from? That would be here. At least some percentage of it. 28" pipes bring oil from the Iraqi mainland, along the bottom of the gulf, and out to the oil platform where large valves, and perhaps some pumps, send it up and into the supertankers.
Much the same apparatus as on KAAOT, there are towers that swing out and hook up into the ship. The det OIC told me this was the first time they had seen all three hooked up at once. That's probably because there wasn't a tanker on the other side of this platform, so they were able to pump more into the ANDROMEDA. Usually all four pumping stations have a tanker. It's a very popular place. Even more so when the price of gas is high. They are actually doing some maintenance at the moment because the price of gas is low compared to the summer. The cost of labor is fairly constant, so might as well get maintenance done in the winter.
Though I was a little rushed to leave, I managed to take what is probably the best photo to date. Of course its a sunset photo. But I was intrigued by the setting sun next to the shape of the Andromeda's bow. The coalition patrol ship, and bird flying across the sun, was just icing on the cake. Now I'm wishing I had my big Cannon. Oh well!
As we pulled away and headed back on the INCHCAPE tug, we got a good view of the tugs pushing this Titan lines tanker into her berth across from Andromeda. It is not a quick operation, takes several hours from the time the ship comes over the horizon to when its alongside with all lines over (those funny looking cleats).
Back on KAAOT later in the week we had a couple more events. The next day we all had to complete some mandatory weapons training. Here's a bunch of guys from the Security Detachment going over the M240. This is the smallest of our crew-served weapons. The definition of crew-served is that is has linked ammunition. As least that's my definition. Notice the cleat/bollard thing underneath. This picture is right outside our armory, which is in the complex housing our work spaces. So at one point this platform, or maybe the one next to this, was a pumping station.
And yesterday we put our safe weapons handling skills to work. We had a gun shoot with the afore-mentioned Royal Marines. These guys were a cheerful lot, but when it came time to shoot they were all business. They have a vast array of weapons. Not only did they shoot on our M240, but they brought out their small arms. All of them, from the looks of things.
Here a couple of chaps are shooting the SA80 (literally "Small Arms for the 80s" ... as in 1980s). It fires the same ammo as our M16, even uses the same magazines (by virtue of some NATO decision back in the Cold War). But it comes in a few different configurations. This one has a shorter barrel for shipboard use, which I'm told is called a “bullpup” configuration, with a forward mounted pistol grip (OK, I stole that from Wikipedia). That makes it shorter than the American M4, but the length of the barrel is still longer than that of the M16. Still very accurate I'm told. Their course of fire was ridiculous: 6 magazines, 7 rounds each, all in one sequence. They also shout "magazine" and drop to one knee to reload, and shout something else I couldn't decipher when they start firing again. Overall, they seemed a lot more familiar with their weapons. But then again, they are Marines. The two Royal Navy officers assigned to the staff here also got in on the action. Hopefully they will let me shoot next time!
As I write this we've had a couple nights of rough seas. I'd heard about being rocked to sleep. At one point that had me thinking that the oil platforms were floating on the surface, and just anchored to the bottom of the sea. That's not the case, and the rocking is more like a vibration, the waves pounding into the pylons make it feel like there is a diesel generator right underneath our deck. A diesel generator in need of a serious tune up! And today we have a really big swell coming in the from the south east, roughly 6 to 8 feet. So our little close-to-the-water OPLAT is going pretty good right now. Hopefully our guys on ABOT have a better ride!
Super Bowl tonight, 2 am!!
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