Letters From The Gulf, Parts 5, 6 & 7: "A Smudge Cloud Of Smoke"

by Dan Horton

Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day; his girlfriend, Lori, passes along his daily email to friends and family. With their permission, we’re passing them along to you. -Dave Bry

Subject: Daily Dan: Black Oil Baptism
Date: Tuesday, June 22nd

Family,

Going to write a short one today. I’m on break and don’t want my partner to have to go too long without a cigarette. He’s a good guy and I like to keep him happy. Decade older than I am and I can’t hope to keep up with him on deck, a regular Ricochet Rabbit.
 Today we offloaded a good deal of the crude oil/seawater that we have onboard onto another smaller barge. It gave me a chance to swing valves and run pump engines, do ballast and connect an eight-inch hose. It was the busiest day we’ve had yet and I was running ragged. No breaks on the afternoon watch. I’d never worked in “black oil” before (though technically, crude oil isn’t yet refined enough to be called black oil). My last barge was all “clean oil,” diesel and kerosene usually. Black oil is a different beast, a little harder to work with. I got a good coating of it on me, so I now consider myself properly broken in.
 I have to run, but wanted to let you all know that I’m doing fine and miss you all.

Tomorrow’s post will hopefully have more to it.

Best,

Dan

Subject: Daily Dan: Crew Change Special

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010

Hey Babe,


Nothing much to report today. The crew I’m working with will be getting off 
sometime this morning and the other crew will be getting on. Everybody is 
in that weird crew-change mode… Kind of high strung and spacey, getting a 
little nasty towards each other. We had a relatively easy day yesterday 
(especially compared to the day before!) with only one boat alongside and 
now we are steaming around, waiting for word from the crew boat. The weather 
picked up a little bit and the small skimmer boats left the site this afternoon. It wasn’t really much to mention, from our perspective. 
I wasn’t really 
feeling the weather much at all until I came up to the upper wheelhouse, but 
it’s definitely swaying and bouncing up here.
 The way that I understand how this process works is that the small 
skimmer boats gather together patches of oil for the larger skimmer boats-usually boats with holding tanks either for oil response or for carrying the 
”mud” from drilling-that then use their equipment to suck up the patches. 
I’m guessing that the larger boats also just drive through the slick to 
vacuum the stuff up.
 One of our pastimes is trying to figure out how all the various deck 
machinery on the boats that come near us works, or what it’s for. Last night there 
was one of the larger skimmer boats alongside us and they had the biggest, 
most impressive crane I’d ever seen on a boat. It was massive. I finally 
had to ask what kind of boat it was when they weren’t chasing oil slicks and 
they said they carried an R.O.V. (Remote Operated Vehicle), one of those 
unmanned submersibles you’d see on Discovery channel. The R.O.V. wasn’t 
on board last night, of course, which was too bad.


There is always a smudge cloud of smoke over the Deep Water site, it 
takes up a good tenth or so of the horizon. Though I have a hard time gauging 
that-it’s a long cloud.

I miss you,

Dan

Subject: Daily Dan
Date: Friday, June 25th

Lori,


There is a new crew onboard. This new crew operates on Eastern Standard 
Time, so I lost an hour’s sleep on my off watch. They moved me to a smaller 
bunk room, which I have to share with a female cadet. She claimed the bottom 
bunk before I even knew that I was switching rooms. The top bunk is really 
high and it appears that the reading light does not work. I am twice her age and am an actual paid merchant mariner, not a 
cadet. Been working on boats since she was in diapers, I am sure. This is 
the obsession du soir. I do accept that I am being a tad silly, but such is 
boat life. Serves me right for being an unlicensed deck ape.

Reading obsessively. Already polished off the first two books by that Swedish crime writer.


Love,


Dan



P.S. We have Satellite TV. I saw a story on CNN about how crowded the ground 
zero site is with boats and how that is a potentially dangerous situation. 
We stay about four-to-six miles out from that area, so no worries for us in that 
department. Plus, the tug and barge are an integrated unit totaling about 600 feet long, so we are bigger than most of these boats out here. (I 
assume there are bigger boats but I haven’t seen them as of yet.)