My wife and I made a visit to Stavanger earlier this year; part business, part pleasure. It made me think of hotels and airports, aircraft and trains, across almost forty years of being sent to different parts of the world at my employer’s expense. This article is a fuller and more extended version of my earlier musing on long-haul flying, posted here: https://plateroom28.blog/2022/11/18/thirty-years-of-long-haul-flying/.

I went to work for Seismograph Service Ltd, of Keston, Kent, in 1988. My job interview, at Holwood in Kent, was in the week after the “October Hurricane” of 1987. Well I recall seeing the devastation wrought by the storm in that heavily wooded county. I was hired at £705 per month as an “Assistant Observer”, and in the February of that year, despatched to Tyne Commission Quay at Jarrow near Newcastle, to join the aging seismic survey ship Seismariner. Within minutes of the vessel leaving the shelter of the Tyne the following morning, I had donated my breakfast to Father Neptune, and I remained seasick for weeks. I left the Seismariner after two months from the port of Peterhead, having in the meantime circumnavigated the UK on my first trip. I went on an aircraft for the first time in my life, flying from Aberdeen to Birmingham in a “Vanguard” – a Hawker Siddeley 748. Not many days thereafter, I flew from Heathrow to Madrid in a 727. Smoking seats were on the port side, non-smoking on the starboard. I bought the ticket from a travel agent in town, and it cost me £208.

Next trip, in May 1988, I flew to Amsterdam to join the ship at Den Helder. The airline lost my luggage – the only time it has ever happened to me personally. I learned important lessons about luggage and about Schiphol, none of which I have forgotten. To this day I feel edgy with checked luggage on flights and avoid it wherever possible. In my break, I went Inter-railing. While I was with friends in Paris, the news came through of a dreadful oilfield disaster – Piper Alpha. I travelled down through the Balkans to Greece and onto Athens, as travel through what was then still referred to as the “Eastern bloc countries” was not so easy. I witnessed the destructive power of inflation, seeing the value of local Yugoslavian currency evaporate from my wallet in the space of less than a week.

In the November of 1988 and early 1989 I was on the Seismariner when it made a trip to Africa. You can read more about it here: https://plateroom28.blog/2020/05/31/marine-seismic-in-the-tropics-1989/. I came back from Ponte Noire in the Congo, via Paris. Several of us were taken to the airport and flew in an antique 737 with Lina Congo, to Brazzaville. They did not even pressurize the 737 and it flew at 6000′ the whole way. As it was only the 4th or 5th time in my life I had been in an aircraft at all, this passed me by. Those who knew better were petrified. At Brazzaville we changed onto a 747-combi (half passenger, half freight) of UTA. This was in fact the first long-haul flight I ever took. The flight was to Paris via Doula in Cameroon, and Marseille. All was well until we landed at Marseille at 6a.m the next day, and that’s where we stayed. Owing to fog in Paris, we remained on the tarmac at Marseille for four hours, with neither refreshments nor breakfast served. We eventually arrived at De Gaulle early afternoon. It was February in Paris – foggy. I spent the rest of the day trying without success to get a flight to England – anywhere – Heathrow, Birmingham, East Midlands. Late in the evening I gave up and took train into central Paris, and secured myself a train ticket to London via the Bologne-Dover ferry. This was 1989 – LONG before the Channel Tunnel. I remember several things about that journey. One of them, is buying a Croque Monsieur from a vendor near Gare St Lazaire, and the second, is sitting in a compartment on the train (that dates this story – compartments??) with a number of men – clearly pilots and aircrew – who claimed to be from Mauritius but who were clearly Scythe Ifrican. This was in the days of apartheid when everything and anyone remotely white South African was considered rather bad form in liberal society. These gentlemen, it must be said, were perfectly upright and pleasant fellows. We took train from Gare St Lazaire (the first and only time I’ve ever been to that particular station in Paris), crossed the channel, and then on a cold winter’s morning, more trains, from Dover to Victoria and on home. I arrived home on 3rd February 1989, having left on 27th November the previous year.

In early 1990 we went home from our trip at sea from Pembroke Dock in West Wales. I remember the occasion because we transited down the English Channel in the teeth of a wild gale, taking days to go from Dover to Lands End. Then at Lands End we turned across the full fury of a Force 10 storm, and headed for Pembroke. The Seismariner rolled 45 degrees, which was somewhat alarming, and thousands of pounds worth of equipment were damaged breaking loose and sliding around. The following trip we rejoined at Pembroke Dock – the client, a minor oil company, having hired us to shoot seismic over a large prospect in the Celtic Sea between Wales and Ireland. It was a memorable crew change for two reasons. Firstly, I hired a car – an automatic, a Ford Scorpio it was – and learned an important life lesson about automatic cars. Take them out of “DRIVE” before getting out of the car! I got out in a layby for some reason, leaving the car in “DRIVE”, and the car proceeded to set off all of its own accord. A shocking moment from which I recovered after nearly falling to my doom under the wheels. Secondly, a new crew member joined us. Ex Army officer, very strait-laced and upright. He told us the story that he sat on a train travelling through all England, and became rather sniffy and upset at the rowdy behaviour of four lads sat in the same carriage as he. Drinking heavily, shouting and swearing, being rude to other passengers…but as the train trundled its way further into the wilds of west Wales and these dreadful yobbos did not get off, he became aware by degrees that they were in fact some of his future crew-mates and colleagues. That ex-army officer, straight as a die, some years later got into a fight with the fourth engineer, in the process earning himself the nickname (after Viz comic) of “Biffa Bolton”.

That summer of 1990 we got married: part of our honeymoon was a long and complex tour of the United States, including a memorable trip white water rafting on the Colorado river. We flew out and back with Air India. The fare was £257 return, economy. The service was dreadful. We used a travel agent to organise the entire trip. I mention this early long-haul trip because it is one of very few I have made at my own expense. In my working lifetime I have made over 200 long-haul return journeys by air. I can probably count on my fingers how many of them have been private holidays where I have paid for for the flights myself. Let me think…I struggle to get past six.

In the winter of 1990/91 we won some work for an Anglo-dutch oil major, in the Baltic Sea. It was the first time I saw commercial GPS equipment used offshore. This was the time of the first Gulf War, and in Arlanda – Stockholm’s airport – for the first time in my life I saw an armed man with a gun. The other thing I remember seeing around that time, was the sea frozen at Den Helder. You couldn’t walk on it in the harbour, but the ice mush was thick enough and strong enough to tear off anti-foul paint, and so it was stained with red lead. I recall the Seismariner’s engine (an antique by that time, the only other extant example being in a museum in Copenhagen) straining to push through the ice as we left the port. A cold winter.

In 1991 we travelled to Nigeria and worked there. I remember a messed up crew change down in the delta – the engines of small boats failing, people losing their passports, people giving all their money away when officials asked them for bribes. We got off in Dakar in Senegal. There was a blizzard of butterflies out in the roads where the ship was moored. We flew home via Rome, in an Alitalia A310 Airbus, and then – a good deal more civilised in those far-off days – over the Alps in a BA 757.

In 1992 we did a lot of work in Liverpool bay, and crew changed out of Liverpool, generally staying the night before crew change at the Atlantic Tower Hotel in the city centre. Well I recall the night we were there the same night Liverpool played FC Torino in the European Cup, and Dickie Davis was in the bar at the same time as we were. One of our number asked for his autograph. Reminds me of the Half Man Half Biscuit song “Dickie Davis eyes…” Some of us were very nearly laid off around that time, and that year I never went to sea from mid-April until mid-July. The company I worked for was sold as a chattel, the vendor being the arms manufacturer Raytheon; the buyer was oilfield giant Schlumberger. And someone senior said “get that boat working”, and off we went to Romania, for one of the more interesting episodes of my career. To be continued…