School Trip to an Oil Platform - Safe Concordia

We had been doing some school on oil with the kids and could see the top crane of this oil platform moored to the shore in the next bay. We had met the crane operator on the afternoon of the world cup final a little worsse for wear, and he'd said, in his most Mexican Spanish, "Jeest come-zee over and zee zee Capiitan and ee will show you around".  Seemed an offfer too good to pass up, but seemed far less possible in the cold (all relative) light of day.  Phoebe, Zinnia, Cosmo, Emma and Colin went and quite literally pressed the doorbell.  An English sounding voice answered and said he was the captain, and he'd be down in a moment.  Well, much to our suprise and excitement the Very English Captain not only let us on to the site, but gave us a personal guided tour for the next two hours, from the engine rooms to the bridge, to the heli-deck, culminating with ice cream in the canteen.  Many thanks to, the very well travelled, Capt. Laurence C Farquhar, who yearned for his country garden in Shropshire.

The platform was tied up in Curacao avaoiding the hurricane season and had got there under its own steam at 5-6knots being powered by 4 electric azimuth drives (one on each corner) that normally keep it stationary next to an oil drilling platform with only 1m deflection in up to 40kn of wind.  I think i heard there was 80 MWatts of generation capacity on the rig, but that could be rubbish.

Below is a copy of Zinnias diary entry for the visit, very enlightening:

Safe Concordia is a mainetenance and repair platform it is red.

In it there is a cinema and a gym room.  We got to see the Captains bedroom, it was amazing and small.  The platform was scary because it was high, there was 18 people onboard it, but normally it had 350 people on board.  It had six legs they were red. We had ice cream, the capitain was a very nice man.