WHY ARE WE HERE? JACKETS AND DECKS

Dearest Friends,

In case you've been wondering how we ended up here in the first place, and what exactly John was doing, well, he was building these guys -- jackets and decks -- which would eventually support off-shore drilling platforms.

This is the fabrication yard where they were assembled.

It still boggles my mind that B&R would hire little engineers right out of college, just kids really, and send them over here to deal with the tough-as-nails foremen who'd been doing this for 20 or 30 years.

Here is the explanation that John scrawled on the back of this last photo, when my grandfather asked exactly what he was up to: "This shows our assembly line of jackets.  These will be loaded onto a barge and transported out to a production site.  A large crane, 500 short ton capacity, will lift the jacket off the barge and set it in the water.  Piles are driven down through the legs into the seabed to anchor the jacket, legs are laid out on the ground, the bracing for 2 sides are erected."

There.  Now you know.