Again, I depart from my intention to provide a chronology of my grand adventure in Nigeria and provide an expanded version of today’s Facebook comment.
When the price of oil crashed in 1985 I gave up hope of working in the oilfield and took a job as Research Associate/Electronics Engineer at Nova University’s Graduate School of Oceanography.
I lived on a houseboat at the Oceanographic lab and collected high resolution directional spectra of gravity waves two months each spring on an otherwise uninhabited island in the Bahamas from instrumentation using microprocessor data acquisition and telemetry systems that I had designed. The project had the distinction of being the last major project funded by the National Science Foundation to use a wooden sail boat as a research vessel.
Prior to this, I had ridden boats to some pretty remote places doing geochemical prospecting but never really had much interest in boats. The oceanographic lab, and therefore my floating home, was located between the U. S. Navy Surface Warfare Center facility and Station Fort Lauderdale, U. S. Coast Guard at Dania Beach, Florida. Twenty years later and 6000 miles away, I am again living next to a navy facility at a major port. This time it is the Nigerian Navy yard on Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria. Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, commissioned four “new” Nigerian Navy ships on 19 February, 2015, the day before I left for two weeks rotational leave in Houston. By the time I returned to Lagos, the second smallest of the four, NNS Prosperity, an ex-Irish Naval Force OPV, had left the dock. Last week the two largest vessels sailed, leaving the dock empty and this morning NNS Prosperity is back.
It’s low tide so you cannot see much of her on the other side of the dock.
