Surf Page Noticeboard - June 1999

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• emmet submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 15:33:06 GMT
  
  • ha ha mambo tis true. Good pub yarns are great though.

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• Spawny submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 15:00:18 GMT
  
  • Hahahaha - ain't that the truth

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• Yoda submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 14:26:11 GMT
  
  • Ha ha so true Mambo.

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• Mambo submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 13:44:43 GMT
  
  • I liked those stories.
    
    It's funny how you can have a few beers with your mates reminising and telling the same stories over again every couple of weeks and still laugh but when you've had a drink with you missus and start telling your stories she cuts you straight off and says shut up you piss head i've heard them before. :-)

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• submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 13:15:57 GMT
  
  • Looks like murray is about to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory!

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• Bear submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 12:47:02 GMT
  
  • Yes, I think I'd heard the beanie hat story before....by the time you're my age, you'll have told all yourstories a minimum of 100 times each...and rising B-)

    
    ...there can be a magic in industrial sites. It's only a shadow of its former self (I found when I first got back over, 2 years ago), but Port Talbot Steelworks used to look like a fairy castle, on the trip back from Pembs or the Gower, late on a Sunday evening. And the coke ovens being emptied at night, the blast furnaces being puddled and going down inside a deflated gas-holder when maintenance was on, in GKIS Cardiff...etc.

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• emmet submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 12:42:57 GMT
  
  • yep great story good fun as a kid doing stuff like that.

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• Spawny submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 12:39:33 GMT
  
  • Hahaha - excellent advice
    
    I loved the idea of 50 kids on their bikes riding to the ships to smash them up with iron bars. Could be a Steven Spielberg horror movie ;)

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• Lez submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 11:52:01 GMT
  
  • My old king's words in the whole debacle still resonate - "if you are going to do stuff like that son, don't get caught"

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• Yoda submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 11:13:10 GMT
  
  • Ha good story Lez. Folk shit themselves these days at the thought of youngsters being exposed to any sort of danger but stuff like that is what (boys') childhoods should be all about.
    
    Hey come on Ben, I was only ;-) ing. ;-)
    
    (know what youmean about over use of ;-)

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• Spawny submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 11:11:28 GMT
  
  • Some excellent tales from Yoda and Lezzer....
    
    Jolly good show for a Friday. Keep it up chaps
    
    As you were...

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• ben submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 11:10:42 GMT
  
  • no doubt they'll cope with it with ruthless efficiency

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• Lez submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 10:18:29 GMT
  
  • and the rest son - could go a lot colder than that - wetbulbs of -13C!
    
    you'm looking closer to minimums of -10 to -15 i reckon.
    
    

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• ben submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 10:12:31 GMT
  
  • yode - I've often thought that it doesn't really have any connection with climbing per se, apart from the whole hanging off a rope and not suffering from vertigo I guess. I imagine one of the main perks for dirt bag climbers is the contract nature of the work, go and spend 2 weeks inside a ballast tank and you can afford to go climbing for the next 2 months..
    
    off to Munich with work next week, apparently the high is forecast to be -4degC, brrr...
    
    exciting enough for you yoda?!

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• lez submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 09:57:06 GMT
  
  • ha - scrape after scape Mr Green.
    
    When I were a nipper they used to moor up loads of boats in the fal estuary (just down the river from Matt's place in fact) before scrapping them on the dockside in Falmouth. Some of these things were huge and had already had their bridges removed.
    We'd ride down there on our bikes and access these old hulks. Then have a wild time hitting the sides of these massive ships with scaffolding pipes. the noise that it would make was amazing - really bassy donking noises
    
    Inevitable with such excitement, after a few episodes of this type of quite friendly low level vandalism - word spread and it wasn't long before a peloton of about 50 young bucks were leaving Polgooth on a saturday morning and the vandalism took a more sinister turn. Its a trait I've often seen amongst males of this species - when a rabble is out of control personal responsibility is diluted and public order tends to fall by the wayside - even when a (usually) fairly sensible bunch of characters are involved.
    
    Inevitable the cops turned up and I was singled out with a mate - (now a doctor) as being the ringleaders. We hauled up in front of the headmaster at school and thrashed within an inch of our lives.

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• Yoda submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 09:55:22 GMT
  
  • Nah Emmet we just go and hit it wiv a hammer init?
    
    Sorry mate, its a perfectly valid question actually. There are two types of rope access bods; those ex-climber types who want to earn a crust doing something that they think will be a bit like climbing (it isn't really) and then there are those with qualifications such as coded welders, EX rated electricians, NDT inspectors who take a rope access qual' so that they can improve their earnings.
    
    On that inspection of wing ballast tanks we were working under the supervision of the two inspectors I mentioned (the ones who looked on as I turned into a foaming madman in the bar). All we were doing was abseiling down these steel shafts with a map of the shaft and all its welds on a clip board. Wherever the steel looked degraded we took Ultrasound readings using a probe to measure the thickness of the steel and mapped out the area of degradation. At the end of the day we submitted these reports to the inspectors who were drawing up the overall inspection report.
    
    

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• emmet submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 09:45:17 GMT
  
  • who has knocked the PT camera up a bit or is it a mega high tide?
    
    Yoda, Do you guys have to do some sort of training before you do the inspections or replace things like the ice deflector-thingy-majigs? Hats off (calm down..) to you guys doing it though is it well paid?

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• Tommy Tourettes submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 09:19:51 GMT
  
  • BEN'S MISSUS IS OFF UP TOWN WITH HER BOYFRIEND - doh, shit, shit, shit. Sorry Ben.

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• Yoda submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 09:18:21 GMT
  
  • Have I told you that one before? Probably told you all my stories before. Apologies if so - just skip to the next exciting post, like Ben's for instance.
    
    ;-

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• Yoda submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 09:07:02 GMT
  
  • Its getting like Jackanory around her isn't it?

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• ben submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 09:06:45 GMT
  
  • gawd yoda's not rolling out his hat story again is he.. just kidding you yode (I would put a winking emoticon in there but I'm making a conscious effort to use them less)
    
    home along with the boy this weekend as the missus is off to London, attempting to plan some adventures around the naptimes

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• Yoda submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 01:34:58 GMT
  
  • I tell you what Bear there was poetry in motion at Livnos shipyard. Me and two work mates were there for a couple of months inspecting the wing ballast tanks on this rusting hulk of an oil tanker. We spent the daytime abseiling down 30m deep and 1m square tubes that circumnavigated the whole ship. Their purpose is so that when the ship has no cargo the captain can flood the wing ballast tanks to balance out the load and keep the vessel at an acceptable level in the water. Some of the tanks were in perfect condition but others were so bad we could kick through what was once 20mm steel through to the next tank. The awesome thing was after our reports went in seeing the scaffolding go up outside the hull then the "fixers" would cut through the steel hull and cut out the shit steel to replace it. Again, awesom.
    
    The shipyard at night was so eerie. Great hulking machinery everywhere, empty stark buildings, occasional old single bulb lights and great empty docksides. I loved it.
    
    One night me and the lads went out on the piss in Setubal with these two non rope access inspectors we were working with. We found this nice little bar and had a good old laugh with the owner who was a young bloke (about 30) who'd grown up in Canada. We were sat at the bar and about 4 pints in when I absent mindedly pulled my fleece hat out of my pocket and put it on my head (it was winter) whereupon the bar owner suddenly points at me and says "take the chuk off man". I said "you what". "Take the chuk off" he said again. "What's a "chuck"" says I. "The hat man, the hat".
    
    At this point the evening took a turn for the worse; what had previously been five guys having a placid drink sitting at the bar of an empty little shack in an empty winter Setubal suddenly became four guys looking at me kicking off. I couldn't believe that, having sat there for two hours, pretty much the only customers bar about five old pissheads, this young guy was getting heavy with me about a fucking woolly hat.
    
    Turns out there are some local hoodie types who wear hats like the one I had. How the fuck I was supposed to know that I don't know but I ended up calling this guy a "cunt" and he slammed his fists down on the bar spilling all the beer and I offered him out and my mates dragged me out and the police came and we skulked back to our oil tanker in Livnos and I berated my mates for not supporting me and woke up with an almighty hangover and abseiled some more wing ballast tanks.
    
    The end.

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• Yoda submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 01:14:31 GMT
  
  • Lez we've been approached by loads of those Sky telly "world's most extreme jobs" programmes looking for material. All the good stuff we offered was vetoed by the client; stuff like removing damaged ice shields from platform legs on the Hibernian rig in Nova Scotia and replacing with new. The companies approaching us always have their "rope access trained guy" but the problem is that companies like BP, Shell, Chevron etc. aint interested in having their brand associated with "the world's most dangerous jobs" programmes.

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• Bear submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 00:24:26 GMT
  
  • "The ever present smell of oil and sea..." has all the features of an opening line. Give us the rest of the poem/song, Yode ! B-)

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• Bear submitted on Fri 27/01/12 at 00:19:49 GMT
  
  • Well, Ron, I assume the ones you did know included Gotye, Lana Del Ray (I just love "video ganes"), SParkadia, Foo Fighters, Florence and the Machine, Arctic MOnkeys...otherwise you're just TOO old, mate ! B-)

    
    ...I know so many people our age that reckon all new music is crap...then they quote 'rap' and I have to say, "Hey!, rap's not new, it's been around 20-odd years!" ..but then that's when most of our generation seem to have turned their musical ears off. I hear so much great new stuff on TripleJ

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