FIFO Life

Recently I read this blog from FIFO Wife which I really liked and I thought to myself, it's about time to share with you how I live for the 6 months of the year when I'm at work.

My work starts on a Thursday, so on Wednesday every 4 weeks I get ready to go back to work. I have my shopping done for any toiletries or food items I like to take (normally rolled oats and dark mint chocolate). I pack a small bag as I just need items for one overnight stay - PJs, a fresh shirt and underwear, basic toiletries (hairbrush, toothbrush and some make up) and those items I need to 'refill' at work. My uniforms and everything else I might need during my 4 weeks on island stay at work as I have what is called a B2B (Back to Back) room. A B2B is the person who does my job for the 4 weeks I'm gone. Every Thursday 4 weeks apart, we have a handover of what we worked on and what we need to achieve and the other person takes over. It's like job sharing I suppose.

As I live in Central QLD, my travel starts on Wednesday morning. So Wednesday morning every 4 weeks, Steve takes me to the Rockhampton Airport and I leave my home, my partner, my beloved Hera and all the other animals behind to fly to the other side of the country to make a living which enables us a good lifestyle. I'm always teary when I leave. Hera is nearly 16 years old. Everytime I'm worried that I will never see her again - just like it happened with Quentin, also that was very unexpected.

The flight from Rockhampton to Brisbane only takes an hour, than I have a 2 hour stop at the Qantas Club in Brisbane. If you've never been to the Qantas Club, you pay an annual fee (which is tax deductible) to use it and there you can rest, use the internet and/or their computers, eat, drink and even shower - all for free when you're on a connecting flight with Qantas. When you travel as much as I do, it's well worth while.

Then I travel to Perth. The flight to Perth takes a bit over 5 1/2 hours. I don't mind that flight. I watch movies or read, eat lunch and have my last wine. Upon arrival in Perth I collect my luggage and take a cab to my hotel. After checking in, I make myself comfortable and I normally go for a walk and grab some take away. There's a 2 hour time difference between QLD and WA, so when I arrive at 3 pm in Perth, it's already 5 pm at home. I normally eat as soon as the take away shops open because at 5.30 pm Perth time, it's 7.30 pm 'my' time and I'm hungry. I prefer take away as I can take it back to my room eat at leisure and can sit comfortable in my PJs. Often the weather in Perth is much colder than at home and as I don't want to take too much stuff, I just don't have the right clothing to go outside. For example, last time, I flew in it was 14 (min)/27 (max) deg C in Rockhampton and 4 (min)/19(max) in Perth. Brrrr!

After dinner I shower and go to bed early. My alarm clock rings at 3.30 am, I get up, brush my teeth, get dressed and leave the hotel at 4 am to take a cab to the airport. We have chartered flights going to work, so on this early Thursday morning I sit with close to 200 people who are on the same flight as me. 200 people who just left their wifes, girlfriends, husbands, children - their entire life behind to fly up to a job on a desert island. Our flight leaves at 5.40 am and takes about 2 hours. Mostly on these flights there's about 195 men and 5 women (crew excluded). There's 10 flights a day going back and forward between the island and Perth.

Once we arrive on the island, we collect our luggage, get on the bus and get driven to Camp where we have our handover for a couple of hours, get changed, collect our crib and go to work. It's long day! We still have to work until 5 pm and normally the last night spent in a strange hotel room doesn't really give you good quality sleep. Also you're worried about missing the alarm clock ringing and potentially missing the plane. I'm lucky if I sleep 4 hours that night, so having to go through all of this and then still have to work until 5 pm is exhausting!

In the evening when we return to our room, it has been cleaned and I can unpack my things and make this sterile room home for 4 weeks. The rooms are fairly large compared to other camps, about 4 x 4 m including the bathroom. Each room looks exactly the same and contains a single bed, a TV, aircon, a cyclonproof window, desk, kettle, wardrobe and a bathroom with toilet, shower and sink.

As soon as you step in, you see the entirety of the room.

My bed laden in a blue bed spread that looks like it had been washed more times than I’d like to think about. Little Quentin sitting there and waiting for me to come 'home' every night.

I don't sit on this desk very often. After 12 hours in the office, the last thing I want to do is sitting on a desk. But at least it's a space where I can have a few personal items.

We have 12 clusters (=buildings) in camp, each cluster containing 8 wings and 2 storeys. This is the hallway when I step out of my room. Each hallway looks exactly the same and you can get lost easily.

Each wing has their own laundry. Our laundry gets done twice a week, so normally I don't use it except when I wash my clothing I wore during my travel. I don't like it to go in the dryer, so I wash it with my own washing powder which is less harsh and dry it in my room. The island is located in the NW shelf of Australia and it's hot and humid all year round. The aircon is on daily just to keep the room as dry as possible. It takes about 5 days to dry a shirt and trousers in there.

The Camp is not very old and the buildings have good facilities. These are common rooms where people can come together after their 12 hour shift and watch a game or play Xbox.

Often people sit here and wait for their rooms to be cleaned when they come from shift. There's people sharing rooms (between day- and nightshift) and they cannot go to their rooms during shift changeover. I wouldn't be able to do that. At least I have 4x4 m all to myself.

Here people take their laptops if they don't have the internet in their room and you often see people sitting here skyping with their family far far away. I have a little modem in my room, so I have internet connection. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not so but at least I'm connected with my loved ones by the click of a button and can talk to them without anybody else listening.

This is what the camp looks like at night.

The yellow lighting is used to not attract turtles to a light source.

The Camp has 4 Gyms including a 'women only' gym, it's got tennis courts, 2 swimming pools, you can play soccer, basketball and cricket. I do go to the women gym regularly but that's about it. After 12 hours with people, I just want to be alone in the little spare time I have.

We have a wet mess (=bar) where we're allowed to drink 4 light beers a night. Obviously this pic was taken during the day where everybody is either working or sleeping. The wet mess is open for dayshift after they finished working and then again in the morning for the nightshift personnel.

This is how the 'clusters' look like. Normally in the morning you see 6500 people walking here to collect their crib and take the bus to work.

I'm lucky. I work 28 day on and 28 days off. A lot of contractors work 26 days on, 9 days off. When I arrive home, it usually takes me 2-3 days to return to normal and the day before I fly out, I start getting cranky again. I couldn't do 26/9...

The company I work for doesn't have RDOs (= rostered day off), so we work for 28 days every day, 5 am to 5 pm. However, some contractors work 10 hour days and have half a Sunday off every two weeks.

There's 2 walking tracks we allowed to go on after hours - one goes to the beach. We're not allowed to go swimming but we're allowed to walk on it until I have to close it for turtle season. I took this picture a couple of days ago of the full moon rising over the Indian Ocean. Actually it's much prettier than the pic shows it.

Currently it's winter, my favourite time of the year here. The temps are around 22 (min)/27 (max) but the humidity is as always very high. In summer the temps are hardly bearable with 27(min)/45 (max) with very high humidity.

But now it's winter and the colours in the sky are just so beautiful!

So what does a typical day look like? Well, I get up at 4 am every day, do my stretches, jump in my uniform and go to collect my crib. All food for the day needs to be taken in the morning, we have no opportunity to buy or get anything until we return to camp. I catch the bus at 4.45 am which drives me to my office and I start my working day with meetings and catching up on nightshift activities.

Normally at around 6.30 am, I have my breakfast - oats with raisins. I recently started following Rhonda's recipe and am soaking 1/2 cup of oats with 1 cup of water and 1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar overnight. I also add some raisins and some ground chia before I heat it up in the microwave. After 3 minutes, the oats are ready and I add a big spoonful of natural yoghurt. Very yummy! I have trialled a few variations in the past but this one is the one I like the most, so I stick to it now. We only get quick oats here, so every swing I make sure, I bring beautiful wholegrain rolled oats with me.

The day goes on and it varies in regards to what I do. It's a mixture of office and field work and lots of meetings. I try not to snack during the day but normally have some watermelon for morning tea. It's a long time from waking up at 4 am to noon. In summer I have a mixed salad for lunch. But now it's winter and there's nothing better than hot soup for lunch with a slice of light rye bread. No, it doesn't look very appetizing eating out of plastic containers but we don't have any proper plates in the office. I brought my own cutlery up, so at least I don't have to eat with plastic ones. On my shopping list for next swing I have a plate and bowl to bring here. I guess they don't want to end up with a pile of dishes nobody cleans.

At 5 pm we finish the day and either the bus will take us back to camp or we can walk. There's a 5 km walking track from site to camp which I take most days. The walking track was closed when I came back due to recent rain and just has been reopened, so I'm looking forward to walk home again.

As I'm not the most social person, I normally grab breakfast, lunch and dinner when I collect my crib in the morning. If I don't walk back to Camp, I usually either go the Women's Gym and exercise or I go for a walk to the beach or the airport - the only two walking tracks were allowed to use for recreational activities. I mostly eat in my room while watching TV. This is what a typical dinner looks like:

This one is Shepherd's Pie and Veggies. We have microwaves in the common areas we can use, so I can heat my dinner up and go back to my room and eat.

Of course, we can also go in the diners to have dinner there. We have 3 diners on camp all serving the same food. This is how it looks like in one of our diners. Work clothes are not permitted, so it's nice to see people in normal clothes instead of the high vis. All the food has labels saying "eat less" or "eat more" or "eat moderately" to help avoid obesity. I tend to disagree with their methods of choosing which food is healthy and which one isn't.

As the island is highly quarantined, all food gets cut and prepared in Perth and then send to site to minimise waste and reduce quarantine risk.



All in all, it's a good place to work and also there're a lot of restrictions in place, we all understand that if you have 8500 people on a small island you need to control them to not impact the footprint. I love my job and I love the lifestyle but yes, I do miss my fiancé, my animals, my home and I do miss normal life. I sometimes dream of Steve or Hera and wake up feeling sad that I can't just get hug. It can be lonely despite being amongst so many people. But I have chosen this life, I don't have to do it. I choose to do it to provide to my family, to enable us to do the things we want to do - both financially and timewise. It's certainly not for everyone but as long as I enjoy it, I will do it.

Now you know what it looks like where I work and where I am when I miss out on birthdays and Xmas. I'm sure you can appreciate why when I come home, I want to do the most basic things such as cooking and cleaning. I go back to normality and enjoy everyday chaos after 4 weeks of strict routine.

Have a great weekend!    

Changes

The transformation from a materialistic, highly commercial and 'expected' life to a more simple, back-to-basic and slower life was a big change for me. But life is all about changes and sometimes they're good but sometimes they're sad and you have to make the most of it.

For me, the change to simple living has saved my life. I'm convinced of that. I was too stressed, too burnt out and trying to please everybody's expectations was torture. But I always thought that is what life is. You enjoy life while you're young, when you start school, you cannot wait until it's over, so a little bit of living is taken away. Then when you start working, you need to have a career and climb up that ladder and the only joy you have is when you're on holidays but normally by the time you've just started to relax, work starts again. So your enjoyment of life decreases to those four weeks a year plus a few public holidays. Then you're too old to work and nobody really cares about you anymore, you don't know what to do with yourself because all you ever did was working and your kids are busy raising a family and making a career for themselves and then you die and it's over. Yes, I truly believed this is how life was supposed to be. Pretty sad hm?

My transition to simple life was very slow. I have been living like this for over a year now and I know there's still more things to learn and do. But for the time being this is how I live. I grew up believing the most important thing is your performance at work. You always have to aim highest, put up with everything to climb that career ladder and earn more money, have a bigger car, a bigger house, better holidays and I can't even remember what else you need to show the world that you're so fantastic. This is what I was thought when I grew up. This came from my parental side. Also my Mum was able not having to work anymore after my sister was born, she never seemed all that happy, so obviously staying at home is not good for you I thought. It was only a few years ago that she wasn't unhappy because she was at home but because she was in a very unhappy relationship which I didn't know back then. When I told my Ex-Stepfather that I was going to study Biology, he was not happy. There weren't any promising careers in biology so it would be an absolute waste and I would end up a teacher or even worse a pharmaceutical salesperson. But animals and nature is what I've always been interested in. I'm not very social, I don't like people around me, I'm not creative or arty but put me in the middle of a forest and I feel like I'm in heaven. So for me studying biology wasn't a choice, it was a must. I never regretted it!

I started studying over in Europe and then moved to Australia to learn English. I met Steve and now I have been living here for over 15 years. I finished my degree, I worked, I specialised in environmental engineering and I love my job! Environmentalists are highly regarded here and as I work for industries, I am lucky enough to have fairly secure jobs with good pay (there always will be industries) and I know I can make a difference on the inside of an organisation. I did get caught up with a materialistic lifestyle, wanting more and more and more but luckily at the peak of it, I found out that the only reason I was unhappy, was that I've forgotten who I was. Over the past year, I slowly have re-discovered myself and my happiness and boy, what a surprise it has been!

I never really had a plan for my life, other than working, working and working and then dieing because what else is there? Now this has changed. I HAVE A PLAN! For the next 12 years I will continue the kind of work I'm currently doing - FIFO, working for the oil and gas companies and making sure they do what they're supposed to do. By the time I turn 50, I should have paid everything off. We only have the mortgage to our home a a couple of investment properties which I'm planning to sell before I retire. So in the next 12 years we will have enough money to pay of as much as we can and get our place set-up. We're in the process of installing a solar system but down the track we will need a new sewerage system, we need to do some fencing and plant some more trees. My plan is that once I turn 50, I want to semi retire. I'd like to take on a job where I don't care about money, status, spare time - a job which just makes me happy. During this time, I'd like to learn the skills I currently miss - I can sew on a button but I cannot mend, knit or crochet. I will learn and I'm looking forward to think I will be sitting there with a sewing machine and mend or even make my own clothes!

I'm looking forward to be 50, 60, 70 and 80! I hope I stay healthy and that nothing bad happens to my family and myself - but to be honest that's all I wish for. So here's my bucket list:

* I want to be happy and I want to be myself and stand for what I do.
* I want to go trail riding and camping.
* I want to learn skills; like sewing, mending, making my own clothes, cheese making, woodwork.
* I do want to see a lion and a giraffe in the wild (I know they don't live here, I will have to travel for that.)

The inspiration for today's post came from my Grandma. She's 75 years old, has been married for 57 years and has 2 children. Life has always been good for them. They had their problems, their ups and downs but in general things have been good. They lived a very active life with lots of friends and I think I'm one of the very few people who can say that I have seen my Grandparents going out, drinking, having fun, partying and dancing. Unfortunately they have not prepared themselves for retirement and sickness. My Grandma fell last week and fractured her shoulder - the same shoulder she had fractured a few years back. This time it was beyond repair. She was in pain with a black swollen arm until yesterday where she had surgery and received a prosthesis. Due to health issues of his own, my Granddad is unable to stay home by himself, so he had to go to hospital with her. My Mum and sister take care of everything which is great but it shows that they had not planned for being old. They don't know what to do with themselves because they haven't got any hobbies now where they cannot follow the active lifestyle they once led.

I will go and visit them in September this year. I'm looking forward to it on one side but I'm scared on the other. I know this is going to sadden me and they're to stubborn to change anything. I will show them that I love them and that I'm there for them whatever decision they make but I think things will have to change for them.
I think I have learnt from their experience and now there will be many changes and challenges coming in my life. I need to think about this know, be prepared and have a plan and hopefully the transition goes smoothly.

How do you react to change?

Simple Life as a FIFO worker

The other day I have been asked to write about life as a FIFO (fly-in, fly-out) worker. For people who don’t know what that means, I will explain it. I live west of Rockhampton in Central Queensland but I work over in the north shelf of Western Australia – a distance of about 5000 km. So, I do fly from Rocky to Brisbane to Perth, stay the night and then take a work charterplane to work on an island in the Indian Ocean. For 28 days I live and work on this island together with about 6500 other workers (there’s no residential people here) and then I fly back home, while my ‘back to back’ (B2B) takes over for 28 days and I enjoy my R’n’R (Rest and Relaxation). So I actually only work 6 months of the year which I absolutely love!

While I’m rostered on for my 28 days, I work 12 hours a day (5 am – 5 pm), every day, 28 days straight. I have 30 mins lunch break but no RDO (rostered day off). I get up at 4.15 am every day to get dressed and then go to the diner to pick up my breakfast, lunch and snacks. I could have breakfast there but 4.30 am is a bit early for me. I then take the bus to the offices and work. I work as an Environmentalist, so I ensure compliance with all regulatory conditions are met, I take care of the Regulators on site and supervise a team. The job is very versatile and I can enjoy both office and field work.

When I come back to camp at about 5.30 pm, I get changed and go for a walk or a jog. The island is very restricted and we’re only allowed to walk on 2 roads. One of them however is a 15 km return walk and I do enjoy that. I see the animals coming out at dusk, listen to the waves and watch the sun go down in the ocean. Upon my return I have a shower and then go for dinner, normally around 7 pm. We have 4 meal areas – all serving the same food. After dinner I read, watch TV or check Facebook and then go to bed between 8 and 9 pm. This goes for 28 days. My room’s dimensions are about 4x3 m and part of it is my own bathroom with toilet, shower and sink. In my room I have a TV, Internet, a little fridge, a single bed, a desk and a wardrobe. It gets cleaned twice a week and our clothes get washed twice a week as well. There’re gyms here and tennis courts and pools and 2 ‘wet messes’ (= bars, where we’re allowed to have 4 light beers per day). But I enjoy solitary after a day at work and prefer to keep to myself. I sometimes meet up with colleagues for dinner and we do have the occasional drinks and a BBQ – especially around Christmas time.

I enjoy working here. It really does teach you about living simple. And when you notice how little you need you come back home and wonder what you’re supposed to do with all the stuff. I also like being able to concentrate on my work and not have to worry about things like shopping, cooking and cleaning while when I’m home I don’t have to think about work and can fully concentrate on my home life. I’ve done FIFO work for about 6 years now and in between had a residential job. That was terrible! I worked Monday to Friday, 10 hours a day plus travelling to and from work, 12 hours a day all up. In winter I never saw my backyard in daylight until the weekend. I felt tired and exhausted, mainly because work never stopped. I had to deal with incidents on weekends, expect phone calls at any time of the day or night, it was draining. I had my daily routine as I had no intentions to spend my entire weekend catching up on cleaning and washing but still, I never felt relaxed.

When this job came up, I jumped at it. Yes, it’s sad at times to be away from home for so long and to miss Christmases and birthdays but I earn well so I can pay my house off quickly and retire early. And I do enjoy being able to spend 6 months of the years at home, doing all the things I love and be close to the ones I love.