What’s the worst sea you’ve ever been in?  Tell us about it below…

(Dow Jones) Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC) said Wednesday that it has removed nonessential workers from the company’s Gunnison, Nansen and Boomvang oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico as a tropical wave and a tropical storm moved toward the area.

Anadarko said it was monitoring the path of the weather systems and was “prepared to evacuate all personnel and shut in production if necessary.”

BP PLC (BP) said it was evacuating more than 500 nonessential workers from platforms in the Southern Green Canyon area of the Gulf, while Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA, RDSA.LN) said it was preparing to evacuate personnel but had not yet done so.

The National Hurricane Center said a tropical wave in the northwestern Caribbean Sea was moving west-northwest at 10 to 15 miles an hour and could turn into a larger storm headed for the central or western Gulf of Mexico in a few days.

A storm in the Gulf could affect offshore oil and gas production. The possibility of a Gulf storm helped drive natural gas futures to two-week highs.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Katia, located further south, near the Leeward Islands, was also moving west-northwest, at 20 miles an hour (32 km an hour), with maximum sustained winds of 70 miles an hour (110 km an hour), the NHC said. The agency has predicted that Katia is likely to veer east of the Gulf, toward the east coast of Florida.

-By Cassandra Sweet, Dow Jones Newswires

By John J. Miller

Tropical Storm Emily petered out over Cuba last week, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns of “high hurricane activity” in the months ahead, with three to five major hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean and threatening coastlines. Next on the NOAA’s list of nicknames is Franklin, followed by Gert and Harvey. By December, we’ll know what became of them, as well as whether the storm-desk professionals made it all the way down their alphabetical list to Tammy, Vince and Whitney.

A little more than three centuries ago, a violent tempest with no name—and no meteorological forewarning—ripped through England. It was probably the fiercest storm in British history, which is saying something for an island whose inhabitants are famous for gripes about the weather. Yet it left more than a legacy of destruction. It also became a source of creative inspiration, giving birth to the first substantial work of modern journalism: “The Storm,” by Daniel Defoe.

On the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 24, 1703, Londoners felt the first strong breezes. By 4 p.m., the winds had picked up. The worst of the storm was still more than two days away, but that night the gusts were powerful enough to knock over part of a house and nearly crush Defoe, who was then a minor poet and pamphleteer in his early 40s. If he had died in that moment, he would not have gone on to scale the heights of English literature 16 years later with “Robinson Crusoe.”

When the storm struck, Defoe was fresh from prison. He had written a satirical tract on the religious intolerance of high-church Anglicans. For this offense he was fined, placed in a pillory and jailed for several months. Upon his release, Defoe was desperate for money to support his family and wrote at a frantic clip. The scholar Paula R. Bachscheider estimates that more than 400,000 words poured from his pen over the next year. About 75,000 of them went into “The Storm,” the first book-length work of his career.

After Defoe’s close call with the collapsing house, the winds remained high in London. On the night of Friday, Nov. 26, Defoe looked at his barometer. He had never seen the mercury so low and suspected that “the Tube had been handled and disturb’d by the Children.” Defoe rarely wrote about private matters, but in this line he provides a brief glimpse into what must have been a boisterous family life with six children.

As Friday turned into Saturday, the storm unleashed its full fury. The wind shrieked and homes rattled. “Most People expected the Fall of their Houses,” wrote Defoe. Even so, they judged it safer to stay put than to seek new shelter: “Whatever the Danger was within doors, ’twas worse without; the Bricks, Tiles, and Stones, from the Tops of the Houses, flew with such force, and so thick in the Streets, that no one thought fit to venture out, tho’ their Houses were near demolish’d within.” From start to finish, the mayhem lasted an entire week.

The human toll was substantial: 123 dead in and around London and an estimated 8,000 drowned at sea, including about one-fifth of the sailors in the queen’s navy. The physical wreckage was equally immense, with 800 houses flattened, 400 windmills demolished and the newly built Eddystone Lighthouse, off England’s southern coast, washed away. Whole forests blew over. On a tour of Kent, Defoe started to count the fallen trees but quit at 17,000, having grown “tired with the Number.” So it’s little wonder that he reached for superlatives to describe what he called “The Greatest, the Longest in Duration, the widest in Extent, of all the Tempests and Storms that History gives any Account of since the Beginning of Time.”

Defoe’s eyewitness account is valuable, but his real innovation was to collect the observations of others. Journalism was then in its infancy, and there was nothing like systematic and objective reporting on contemporary events. Within a week of the storm’s strike, however, Defoe was running newspaper ads that asked readers to submit stories. He and his publisher, John Nutt, must have regarded this invitation as an investment, knowing that they would absorb the cost of correspondence: In those days, the recipients of mail paid for postage.

While Defoe waited for the stories, he learned everything he could about the science of weather. He also contemplated metaphysical lessons: “I cannot believe any Man so rooted in Atheistical Opinions, as not…to apprehend the Possibility of a Supreme Being, when he felt the terrible Blasts of this Tempest.”

All of this appeared the following summer in “The Storm,” which might be called the world’s first instant book. The heart of the manuscript contains about 60 accounts of the tempest from around England, selected and excerpted by Defoe. He regarded them as truthful because “most of our Relators have not only given us their Names, and sign’d the Accounts they have sent, but have also given us Leave to hand their Names down to Posterity.” And so the name Elizabeth Luck survives along with her report from Tunbridge Wells, where hundreds of trees fell down, a church lost its steeple, and two horses perished beneath a smashed stable.

Like any good reporter, Defoe understood the importance of drama and human-interest stories. A letter from the Rev. James King of London tells of a chimney that crashed through a house and buried a maid. She was feared dead, but emerged the next morning from a small cavity in the rubble. Thomas Powell, a shopkeeper in Deal, was so appalled that his neighbors would not rescue sailors stranded on a sandbar that he paid them five shillings per head to help out. Defoe credits Powell’s initiative with saving 200 lives. Defoe also relates grimmer anecdotes, including the tale of the captain of a leaky ship who tried to escape his fate by committing suicide—only to have his vessel survive.

“The Storm” was not a best seller. A proposed sequel with additional material never went to press—a reminder that journalism and book publishing, for all of their occasional pretensions, are ultimately commercial enterprises and vulnerable to the whims of consumers. Yet Defoe had invented a new way to examine the world, and today’s journalists are his descendants.

Mr. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College.

Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

HOUSTON (Dow Jones)–BP PLC (BP, BP.LN) said Thursday it is pulling all personnel from offshore oil platforms located in the southern Green Canyon area of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico as a precaution due to Tropical Storm Don.

The platforms being evacuated are Atlantis, Holstein and Mad Dog. The company is shutting in production at Atlantis, which according to consultancy Wood Mackenzie produces 90,000 barrels of oil and 60 million cubic feet of gas a day.

BP said no production will be affected at Holstein and Mad Dog, because both facilities were undergoing scheduled maintenance.

The company expects all personnel to be removed by Thursday afternoon.

-By Angel Gonzalez, Dow Jones Newswires

COPENHAGEN (Dow Jones)–Danish oil and gas company Maersk Oil stands to lose production of up to 5.3 million barrels of oil equivalent due to extensive repair works on a floating production unit damaged in a storm last winter in the U.K. North Sea, reports Danish business daily Borsen Monday.

Maersk Oil’s Gryphon floating production, storage and offloading unit, currently under repair in Rotterdam, services a number of the company’s offshore U.K. oilfields.

The platform tore loose during a heavy storm, suffered severe damage, and will be out of production for up to a year while it’s being repaired, writes Borsen.

Maersk Oil has a normal daily production in the U.K. North Sea of about 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent, of which about a third hinges on the services of Gryphon.

Maersk Oil, a unit of Danish industrial conglomerate A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S (MAERSK-B.KO), doesn’t expect the FPSO will return to full production before the Spring of 2012, Maersk Oil U.K. managing director Martin Rune Pedersen now told Borsen.

At current prices, the resulting production fall could equal a revenue of about DKK3.2 billion, or a net profit of roughly DKK350 million, Sydbank analyst Jacob Pedersen said to Borsen.

Newspaper website: http://www.borsen.dk

-By Flemming Emil Hansen, Dow Jones Newswires

Photo by Lars Grepstad

On the North Sea – Photo of the Bourbon Mistral

The Bourbon Mistral platform supply vessel was the first ship with the Ulstein’s X-Bow design which helped it win the Ship of the Year Award at the SMM in 2006.

This weeks photo comes to us via boston.com/bigpicture.

Waves batter a merchant vessel stranded along the coast during a heavy storm in Valparaiso City, Chile, 121 km (75 miles) northwest of Santiago on July 6, 2010. (REUTERS/Eliseo Fernandez)

Beaufort developed the first versions of his Wind Force Scale and Weather Notation coding, which he was to use in his journals for the remainder of his life. From the circle representing a weather station, a stave (as in musical notation) extends, with one or more half or whole barbs. For example, a stave with 3 ½ barbs represents Beaufort seven on the scale, decoded as 32–38 mph, or a “Fresh Gale”. Beaufort didn’t really invent something new here; rather, he eventually succeeded in getting others to adopt it as a standard when there was no existing standard.

While the information hasn’t changed much (nor has chart most of us are familiar with, shown in the picture above) the way in which the information is displayed can be depicted in a variety of ways. Below is just a sampling, be sure to leave a link to your favorite rendition of the scale in the comments below…. and not, the Beaufort-esque chart for determining the scale of a bar fight, doesn’t count.

We found this interesting YouTube video of ships battling heavy seas and rogue waves. These photos have been provided by SplashVision.com. Here at gCaptain.com we would love to see your interesting photos of ships struggling in heavy seas and/or rogue waves. To submit you photos drop us an email at Tips@gCaptain.com. Thanks..

If you like this post you might also like to take a look at some of these other posts.

Deadliest Catch – Monster Waves

Piloting Heavy Seas

Rescue On The High Seas- USCG Helicopter Crew Interviewe

Ship Battling Arctic Ice – Photos

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As a young cadet excited about an approaching storm the C/M told me something I find myself repeating; “You can tell the green hands from the old salts by their reaction to an approaching storm. The newbie will say ‘This is going to be fun’ while the old salt is thinking ‘Shit, not another’.