The First Day
I was tired to the point of feeling like I was in some sort of distorted dream, awake but still major parts of my brain were not functional. I had been awake for better than 24 hours. I had a chance to get an hour of rest but real sleep just wasn’t possible. The oiled sofa would not cooperate.I was nervous as I settled at one of the galley tables to have coffee with 3 of the workers that had already started talking about what was going to happen that morning. I looked through the window and saw only darkness outside. I introduced myself and slowly sprawled across my chair trying to look experienced. I listened.
One was a grizzled slightly built man with a forcefully quiet demeanor, cold steel eyes and tanned leather for skin. He kept his jaw under tension and didn't move it much whenever he spoke. It was obvious he was in charge and he knew it.
The other was a Cajun named Mick. He was loud, uneducated and looked like he had just spent the night wrapped around a truck engine. He was young but, the few years he had spent working on rigs showed through in the already deep creases in his stubbled face.
The last man, Ben was a driller. I knew that because that’s what the man in charge called him.
“Y’all men grab some 18’s an some shackles. We’ll meet on the drill floor in 15. The driller is on the floor with ya’ll. I’m runin the table.”
Ben nodded then Mick piped up.
“Fuckin 18’s? They aint no way we could break that fuckin’ bit with no fuckin’ 18’s! Muther fuckin’ 18’s. Shit!” he said indignantly.
“We aint gonna use the 18’s to break it.” the man in charge growled with and armor piercing glare back at Mick.
Mick obviously was an experienced rig hand and was used to respect from anyone within earshot but the man in charge had silenced him with almost no effort.
I now somehow knew that the man in charge was called a tool pusher. Also instinctively I knew to avoid him. He was not pleased I was there and I was very aware that he was watching me.
As the 3 of us walked out onto the deck and headed down into the bowels of the machine, Mick was talking to no one in particular in his usual loud Cajun accent.
“Fuckin pusher. Fuck that muddah fucker.”
“Fuck him“ the driller commented.
It was at about this point in my young oil rig tenure that I began to realize the word fuck is a universal term and it’s use is required at least once in any form in every spoken sentence. I also found if I didn’t know what someone was talking about the phrase “fuckin A” or in a real pinch just a palin, old fashioned “fuck” would get me by even though it was known I was a worm or, the new guy for those never exposed to oil hands.
Mick found what we needed and started passing the tools out.
I was disappointed really when I found out that the oil industry’s “18” was nothing more than an 18 inch pipe wrench. Fuck. I can buy one of these fuckers at the local hardware store I thought. What a gyp. I noticed however that I was picking up the lingo. I was pleased I was adapting so quickly.
It was sunrise when we made it up to the drill floor which was immediately under the derrick. On the way, I had started to notice that there are a lot of stairs on an offshore rig.
I would come to find out that everywhere I needed to go on the machine, climbing in some form was required to get there. The cardiovascular benefits of this activity were most often enhanced by carrying large heavy objects, usually metal. One hundred feet of coiled arc welding cable was especially effective at driving my heart rate to nearly explosive levels.
The drill floor was about a 30 foot by 30 foot square pad made of what appeared to be wood, but I had never seen wood quite like this. In appearance the planks looked like garden variety railroad ties but, they were unnaturally large, looking like Paul Bunyan himself had cut them long ago. The surface was a cold grey and felt like stone. The many scars and gashes left in the timbers served as record of it's long days at battle in the fields against obviously colossal metal opponents slammed against it.
As I looked around I realized not one piece of machinery I saw was familiar.
The tool pusher circled us up and reviewed the plan of action.
“Nah men, they want us to use the drill table to twist the bit off the collar.”
Mick immediately piped up.
“How da fuck is we sposed to hold the bit and turn da collar with a mudda fuckin bunch a 18's? Aint no fuckin way!”
The tool pusher shot him a glance but it was an understated version of the one I had seem in the galley. The tool pusher was as skeptical as Mick.
“Ahh raht nah what the engineers want us to do is turn the collar with the table and clamp the bit with the tongs” he explained.
I looked at Mick for some indication of what he thought about this plan we were about to execute. He had a puzzled look on his face and was making small circles in the air with his index finger. He was trying to visualize this unsrewing process.
Finally he fixed a gaze at something far away in the middle of his mind. A look of discovery flashed across his face –
“Aint no fuckin way! Cause, look, this fucker turns like that right? Den the fuckin bit comes off like this. Mudda fucker! Wait…………………….. Fuck. He’s fuckin right. It could work!”
The problem was that there was a drill bit screwed onto a drill collar that was stuck fast and no application of heavy tools so far had persuaded the thing to come off.
The plan was to lift the whole piece upside down with the air tuggers, put the collar into the table and clamp the bit with the pipe tongs. Once we had hold of it the drill would be turned hopefully breaking the bit free.
Dangerous? Of course. The drill table was capable of turning millions of pounds of mud filled drill pipe all day every day. We were about to try and turn only a few hundred pounds of bit with it. If the threads really were welded together somehow and didn’t give way the table could twist the collar to the point of shattering. It was also possible that the whole thing could slip out of the table and tumble over the floor in an unpredictable path. Then there was the danger of the tongs breaking. If any of these were to occur, large chunks of sharp, very mad metal would fly everywhere. The drill floor would be a war zone for an instant.
The pipe tongs were suspended horizontally over the floor on something akin to garage door springs. They were serious industrial strenght tools with clamping jaws that could have ripped large trees in two at the base in skilled hands. The handle on each was the size of a ball bat at the fat end and perhaps 7 feet long. This was a leverage tool intended to quickly grab large objects and hold them against great force.
I followed everyone else’s lead and we set to work making the preparations for the operation that was about to take place. The collar was clamped in the table, the bit was clamped with the tongs and the tongs were held in place with the wire rope from the air tuggers.
When we were ready, the tool pusher yelled out to us “Ah raht men! Get outta there!”
Ben and Mick ran and I followed. Clearly they were unsure of what was about to happen.
I was worried because the tool pusher had let a hint of fear escape his lips when he told us to leave the floor and I distictly remember seeing his jaw move. It was very apparent none of them had ever seen anything like this attempted before.
As we watched from behind a quarter inch thick steel wall that partially surrounded the back half of the derrick, the table slowly turned right. The tongs jerked slightly as the slack came out of their wire rope tethers. Even with the noises of the machine running, I could hear everything start to strain and popping sounds were coming from places that seemed to have nothing to do with what was happening on the floor.
I watched the tool pusher as he braced himself and gently cradled the drill controls in his hands. He slowly but continually increased the turn on the table. Nothing was moving as far as I could tell but I could hear the motor on the table continuing to work and twist.
There was suddenly a sharp and loud report not unlike a gunshot from the direction of the clamped bit. Everyone yelled “fuck!” in unison and jumped back a full step.
Something serious had just broken but it was unclear as to what. I looked at the tool pusher and he had let the controls snap back into the neutral position as he gazed at the bit trying to decide what had just happened. He gathered his courage and started the table again but barely applying pressure to the drill controls. The collar was turning but the bit was not.
“Holy Fuck! That shit fuckin’ worked!” Mick yelled with a smile on his face.
The bit was free. There was a brief attempt at celebration on the floor but it was actually more an expression of relief.
I would listen to lots of rig stories later that made me understand most celebrations like this were just about surviving to work the next day.
posted by Knot @ 11:39 PM
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