Run-around and around and around

On Wednesday I was informed that I would be leaving the rig once our tools were out of the hole. After that the rig was planning on running casing and they needed to get all non-essential personnel off the rig to make room. It's a pretty small rig, so bed space is a high commodity.

But first we had to unload our nuclear source, download the data from our tools, and process and send the logs to town. Wary of how late at night that would be, I went to take a nap with a promise from our lead hand that he would wake me up when they were ready to unload the source.

A short forty-five minutes later I was awakened from my semi-somnolent state by a knocking on my door. I opened it not to find my lead hand instructing me to don my coveralls and grab my dosimeter, but instead a pair of casing workers with bags in hand and looking to move into my still-warm bed.

"But you're supposed to be on the boat tonight!" was their response to my claim that I wasn't leaving until the next morning. "I can't go anywhere until my source is out of my tool!" It's a complicated and dangerous enough process unloading the source as it is -- it would be impossible with only one person.

What next ensued was an unpleasant confrontation in the Company Man's office where the Company Man claimed he told us to have three people ready for the evening boat, and our directional driller claiming he had already assured the Company Man we couldn't send anyone in until the tools were out of the hole.

We made a compromise to send the second directional driller and our third MWD hand in on the boat departing in fifteen minutes, and the rest of us would stay until the tools were out and ready to ship back to base. Unfortunately for them, both of those guys were sound asleep and had to be woken rather abruptly to pack and be ready to leave in record time.

As I was preparing to go back to bed to catch whatever sleep I could in anticipation of my red-eye work, another knock sounded on my door. It was the same casing hands saying they had been instructed to move into my room.

"You're not on the boat yet?"

No.

Seeing as how it's the only room on this rig that is appropriate for female use, I spent the next thirty minutes running all over the rig's offices again trying to track down the people who could fix the error.

In the end I got about thirty minutes of sleep before I was awoken by the third interruption of the night which was at last the wake-up call I had been expecting. Unloading the source went remarkably smoothly, as well as the processing and uploading of the data, and I was up until one o'clock in the morning checking off various to-do items that I was too conscientious to just leave until the morning (never have I learned the risks of procrastination better than on this job).

It turned out that the Company Man threw another fit that evening when he found out that (as per our agreement) we had only sent in two people on the boat. He ranted and raved and claimed we had agreed to send three, but no, that would have been impossible. I was glad to have missed that discussion.

After a refreshing four hours of sleep I relieved my lead hand so he could rest up, and sat myself down in our unit in front of my laptop for a relaxing few hours since I had already finished most of the work.

I had just turned in the shipping paperwork for our tools, and was expecting to be on a helicopter in a few hours when I got a call from the Company Man saying that he wanted to send all of us in as soon as possible. All of the crew, all of our tools. I woke up all of the sleeping guys, instructing them to pack and be ready to leave, and re-did all of the shipping paperwork.

Two hours later, the weather is looking pretty iffy and we're not sure if the helicopters will be able to fly. I get a call from my manager instructing us to leave one set of tools on the rig (and a nuclear source! Is it allowed to stay on the rig unsupervised? Apparently so.) I redo the shipping paperwork again.

By early afternoon a thick, pea-soup fog has set in and its clear the helicopters won't be flying. Our tools are all ready to go, and other than a few last-minute requests for additional data from town I have little to do but sit and stew. When I went to bed I was given the possibility of leaving on a boat that evening and was told I would be woken up in that event. Morning came with no wake-up call, and little elucidation into the future's plans for me. The fog was gone, but a check of the three posted helicopter manifests failed to reveal my name or the names of my crew members. I found out that I might still be sent in on the boat, which hadn't even left port yet, or I might be on a fourth and yet unscheduled helicopter.

With all these delays in leaving, our time to be home during the casing break is contracting tighter and tighter. As it is right now we are expected to return on Monday morning, which means we'll have to be at the hotel near the heliport Sunday night. An unexpected call from my manager yesterday, however, instructed me that I would not be coming back on Monday. There is another engineer who has been waiting in town for too long and needs some rig days. Now normally this would be considered "stealing" my spot, but she'll only be here for a week and I don't have the energy to care. A week on land looks like a nice little piece of heaven to me. And I could really go for a cold beer tonight.

As I wrote this post, I was confirmed on the manifest of the fourth flight this afternoon. The fog has cleared, and the first flight has already come and gone. Home, I'll be there soon.