Monthly Archives: July 2012
Hi Ho, Hi Ho . . .
It’s back to work we go.
Well, as I posted on Monday, a knock at the door put us to work on our new gate. It seemed kind of early to us. They didn’t even have the derrick up yet. But I guess that’s why they pay us the big bucks. LOL
Like our gate-before-last, we’re just a few hundred feet from the rig. It is convenient for dropping off the logs at the rig office, but it is noisy. The big chillers make a loud roaring sound very much like the roar of the water at Niagara Falls.
Last time we were almost a mile and a half from the rig, and couldn’t even really see it through the trees. We kind of do miss the peace and quiet.
This is what it looks like from our RV.
This is our 3rd gate with this drill rig, and should be our last, since we’ll be leaving sometime around the 20th of August to start heading north to Celina OH for Nick Russell’s upcoming Gypsy Journal Rally.
One nice thing about moving with a rig is that you don’t have to learn a whole new group of people. The drill rig has the same core of 15-20 people all the time. Actually I should say 30-40 since half are off at any one time.
The Marathon guys work 2 weeks on and 2 weeks off, and the H&P guys (the crew) work 1 week on and 1 week off. Marathon owns the lease and runs things. They hire H&P to furnish the drill rig and the crew to do the actual drilling,.
The other thing different about this new site is the rain. This past Tuesday and Wednesday we had a lot of it. Inches of it. And we discovered a problem with our pad.
Even though it should be nice and dry under our canopy, we were slogging around in about 2 inches of mud. The problem is that the pad has a definite slope from behind us, under the rig, under the canopy, and out onto the road. I guess the idea was for drainage, and it does drain, pretty much right under our feet.
But that’s not the worse part. The roadway and the pad are all made from caliche, a form of calcium carbonate. When it’s dry, it hardens like concrete. That’s why it’s used for the roads and pads. But when it gets wet, it becomes, as my grandpa used to say “slick as snot”, and very sticky.
The slick part makes it kind of hard to walk on and the sticky part means it clumps to your shoes until you’re just walking around on about 2 inches of mud caked to your boots. But the real problem comes if you let the stuff dry on your shoes.
It turns to concrete and you pretty much have to chip it off, unless you soak them in water until it softens again, and then scrape it off. I finally ended up just wearing my Crocs since they were the easiest to wash off and clean.
One nice thing was that yesterday (Wednesday) we got another steak dinner for each of us dropped off at our rig. But since we had already had dinner, we just saved it for tonight.
Now that things have settled down I’m going to try and catch up on the blog comments and emails. I’m a few days behind, but I’ll get to them.
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Thought for the Day:
A single fact can spoil a good argument.
dsfds
An End To Eden . . .
Well, our 4 day long idyllic interlude has come to an end.
A knock at the door at about 1pm brought our goofing-off to a screeching halt, and we were back to work.
More later.
