Fishing Trip

I've been on a very frustrating rig the last two weeks. And I have a post about it. But I feel the need to balance it out with the good. So first I want to talk about the moments that are so good and sweet that I can’t help but love what I’m doing.  During these moments I feel so strongly that God has led me to be exactly where I am so I can do exactly what I’m doing. It’s these moments I hold on to when I’m having a bad day in the field. Or when I've been working for 3 months straight with not enough rest time and am burnt out. Or when the frustrations feel like too much and I can’t see past the situation to what might be waiting on the other side.

One of these moments was at the end of a fishing trip.  Sounds job unrelated right? Wrong! One of our tools I run quite a bit and I've developed a reputation here for knowing it well.  This is mostly because I've seen it fail in the most spectacular ways and can now diagnose problems quickly. It’s what’s called a ‘retrievable tool’.  This means that even if you are unable to get part of the BHA or the drillstring to be removed, you can still pull this tool up the inside of the pipe.  (The picture below might help clarify... it's a little hard to explain) Since the beginning I've said I want to retrieve or ‘fish’ a SlimPulse tool. And everyone has laughed at me because it’s only happened once in this location before. Until about two months ago that is.  When I fished the second one.

In total I spent about a month at that rig. I left for 1 night about halfway through and the next day I begged them not to send me back because the job was so boring and nothing was happening. Then, we got stuck in the hole. This happens, usually because the hole we’re drilling collapses. When you were a kid did you ever try to dig a hole to China? No? Then you did not have a childhood. Yes? Good.

Remember how you kept having to make the hole bigger around the top so all the dirt didn't keep falling in the bottom?  Well when ‘digging’ to 10,000ft or more we can’t make the top of the hole bigger. So we use all kinds of fancy technology (called mud) to keep the dirt from falling in and trapping our drillstring. Sometimes it fails. And all the dirt falls in anyway and then we can’t move. We can’t go up, we can’t go down.  This particular well had eaten three BHA’s by time I arrived and we’d lost two complete sets of tools. Over a million dollars each.

Then the well tried to take a big bite out of my tools..  They said our tools were lost and started to remove us from the well. Then decided they needed one of us to stay. I wanted to leave so badly, but something told me that just maybe it would be worth it to stay.  Sure enough the next day they decided to make a fishing attempt on my tool. As my co-worker can testify, I was SO EXCITED. As I said before, it was something I’ve always wanted to do and finally I had the chance.  I researched and prepared as best I could. My co-worker and I tried to think of every detail in advance, not easy when it’s something you've only read about doing. 

Finally they were ready.  Of course this happened at about 11 pm right as I was trying to go to sleep. I had been up since 5 am checking every detail again. The basic procedure is this. Attach a fishing tool (think of it like the hook) to the end of a very long rope (provided by wireline – the fishing line!) which is connected to a truck with a reel (the pole and reel). We lower the fishing tool down 15,000ft, and then try to land it and ‘catch’ my tool. Pull up and reel it in!  It’s slightly more complicated than this, but not as much as you would think. The second attempt we had the tool and reeled it back to surface.

I was SO EXCITED.  And I was not hiding it well.  The wireline crew kept teasing me that they were going to drop the tool all the way back down the 15,000ft. I was jumping around and anxious until finally, FINALLY they secured the tool permanently on surface. The feeling I had at that moment was one I remember well.  I was exhausted from being up for about 36 hours. I was tired from being at the rig for so long. We still had plenty of work ahead of us. But in that moment I was exhilarated beyond belief. To have had a challenge placed in front of me and to have overcome and triumphed and have the result sitting there dangling from 90ft high. The excitement and yet complete peace and contentment that comes from doing a job well and doing exactly what God brought me here to do. I told myself to soak it in for a minute and hold on to it. And now, on days where I'm not doing amazing things, days that are bad or horrible or just blah I bring back what it felt like to feel that way.