One of my past jobs was as a medic on offshore oil rigs. This is an altogether different world than most, and the adventures I encountered were strange and fun. Digging around in my archives I found this post I wrote after a particularily tedious crew change.

It is calm now, here in the Gulf, as the waters have tired themselves from boiling into a dangerous froth. Many people said it was the coming of more winter; other pointed to the calendar and predicted a quick spring. In the end, it was apparent that no one knew what the weather would do, and that we weren’t prepared or in the right frame of mind to deal with it anyway…..

Crew change day is always hectic enough, and the crew here changes by boat. This involves getting on a rope basket that holds four people, each clinging to the outside, while the cargo is loaded in the middle. Then the crane swings it over the ocean to the boat, which is pitching and turning, spewing smoke as it tries to stay in place.

The crew getting on from the rig could care less, and some of them are so ready to get home they would dive in the ocean from the helideck if they needed to. I can understand the anticipation. On the other end, in the boat, most of the crew is ready to get off for entirely different reasons; seasickness coupled with hangovers.

The tradition in Mississippi, it seems, is to get as drunk as possible the night before coming to work. Load up the blood stream with alcohol and get ready for a week of abstinence.

This crew change was rather exciting, and what started as a simple incident soon escalated into near disaster, but not for obvious reasons at first. As safety man, it is my duty to oversee certain operations, like crew change, and make sure they go smoothly. This seems simple enough, until you factor in 24 country boys ready to bail over the side to get home, another 24 violently ill on a bobbing boat, a crane operator named “Shaky”, and other horrible circumstances……

The “Beverly F” is the boat used for crew change, and it is a fast crew boat. Four engines make her the fastest in the field. However, the captain, a guy named Bert, is famous for his insistence that everyone sit in one of the seats in the passenger area. He will stop the boat and drop anchor, if necessary and unheeding of pipelines in the area, until all his passengers are sitting down, with life jackets on, reading or engaged in some other quiet activity. This does not bode well with the smokers, who sneak outside on the deck , or those warding off hangovers, who simply must lay down to restore some sense of blood flow to the brain. Some say Bert had a bad experience on a noisy boat before, while others deem him a fool. In any case, Bert, by law of the sea, has final say-so.

Another hang-up of Bert’s is his insistence in backing up to the rig before off-loading any passengers. He won’t just come around alongside, but has to back in. His boat has too much engine for him, however, and the only way Bert can navigate is by over-correction, a full and unexpected bend on the throttles that throws passengers out of their seats and leaves loads suspended in the air.

Watching Bert navigate around the rig is like watching a driving student parallel park at noon in the business district. I’m reminded of my friend B.J., with whom I used to work in the ambulances. B.J.’s favorite driving activity to relieve stress (when no patients were onboard) was to drive around until he found a driving student. You’ve seen the cars, with decals on the side proclaiming “Warning, Student Driver” or some such thing. B.J. would find one, follow it about four car lengths back, and then, at some crucial moment like a busy intersection or merge onto the interstate, would gun the engine, get right behind the unsuspecting victim, and then without warning throw all the lights and sirens on, honking the horn, waving out the window and screaming on the P.A. all at once.

The noise was enough to scare me out of several sound sleeps, thinking we were on our way to some orphanage fire or plane crash. But normally I would wake up just in time to see the student car veer left, right, speed up, slow down, all the while the instructor shaking his fist at us through the back glass. Eventually we would have to pass, or else others would get suspicious, and B.J. would calm down for about three calls.

Bert reminds me of those terrified students, but his fears come from unseen currents, gusts of winds, or fish jumping. Add to this 24 frantic passengers trying to get off his boat, with another 24 clambering to get on, Bert is frayed beyond repair by the end of crew change on normal days.

Today, however, would be much worse. By the end of the morning Bert was screaming and cursing me on the radio, and threatened never to return to the open sea. It must have been a terrible ride in for the guys.

But how am I to blame? Who could have predicted the wild events which would destroy the captain quicker than Ahab and bring untold horrors upon me? Certainly not me……

The crane operator was in the crane, and we could see the Beverly F approaching the rig. The problem began when the wind picked up a bit, then a light rain started falling. The seas had been building all night, and now peaked at about 8 ft. waves, making the boat pitch and roll impressively.

Shaky the crane operator told me earlier he was worried about getting people off the boat in the bad weather, but his concerns were loudly muffled in the galley by the entire crew waiting to go home. The alcohol levels in their blood were dangerously low, I could see, and they reassured Shaky by threatening to throw him overboard if he didn’t drive the crane.

Shaky calms himself by smoking more cigarettes than I thought humanly possible. In one day I watched him actually inhale through a cigarette more than I saw him inhale regular air. Every action requires a cigarette. Unfortunately, on this rig, crewmen are only allowed to smoke in one building. So Shaky makes frequent visits to the smokehouse to calm himself. He has threatened many times to violate this rule, but no one takes him seriously.

The first hint of a problem came when the first set of four got on the personnel basket. This basket is bright orange, and black and orange ropes form a cone that resembles a rope ladder you see in any childhood playground. Basically the basket is a huge, inverted, elastic orange ice cream cone. It can hold up to 1500 pounds, and with four people and luggage it is frequently stretched to the limits.

The first set of guys off were the small guys, with hardly any luggage, because they could make it up the stairs the quickest. Hardly any weight to them, they barely made the basket stretch. Unfortunately, as Shaky swung them over the side, a huge gust of wind came out of nowhere, and the basket was being dragged through this wind. Normally vertical, the basket started billowing in the wind like a windsock, and guys that were looking straight ahead found themselves staring at the ocean, then the sky.

The wind wasn’t strong enough to quite carry away all the screams of horror, but Shaky couldn’t hear them over the noise of the crane. He judged the wind and plummeted the basket down on the deck. Cleared of the first load, four guys coming to the rig got on, wrapping their arms in the ropes and closing their eyes.

As soon as Shaky got the basket cleared of the boat by about three feet, Bert gunned his engines and over-corrected for the current, shooting off 200 yards away. The wind picked up again, and the basket began billowing like a flag, and now with four seasick and hungover employees the ride was getting interesting.

Shaky decided to judge the wind for a minute, leaving them flowing over the side. Finally, it became too much for one guy, the driller, and he began screaming and cursing Shaky and threatening to kill him if he didn’t get them on the rig. The guy immediately in front of the driller, perhaps tired of looking straight down at water and unable to bear any more vertigo, finally vomited so forcefully spray could be seen shooting UP into the wind.

The driller tried to wipe off the stuff, but his arms were too entangled in the ropes, and this episode started a chain reaction with the other two guys on either side. They simultaneously threw up on each other, and apparently not judging for crosswinds, got it on everyone, including themselves.

Using the only free appendage, the driller attempted to kick the other three’s luggage off the basket, but the angle and wind were against him. Shaky saw all the activity and wisely decided to get them on the heliport as fast as possible.

Once fighting to get on, now no one going home wanted to get on the basket as it was covered in vomit. So Shaky brought it back over the side. He intended to put it in the ocean, to wash it off. However, with no weight to the basket, it launched completely horizontal. This drove Shaky crazy, and I could see he was fighting nerves and wind. He finally got the basket down, then below the water line, as the boat came back alongside.

The next trip was uneventful, but the next trip up resulted in the same upheaves by hungover crewmen, and this delay of washing the basket after every trip was getting tiring. Two hands fetched a fire hose and brought it to the helideck. The driller had to be restrained from physically hosing down other crewmen.

This break in the routine, however, resulted in an unfortunate mixup. Since Bert was now used to the routine of four down, four up, basket in the water, four up again, he was not expecting the next basket down to contain people. As he watched it descend towards the boat, he made slow adjustments to get out from under it.

Shaky, figuring this was Bert adjusting for the current, pushed the basket left to follow the boat, but then Bert reversed his turn, bringing the boat away from the basket. This went on for a minute, left, then right, until the basket was about 30 feet off the water, and finally Bert reverted to old navigation techniques and shot forward with all four engines fire-walled, huge billowing clouds of black smoke obscuring the whole basket as Shaky cranked on the brake.

Of course, the wind had died down, so it took a moment for the smoke to clear, and amid the coughs we could hear the cursing from the basket. It was truly awful. It took me a few minutes to coax Bert back and explain to him the basket was full of people, not vomit. As he returned, cautiously, I looked over to the crane.

At first I thought it was on fire, because the cab was full of smoke. But then the small amber light behind the window betrayed Shaky. He was smoking away. He saw me watching him, and called over the radio, “To hell with it,” which comes out as about two syllables in northern Mississippi dialect. I shrugged. Who was I to say no? We had already broken so many rules to this point, what was a couple more?

The final trip down would be the bosses. In the oilfield, as you get promoted, you get bigger. It’s easy to find the boss on an oil rig. Look for the roundest man available. The four guys in charge were ready to get on the basket. One looked at the fire hose and shrugged. The other commented on how wet the basket was. They all got on. Shaky cranked on the power to the crane as I watched. The fast line stretched, then pulled at the basket, but it wouldn’t pull off the deck, and the ropes stretched longer and longer, and soon the cone was more shaped like a noodle, until finally I thought it would shoot off into space, but then Shaky got them off and onto the boat.

One lift left, I thought, and was finally contemplating an easy day. But the last man to come aboard would prove to be the most work.

Part two later………