Life at Sea

Chapter 2.   Life at Sea on a Research Drillship

Moored Semi-Sumersible (L) and Drillship (R)

     There are about 80 drillships in the world today.  Those are used, almost exclusively, for offshore oil and gas exploration.  The number approaches 100 if you count the fleet of much smaller offshore drilling vessels generally used for geotechnical drilling contracts – sampling the seafloor for analysis of foundations for bridges, pipelines, etc.  (I am leaving out the dozens of semi-submersibles used for offshore oil and gas drilling.)  Of those ships only three in history have been used almost exclusively for what is known as “scientific drilling”, meaning drilling under the oceans purely for marine geology research.  They are, in chronological order, Glomar Challenger (NOT Glomar Explorer, which was never a science research ship), JOIDES Resolution (registered as Sedco/BP 471), and the Japanese ship, Chikyu.  (See Chapter 3 for information about CUSS-1, the Mohole Project test vessel, which was the earliest of them all, but often referred to as a converted drilling barge.)  Chikyu is newer, larger, differently equipped and has not yet been routinely used for long duration science drilling projects in remote oceans.  In their science work to date they have stayed within helicopter range of the Japanese islands.  So for the purposes of a “Life at Sea” discussion I limit myself here to stories based on experiences from onboard Challenger and Resolution.

HMS Challenger, by Wm. Frederick Mitchell

     The Glomar Challenger (named after the history-making 19^th century British oceanographic survey vessel, HMS Challenger) was first and was the workhorse of the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), started in 1968.  It was converted from original plans to be a normal oil and gas exploration vessel to become the first scientific drilling vessel before it left the shipyard where it was being built.  Glomar Challenger conducted 96 scientific drilling expeditions at sea (known then as “Legs”, as in different legs of one continuous voyage).  When DSDP was ended in 1984 the oceanic scientific drilling assignments were taken up by the new Ocean Drilling Program (ODP).  Along with new headquarters at Texas A&M University, new and upgraded funding, new partner nations, and many new personnel ODP also selected a new ship, the Sedco/BP 471, which was informally christened the JOIDES Resolution.  (JOIDES is for Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling, the overseeing body, and Resolution is in honor of Captain James Cook’s exploration vessel, HMS Resolution.)

Capt. Cook's ship, HMS Resolution

     To become scientific drillships both Challenger and Resolution were converted with many modifications to their drilling systems, accommodations, and most importantly by the addition of a multi-deck scientific laboratory complex, as much as possible equivalent to the geoscience research facilities at a university.  Both ships became floating labs capable of not only drilling and sampling beneath the seafloor at water depths up to 20,000-ft, but also to perform initial analysis of those samples very shortly after they were recovered on deck.  Both vessels were also set up for continuous duty at sea on “Legs” with a nominal duration of 60 days.  Neither ship ever called one port its home.  Both have travelled the seven seas continuously going from one pre-selected drill site to another in series of expeditions.  (Challenger was sold and taken out of service in 1985, Resolution continues its work to this day for IODP – the initials standing initially for Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (USA, Japan, Europe), and more recently for International Ocean Discovery Program.)

     So that is the background for understanding the discussion of life at sea on one of those Legs (or as ODP has come to call them, Expeditions.)  On any leg/expedition the science plan including the target drill sites was worked out and approved through a series of international committees literally years in advance.  A science party was named (about 25-30 scientists and technicians on Challenger, about double that number on Resolution.)  The seagoing complement also included an experienced captain and his marine crew, a drilling rig crew, a catering crew (cooks, stewards and laundrymen) all provided by the ship owner, plus the DSDP or ODP employees responsible to bring it all together (I was one of those).  Total personnel on Challenger was about 70, Resolution around 105.  There was no room for sightseers, everyone on an expedition had a defined role and work assignment.  Typically it was a male-dominated crew with women making up about 5-15%, all in the science or marine technician ranks.  Once a voyage left the initial port-of-call there would be little, or most often, no opportunity for adding or subtracting personnel.  No extra ports-of-call were included, no re-supply stops or rendezvouses were planned, although some occurred out of necessity - things don't always go as planned over a two month operation.   Almost always the drill sites were out of sight of land and out of the way of any standard shipping lanes.  The ship and people were normally as isolated for those 55-60 days as the crew of the space station.  It made for some interesting experiences. 

Models of HMS Challenger and Glomar Challenger





     Leasing a drillship for operations at sea is an expensive business.  Today the really big oil and gas drilling rigs (ships the size of WWII aircraft carriers) are charging rates approaching $1 million PER DAY.  Challenger and Resolution carried daily lease rates in the mid-to-upper tens of thousands of dollars (prices escalated over time, obviously).  At those prices the only reasonable option was to operate at sea 24/7.  Except for a few personnel, everyone worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, from the moment of stepping on board until the cruise ended.  The exceptions were people like me who did not have an opposite number who worked the other 12 hours per day, so I, and a few others, worked when we were awake and caught up on our sleep when we could, generally when things got tedious.

     Meals were served every 6 hours and the galley/mess decks were only closed for cleaning for one hour twice or so a day.  With four robust meal options each day qnd snacks in between, it was possible to work any schedule and still catch at least three meals – if your waistline could stand it.  Food on board the two ships is an interesting subject.  First off, there can’t be anything much more thankless than trying to satisfy the food preferences of the variety of people we generally had onboard.  Folks came from a dozen or more different countries and cultures, to say nothing of the wide range of food tastes to be found in any group ranging from vegan to burger lovers and everything in between.  Complicating the issue was food storage capacity for 60 days.  Fresh fruits, veggies and meat products were purchased and stored at the start of each leg, but often the source was a foreign port with its own foodstuff supply limitations.  Freshness of perishables was a problem and we usually began to run out of some basics within the first couple weeks.  Lettuce and fresh vegetables were first to disappear, then fresh juices, fruits, milk, etc.  After a few of these voyages you could almost tell the calendar by the menu offerings.  By the fourth week everything that was served started as a frozen, canned or powdered product, which limited menu options, but not horribly.  Oh, and in case you are curious, alcohol was prohibited on board, primarily for safety of the drilling crew, but you would lose money betting there was never a drop on the ships.  No regular rum ration, however.

     There was an interesting contrast between Challenger and Resolution food.  Challenger was owned and crewed by Global Marine, at that time very active in offshore oil and gas work.  As an inducement for oil companies to lease their vesselsin a competitive market they maintained a policy of best food possible.  And the food was awesome.  Steak and lobster once a week, incredible meals on other days, unlimited goodies like ice cream, cans of candies and peanuts, and, my favorite, a full time baker who twice daily put out more fresh cinnamon rolls, cookies and pastries than we all could eat.  

JOIDES Resolution

One of the challenges onboard Challenger was to avoid gaining about 15 lbs during two months at sea.  Resolution food was a completely different story.  Sedco corporate owners faced a different lease market in 1984 when ODP operations began.  Times were tougher and budgets were leaner, so their approach was to go with low-bid catering, which turned out to be a Portuguese company, Catermar.  They were paid on the basis of x-dollars per person per day and did their best to reduce costs at every turn.  The food was still acceptable and sometimes very good but the glories of Challenger food were long gone.  Over time there were dozens of menu reform attempts (if not virtual food mutinies) aboard Resolution and there was a general improvement in food and morale as time went on.

     There are innumerable other life at sea tidbits that could be shared here but this chapter is getting a bit long so I will end with three topics – communications while at sea, boredom, and medical emergencies, as highlighted in the anecdote that ends this chapter.  Ship-to-shore communications on both vessels was state of the art, but that was mainly for official ship’s business.  Reason: it is limited and expensive.  Even today marine radio communications via satellite are pricey.  In the days of early DSDP operations aboard Challenger, 98% of personal ship-to-shore communications were limited to randomly available ham radio telephone patches.  This system was free, spotty at best and wholly uncomfortable.  It worked like this – each crew had one or two volunteer, certified ham operators who could use the nice shipboard ham radio.  During his off duty hours the ham expert would try to raise some other ham radio operator somewhere in the world.  Atmospheric conditions and sunspot activity (believe it or not) had a lot to do with any success in raising another ham with a connection clear enough to hear.  Then, if the faraway ham operator was willing and had the right equipment he would offer ham patch telephone calls to anyone at our end.  You would give him or her a phone number to call -- collect and long distance (say, from Guam to Texas or New Jersey) -- and he would put through the call hoping for the best.  If all went well, my calls generally went like this: 

Me:  Hi, honey, how can you hear me? Over.

Wife:  What?

(Long pause)

Guam ham operator:  Go ahead caller, she is ready.

Me:  (louder)  I am calling from the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  How about that?  Oh, and you have to say “over” at the end of your portions.  Over.

Wife:  What?  (Guam operator repeats what I just said).  Oh, okay……. over.

Me:  How is everything at home?  Over.

Wife:  Fine …… over.

Me:  Kids okay?  Over.

Wife:  Yes, just fine ….. over.

Me:  Did you get the post card I sent from Tokyo?  Over.

Wife:  No, it hasn't arrived yet ……. Over.

Me:  Well …. Anything new going on at home?   Over.

Wife:  No …………… over.

Me:  Well, it is great to hear your voice but I guess I better get off this connection, there are a line of my shipmates who want to squeeze in a call before we lose touch with this nice operator in Guam.  Love you.  Over.

(Pause)  Guam ham operator:  She didn’t get most of that and just said to tell you bye-bye.

   

     Needless to say this system was priced right but there was very little else to like about it other than it kept family members from complaining that you never called for two months.  It was intimidating to realize that your conversations were heard/eavesdropped by not only the two hams who connected, but also any ham operator in the world who happened to tune in to that frequency at that moment.  It was not uncommon for a bad-connection conversation to get suddenly helped along by a new, unknown voice coming in saying something like – SHE SAYS SHE LOVES YOU, or, SHE SAYS SHE SOLD YOUR CAR, NOT HERS.  Of course, there had to be some hilarious side effects and stories abounded.  My favorite was the single guy on our crew who got dear-johned during one of our cruises.  His fateful ham patch call went something like this:

Girlfriend:  I sorry, Bob, but it is over.  Over.

Bob:  What do you mean over?  Over.

Ex-girlfriend:  I mean over!  Over and out!

     You get the idea.  Once the real modern communications age, complete with comm satellites, began to reach the entire ocean-covered parts of the globe things got a lot better.  The shipboard science chatter message traffic was taken from a Morse code radio operator (no kidding) and handed to the computer techs, who would compress the message data streams and squirt them to shore via satellite links.  Then private written communications to friends and family via satellite were offered to the crew on a limited basis (one day a week, certain max number of pages).  This “P-mail” system quickly expanded until it became limited email, then unlimited email, and now full internet access.  Big improvement over the early days.

     The ease of communication helps to lessen the pure tedium of 55-60 days at sea but it is still trying to the mind and soul and some people simply did not have the psyche for it.  A lot of on-the-spot humor was needed to get through those middle three or four weeks.  Challenger had on the crew at one time a technician who was a talented cartoonist.  His primary cartoon character was a cute seagull.  One of his most famous cartoons showed the seagull sitting on the ship’s rail and gazing out at the endless, unbroken, watery horizon and lamenting, “On a clear day it just seems like forever.”

Anecdote:  “A Side Trip to Deliver the Cook”

     A project that requires 70-100 people to spend about 60 days at sea in remote locations, often 1000s of miles from any port with decent services (hospitals, airports) must give considerable thought to medical care.  Both the Glomar Challenger and JOIDES Resolution made provisions for onboard health care by having a full time doctor on board plus a small hospital – 2 or 3 beds, depending on whether you counted the doctor’s own bunk.  This arrangement always proved adequate in my experience.  The expedition participants were nominally required to undergo a physical at least annually to qualify for sea duty.  But even at that the medical situation was complicated because the population on board was made up of a range of age groups (early 20s to late 60s), both genders, various ethnic and national denominations, and a normal range of fitness and health.   The doctor usually stayed busy with day to day health maintenance (seasickness – always during the first few weeks at sea), colds and flu (too many germs from too many sources), other minor medical issues and accidents.  When a medical condition or accident was too serious to be handled on the ship we had to plan and execute a medical evacuation, just like in the military.

     Over the course of the drilling programs medevacs were required for situations ranging from cut or crushed fingers and toes, extreme dehydration, broken bones, very serious disease (including a scary case of Guillain–Barré syndrome), and even one natural death on board, which occurred in the most remote stretch of ocean in the world - the deep south section of the Indian Ocean.  In that sad instance  the ship stopped drilling operations immediately and hastened to Fremantle, the port of Perth, Australia, to repatriate the body back to the USA.  Along the way the body was placed in the large onboard refrigeration unit where the core samples are stored before they are offloaded at a port where truck and/or air transport is available. 
     But the strangest, and most poignant, medevac story involved the time we had to deliver the cook.

     The JOIDES Resolution was operating in the middle of the Indian Ocean many hundreds of miles from any land including even any small island.  On this expedition we had started in Fremantle (on the heels of the cruise when the crew member died of a heart attack).  The ongoing crew, my crew, arrived in Fremantle prepared for embarkation including a cook from the seagoing catering service, Catermar, a Portuguese company.  The cook was a regular participant and knew the rules, but had violated them slightly for this expedition.  He had gone to some doctor in Lisbon complaining of stomach problems and had had surgery to remove his appendix.  The surgery had taken place within a few days of his departure from Lisbon, really too close to the cruise start day, but he tried to tough it out because he needed the money.

    Shortly after the ship departed Western Australia bound for our site destinations in the middle of the Indian Ocean the cook, Fernando, began a series of visits to the ship’s doctor complaining of stomach and intestinal pain.  He confessed about the last minute appendectomy and at first Dr. Knotts put his symptoms down to minor complications following surgery, which he suspected might have been a bit of the back alley kind.  But within a few weeks the picture got clearer for the doctor and his patient.  Every time Fernando ate solid food (he was a cook, after all, and dearly loved to eat) his lower intestines blocked off causing him a lot of discomfort.  Doc Knotts would put him on an all-liquid diet and the symptoms would go away in a day or two.  But Fernando was stubborn and continued to violate doctor’s orders and eat solid food.  This situation continued until Doc Knotts began to consider an emergency medevac because the cook was incorrigible and when his internal plumbing got fully blocked it was truly life-threatening.  Medevac from our location in a most remote part of the Indian Ocean was going to be a serious problem.  We were located far from any sizeable port, well beyond any helicopter range (if one existed in the region) and out of normal shipping lanes where a vessel of opportunity might pass by willing to take the cook to their next port of call.

    Finally the issue came to a serious crisis point when the cook slipped away from the food spy we had placed on him and consumed a big piece of his favorite dish, grilled liver.  This epicurean delight apparently blocked off his lower intestines like a beaver dam and sent him into a legitimate medical crisis condition.  The doctor said he had done all he could on board for the man and recommended an immediate medevac to save Fernando’s life.

    So what to do then?  The nearest realistic port of any kind from our current location was many days away, one way.  (Possibly all the way back to Australia or maybe to Jakarta, about 4 days distant.)  A poor option, because, first, the cook might not survive the voyage and second, we would in any case lose virtually all the remaining allotted science time for the voyage, before the mandatory deadline came for our end-of-expedition departure for Singapore. 



650 miles from drill site to South Keeling Islands



     Then someone had a stroke of genius.  We contacted the famous Aussie Flying Doctor Service and, lo and behold, they said they could send their business jet to the Cocos Islands, an Australian territory and within their area of service.  Thanks to an airstrip built during World War II they could land, charter a small boat to meet us offshore (there is no harbor deep enough to handle our drillship on those islands) and take the cook off our hands and fly him immediately to a hospital in Perth.

     They were, however, adamant that we certify this was a very serious and life-threatening emergency with no other possible solution.  This was extraordinary service for them, at the very edge of their defined range of operations, and very expensive considering the use of the business jet.  We assured them that we were convinced it was a legitimate emergency and offered up whatever assurances they required stating that we would pay for all services that they might later deem unnecessary in the final analysis.

     So off we went to the South Keeling Islands, part of the Cocos Atoll group, 57 hours at full speed from our drilling location.  We were on our way to “de-liver” the cook.  (No situation is off limits for some gallows humor when you are stuck at sea long enough.)  But … during those 57 hours the all-liquid diet and Doc Knotts’ expert ministrations had an impressively positive effect on Fernando.  He gamely came back from death’s doorstep, began to feel better, could get out of his sick bed, and by the time we rendezvoused with the flying doctor representatives he was able to trot nimbly down the boarding ladder to the small boat they brought alongside.

     The flying doctors on the small boat were mighty angry and who could blame them.  This certainly did not seem to them to be anything close to a serious medical emergency.  We got an earful from the rendezvous doctors, who didn’t want to hear, “Really, we are pretty sure it is worse than it looks”.  When the patient arrived at the hospital in Perth he appeared in amazingly good shape and the officials there went on the warpath, proclaiming what they thought of fools like us and insisting on financial recompense for their unnecessary and expensive efforts.  On board the ship we suffered under a steady stream of scathing teletype messages from the hospital and various Australian government officials.

     Then everything changed.  A more in-depth medical exam of the cook’s innards revealed the true problem.  He had cancer of his lower intestines; fairly advanced.  The operated on him immediately and saved his life in the process.  Their opinion was that he had never had a bad appendix, only an incompetent surgeon in Lisbon who could not tell appendicitis from intestinal cancer.

    Needless to say, the tone of the messages to the ship carrying that information were polite, a bit chagrined, and lacking any comments about our medical incompetence or financial liabilities.