Some of the People - and Me

Chapter 4.   Some of the People

     There have been a lot of fascinating aspects of my experiences in participating in all this marine geology research, not the least of which are the people I have met and worked with.  Let me tell you about some of them, and introduce myself a little more.  The photo here was taken when I was young and just starting out on the Glomar Challenger, I think during Leg 90 in the Tasman Sea.  That is me in the center.  

Working on the drillfloor of the Challenger

On my left is the drill crew chief, called the Toolpusher, the incomparable Howard G.  (last name withheld because I’ve never asked Howard for his permission to publish this and lost touch with him long ago.)  On my right is the driller (one of two on the voyage), Bill N.  We are attempting to assemble for the first time a new coring tool (the Extended Core Barrel).  Howard is holding the assembly instructions I had written myself about 3 months earlier.  It was more complicated than it looks.

     Howard is a proud Cajun from New Iberia, La, or as he will tell you immediately, a coon ass.  If you were casting for a movie of these adventures at sea you couldn’t find an actor any more suited for the role than Howard himself who was a little larger than life.  I’m from Seattle, and to tell the truth it took me a couple weeks to get the rhythm of Howard’s Cajun version of English.  The tattoo visible on his arm, says, “Drink and be merry, for soon we will be dead” (or something pretty close to that).  I have not heard from Howard in years.  I hope he has not succumbed to his own body art prophesy.

     Bill N. is from Jackson, Mississippi.  If anybody is really an oilfield good ol’ boy, then Bill might just be the prototype.  Big, strong, quiet and immensely respected by his crewmates, he is the guy you’d want with you in the proverbial foxhole.  We called him a mile wide and an inch deep.  Not that he wasn’t intelligent or articulate, he just didn’t bother with a lot of philosophical thinking.  Give him a rig crew to run or a week at his deer hunting camp in Mississippi (with a couple cases of liquor) and he was a happy man.  The anecdote at the end of this chapter is the highlight of my experiences with the redoubtable Bill N.

     Most drill crews, on land rigs or on floating drilling vessels, have a similar structure of jobs and job titles.  The pyramid begins at the bottom with the roustabout, some of whom get promoted to roughneck, then derrickman, asst. driller, driller, toolpusher and superintendent.  The titles vary a little and there are numbers of support specialists like electronics technicians, subsea engineers, welders, etc.  On the Challenger and Resolution we added another vital specialty, the Core Techs.  Two on each expedition; these clever guys had to maintain and operate the vast array of specialized coring tools that interfaced with the main drilling apparatus.  Those tools are unique to scientific drilling and the majority of that equipment was invented, fabricated and fielded by the engineering staffs of DSDP and ODP.  The picture at the left shows one of them, Tim M., from I can’t remember which small town in Texas.That is me with the headband, Tim in the hard hat.  Tim had charm, good looks, and a quiet intelligence and sense of humor that snuck up on just about everybody.  His opposite number, Bill L., was big, strong, experienced and assertive.  He hailed from some small town in North Dakota where he claimed it got so cold because there were only two barbed wire fences between there and the North Pole.  Bill had an interesting Navy career at one time, listening in on Russian radio broadcasts from a base in Turkey.  On the opposing crew you would find at one time Pepe, a charming Spaniard who was actually the mayor of his village, when he wasn’t at sea. 



Tim and me (with headband) --- must have
 been on a nice-weather expedition

        The captains of the drillships were invariably memorable figures.  I have introduced Capt. Joe Clarke in an earlier chapter.  He was the reincarnation of Jimmy Cagney and didn’t try to hide it.  He ran away from home to join the Navy when he was a year too young to volunteer at the start of WWII and got himself signed up anyway.  That started a lifelong career at sea that ended with his untimely death of cancer some years ago.  Capt. Clarke had a number of unforgettable characteristics, but two of the most evident that we learned about no matter who you were, were his command of every poem by Robert Service (he could recite “The Cremation of Sam McGee” from memory at any time) and his encyclopedic knowledge of every historical detail of the South Pacific naval campaigns of WWII.  He could tell you the minutia of every battle with the name of every ship and its captain in the US or Japanese navies and often did, whether you were all that interested or not.

     My favorite skipper was Capt. Edwin Oonk., from the Netherlands.  Back to the movie casting analogy, if you called central casting and asked for a commanding ship’s captain type, Capt. Ed would be the first they’d send.  He was stern, competent and absolutely charming if you caught him off duty, but a real commander when he was on the bridge.  My first encounter with Capt. Ed was when I went to Pascagoula, MS, for my first look at the SEDCO/BP 471 drillship, at that time being converted into what would soon become the JOIDES Resolution scientific drillship.  

JOIDES Resolution

One of my colleagues who had been there a week or so before I arrived suggested we go up by the bridge and see if we could catch the captain so I could meet him.  On our way up one of the outside ladders to the bridge deck we heard a roaring voice shouting, with a slight Dutch accent “When I say to get rid of something, I mean GET RID OF IT.”  At that point the watertight door to the bridge banged open, a large booted foot followed, and a junked piece of communications equipment sailed over the bridge rail to the trash heap on the deck below.  My guide took it all in, and said, okay that was your intro to the captain, probably not his best moment.

     Every expedition had its share of old faces and new.  After a few years the marine crews and drilling crews became old friends with only a little turnover.  These fellows came from all over the globe – Texas, Canada, California, North Dakota, Mississippi, Montana, Australia, France, New Zealand, Great Britain.  We actually had a chief engineer from Scotland on the Resolution with the last name of Scott, so obviously he was called Scotty.  He got VERY tired of the Star Trek chief engineer jokes and impersonations -- We’re giving it all we’ve got, Captain, but I don’t think the dilithium crystals will take much more!  ----- You can’t make this stuff up. 

     Even the room stewards were sometimes remarkable.  The first I met on the Challenger was Carlos.  He was so attentive that everyone he took care of had a story about his industriousness.  You could get up in the middle of the night to go to the head and find your bed freshly made when you returned.  After sailing one expedition with Carlos, I did not see him again for a year.  I expected that he had met hundreds of people in the interim and wound never remember me.  At first sight he said, oh sure, nice to see you again, let’s see, you are the one that rarely uses the washcloths.  I visited Carlos one time at his home in New Orleans, an address on Bourbon St, no less.  Too bad it was not during Mardi Gras.

     The science crew was another story because it was typical to get a staff of scientists for a specific voyage that had 2 or 3 familiar faces and everyone else brand new.  And they came from all the partner nations (those countries in the “club” who paid several million dollars per year to participate in the voyages and gain immediate access to all new marine geology research data we acquired).  So they came from all over the globe, North and South America, Europe, Japan, India, Russia, Australia and New Zealand.  Pick a country, if they weren’t employed at a university there it would turn out they’d been born there and emigrated to some other country for their post-graduate education.  On each cruise we had to two Chief Scientists (called co-chiefs), and about two dozen selected specialists in the necessary fields; sedimentology, paleontology, paleomagnetics, geochemistry, petrology, etc.  The photos at left shows a typical group of scientists clustered around the core sampling table in the main lab on the Resolution.



Scientists around the core sampling table
on the Resolution drillship



     On one cruise of mine we had one each co-chief from Australia and New Zealand.  The kiwi co-chief who spent more of his time on the rig floor observing drilling operations had a lovely New Zealand accent.  When he attempted to communicate with our predominately Cajun drill crew he ran into coon ass English he couldn’t understand, and they frankly had trouble catching his kiwi accent as well.  The net result was that I spent way too much time translating (from English to English) after one or other turned to me and asked, What did he say?

A quieter moment extracting samples
from specific cores

     One scientist I will not forget even though we only knew each other for less than an hour.  We were anchored out in the harbor of Valparaiso, Chile, getting ready to start an expedition and awaiting a small boat bringing out a handful of late-arriving scientists.  The boat had been forced to circle the drillship for 45 minutes while some last minute foreign port authorizations were secured.  It was a bit windy and rough, even in the harbor, and the small boat tossed quite a bit before carefully approaching the ship.  By the time the scientists stepped aboard they had had their sea legs thoroughly tested.  Most recovered quickly on the very stable drillship but shortly before we weighed anchor one young lady scientist from Australia who had never sailed with us before came up with a problem.  She was badly ill and was afraid she couldn’t go on the cruise for fear severe seasickness might force us into a medevac to get her off the ship before dehydration became unhealthy for her, or even deadly.  It came to my attention because I was the operations superintendent and senior official onboard from Texas A&M, who were the official leasers of the vessel.  Actually it was the shipboard doctor’s call but he, one the co-chief scientists, and I all put our heads together for this problem.  Probably repeating what she’d already been told, I assured the young lady that things might not be as bad as they seemed.

Me:  Oh, not to worry, this ship is really very stable at sea.  You will be fine.  It was just that small boat ride that got you off to such an uncomfortable start.

Her:  I have only felt worse since coming aboard the drillship.

Me:  Oh.  Well, it would be a shame for you to miss the expedition.  There are lots of anti-seasickness drugs the doctor can give you, like Dramamine or Bonine.

Her:  I took two each of those before I left the hotel in Valparaiso.

Me:  Oh ….  OK, well, there are also scopolamine patches you can wear on your neck.  Some people do very well on them.

Her:  (She pulled back her hair so I could see one patch behind each ear.)

Me:  Ah, I see.  Well, it is a long shot but there are also acupressure cuffs you can wear that put pressure on some parts of your wrists.  I have occasionally known people who got over their acute seasickness problems that way.

Her:   (She rolled up her sleeves to show a cuff on each wrist.)

     I gave up at that point and glanced at the doc who gave me a solemn nod of the head.  Then we escorted the disappointed young lady to the waiting boat for shore.  I hope her career as a marine geologist went successfully after that – without ever having to get on a ship.

Anecdote:  “Suicide is painless (with apologies to MASH)”

     One day while crossing the drill floor of the Challenger during a break in the drilling operations I was spotted and shouted over by three of the rig crew.  Two were new hires, I think summer replacement roughnecks, who were unusual in the business because they both had college degrees.  The third was the amazing Bill N., introduced above.  Bill was outraged and wanted my opinion on something the three of them had been discussing.

Bill:  Have you ever thought of killing yourself?  ‘Cause if you have, you’re as crazy as these clowns. 

Other two:  Wait a minute, that’s not what we said.  We were just talking about thinking of the idea of suicide, not doing it.

Bill to me:  Well, have you ever thought about the “idea of suicide” then?

Me:  Yeah, I guess so.  Just as a concept.  Like what it would take to drive me to do it.  Or how I would do it.  That kind of thing.

Other two:  See …..

Bill:  Then all of you idiots are crazy.  Period.

     At the time Bill was an Asst. Driller with serious ambitions to get that BIG promotion to Driller.  A driller on a rig enjoys a very senior and serious position.  He runs the rig minute by minute, handles all the major drilling controls, directs the activities of the floor hands and others, and literally has the lives of a number of other workers in his hands, because any drill rig can be a deadly place when accidents occur.  One of the driller’s main jobs is to avoid such accidents on his watch.  Only the very best oil field hands who start as roustabouts or roughnecks ever get promoted up through the ranks to driller.  And when they get there they want to keep those jobs.  At that time I was a degreed mechanical engineer about 7 years out of college and was amazed to find out that drillers were typically paid about 3 times as much salary as I was getting.

     On the next expedition where Bill N. sailed he got his promotion to driller.  One day he was deploying drill pipe while one of my colleagues was looking on (I was not aboard for that expedition).  At one point in the highly synchronized activity of running pipe into the ocean at high speed he got careless and made a slight mistake forcing him to slam on the drawworks brake suddenly.  Some minor damage to the derrick equipment occurred causing money-wasting downtime.  Bill was stricken; sure he would be fired or demoted from his dream job.  When all was put right with not-too-much lost time or effort, Bill heaved a huge sigh of relief.  He turned to my colleague and said, “Next time you see Dave tell him I considered suicide.”