The summer after my sophomore year in college, I worked offshore for Kerr McGee. This was my first experience working on a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Although I was a seasoned KerMac hand, I had never actually worked on one of the rigs. This would add a new dimension to my young life. How can I forget my first week offshore? I bought a brand new pair of Red Wing boots, and I packed nothing but tight Levis blue jeans! At that time Kerr McGee had nothing but slow, round bottom crew boats. KerMac Rig 56 was my assigned destination and Roustabout was my title. A Roustabout is as low as one can get in the oilfield food chain! Everyone on a drilling rig just loves to have college boys to work for the summer! The boat ride to the rig was about eight hours long, and as a result of the slowness of the boat, I became sea sick every time we took that long ride! Crew change was always on Fridays', and when we got to the rig the smell of oysters frying was just enough to make me throw up!! The next fun thing was disembarking the boat in order to embark the LST tender! The sea usually had four to five foot swells, and each person had to jump from the boat onto a narrow walkway on the tender. This meant that you had to time your jump just right or you would be smashed between the two vessels! Not such an easy task when sea sick and loaded down with a duffel bag containing a week's worth of clothes and other personal possessions! It still amazes me that no one was killed the entire time I worked out in the Gulf!
Once aboard this ship anchored adjacent to the rig in 217 feet of water, the nausea slowly began to abate. I always skipped lunch on Fridays, and what was left of my breakfast was already overboard! As I said, on my first trip I had new boots and tight fitting blue jeans. The first day was not too bad, because we only worked until 6 P.M. The second day, however, was slightly different. Our day began abruptly with a loud and startling awakening accredited to the gruff voice of a Rough Neck who would be getting off at 6 A.M. This gave us time to get up, dress, eat breakfast, and be ready for our twelve-hour workday. The 120-degree surface temperature of solid steel enhanced the entire experience wherever you walked!
The first time I ever worked a twelve- hour shift; I began to find out just how green I really was. This was not at all like doing paper work relating to the rig operations or operating a two-way radio that handled the communications from the rig to land. This was the grease and the grime of the actual procedure of drilling for oil. My first day was long and hot, but I was in pretty good shape so tolerable is a good word to describe that first day. By the second day, my blue jeans began to chafe my groin area! The sweat and the friction from the tight fitting jeans resulted in brutal Rawhide! That was just the beginning, as the seams in my boots began to buckle, and leather cut into the sides of each foot! I tried to walk with my legs spread as far apart as possible, but that resulted in minimal relief! My feet were killing me, and the pressure points from the boot seams began to draw blood in four spots! I still have scars on my feet as of this day from those damned, Red Wing, boots! We worked for twelve hours, and at 6 P.M., I went to bed without even thinking about eating supper. Each day that week got progressively worse. I still, today, feel as though that was the longest week of my entire life! I never ate supper, and 6 A.M. always arrived far too soon! When the Crew-Change boat arrived the following Friday, I nearly collapsed from exhaustion, and I slept all the way from the rig back to the base! I swayed back and forth for two or three days before I regained my land legs. However, I did not do much walking on my seven days OFF?? It took all week to heal the chafing and for my feet to recover enough to try another wonderful seven days offshore!
The second week was even more delightful than the first! I was instructed to walk across a flat horizontal beam on the main rig structure. There was an aero quip hose located on the opposite corner of the rig that needed to be tightened. I was a college boy, and I got the nod! The surface of the water appeared to be at least 100 feet below the rig, and each anchor chain on the LST had at least two Barracuda just hanging around waiting for a meal to fall into the water! "Oh Magoo, What a Glorious Day for the Little League"! The rig shook violently as the block and tackle moved up and down like a giant piston sliding another joint of drill pipe into the hole! I know I nearly "Shit in my Pants" before I finished that task! To add insult to injury, the Derrick Man was clowning around far atop the structure as though he was trying to distract me by emulating a monkey! Damn, was I relieved when I finally got off of that beam and back onto the rig floor! I glanced at my watch, and to my surprise, only ten minutes had elapsed from beginning to end! I thought, for sure, that I had been out there (all alone) for at least an hour!
The Roughnecks and the Driller, and every "Old Hand" were just thrilled by the performance! The damned hose did not really need tightening anyway, that was just a good excuse to watch the pathetic performance turned in by the "College Man"!
The next extremely exciting job was a real thriller! There was a bin located just under the deck of the LST, Inside of that bin was a powdery substance called "Weight Material". This substance was sucked into the hole in order to weight down the casing surrounding the drill stem. The bin was only about four feet deep, so a normal sized adult could not stand in this hot bed! It was about ten to twelve feet long and abut four or five feet wide. There was only about eight to twelve inches of headroom, because the damned thing was filled with "Weight Material"! The problem was, the intake holes and screens would get clogged up as the material became moist from humidity, and the clumps could not be effectively sucked into the pipes that subsequently led to the wall of the casing. Therefore nothing could be extracted from the bin and into the hole! Our job was to shovel the material away from the intake holes, so that we could remove the clumpy material, and restore the environment around those screens back to dry and smooth textured. Now, this is not as simple as it may sound. The hell of it was that we had to shovel the tremendously heavy material away from the holes. We started on the end far away from the holes, and gradually inched it away one shovel at a time. What little hot air there was in that pit quickly resembled a sand storm! Our faces were covered with at least one half inch of the crap! We were not provided with masks, so our nostrils, mouths, ears, eyes, and lungs were caked! The temperature in that miserable place was unbelievable, and sweat poured off of us like a running faucet. Every thirty to forty five minutes or so we would be forced to get out of the pit and go back on deck to hose each other off with cool water. It was Cliff Clingler (another college boy from Oklahoma) and I who were assigned this pleasant task. Once we got to the clogged up holes, it was not much of a job to remove the moistened material and clean the screens thoroughly. It was, however, no easy task then to turn around and shovel back toward the holes the very same material that took us a day and a half to shovel away! Damned, just how lucky can two guys get?
That summer went along just about as expected. I think, by this time, it was probably early August. The guys had been bugging me all summer about trying some "Red Man" chewing tobacco. I repeatedly told them that I was not remotely interested, and they might just as well save their breath! Well, one hot August day, we were taking a break near the rig floor, and the driller approached me again about the very same subject. I asked him if he had not gotten tired of my repeatedly telling him NO! I don't know what was so different about this particular time, but I finally succumbed to the repetitive inquisition. Why, I don't know, but I finally said; "Okay Pop, let me have a Chew"! I took a plug of that nasty stuff and shoved it into my mouth, I began the mastication process, and before I knew what had happened, some of the juice dripped into my throat! Needless to say, it burned like fire, but the worst was yet to come! I spit the stuff out as quickly as possible, but I began to get dizzy, I became nauseated, and I broke out in a cold sweat! My face was either Ivory or Green; I did not have a mirror! I sat down on a rack of pipe as I desperately grasped for something stable to hold on to! The "Peanut Gallery" immediately burst into laughter as they finally, or for the first time that summer, had evoked the long awaited response that they expected! I don't do tobacco! I don't smoke, I don't dip, I don't chew, I just don't do tobacco!! As a matter of FACT, that was my first and last experience with the stuff! At the risk of sounding redundant, "I Don't Do Tobacco"!!
What a summer to remember! One morning, about 4:30 or 5:00, Cliff and I were racking drill pipe as we were in the process of backing out of the hole to change the bit. The drill pipe was extracted from the hole, unscrewed one joint at a time, and hooked onto chains attached to a crane. There was a trough that had been put into place, which ran from the rig floor down to the deck of the LST ship. A pipe rack was in place to accept the pipe as the crane operator swung it into the trough. As the pipe cam shimmying down the trough, it eventually slammed into the pipe rack where Cliff and I were standing. As the pipe came to rest, we would neatly stack each joint against the other. This was repeated until all of the pipe was out of the hole and stacked on the rack on the ship. The crane operator that morning was not the regular operator, he had conned the regular operator into letting him do the job! He was a wild assed crazy "Coonass" from Johnson Bayou, Louisiana. Just about the crack of dawn that morning, he got a little too enthusiastic and overconfident with that piece of equipment! Suddenly we were faced with a joint of pipe heading our way shimmering and dancing in the air completely wild and free! The pipe had bounced out of the trough, and it was nothing less than a missile! I briefly thought about jumping overboard, but the sight of the barracuda made me think twice! The pipe slammed into the rack and missed Cliff only by a few inches! I had moved over, but he had nowhere to go! When things stabilized, we climbed that trough, grabbed that idiot out of that crane and proceeded to beat the living dog shit out of him! I have no regrets, to this day for what we did and, the tool pusher must have agreed, because he sent him in on the very next boat! That was as close as either one of us had ever come to getting killed! Being a college boy on an oilrig is one thing, but being a "Hot Dog" is quite another! I think we may have even gained a little respect that morning, because neither of us was ever messed with again the rest of the summer!
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