Just a story

[Boaz]

Year would have been bout 1975 . I was a floor hand on a drilling rig ...Luke Grace Drilling . We moved to near Stoneburg TX to drill a well . I was working morning tire , now 'tire' was Texan for ..tour , the shift you worked on . Back in the day 'tour' didn't mean anything to the old steam rig hands and to closest they could relate to tour was 'tire' so it lived on through the 70's .

Morning tire was from 11 pm to 7am ..the night shift so to speak . Morning tire laid the water line from the source (river , stock tank , creek , ect ) to the rig . Some time a short distance some time miles . Had to have water for drilling mud . I was working for a driller named Don Hale , Don is still with us , I see him from time to time a good guy , always liked Don . It was summer and it was hot , we laid bout 2 miles of 2 and 7/8 upset tubing , 30' joints in a day . Did I mention it was hot ?

As we got closer to the rig laying pipe we passed right by a windmill with a big galvanized stock tank , a pipe was sticking out of the mill and a steady trickle of water kept it full . I waked over and looked at it from a ways . DANG ! It looked cool .

We got the line laid and plumbed in , crews worked till near dark rigging up , got the derrick raised . I offered to 'dry watch' This was during the 70's oil boom and thieves were stealing boxes of drill pipe or any equipment . 'Dry watching ' was a term related to 'dry camp' which meant camping out with no water available . You got an extra days wages to dry watch .

I dry watched a lot , had a 12 volt bulb on a long extension and carried reading material . I thought about that stock tank , after dark I got down to my underwear , took a hand towel and headed out across the prairie with a flashlight . Had worked 12 hours in the heat , was tired and I'm sure I stunk pretty bad but I kept seeing that cool tank of water in my mind . Had to get through one bobbed wire fence (got to be careful getting through bobbed wire fences in your underwear) , tank was only bout a quarter
mile away .
I got to the windmill ! It was beautiful , the moon was out and the tank looked like a mirror , the mill was slowly turning , the water was dribbling into the tank making pretty rings , the moonlight was reflecting off the water like a pastoral picture . It was inspiring !

I I pulled my underwear off , hung em on the windmill with my hand towel , climbed the ladder and wanted to jump in to enhance this event ! I jumped into the tank expecting an amazing experience ! I cannonballed into the tank !

I came up and started gagging . The top of the water was pretty but the tank was 2/3 full of cow xxxx , it hadn't been cleaned out in a long time . Made it back to the rig carrying my towel and underwear . Going through a bobbed wire fence necked is dangerous . I had a one gallon bucket of drinking/coffee water ..it didn't make a dent in getting cleaned up . Next day my crew shunned me ..I stunk .

So ! What would be the moral to this story ?

[M-Tecs]

Don't jump in with both feet until you know what you are getting in to.

The question I have is how does a water tank get 2/3 full of cow xxxx?

[Texas by God]

Don't work in the oil field?
Mitchell Energy Summer of 80 alumni here!

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk

[Boaz]

LOL, you were a clinger ...boom bottomed in 79 . Hats off to you sir !

[Boaz]

Don't jump in with both feet until you know what you are getting in to.

The question I have is how does a water tank get 2/3 full of cow xxxx?

Hot country , cows hang round a tank and by chance , inadvertently are just in the right place when they let go backed up to the tank ...over time it builds up . Normally tanks are drained and cleaned .

[starmac]

I didn't work on the rigs until after the bust, and worked the relief crew, which meant missing 2 days sleep a week the way it worked out.

I don't know about the spelling, but we called it tower, not tire when I was in the patch, which wasn't all that long. Two days daylight, two days swing, two days morning, then two days off kept you screwed up all the time.

[Boaz]

Tower could be . Texans back then had many different terms ..state is big . On rigs you worked 7 days a week ..LOL , no holidays , no weekends ...7 days a week less you could get someone to double and you paid back 2 days for one ..standard deal .

[starmac]

Like I said, I didn't get involved until after the bust and from what I understood a lot changed, hince the 6 on 2 off deal, we also lost a hand per shift from what I understand.
most of the wells I worked on were from the Huntsville area over to Bryan college station up to Corsicana, all shallow 7day holes. The company would send everyone home for one day every time we laid the rig down and called us laid off, just to mess with our overtime.

[Boaz]

Understand ...worked on lay downs , the 'bookkeeper' who ever they were figured the least time . I broke in with standard rig builders that cut their overalls off 4'' so they wouldn't step on em and fall out of a wood derrick ..I predate you a bit . Talked to the ones that ran the steam engines on the rigs ..many died . BUT ..lol many kept on .

[Boaz]

Like I said, I didn't get involved until after the bust and from what I understood a lot changed, hince the 6 on 2 off deal, we also lost a hand per shift from what I understand.
most of the wells I worked on were from the Huntsville area over to Bryan college station up to Corsicana, all shallow 7day holes. The company would send everyone home for one day every time we laid the rig down and called us laid off, just to mess with our overtime.

Times were hard , boom was bust . The old ways fell to the way side , companies figured cheapest way out and hands didn't want to work 7 days a week ..'space age roughnecks' . Time was figured to benefit contractor . I agree .

[Texas by God]

Worked on a barge rig in the Arkansas Wildlife Refuge by Freeport in 81/82. To this day that's the hottest and coldest I've been. Gulf humidity sucks. Land rigs were 8hrs/7days/365, out there we were 12hrs/2 weeks on/2 weeks off. I made a lot of money and spent it all and perfected my cussing skills.

[Boaz]

LOL , perfected cussing skills ...yep. Part of the coarse . Always wanted to work offshore but never made it . Hired out to Loffland Brothers to work on a rig out of Malaysia but never happened . Being hot and cold I will not discuss , people don't believe it anyway . Many a night 90 foot off the ground tripping with only a sweatshirt on I knew I would not survive it , but you got home to a hot bath , 6 hours sleep and a can of Wolfe brand chili and could do it again .

[Texas by God]

As Merle sang-"In the good old days;when times were bad" It shaped and mis-shaped us, didn't it?
Thanks for the story.

[Down South]

Always wanted to work offshore but never made it.

I started offshore in 83. worked through the bust of the 80's. I was 30 yrs old when I started. I was a sawmill millwright and construction millwright before offshore. I worked offshore for 25 yrs until my back went south. I've been a desk jockey for the same company for the last 10 yrs.
I've got 35 yrs with this company now. Someday soon, somebody else can worry with it but, I'm going home.

[tommag]

Boaz, thanks for the chuckle! I've filled my canteen from tanks a few times. It usually tasted better without those silly iodine tablets and never affected me a bit, other than maybe that frequent urge I get to graze on cheat grass and wild onions.
The only moral I can think of is to be sure the pond isn't actually a cesspool.

[starmac]

Iirc it was 83 that I started on a rig too, I finished in 83 too. If the company I worked for hadn't messed with our overtime so bad, I might have stayed, but the last time we layed the rig down and they laid us off, my driller stopped at thelocal watering hole, and I had another job before we left it.

Boaz, that was a triple I was on, we were just drilling shallow wells, 7 to 9000 feet iirc.

One of the side benefits of working that relief shift on the 6 on 2 off schedule was, we were lucky enough to trip all, and I mean all of the pipe. Many times when we drove up, they would be just starting to rig up to come out of the hole. lol

[rancher1913]

well I was going to try and post a photo of what night shift left us, but can not get anything to work. we do 14 on and 7 off and with travel we are doing 16 hour days, gets hard on an old man but ranching just don't make ends meet. I am part of a coil tubing crew, kind of like a real portable workover rig, we do drill outs after fracking, fish jobs, pyrotechnics, and clean outs. we carry 20,000 feet of 2 and 3/8 pipe on a big reel and use a special injector head to stuff it down the well, the head acts as a snubbing unit and hoist all in one. we use water to help pull the pipe through the well, kind of like a big jetter, and have a motor and mill that is run by the water for drilling. we run about 6 barrels a minute down the tube at pressures around 5000 psi, sometimes as high as 8000 psi.

been off a week so today was our "monday" and night shift left us with a birdsnest of pipe on the reel with half of it hanging off, if you have ever seen the photos of when a snubbing unit slips and makes spaghetti, well its kind of like that but in a nice roll.

just for comparison for the oldtimers, we did a fishing job one time and had a double crew for some reason so we decided to set a drill record. from the time we pulled onto location to the time we were headed in hole was 1 hour, we got the fish first try and were packed up and gone with a total time of 5 hours. I think the depth was about 15,000 feet, we were able to go 180 feet per minute in hole but had to slow down coming out hole, we were dragging loaded guns that wireline had lost.

[starmac]

Maybe you old time roughnecks can answer this for me.
As I said my short roughneck carreer was iirc in 83, naturally I was the floorhand, they had cut back on the crews, so a crew consisted of a floorhand, motorman, driller and derrick hand. The motorman was also the chainchunker.

Since it was my first job on a rig, I was called a worm.
Now the question I would like to ask is about a supposed custom in the oil patch back then.
Supposedly it was some sort of initiation for all worms, for the crew to pull there pants down and give them a liberal dose of pipe dope.
Now here is the deal, I am fairly about who gets my pants down and what gets done once we get that far, and roughnecks and pipe dope was never a fantasy of mine, so when they tried, I strongly objected. They didn't try again until we finished the hole and laid the rig down, at witch time there were 2 crews working. Now my strong objections were ignored until I got my old timer out and open.
Was that actually a custom, and if so, how in the world did that ever get started? or was this just something those crazy coona$$es I worked with dreamed up?

[Boaz]

Maybe you old time roughnecks can answer this for me.
As I said my short roughneck carreer was iirc in 83, naturally I was the floorhand, they had cut back on the crews, so a crew consisted of a floorhand, motorman, driller and derrick hand. The motorman was also the chainchunker.

Since it was my first job on a rig, I was called a worm.
Now the question I would like to ask is about a supposed custom in the oil patch back then.
Supposedly it was some sort of initiation for all worms, for the crew to pull there pants down and give them a liberal dose of pipe dope.
Now here is the deal, I am fairly about who gets my pants down and what gets done once we get that far, and roughnecks and pipe dope was never a fantasy of mine, so when they tried, I strongly objected. They didn't try again until we finished the hole and laid the rig down, at witch time there were 2 crews working. Now my strong objections were ignored until I got my old timer out and open.
Was that actually a custom, and if so, how in the world did that ever get started? or was this just something those crazy coona$$es I worked with dreamed up?

Naw , that was no universal custom , just the bunch you were working with . There would have been killins over a deal like that in my country . It was customary to torment the living snot out of the worms though . Right of passage so to speak , we all went through that .

Worm defined; The lowest form of life on earth with aspirations of being a roughneck . Only use is doing jobs that require no brain , constant subjects of scorn , cruel jokes and verbal abuse . A constant source of problems for real hands to try to keep them alive with little reward for the effort since they would quit as soon as they got their first paycheck . Worms were often referred to as one week wonders .

[Boaz]

I started breaking out when I was a freshmen in high school , lied about my age , was 15 years old. Would double on weekends for hands that wanted off . First rig I went out on was morning tire , Moran Drilling rig 6 . Was making hole for Arco near Walnut Bend on the Red River near Gainesville TX . I was scared to death .