Deep, deep! sea fishin'
The world just keeps getting smaller as one gets older. Ever noticed that? 'Six degrees of separation'? All that stuff?
It turns out that Grant, our friend who spends about 9 months of the year in Brazil, 'commuting' from Australia, working on a drill ship, was working as the derrickman on the Diamond M Epoch the night that the old rig started to tip over in Bass Strait. I was working there as an ROV pilot/technician as well, but didn't meet Grant for another 15+ years in Adelaide.
Anyway, that's not what I wanted to rave about today.
It was on the Diamond M Epoch, a semi-submersible exploration drill rig. We were three young, cocky, 'know-it-all' ROV operators. We could make that submarine fly over the sea bed like a giant shark stalking its prey. We could fly around the blow-out preventer like a space ship circling the space station. We could grab and retrieve the dropped welders hammer at 800 feet below the surface and return it to the rig floor. Waddn't much we couldn't do with that little unmanned ROV.
So one day, when things were quiet, we needed another challenge. Something to write in the ROV operators' log to inspire the next shift to even greater achievements.
19 January 1983- The rig was anchored in 820 feet of water in Bass Strait, the drill crew had all the subsea gear on the bottom. The driller was doing his job, pushing drill string down the hole turning the bit, eating into the earth looking for something that would justify spending the millions of dollars it takes doing offshore drilling. The huge BOP was cemented to the seabed, keeping the surface-supplied mud down there and any high pressure 'hydrocarbons', as they said in the trade, from blasting up at the rig, displacing the water, sinking the rig and killing us all with the by products like hydrogen sulphide. In other words, a typical drilling day on the rig. Not much for us to do, operations normal for the drill crew.
We had watched all the movies on the rig. It wasn't meal time. We'd already swapped all our reading material including the magazines with titles starting with 'P'. All the new jokes we had learned onshore were no longer funny. It was going to be a slow 14 day shift. Once a well was spudded-in and drilling operations were happening it was quiet times for us 'divers.'
John was flying the sub around the BOP and we saw on the video monitor a very large, ugly fish hanging around the base of the BOP. Apparently some fish are attracted to the BOP because the mud pumped into the well from the rig makes the water around the BOP warm. If you asked me before this if I knew that fish liked to be warm I wouldn't have guessed the truth. There you go. A little bit of trivia perhaps useful for your next fishing charter: don't bother with burley over the side, try throwing little woollen blankets to the fish.
This fish was nearly a meter long (yeah, I know, sure it was...) and was quite slow. We flew the sub close to the fish and it didn't seem too concerned about this activity, unlike most fish that would scatter whenever anything as ominous as the ROV approached them.
Our ROV had two hydraulically operated 'manipulators' on the front (technical talk for mechanical arms.) One manipulator could extend like an arm would, slew sideways, and open and close its three pronged gripper. The other manipulator had a different range of movement and had a rotating gripper which was useful for opening and closing shackles underwater (oh yes, we were very clever little vegemites!)
Back to the fish. This one was ugly, very ugly. I guess you don't need to be beautiful if you live 800 feet below the sea.
John slowly extended the main arm, opened the gripper and eased the jaws over our trusting little heat-loving fish. The fish stirred slightly and moved a few inches to one side but was still between the grippers. We three ROV crew, young, bored males, thought this was a most interesting and amusing situation so John next did the logical action and closed the gripper around the fish. He was gentle though, having had hundreds of hours as an ROV operator, and only held the fish instead of scissoring it in half as the gripper could easily have done.
The fish woke from its heat-induced stupor but too late. Like a kitten caught in a toddler's grip, terror filled its body ('It was a dark and stormy night...').
So what now? Well, we caught the fish so the thing to do was to bring it to the surface. Maybe even take it to the caterers for cooking and eating? Getting back to the surface meant flying the sub back to its submerged cage, then winching the sub in cage the 820 feet back to the rig moon pool floor where we could inspect our catch.
We think the fish blew-up in the process of bringing it to the surface as it was even uglier in person than when we saw it on video and caught it. From my special effects days I know that with enough makeup and the right lighting that anyone can be made to look photogenic. Same for fish, you reckon? Daylight was harsh on this sucker.
So there we were, three dudes in their 20's, using a million dollar machine that cost who knows how much per minute to run, staring at an exploded, slimy ugly dead bottom dwelling fish still held in the ROV's arm. Well, that killed an hour. Maybe we can get the welder to drop his hammer over the side again.
It turns out that Grant, our friend who spends about 9 months of the year in Brazil, 'commuting' from Australia, working on a drill ship, was working as the derrickman on the Diamond M Epoch the night that the old rig started to tip over in Bass Strait. I was working there as an ROV pilot/technician as well, but didn't meet Grant for another 15+ years in Adelaide.
Anyway, that's not what I wanted to rave about today.
It was on the Diamond M Epoch, a semi-submersible exploration drill rig. We were three young, cocky, 'know-it-all' ROV operators. We could make that submarine fly over the sea bed like a giant shark stalking its prey. We could fly around the blow-out preventer like a space ship circling the space station. We could grab and retrieve the dropped welders hammer at 800 feet below the surface and return it to the rig floor. Waddn't much we couldn't do with that little unmanned ROV.
So one day, when things were quiet, we needed another challenge. Something to write in the ROV operators' log to inspire the next shift to even greater achievements.
19 January 1983- The rig was anchored in 820 feet of water in Bass Strait, the drill crew had all the subsea gear on the bottom. The driller was doing his job, pushing drill string down the hole turning the bit, eating into the earth looking for something that would justify spending the millions of dollars it takes doing offshore drilling. The huge BOP was cemented to the seabed, keeping the surface-supplied mud down there and any high pressure 'hydrocarbons', as they said in the trade, from blasting up at the rig, displacing the water, sinking the rig and killing us all with the by products like hydrogen sulphide. In other words, a typical drilling day on the rig. Not much for us to do, operations normal for the drill crew.
We had watched all the movies on the rig. It wasn't meal time. We'd already swapped all our reading material including the magazines with titles starting with 'P'. All the new jokes we had learned onshore were no longer funny. It was going to be a slow 14 day shift. Once a well was spudded-in and drilling operations were happening it was quiet times for us 'divers.'
John was flying the sub around the BOP and we saw on the video monitor a very large, ugly fish hanging around the base of the BOP. Apparently some fish are attracted to the BOP because the mud pumped into the well from the rig makes the water around the BOP warm. If you asked me before this if I knew that fish liked to be warm I wouldn't have guessed the truth. There you go. A little bit of trivia perhaps useful for your next fishing charter: don't bother with burley over the side, try throwing little woollen blankets to the fish.
This fish was nearly a meter long (yeah, I know, sure it was...) and was quite slow. We flew the sub close to the fish and it didn't seem too concerned about this activity, unlike most fish that would scatter whenever anything as ominous as the ROV approached them.
Our ROV had two hydraulically operated 'manipulators' on the front (technical talk for mechanical arms.) One manipulator could extend like an arm would, slew sideways, and open and close its three pronged gripper. The other manipulator had a different range of movement and had a rotating gripper which was useful for opening and closing shackles underwater (oh yes, we were very clever little vegemites!)
Back to the fish. This one was ugly, very ugly. I guess you don't need to be beautiful if you live 800 feet below the sea.
John slowly extended the main arm, opened the gripper and eased the jaws over our trusting little heat-loving fish. The fish stirred slightly and moved a few inches to one side but was still between the grippers. We three ROV crew, young, bored males, thought this was a most interesting and amusing situation so John next did the logical action and closed the gripper around the fish. He was gentle though, having had hundreds of hours as an ROV operator, and only held the fish instead of scissoring it in half as the gripper could easily have done.
The fish woke from its heat-induced stupor but too late. Like a kitten caught in a toddler's grip, terror filled its body ('It was a dark and stormy night...').
So what now? Well, we caught the fish so the thing to do was to bring it to the surface. Maybe even take it to the caterers for cooking and eating? Getting back to the surface meant flying the sub back to its submerged cage, then winching the sub in cage the 820 feet back to the rig moon pool floor where we could inspect our catch.
We think the fish blew-up in the process of bringing it to the surface as it was even uglier in person than when we saw it on video and caught it. From my special effects days I know that with enough makeup and the right lighting that anyone can be made to look photogenic. Same for fish, you reckon? Daylight was harsh on this sucker.
So there we were, three dudes in their 20's, using a million dollar machine that cost who knows how much per minute to run, staring at an exploded, slimy ugly dead bottom dwelling fish still held in the ROV's arm. Well, that killed an hour. Maybe we can get the welder to drop his hammer over the side again.
posted by Rick's Rambles at 6:07 am
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