How Not to Do It

When the tender boat (one of those open-decked pickup-trucks-of-the-sea I talked about many posts ago) arrived yesterday to pick several others and me up from the rig and transfer us to shore, I had the privilege of using a personnel basket for the first time.

There are several ways to get on and off of a rig, and each has its hazards.  The fastest is via helicopter, where the copter simply lands on the helipad and folks get off and on.  This is what the Mexican customs and immigration officials did on Wednesday, while the rig was still under tow (and moving): the copter landed and they got off.  This is fastest and seems safest but there are enough over-water helicopter accidents to at least make you think.  (And also to necessitate escape-and-survive classes like the one I took a week ago).

For rig-to-boat transfers and vice versa, the personnel basket is standard.  This is an octagonal platform linked to one of the rig's cranes, large enough for several people and bags, and having a set of vertical ropes to hold on to as the crane lifts you up and over and then sets you down, from rig to boat or the other way around

(So obviously a lot is riding on the skill of your crane operator, that he doesn't start swinging you around like a yo-yo.)

Yesterday I got some first-hand experience in how not to do this.

The tender arrived, and fresh crew transferred to the rig.  Next it was our turn to get off, so we dutifully piled our bags into the middle of the basket, stepped aboard, clutched the ropes and the crane lifted us off.  Now, the deck from which we'd started was one of the upper decks, below only the helipad and (of course) the derrick for how high it was off the water.  So ground zero for us was already a good, oh, eighty to a hundred feet above the water surface.  Then the crane lifted us up another twenty or thirty feet.  Problem was, the tender was no longer in position beneath the crane.

It's hard, and dangerous, for an unattached boat to try to hold position sten-in toward a rig, for very long.  It's a precarious position relative to the rig, and of course, waves and currents can sweep the boat left or right and just make a mess of things.  So really, it makes sense that the boat would have to vacate the area and then re-set for each transfer.

Problem was, the boat was now a good half a mile off, and seemed to be showing no signs of moving.  It was almost as if they'd forgotten about us, like, "Oh...you mean you wanted us to bring some other folks back in, too?....oh, OK, I guess so."

Now, I hate heights.  I mean, I really hate heights.  Like Indiana Jones hates snakes, like cats hate water, I hate heights.  So we were now just hanging there, maybe 120 or even 150 feet above the water.

Did you know that, when you fall from 90 feet, water is as hard as concrete?  It is.  That's due to a phenomenon called surface tension, basically that the water molecules are very close together, compared to the air, and kind of hold onto each other.  Not as hard as, say, iron atoms do in metal, but hard enough from 90 feet to make life very uncomfortable.  Guys who jump from that height to escape burning vessels break their legs.

Of course, the crane is a strong crane, rated to lift many tons, used regularly to transfer steel and other supplies back and forth.  This is remarkably little consolation when you're swinging in the breeze at a nauseating height above the water.  All that matters is the height.

And I wasn't alone.  The poor cook was panicking, in that stone-cold-expressionless-is-he-even-breathing? kind of panic, the kind of thing which I imagine might make him think about looking for a less-well-paying job ashore.  He couldn't even answer a question when one of the other guys (obnoxiously--just leave him alone man!) asked if he was okay.  Obviously he wasn't.

The boat still wasn't showing signs of moving, a good minute or two later--quite a long time when dangling over the water at a deadly height--so the crane operator lowered us to more like twenty feet off the water.  This was actually a gigantic relief, because a fall from that height is not nearly as big a deal.


Then the crane man decided to mess with us.


Not much, admittedly, but enough.  He raised the basket back up to 100 feet or so, and then lowered us back down to boat level, and then back up again to 40 or 50 feet.  By this time the boat was moving in, so we could all breath a sigh of relief (and the cook could just breathe), but much more of that and I'd have started getting angry.  And thought about filing some kind of complaint.  Not to be prissy about things, but I just don't like heights.


Anyway, we safely got on the boat and left.