All-night logging

I drove back to K26 at 9.30 in atrocious weather conditions (it had started snowing and my wipers still didn’t work-visibilty: 2m. It took me 1 hour to do 13 km. I almost turned back after 10mins but decided not to as a) I don’t like to give up and b) I couldn’t see the edges of the road to do a 3-point turn. The worst was really when the wind blew all the powder snow onto my windscreen…)
This was to be a PEX and also XPT job so it was Marc’s crew again. PEX was fast with no problems, XPT was shorter (only 10 pressure points instead of 30) and we were better organised than last time, thanks to Gilles’ feedback last time and Sergey’s presence. Sergey and Sasha were pretty tired as they hadn’t been able to catch a nap but I was feeling fine and again really enjoyed going up to the drill floor to look at the tool.
It was quite a long night but busy and I managed to stay awake fine-unlike Sergey who at one stage was falling asleep whilst reading out values for me to type up ;-)

This time I had some Petit Ecolier biscuits with me so I gave some to Marc, who got rather excited (SLB tend to eat smash out of a plastic pot) and also to Pierre the DSV (another Frenchie-haven’t seen so many for ages!)

When we got back to the unit at the end of the job, tired but happy, we switched on the kettle…and then the phone rang. This is never a good sign, because it is usually Alexey, instructing. But this time it was Gilles and he was really annoyed! Apparently we hadn’t sent all the data we should have (but we hadn’t been told) and he was worried the decision to finish the job had been taken too early. At the time we were rather annoyed, tired and did not understand the problem. Having slept on it though, a $35,000 job really does need to be done properly and there had been some miscommunication along the way. Anyway, Tuesday morning was pretty awful as we were scrambling to input more data, convert units, make excel charts-you can imagine what that was like with no sleep. Marc joined us for a cuppa and ended up spending 2 hours in excel and some time on the phone to Gilles trying to calm him down.

Finally the spreadie was sent and we went to CPF for Sasha’s licence (yes, still) and when we got back I gathered all my stuff and drove back to pad 5, with Sergey next to me and Sasha behind, as Sergey wanted to make sure I stayed awake (as his eyelids drooped…) while driving.
I thought I would read till dinner then sleep but I had a nap for an hour before dinner, ate then went straight back to bed, and really had to make myself get up in the morning for breakfast! I then read a bit (my first chance to relax) had a shower etc.

At this stage I lost my car, because Sasha the technician was going off shift and needed a lift to pad 7 and his B2B (back-to-back)’s car was broken so they took mine. After lunch Sergey and Sahsa picked me up and we went down to base camp as it was Sergey’s end-of-shift. Apparently he had stayed up till 2am typing up a handover that got lost due to computer crash-I can just imagine. In short, Sergey was more than ready to go home!
We caught up with Gilles, fed back on the day before, which was useful now that some of us had slept! I am now working with Alexey to make sure some of his instructions are clearer.