K5

Yesterday was my first day on my own, back here on pad 5. We are currently drilling the last conductor section. Of course, everything went wrong in the morning: no DSV report (his computer had crashed), no mudlogger computer (crashed), the deviation data was OK but the mudlog data was wrong and it messed up my Winlog-and I thought it was me. To cut a long story short, I got the report out at 11 instead of 9. In the meantime it emerged that there has been a problem since about 7am, when we lost circulation. This is the process whereby “mud”is pumped down while drilling and bits of drilled rock come back up. They tried to restart it but it didn’t work, so they are trying to pull the bit out of the hole, which is difficult without circulation-they are getting stuck on the formations on the way up and are having to pull really hard.

That is still the status at the moment, where we are progressing by about 20m every 3 hours (and there I was getting used to really fast drilling speeds…) so I have made sure all my stuff is up-to-date and I have some free time now (strange concept!).
I can tell that all my inboxes are going to be really well organised after today…and I can do some Russian too JThis respite has given me a chance to “chat”with the mudloggers (they only speak Russian-I am getting very good at this nonverbal communication thing ;-) and with the Sperry Sun guys, as well as the DSV when he is not running around pulling out handfuls of hair. All good for when we finally get to the reservoir sections ahead-there are 4 coming up, let’s see how many we can do in 2 weeks!

Here are a couple of pics of the canteen: