Long time no post

Sorry about that- I have been rushed off my feet, and then there was no network for about 15 hours. But now I have time to kill so here is a bit of an update. I will recap to when we left pad 54/rig1, if I can remember that is! Time is a rather alien concept at the moment-I only know the date thanks to our daily reports but I have no idea of what time of the day it is or what day of the week!

Moving to pad 5

After we left pad 54, we went by the CPF to try and get driving licences and give back bedding and towels from 54. We then went on to pad 5 (which is a Deutag-operated rig; 2 of the rigs are Deutag (German Co.) and 2 are SSK (Russian CO.) and met up with Sergey Ryzhkov, an experienced and very friendly geologist, who was going crazy trying to manage 3 wells at once.
We settled into the caravan where someone had made the bed! (there were dirty sheets when we arrived in 54, and we had to drive all the way to the CPF to get some clean ones). This bed has a proper quilt cover that fits! And for the dievushka (that’s me) there’s even a matching set of sheet, pillowcase and quilt cover. The second nice surprise was that the caravan had been cleaned and has been every day since. We also had water in there-me happy!
We then went for dinner, and this is when I realised that the stodge I had been eating at 54 really was not nice. Here the meals are very nice, and you can help yourself to salads (real ones, with vegetables an’ everyfink, out of large salad bowl, not just a desert-spoonful in a little plastic container), fruit and pastries. The only thing the Deutag rigs don’t have is a “shop”in the canteen so basically chocolate and biscuits are rare currency.
Which is why it’s a good idea to be friends with the Sperry Sun guys (drillers). (They gave me 5 bars of chocolate yesterday!! But I digress).
Anyway, Sergey allocated jobs to us-it appears that all the rigs were drilling production (reservoir) sections at the same time. So I was assigned to work on pad 7, which is pretty close to pad 5, with Radik. Radik was supposed to be in K54 but the well has had problems. The casing, which is the metal shaft they put down the well so that it doesn’t fall in (after we have done logging), got stuck and they couldn’t get it out. Since then they have had to detonate something down there to break it off so they could pull it back out and go down and try to clean out what was left. The hole is totally messed up though so they are having to sidetrack now, which is basically going down part of the existing hole and drilling out sideways trying to go through the same formations. What a mess.