Still alive!

Sorry about the complete lack of blogging. Time has flown over the last few days.
Logging was delayed until Wednesday night. We decided to be clever and split the task, as it was a long PEX followed by XPT. Radik controlled the PEX while I slept and I then controlled the XPT while he slept. Yuri the trainee came with me to see what XPT was like and help me with data transfer.
So I actually got about 6 hours' sleep that night, which was rather good, and started XPT at the very reasonable hour of 7am. The engineers this time were Andrey for PEX (I had met him once, on New Year's Eve, when he had been incredibly grumpy but that turned out to be related to the fact that he was in his work unit instead of at a party) and Vlad for XPT. Everything went incredibly well-PEX was very fast (we just missed a record I think) and XPT was very smooth and produced excellent results :-) everybody was pleased with the whole thing, especially this happy bunny.

So Thursday afternoon we waited for the slb boys to bring round all the data, after which we went to pad 54, who were having a disastrous logging run with Irina and Max (failed tools etc) and who were also coring (which was going badly too but we wanted to see a bit of the process). We then dropped Yuri off at basecamp before returning rather late to our pad. On the way back we checked in on pad 54 again to find that the guys there had managed to convince Max to sleep in the work unit rather than in the (very uncomfortable) Doghouse (which is the name for the Slb unit that transports their materials and acts as a place for them to sleep).





Yesterday we worked on Winlog and prepared everything for the new (and final) well here, which they are starting to drill today. In the late afternoon they skidded the rig (ie moved it so it could be above the new slot) by 40m! It was fascinating watching them pull it along, and also going out again afterwards: the whole view has changed and we are now next to the pump building.
We couldn't do much yesterday evening as we didn't have power due to the rig move. In fact, this morning the caravan was freezing-it looks like it was switched off all night, and that it was moved-despite their having told us they wouldn't need to. Luckily, nothing was broken and it is pretty warm outside so nothing got damaged by the cold in here.

Photos: Radik and Niva606 on the road to basecamp; helping the guys in pad54 with their core samples; Radik and I before the rig skid