Ocean Rambler

I began my offshore career on the Ocean Kokuei. It was the summer of 1975 and the older guy who was with me in Aberdeen Buroo assured me ‘Roughpainters’ would be a job painting trawlers in the harbour. The very small office in Tullos was a hive of activity. I filled in a clearly American application-form and waited to be called into the inner office for my interview. I was nineteen and the first question was a tough one: “What size boots do you take?”

The Kokuei was drilling for Burmah when I joined her but she went on to drill for Chevron ; when Burmah went bust. I’d like to tell you more about that story but the material facts are obscured by a sea-mist of bull-droppings. Jim Sillars once spoke about Scotland being the only country in history to find oil and become poorer. Burmah in 1974 found the Ninian Field and went on to become insolvent.

Odeco had four rigs in Scottish waters at the time. The Ocean Victory had a steady crew with a slow turnover of personnel. The Kokuei and the Voyager were the average rigs with a steady change of faces. And then there was the Rover which had more character than the other three; the highest crew turnover and a consistent place in Odeco’s world-wide league-table of accident statistics.

After a few months on the Kokuei I was transferred to the Rover. Later in my oilfield career I almost encountered the Kokuei again. She had been drilling near to where we were when storm damage caused her to make for Invergordon. The spot where her BOPs were left on the seabed was marked by a buoy and a standby-boat.

The story goes that she had trouble with an anchor-chain and was taking in water at the top of the leg. A member of the crew was placed inside the leg to watch over this. I imagine him in the ‘Fort Knox’ leg at the back of the galley but I should stress that I wasn’t there. I also imagine him without a radio or telephone. The story goes that the Unknown Roustabout was given instructions to remain at his post without fail. When he appeared in another part of the rig he was asked why he had left his post. He replied that the water was up to his knees.

The Kokuei became a part of the Ocean Legend project which did not go much beyond the drawing-board. A team of human legends from the Odeco stable was assembled in Invergordon to build a bigger-better-rig from the Kokuei and the Victory. Instead they built a work-boat, Ocean Taxi, from cement they found in a cement-tank. That was around 1991, a time when some of my fellow-workers were restless about the managerial strategies that led to the easily-preventable Piper Tragedy.

Rewinding my memories a few years; I arrived on the Ocean Rover with a slightly better idea of what to expect. I settled into the week-on, week-off routine of the Rover and began to appreciate the black humour, story-telling and petty feuds that are so important in a world without women, television and many other trivial distractions. The Rover kept us amused and fed but its primary role was as a hole-maker: a second-generation Victory/Voyager Class semi-submersible hole-making-machine. That is to say that technically, nautically and logically she was a Voyager Class rig. But heroically, romantically and poetically she was also a Victory Class rig. Second-generation merely refers to her having a hydraulic motion-heave-compensator as part of her original specification.

The Rover was very much a part of the Odeco-enigma. She had her off-days: ‘We’ve never got time to do it right but we’ve always got time to do it again’. Over the piece however she delivered on an unattributed-claim to drill the cheapest hole in the patch. The Rover tripped pipe faster than any other rig I have worked on. This could in part be the tricks of memory but I suspect that she had an 8-line string-up. This would have given higher travelling-block speed at the expense of less drilling-depth.

The Rover tripped pipe so fast that she was damaging the hole with hydraulic shock-loads. At least that was a story another ex-Rover hand told me years later. At the time I just tried to keep up with the rest of the crew. A five-man drillcrew was a great place to learn fast.

Taken with a polaroid camera by the Phillips Company Man on the drillfloor of the Ocean Rover circa May 1976. Louis Mair, age 20 and a gentleman whose name I can no longer recall.

I had left by the time the trawler ran into her. I cannot confirm the story about the Medic being busy with another patient when a Roughneck with a damaged finger looked into the sick-bay. Mr McLucky’s interest in Vietnam War tunnels is a story you would not believe. I’ll have to fall back on the Comex diving-crew.

In the summer along with cakes the galley-crew left a large bowl of orange squash in the coffee-shop for our breaks. The Night Cook was also the baker; years later I discovered that his name was Peter. His opposite number probably had a name as well but I only knew him as the Midnight Cowboy. His ineptitude as a baker was regularly discussed when he was on board.

On this particular sunny summer day everyone else was busy when the divers arrived to sample the buns with artificial-cream. They decided to improve on these buns by removing the artificial-cream and replacing it with genuine shaving-foam. When the Odeco men came for their tea-break no-one suspected a thing. The buns ended-up in the bowl of orange-squash. The galley-crew took offence at this desecration. We ended-up getting a tin of biscuits and no more cakes. The divers thought this all highly amusing and the rest of us were not sure if we got a good or bad deal with the biscuits.

Later in the seventies the Rover returned to the Gulf of Mexico to work. She sailed under her own power across the Atlantic; slowly. However  as a fully-equipped drilling-rig she was accompanied by a boat loaded with things that might be useful for drilling the next hole.

Years before the incomplete hull of the Ocean Victory left a Norwegian yard and crossed the Atlantic under her own power: Sea-trials gone crazy? Irresponsible over-confidence in a new design built with second-hand-parts? An inspirational story of the human need for adventure? The Ocean Voyager may have been the first commissioned as a drilling-rig but in Norway these rigs are called 'Victory' Class rigs. The Ocean Victory had no boat with her when she crossed the Atlantic.

The Ocean Rover is now a fifth-generation deepwater dynamically-positioned rig. The Rover is also a collection of memories amongst those of us who crewed her.

Pipe-tripping Song

There’ll be bluebirds over

The Ocean Rover

Our Leader is going away