Chopper Down

   
When the down turn in the offshore exploration on the Scotian Shelf came in 1985, many rigs pulled the drill stem and disappeared over the horizon. Sedco 709 was one of the last to go, and Secunda Marine Services of Dartmouth, secured the charter to tow this large semi submersible, in early April 1986, to Flemish Pass, which lays between the  nose of Grand Bank and Flemish Cap. Designated to do the tow was the 7200 HP offshore supply/support vessel ,  Claymore Sea, as lead tug,  along with a  German vessel, Kreusenturm, owned by OSA Offshore of Hamburg.

The tow was completed in four days, and the dynamically positioned rig was on location, and immediately commenced drilling. We started running supplies, barite, cement, drilling fluid, food …. Name it and we carried it. The German was our counterpart in this supply operation and when one vessel would be in port the other would be on standby at the rig.

Crew changes on the rigs are staggered, more or less keeping a finger on the pulse, as it were, and most crew changes  consist of about ten or twelve people. On the Grand Banks, noted in song and story for their fog, crew changes by helicopter are sometimes difficult to plan, for although the flight might leave St. John’s with clear weather at the rig, during the flight time the fog can materialize in a moment, often causing the flight to be aborted.

The afternoon of April 24th  1986 we were on helicopter standby at the rig. The Kreusenturm had arrived from St. John’s that morning and had to halt her unloading and pull away from the rig when the helicopter was due to land. The weather was almost calm, with fog patches, with the visibility varying from -0 to ¼ mile. We could monitor the rigs radio traffic with the aircraft and it was undecided at one point whether to continue with the flight or return to St. John’s. As it turned out they kept on to the rig.

I was third engineer on the Claymore and in that capacity  I was required to keep the fast rescue craft (FRC) in good mechanical order and in a state of constant availability. My watch ran from twelve to four  and I had arranged with the seaman on the eight to twelve, to untarp the boat  just before noon. I would eat, go below and take over the watch from the chief engineer, make a round of the engine room and then go up to the boat deck, go aboard the FRC and check all the fluid levels, rig an auxiliary cooling hose, start the Volvo diesel, run it up to temperature, then shut it down and have the seaman on the twelve to four re-tarp it. So it went that day and when finished I went to the mess room to get a coffee to take below with me. The skipper was in the mess and we got in a conversation; I was just taking my departure when there came a loud bang and the skipper took off for the bridge while I made a race for the engine room, figuring that one of the main engines must have blown up.

I had only gotten as far as the laundry room, in which the engine room entrance was located, when the man overboard alarm started to wail, so I changed direction and went to my station at the FRC, on reaching the boat deck what a sight to behold! There sat the Super Puma, fortunately upright on it’s airbags, less than fifty meters from the starboard side of the ship.

Constant drills pay big dividends. We had drilled with that  FRC to a point where we had launching and retrieval times cut to a minimum. Seven minutes from the time it hit the water, we had the eight passengers and two crew safely on board our vessel.

We took the chopper in tow with the FRC and brought it to the rig, they dropped a nylon strap which we placed around the rotors hub: the crane operator lifted it and we backed under and it was landed on the deck of our ship. The flight engineer and pilot then  proceeded to remove the rotors for the trip to town. Not a big job……….I think of the ease of removal every time I have flown in a chopper since then.

As it turned out the flight engineer was flying the aircraft getting hours toward his license. Coming in on radar, he had three targets, the rig, Kreusenturm and us. On his first approach he made the rig and was climbing the leg to the flight deck when  he lost visual contact in a fog patch and backed off, on the next time around he made us in the fog and it must have unnerved him to find himself eyeball to eyeball with our mate through the wheel house windows. He leap frogged over us, lost control and ditched  on our starboard side.

We took the aircraft to St. John’s were an autopsy was performed at Tor Bay airport. No mechanical malfunction could be found and the Super Puma was flying out to the rig again in a couple of days.



One of the passengers had  a slight back injury, but for the most part it turned out well. Another guy who had been in a chopper ditching off the coast  of NS on the way in from Sable to Halifax the previous summer vowed that two down in  less than a year, meant that he was through flying in choppers; ergo, he was finished working in the oil patch.

  Ron  Sangster  of New Harbour was on board the Claymore for this episode and still works for Secunda Marine. That charter ended my offshore sailing until August 1990, when I was called by Secunda to the  “Ryan Leet” a call that saved me from the worse job I ever had………………the Country Harbour ferry!!

The rig hands have implicit faith in the crews of the standby vessels, but the FRC is very limited  so far as all weather rescue is concerned. The speedy rescue that day only served to bolster their faith, but had it been blowing thirty + knots with a heavy swell it would have been a different story. We would have made the recovery of personnel, but  it would have been  a from the ships deck  and the aircraft would have been history.

The helicopters fly to and from the rigs in some real heavy weather . I have a video of a take off at Rowan Gorilla III in heavy rain with the wind gusting to 60 knots. We on board the Ryan  Leet were happy when we heard the pilot say that he was now above the weather  and gave his ETA  for Halifax.


Being  ships  crew, I wasn’t  required to fly in the helicopters a great deal, but I recall joining a offshore supply vessel  off the coast of Guyana in 1975 where we flew out to the rig which was 110 offshore. We had flown in to Timehri airport at Georgetown and shortly thereafter boarded a decrepit Sikorski, owned by Okanagan Helicopters.

There were twenty of us in all, plus the pilot and flight engineer + our luggage and the aircraft was grossly overloaded. The flight engineer made an attempt to start it up, and there came a grinding clatter, (which turned out to be the starter self destructing.

The pilot looked back through the door between the cockpit and cabin and said with a grin and said, “Gentlemen, I’m afraid you’ll have to deplane for a while, seems as though something has screwed up, again.

We returned to the terminal and sat in the sweltering heat under the slowly turning ceiling fans for forty five minutes, until they installed a new starter, then we took off for the rig; about eighty miles off the land an alarm started to sound and from where I was sitting, I could see this red warning light flashing, the flight engineer worked his magic, the alarm stopped and the light went out.  All the sharks in that part of the Carribean were saying, “Curses!” “Foiled again!!”




                                         Worse job, ever !!