The New Year

Thursday, January 1, 2009, New Year’s Day
When I awoke at 1000 hrs, I walked outside to get to the gym. It was overcast and sultry and is becoming more tropical by the day, the ship being just north of 24 degrees. My target to the Caribbean is to the south of Cuba through the Straits of Yucatan, but favoring the island for friendlier currents. At noon, we were 226 NM from that way point, which is 21˚ 37’ N and 85˚ 7.1’ W. Speed is variable this afternoon from 5.9 to 6.4 knots, due to loop currents entering the Gulf from the Caribbean. It appears to be about two knots acting against the bow. We are now beyond television range, and so all the bowl games and parades will remain a mystery to us for a time. Our first and only stop on this voyage will be in Barbados. There we will take on bunkers for a day or two, and from there, the route will continue meridianally to the east far enough to miss Brazil's big Atlantic shoulder. Thence we shall pick up a great circle route to Capetown. A great circle is a route “drawn” on the surface of the earth that connects the point of departure to the destination on a plane that passes the center of the earth. It provides the shortest distance between two points on a sphere. When you read Charles Lindbergh’s accounting of his solo flight across the Atlantic (The Spirit of Saint Louis), he included a chart from Long Island, NY, to Orley Airport in Paris. The course looked “humpy”; that is, somewhat parabolic, because it was a great circle route, the shortest distance between his takeoff point to his landing point. The parabolic curve on his map is the translation of the spherical surface route to the flat surface of a chart.

It is raining. The skies are lowing: not real virgas, but scuddy bottoms mixed with steam or fog. Barometer is 29.93. I have seen a number of tropical storms and hurricanes, with their rain bands and energy feeding on heated water. Frontal storms are different. One thing about either kind of storm is the victimization of the birds. Thousands of birds get caught in the eye, or along the frontal boundary and are swept out to sea. They land by the hundreds on any and every vessel, totally exhausted, beaten by the elements. There is no food for them, difficult nesting, fresh water disappears, and almost all the poor creatures die: I counted three hundred birds, from cormorants to swallows, on the helideck of the Explorer after a hurricane. A few lived. Sometimes a hawk or several hawks cannibalize the others, until there are only hawks left. Then the biggest, strongest hawk eats the lesser ones, and then he himself starves to death. A little flock of swallows, about thirty, survived a blow on the Discoverer 534. They nested on the roof of the capstan flat in a little, tightly packed huddle. One by one, they fell dead to the floor until none remained. We often tried to catch as many as we could and send them back ashore in a box on a helicopter, but virtually all are doomed. I should like to keep bird cages out here, filled with grass hoppers, and with tubs of worms and seeds. We need a few trees and some grass…The last time I traveled to Africa, we sailed the north side of Cuba and picked up a little pigeon, whom we named Gracie. We fed her, put out fresh water for her, and cooed at her. She roosted beneath the helideck each night. Soon, she came inside the wheel house and perched on whatever she pleased, including an occasional arm or shoulder. She went all the way to Nigeria with us, and then, one morning, disappeared. I read that only one living creature out of every 14,000 dies of old age in the sea. I don’t know how he came across his numbers, but I should think that NOTHING in the sea dies of natural causes. Even in our tubs of steel and motors, she beats us regularly…without any thought whatsoever. As my physicist friend, Gary Walker, would explain it, “it is all gathered up in the quantum universe and left alone, but existing as quantum stuff forever—some little wave function.”

Friday, January 02, 2009
Speed 7.3 knots on a course made good of 146˚ and a transient location at 22° 27’ N and 85° 50’ West. We are about 65NM northwest of the gate to the Strait of the Yucatan, just off the Cuban coast.

Some days are diamonds, some days are gold. This day is diamond: crystalline and bright. Sea and sky are painted in white sunshine, enough to make the eyes squint, and it is warm and cloudless. We have left all but deep-sea traffic, but the water is fast becoming shallow. A couple of nights ago, we were in 11,000+ feet of water. Now we are in 3280 feet of water, the uplift of the islands and coastal Yucatan. At its deepest, the Gulf is 12,927 feet deep. That hole is concentric, more or less, to the surrounding lands, from Florida around to the tip of Yucatan. It is located some 200NM from Brownsville, such that extending the border defined by the Rio Grande passes just north of the greatest depth. For millions of years, fossils and fossil fuels have been slowly washing down to that point. Every time it rains, that water weight pushes against oil-bearing sands that end up in the Donut, a tar-covered circle about 75 miles across, covered in tar.

When La Salle came to the Texas coast almost 500 years ago, the natives were picking up a black, malleable substance up and down the beach. They used it for their fires, and it burned hot and long. It was tar that bubbled up from the Donut and washed ashore, as it does even today.

The Donut is the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Many oil sands end up there, bearing their oils and tars from Mexico and Texas primarily, but also the other Gulf States. Many of those sands are water-driven from rains seeping into those sands and adding weight to increase pressure against hydrocarbons. They seep slowly, desiccated by salt water, or pool deeper into the earth. That Donut is expected to be a great bonanza when man is able to extract it. An ongoing lawsuit by Mexico against the US was finally settled and awarded 30% to the US.

I drilled on the northern periphery of the Donut some years ago on the Discover 534. We were in about 7900 feet of water, drilling for Shell and partners. They planned to drill some 20,000 feet, more or less, with several casing strings. It was a wildcat—exploratory—well, perhaps 80 miles to the nearest neighboring well. Geology was uncertain, but was virtually awash with hydrocarbons. The plan was to run a 30-inch drive pipe to 1100 feet, 26-inch casing to 2000 or so feet, then a 20-inch well-head casing at 3000 feet. They eventually planned a 7-inch liner at 20 or 22 thousand feet.

We ran the drive pipe in pure mush, totally unconsolidated tar, mud, and muck; the pipe virtually sank on its own. We had no choice but to run the 26-inch, and its results were identical. It was not possible to pump cement into that goo to consolidate anything. Pumping just blew muck aside. The same thing occurred until we finally cased ourselves out of the hole at about 2200 feet, never finding solid earth. However, there is an awful lot of petroleum there if we can ever figure out how to recover it. The big deal about cementing and consolidation is safety. If one drills into a pressurized zone, it can not be shut off with a blowout preventer because the muck is insufficient to hold the pressure. Shut the BOP, and the pressure simply bypasses it and runs through the course of least resistance. That is called an underground blowout.

Tonight at 0252hrs GMT (8:52 CST) the long distance phone rang. Its message is that one of our crew’s women had a baby. The announcement came as we passed Cabo Cartoche, Yucatan, on the right and Cabo San Antonio, Cuba, on the left.