Oiled rotten.

December 22nd, 2006 by Jim Clark

Today I spent the day working on an oil platform five miles offshore.

It was kind of a big deal for me. You see, my grandfather was a bigwig engineer at Phillips 66 back in the late ’60s and he did a lot of work out on the oil platforms off the coast of Santa Barbara. My dad followed suit by working on the platforms during summers while he was in college. So for me this was like a rite of passage to be the third generation to work offshore where they did. Granted, installing telecommunications equipment is a completely different line of work than theirs, but as I said it’s still a big deal for me.

There were 50-mph winds and 15-foot swells today. The surfers down the beach may have been enjoying this, but it made for a tricky business to get out to the platforms.

To get on the boat — as well as from the boat to the platform — you must swing from a rope out over the water and hope that you land on the deck. If you time it wrong and a swell moves the boat too far up, down or away from the pier you’re going to take a bath.

The boat slammed into the pier quite violently a few times, tearing off shards of wood from the planks, but I did a pretty good Tarzan swing and managed to make it onto the boat just fine.

There were two platforms I worked on today: Hogan (began operation in 1967) and Houchin (1969). The more famous of the two is Hogan — several movies and TV shows have been filmed there, such as the film Face Off, Baywatch, X-Files and a few others.

The view from the top of the platforms looking out towards the shoreline and the other platforms was pretty impressive.

While standing atop the helicopter pad on platform Hogan, I looked up at the basket at the top of the rig and thought it would be a great idea to go up there to check out the view.

I asked the guy in charge how high the top was from the water and he said it’s about 170 feet or so. Then I asked if I could go up there. He looked at me like I was crazy but agreed to send me up there if that’s what I really wanted. He said I’d have to get a safety harness from one of the crew, and when the guy with the harness heard that I wanted to go up there he started to laugh.

“I wouldn’t even go up there today,” he said. “Not in this wind. But if you really want to go, you can go. Your clothes are going to get dirty, though.” How dirty, I asked? “Oh, just a little.” Soon I would learn what a little dirty means here on the platform.

And with that, the harness went on me and I went up the ladder. All work stopped as I began to climb. The platform crew thought it was extremely entertaining to watch this dumb guy in slacks climb to the tallest part of the rig on the windiest day of the year for no reason at all other than to just do it. The wind tore at me as I climbed higher, and at one point I thought it was going to rip me completely from the ladder. The crew must have thought I was absolutely insane, but they cheered me on and kept urging me to keep going until I had gone as far up as I could. The view from up there was exactly as breathtaking as I had expected it to be.