A drilling mishap and more are the focus of this column.
Sometime around 1980, we had finished drilling a deep well in Lake Jackson, Texas, between Christmas and the New Year. We set the well on New Year's Eve and started development. On New Year's Day, C.R. and I decided to go finish the well and move the rig. We got there in the morning and finished the development while we picked up tools and cleaned up the location. It had been raining, and the location was pretty muddy. When we rigged down and started out, the rig bogged down about 50 feet shy of the road. The water truck had a front bumper-mounted winch, so we tied on to the rig and started to pull. I was in the water truck pulling, and C.R. was in the rig. The rig started moving, and we knew we had it made. As C.R. made the final turn toward the road, disaster struck.