Another winter has pretty much passed in the Williston basin, and I am glad of it. We didn’t have much snow this winter, which made for better road conditions, but the temperature and wind chills set records. On the 15th of January, the wind chill was -51. I couldn’t get my quarters warm enough to keep from seeing my breath, so I slept in the truck. The wind chill on the first of March was only -40 or, as the natives put it, a sign of spring. A local town has passed an ordinance that all buried piping must be 7 feet below ground! Not too much trenching going on for a while.
My fishing work has slowed down a little this year due to a variety of factors. While my company is well known for open hole fishing expertise, we have not pushed the cased hole/production side of the business too much in this area. The drillers active in this area are getting better at what they do and make fewer mistakes. For instance, when the boom took off a few years ago up here, most of the rigs and crews were from Texas and Oklahoma. They knew darned good and well that lots of drill collars were necessary for a good hole. After planting and losing most of their drill collars, they decided that heavy weight drill pipe would provide a much safer weight-on-bit. We fish drill collars less now than we used to.