February 2023

I was in North Miami Florida working for Youngquist Brothers as a driller on a job for the North District Waste Water Treatment Plant. If I remember right, we were drilling five class one injection wells to around thirty five hundred feet with a final casing string to be thirty four inch fiberglass reinforced pipe, and two deep monitoring wells to about the same depth.

Working for Youngquist Brothers as a driller was not a very physically demanding job. They gave me at least four helpers on the floor, and a derrick man. This seemed to me at first as an excessive amount of help, until I realized that they were mostly twenty to twenty five years old Miami natives who knew more about dealing cocaine than I did about well drilling. On any given day you could expect at least one of them to not show up, and on some days I was the only one on my crew who came to work.

On days like that I had to borrow help from another rig that was on the job. We had four of them drilling on this location.

When I was making hole I sat in a gaming chair, in the shade, in front of a console, with a fan blowing on me, and a cooler filled with snacks, bottles of water, and cans of soda within arms reach. I would run the rig with a mouse when I was drilling, setting the weight on bit, torque limits, R.P.M. and rate of penetration, then the computer would either figure out how to make it work, or reach its torque limit and shut down.

Tripping pipe, or running casing was easy too, it was done from the same seat with joy sticks, switches and knobs.

There were lots of cameras too! I had one looking at my face when I was in the chair, one pointed at my monitor, two on the rig floor, and one in the crown that we called “the eye in the sky.” The owners and managers would sit in a room filled with big screen T.V.s in Ft Myers called “the war room,” and watch the show all day. If they saw something that they didn’t like, or thought was abnormal I would get the “what for?” call.

I liked the cameras, and always thought of myself as an actor playing the role of a deep well driller in Miami.

The problem that I had working for Youngquist was the rate of pay, and the way they set your shifts. They were only paying me twenty seven per hour, and wouldn't budge from that. There were plenty of men moving into the area from a communist country less than a hundred miles away. They can and will do the same job for a lot less. The wells would, and are getting drilled without me at a console.

The schedule was ten days on and three and a half off, rotating from days to nights every shift, so you always worked one hundred and twenty hours straight through, and never got more than a sixty hour check, and sometimes only forty eight. On top of all that, no per diem or housing.

It wasn't worth it for me, but I was in it for “The big, deep hole.”

One night I was talking in my sleep, and my wife asked me in Spanish “Que hace?” [what are you doing?]

“trabajando bajo el suelo, con Christo” [working underground with Christ]

That is how she told me I answered.

Yes I can speak the Spanish. I had to learn how when I was working on the farm in the Texas Pan Handle. The farm manager assigned someone to me as a translator, but the things that I asked my team to do through his translations weren't always getting done correctly, so I started to study Spanish. It wasn’t long before I was speaking, thinking, and dreaming in Spanish.

The next day at work my phone rang and the caller I.D. read Shummy!

Shummy is Bob Shumm. He is a project manager that me, and Driller Mike have worked with in the past.

After speaking the normal, how are yous and what you doin nows, he asked me if I was interested in going to work in Nevada to drill raised bore ventilation shafts in the Nevada Gold Mines. They would be three and half meters across and we would start drilling them underground at about three thousand and six hundred feet deep.

Those were holes that were big and deep, and I thought to myself “that's what I’m in it for.”

So I responded with a question.

“Can I make forty dollars per hour?”

He said, “I can get you thirty five, and if you get your Nevada State Drilling License they will bump you up to fourty.”

“I’m in. I just have to give Youngquist a two week notice here.”

I gave my two week notice to the tool pusher, and the next morning the human resource guy from the office showed up with papers for me to sign, and told me that they didn't need me anymore. Someone named Emelio took my place at the console, but I didn't care. I was going to work underground, and I hoped that Christ would be there.

I was a little worried about working underground. Bob told me that it wasn’t for everyone, and a lot of people quit before their first week of work is over.

I had three weeks of training aboveground, and then a week of hauling the rig down into the mine one piece at a time, with a telehandler, through the portal at land surface, which was atop a mountain about thirty five hundred feet above sea level, down to the bottom of the mine, which was close to sea level.

The trip down took about an hour if you didn't make any wrong turns and get lost.

We put the rig together at the drill site which was ninety feet above the bottom most part of the mine, and started to drill a twelve and a quarter inch pilot hole with a polymer based drilling fluid, because it was easier to get buckets down into the mine than pallets of gel.

The mine couldn’t go any deeper until we drilled the shaft to circulate air to it, so they were in a hurry to get it done.

The company I was working for was based in South Africa, and this was their first job in the U.S.

Before we finished setting up the rig I knew that the people who were in charge of this were going about it all in the wrong way for many reasons.

They were Canadians, who were from Newfoundland. They are to Canada what Cubans are to Florida. They liked to be referred to as Newfies, and spoke in the same way that Popeye did, but they were harder to understand.

They were commercial fishermen until the Canadian government put so many regulations on the fishing industry that it was not profitable anymore, so most of them left the island for the oil field or mines.

The Newfies wouldn’t take any advice from me on how to drill a twelve and a quarter inch pilot hole, so I stopped offering any.

Between day and night shift we would have to shut down because the mine would have to be empty for the blast. Then the dust and misfires would have to be cleared before the next shift could start.

They told me one day that I left them with a plugged, or buried bit, and they couldn't circulate, so they spent a good part of the day tripping out.

That was a long process because we were using eleven inch drill pipes in five foot lengths, and as you pulled them out of the hole you had to take them to a laydown cubby about five hundred feet away with the telehandler, and the same in reverse for tripping them back in.

I went down in the mine that night after the blast cleared, fired everything up, turned on the pump, and it dead headed.

My first thought was that I was plugged at the bit too.

The fluid pit and centrifugal mud pump was about a thousand feet from the hole, and probably fifteen feet lower than the rig was, with no check valve in the line.

So instead of going straight to tripping drill pipe I broke the top drive from the drill pipe, turned the pump on, heard air escaping from the break, and when I saw drilling fluid, I made it back up again.

We were circulating.

Bob's your uncle.

I drilled all night.

My crew were American locals who had mining experience, but knew nothing about drilling.

I didn’t explain to them what happened, and I didn’t tell the Newfies either.

The next night they told me that I left them plugged off again, and they spent the day tripping pipe again.

I went down into the mine again and the line was plugged with air again.

And so it was every night.

And every morning they said that I left them with a plugged bit.

I tried to call Bob Shumm to tell him the situation, and he wouldn’t answer.

I got really drunk that day and left him a message telling him that he was irresponsible, because he wouldn’t respond to my calls.

The next day he called me to meet him in the lobby of the hotel — not to talk about the hole — but for some sort of fatherly intervention about my drinking problem.

The next day I called him when I was sober, but he didn’t answer or respond back to me, so I left it at that.

I continued to bleed the air from the pump discharge and listened to the Newfies complain about me leaving them plugged.

I told a Shifter at the mine what the problem was, and that if we left the pump running circulating fluid in the hole during the blast that the problem would go away.

He agreed with me, made some calls, and that's what happened.

In total the pilot hole took us about three weeks to drill.

We drilled the last ten meters of a twenty seven meter long hole in three shifts, without ever shutting the pump down except to make a connection.

The pilot hole bit broke through the ceiling.

(“the back” is what it's called in a mine, the walls are “the ribs,” and the front part where the mine is advancing is called “the face.” It's supposed to represent being inside a whale.)

We broke the pilot hole bit off, and put the big reamer on cutters facing up, and drilled it up the entire way dry.

During this time I took the first part of the Nevada State Drilling License exam, and failed it because it is a timed test and I ran out of time.

I wasn’t expecting to have to fill out a well permit application and a notice of intent to drill form.

I finished that shaft only because I wanted to be able to say that I did it.

And I can.

I took a job running a cason rig in central Florida drilling holes just as big or bigger for mast arms and cell phone tower foundations for the same amount of money that I was making underground.

That didn’t last long either because I didn’t like sharing a hotel room with someone who I had to work with all day long.

I found the job I have now working at Cascade Drilling, as a driller drilling two and four inch shallow monitoring wells in April of twenty four, and took it for less than I was making at Youngquist Brothers.

At present I make more money than I did in the mine.

I have my Nevada State Drilling License, and seven more drilling licenses.

When I started at Cascade I had two.

This is the first time in the last fifteen years that I've only had a W2 tax form from one company.

I'm buying a house in Texas — state that I love the most.

And I haven't had a drink in fourteen months.

The last is the sad part, but it had to happen.

I figure that I’ve drunk the amount of alcohol that a moderate drinker would drink in about a hundred and eighteen years.

I started this story to tell about what it took to pass the Nevada State Well Drilling exam, but I guess this one is just the set up for it.

So stay tuned for the next one where I’ll really tell more about the actual exam.

Maybe.

And until then thanks for reading this story.

And remember to steer clear of people who dress up in flour sacks at Christmas time and want you to give them drinks at your house while you try to guess who they are.

Look up Mummer’s Day if you don’t get it.