The seismic world is 24 / 7. All time is money, so full time production is a must. Therefore our work is shift work. I passed the test to become a shift leader last October, but given the current economic climate, on our boat, by December we had 4 people qualified to be shift le
aders, so I never got to take on that role. This trip, one of those 4 was laid off and I became a shift leader.
I learned this fact the day before joining and suddenly all the worries of incompetency for this role cycled through my thoughts. Luckily - its been a perfect trip to ease into the shift leader role. For one, I'm on the same boat I was before (it can be a pain to have to learn the role and a new boat on the same trip). Secondly, its been a quite calm trip - no major equipment failures, no major software failures. nice and quiet - production, production production. And I have had a fantastic set of people working with me in my department.
It was all perfect until I caused my first downtime 3 nights ago. We were about to do the near impossible - finish a job in the morning for one client and start another job for another client that same afternoon. Not impossible - it just would require alot of work - a new gun configuration from the gunners, reconfiguring all of our onboard software systems for a new client, new job, new job specifications... and finishing up everything from the last job - shipments, data QC, missed data...
Mid afternoon the gunners deployed the reconfigured guns and I started to enable them one by one (there are 24), so that once all were firing I could calibrate them and run some tests. Once about 75% of the guns were firing, it became clear that the air pressure was not holding on one array. After some confused investigating we discovered the cause to be a twisted hose. The solution meant one gun array must come back onboard, so my gun test had to be delayed.
Once the guns were back in the water, we were heading towards the first line of the new job. As usual, I had to start the guns one at a time - a process which takes between 20-30 minutes. By the time that had finished we were about 20 minutes away from the start of line. I had no time to do the test I needed to do, but I did have time to calibrate the guns. By this point we were in the "dummy shots". I went to calibrate the guns - it checks the signal that they are creating versus a known value of what they "should" be creating. I went to check and the known value was telling me "no reference". I tried to figure out why I had no reference - did I not put in gun volumes into the configuration? fine- okay? did I not put in gun types? no - so I put those in and still no luck. I went to check the directo
ry where the files were. On a previous boat we did not have the files for each gun volume, but no those were there for each gun volume. Checking checking. Almost the start of line. I called my chief down (or rather woke him up, it was about 11pm). He came down - no ideas. Finally I looked at the files again and noticed that we did not have the files for the specified gun depth of 8m. The solution was to copy files from close depths and rename the file for the 8m depth we had, then the system could find them. Now everyone was there - the 2 clients, the party chief. Unfortunately we had already started the line - we had missed data and that data had uncalibrated guns and was therefore no good. We aborted the line and circled.
Unfortunately, I think about things too much, I run things through my head. Run the situation over and over and over again. What if this, what if that, next time this, next time that.
Conclusions:
- I should have slowed the boat down. That is the normal procedure. Why I didn't do this I'm still not sure - some sort of pressure of this being the first line? Me thinking I could solve it in the time allowed? I still do not know. Usually I slow the boat down if there is a problem.
- I can blame myself and say I should have checked the files, but these files are set for most standard configurations. This is only the second time in 3 years that I have had to interact with these files, so perhaps checking them should be on some checklist, but its not 100% standard procedure to check them. Trust me, I will ALWAYS check these files before a start of job from now on.
- Afterward the client said, that really a test of the guns should have been done before the real line and someone higher up should have delayed the first line so we could have done the test. Had we done the test we would have noticed the missing files immediately and fixed the problem miles from the start of line.
I will admit - I did cry that night when I got back to my room. Its still not fun to cause downtime. I'm sure there will be much more downtime in the future. Its inevitable I guess.
Welcome to being a Shift Leader.
