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| My first command. Offshore Logistics' M/V Columbia, (X Santa Fe M/V Pacesetter) a 4,000 H.P. supply and towing vessel. I was captain aboard this vessel for about a year and a half, operating out of Singapore. Good duty. | Taking an oil rig in tow. We supplied and towed rigs throughout Southeast Asia, from Burma to the Gulf of Thailand, to east Kalimantan, and into the Indian Ocean. This is the kind of life an adventurous young man could perhaps still enjoy. |
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| I don't have many "firsts" to my credit. But I'd almost be willing to wager that I'm the only one to have bicycled in the middle of the Banka Strait -- on the work deck of the Columbia. This was on a light return trip to Singapore from the Java Sea. | Here the Columbia and another Offshore vessel have the rig, Transworld 60, under tow. This was the largest rig in the area. I towed it several times -- from the Malacca Strait to Borneo. Then to many locations in the Java Sea. |
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My good friend and mentor in the offshore oil
business, Captain Lucky
Wilhelm, (now owner of Oasis
del Pacifico in Costa Rica) used to describe rig towing as,
"Days and days of complete boredom, punctuated at regular
intervals with moments of shear terror." I can vouch for that. And sometimes something really exiting happens, like when the Transworld 60 (left) experienced a blow out. Fortunately, all hands were saved. In this case, the biggest rig in Asia was completely swallowed up and disappeared into the "mud and gas volcano" its drilling had tickled into life (January, 1972). A "mud volcano" is still shown on nautical charts of the area, as I've noted when passing that way several times in recent years on the LASH ship S.S. Stonewall Jackson. |
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| Above is a serene view of a "Makasar Schooner" nearly becalmed in the Java Sea with a load of lumber. Not actually a schooner, since the foremast and sail is larger than those aft, they certainly were a beautiful sight to behold. I once found one just like this foundered and on its side in the middle of the Java Sea. It still had a its full cargo of lumber aboard, but there was no sign of the crew. The vessel's hull had been ruptured in a blow some days before, and the crew, I found, had been rescued. I owned salvage rights for an hour or so, but was unable to take it in tow. My crew salvaged some lumber and rigging lines, and we anchored it in hopes of returning to the site, but we never did. | The Borneo railway pictured above was actually a
wooden track laid down through the jungle from a helicopter service
barge, the Seamar Sakan, moored in a river in northeast Kalimantan, to
a land oil rig, a couple of miles inland, which had blown out and was
on fire. The track was for a cement pipeline from the barge to the rig
to be used to pump cement into the hole to stop the blow-out. The
distance was too great, however, and the attempt failed. The blowout
just had to burn itself out. (See photo below) I was relief barge captain on the service barge at the time, and an interesting two weeks it was! |
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| On the Seamar Sakan in Borneo, good meat was sometimes difficult to import from Singapore. The Indonesian government wanted us to buy Indonesian meat, which was very expensive and difficult to obtain. But free meat was never very difficult to get. Wild pigs, taken while swimming the river, (as well as other game), were always plentiful. | To get around purchasing beef from distant Jakarta, on one memorable occasion we had a supply boat captain bring us a live beef from nearby Tarakan. The crew slaughtered it on deck. Unfortunately, the meat was rather tough, and the American oil field hands complained, so it was just a one time deal. |
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One of the more memorable trips I made was as
captain on a small tug called the Seamar III. We towed 6,000 tons of
limestone gravel, on three barges, from a quarry on Karimun Island,
near Singapore, to a Bechtel construction site at Bontang, in northeast
Kalimantang. The trip was punctuated with difficulties and is the
subject of an article soon to appear somewhere on this web-site. At left is a view of a new "suburb" of Bontang (bigger than Bontang itself) -- the booming red light district. Built over a swamp area, the main street is a long wooden dock lined on one side with bars. Most had thatched roofs, but the fancier ones had corrugated steel roofs. A fight and killing took place here which sparked a small war between the locals and the imported labor from Java and the Celebes. Things were a little hairy for a while. The Indonesian Army (Pertamina police, actually), had to be called in from Balikpapan to quell the disturbance. |
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At right: Some of the ladies of the evening from the new bar district out bathing and sunbathing in a dugout canoe. This shot was taken off the end of the bar district Main Street. The actual Main Street of the town was on higher ground and was of dirt. The "war," having broke out on the day after our arrival, pretty much shut things down for the few days we were there. I didn't get to partake of much of the night life in the new boom-town, and we had difficulty purchasing fresh supplies for the return trip to Karimun Island and Singapore. I was sorry that I didn't have an opportunity to return to this wild frontier town. As with my short stint on the Seamar Sakan, I was only a relief captain on the Seamar III. |
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