March 16, 2009
All,
News of Today:
- After the casing was successfully run yesterday, we today started to work in 12-hour shifts.
- The dayshift headed out for the drill site early morning intending to run the pipe and start coring early afternoon. Unfortunately some problems with the winch used for the drilling tools stopped the progress for a couple of hours. In addition, the water pump at the drill rig seemed to be frozen and needed some extra effort.
- The dayshift finally solved all these problems and started to run the bottom hole assembly that forms the lowermost part of the drill pipe. This was immediately stopped by ice that apparently had formed during the past 12 hours inside the uppermost part of the casing. So instead of drilling with the drill rig the dayshift first had to drill through the ice inside the casing by hand.
- Shortly before shift change good news arrived from the drill site: they finally started to run the pipe! The nightshift will now run the rest of the pipe and we expect the first core to be recovered shortly after midnight.
We are all pretty excited!
Cheers for now
Catalina
