Lake E Daily News, 30 April, 2009
Sadly, I have to report that today we called an end to drilling at Lake E. Drilling is risky business and today we had a "perfect storm" of bad luck while trying to start our last hole. During the night shift, it was discovered that we had lost 30 HQ rods and the center bit. Then while trying to fish them out, we lost another 13 rods of HQ plus a recovery tool called a Bowen spear; at least 9 other HQ pipes were dented. The final straw was when we learned that when they pulled up the PQ, we had also lost 41 rods of PQ, the PQ shoe, and 9 sections of casing. Jerry suggested that Lake E now be called Lake Eater!
To pull out of the lake again and reset the lake casing, to essentially start over, would take 2.5 days leaving us only 2.5 days to drill. But without the PQ we would have to start drilling at the bottom of the lake casing (i.e., -30m blf) because we now do not have a center bit and the tricone reamer is not expected to work in the clay rich sediments. So we don't have time to get down to our planned starting depth of -135m blf.
Starting a new hole with only 2 days left puts us at high risk for additional loss and gives us a very low to impossible chance of recovering anything below -135m. To pull up the lake casing, we need to also knock off welding tabs in order to get the casing up through the foot clamp and this is additional time even if we only pull up the casing enough to free it from the lake floor.
So, you can imagine how we all feel here..... But we know that at every point we have done our best. Explanations are varied. But apparently the PQ must have started to enter the sediments below the casing at an angle that got worse with depth. There was no indication that the casing was in at an angle at all. But some of the rods that they did get up are bent -- 9 are bent real bad, indicating that the pipe "kicked off " vertical without our knowing. It’s interesting that all of our most serious drilling issues have had something to do with drilling between -100 and -150m blf. One person suggested that perhaps the ice moved a few centimeters during the high winds yesterday contributing to a small entrance angle; yet Volker Neth thinks this is extremely unlikely. >> continuation to drilling results
