Life on board the 703 was both challenging and exciting, the weather some 200 miles north of the Shetland Islands, whilst drilling for oil was very hostile and I had to learn a whole new way of welding, that of coping with a moving target as the vessel pitched and yawed. The wild life around us in the air and ocean came as quite a surprise. One day after lunch in the galley I went to my cabin for a short siesta and as I settled down for my nap, I glanced out of the porthole and there to my horror was what appeared to be a second world war mine drifting slowly towards us. I leapt from my bunk, ran down the gangway to the stern of the vessel grabbing the first crewman I came across an as we ran I told him what I thought I had seen in the water Arriving at the stern rail and looking 100ft down at the ocean and ready to sound the general alarm. Suddenly there was an explosion of water and I found myself eye to eye with a huge whale that had leapt over one of our mooring cables.

I gasped in amazement as I watched it dive back down and swim away. I turned to share the moment with the crewman I had dragged with me, only to find him unconscious beside me on the deck. As the whale had breached he had fainted and thus missed the wonder of the leaping whale. My mine was nothing more than the rear view of a whale’s tail as it dived. Over the course of the next two years, I was lucky enough to have many more encounters with wildlife but none quite as exciting as the leaping whale.

One evening in the galley I heard a rumour that SEDCO had formed a new company in Dallas with Red Adair, a famous oilfield firefighter portrayed in the movie Hell fighters by none other than John Wayne. Red had designed a vessel specially built to manage disasters at sea. This sounded great so I volunteered to join the commissioning crew and found myself flying to Tokyo to join the Phillips SS on its maiden voyage to Stavanger Norway.