Life on Ocean Wave No Funfair

It was the third time I had boarded an offshore drilling rig but the first time I stayed there overnight.

To be frank, after about a two-hour flight in a helicopter, I felt nothing but fatigue. But when I caught sight of the red-coated drilling platform in the South China Sea, I had to admit it was a marvelous scene, demonstrating a mighty power in a very extraordinary manner, particularly when the sea looked so tranquil.

The platform I boarded, Hangyangshiyou 981, is China's first homemade drilling rig for deep waters. I could feel the pride of all the staff on the platform, even though most of them had plenty of experience working with offshore drilling equipment before.

Liu Chao, 981's offshore installation manager, who is in charge of the entire operation of the platform, said he felt really honored when notified he was to work on the rig. The 36-year-old started his career in 1998 as a driller and was promoted to managerial level after experiencing several challenging assignments both home and abroad.

He said he felt an enormous burden of responsibility because he had never before been in charge of a deepwater drilling rig and he realized its importance to the company.

Same-specification rigs operating in China are mostly managed by foreigners because of the sophisticated equipment that requires high-standard English skills, Liu said.

To assist Liu and his Chinese colleagues on the platform, China National Offshore Corp, the owner of the rig, for the first time employed about 19 foreigners with vast expertise, forming a dynamic and multinational team to ensure the stable and safe operation of the strategically important vessel.

"It's always very busy, and we encounter a lot of challenges," said Daniel Sheehan, the drilling vessel's OIM adviser from New Jersey, in the United States. He has 14 years of experience in rigs in Africa, Latin America and the US and joined the new team in February.

On a brand-new, but sophisticated vessel, the priority of his routine work is to assist the crew to react to the advanced equipment and make sure the team operate in a cooperative way.

After their busy 12-hour work day, life in a drilling platform far from the land is far less romantic than I expected. When the sun sets, the only thing you can see is, well, virtually nothing. The darkness is all-encompassing and the only sound you can hear is from the buzzing machines that run 24 hours a day.

Sheehan said he chats with his wife and 10-year-daughter in New Jersey every other day via Skype to keep up with the girl's development.

"My daughter is my priority now. She is intrigued about China. That's also part of the reason I came to work in China," Sheehan said. "I'll bring her over to see the country."

All the drilling rigs I've been to have been occupied only by men. They work 28 days in a row before flying back for a 28-day break. Most of them only see women on the rig when we female reporters visit.

Given that, I was very impressed by the self-discipline of the staff and how they get through their spare time on a vessel with very limited entertainment facilities. The average age of the platform's staff is 32. Their peers at similar ages back on the land may be spending their leisure time in bars and singing karaoke with friends.

Fortunately for them, the new 981 is much better equipped than older rigs, with broader Internet access, bigger gyms and a canteen that has a greater variety of food brought from all over Shenzhen by supply ships that generally take about 20 days to sail from the coastal city.

I saw most of the young staff choosing to surf the Internet when they were off during the night time, something hard to imagine in older rigs in which the internet connection is so slow that it's even hard to view a news page.

It reminded me of a worker I encountered at another platform last year. The young man, born in 1984, said that what he expected the most during his spare time was to stand on the deck watching the sunrise or sunset during the first few years. Now, what he really hopes for is to have a girlfriend that he can see every day.

On hearing that, I felt great compassion for these workers. It's a very different story from what we write as business reporters every day. The oil industry that creates fortunes and is run by several mammoth corporations has a side that we had never really explored before.

Looking back at the gigantic platform when we left on the helicopter, it looked like an isolated island where human beings have left behind many of their passions to conquer nature. In this regard, soaring oil prices seem less harsh, if only for the sake of the precious time these workers spend on these rigs.