"Well I stand up next to a mountain and I chop it down with the edge of my hand.
I pick up all the pieces and make an island; might even make a little sand . . . "
From "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)" by Jimi Hendrix.

Talking of sand, that reminds me. During the early 1980s, I worked on a BGS project where I was the geologist on some rather tedious sand & gravel field surveys in various parts of southern England, which involved drilling over 200 Shell & Auger boreholes, usually 6 to 10 inches diameter, depending on the type of ground. Each set of holes was on a roughly 1km grid spacing, through the drift to bedrock. The dullness was occasionally relieved by events such as getting about 2 tons of Land Rover and drill rig stuck up to the axles in soft mud, or coming back from lunch to find we had been drilling into an artesian aquifer and had flooded half a field with a knee deep pool surrounding our drill rig. There was one time when we didn't realise how close to a spectacular result we had been.

Part of my responsilbility was arranging access permission to the sites to be drilled, which involved liason with the land owners, local authority, service providers etc. Critical information such as plans showing the locations of underground services such as gas mains, electric cables, etc, would have been collected weeks in advance from our consultant land agents. I was also supervising the drill crew, logging the superficial deposits and collecting samples for analysis. In soft rock, and in some areas with only a thin deposit over the bedrock, the holes would often only be a few metres deep, and we could usually complete several sites in a day.

Being almost incommunicado out in the field during the day (it was well before e-mail or mobile phones, and I had no access to fax), I would ring in to the office every few days by land line to receive any new information and to give my progress report. One afternoon I called in with my report, and was greeted by a rather nervous voice informing me NOT to drill the hole number xx (due to be drilled during the next few days) at the planned location, as some new information about the site had just been received from the land agents. It was too late. We had made good progress that week and were a couple of days ahead of schedule, and had drilled that hole (in a corner of a farm yard close to some buildings) that afternoon. The "new information" was the rather important location of a 4" water main supplying the nearby village. It ran right across the farmyard, passing through the corner where we had received clearance permission that it was safe to drill our borehole, and we had missed it by inches! If we had hit that it would have made our field flood seem like a dripping tap!

We (me & the drilling crew) sometimes used to relieve the boredom and keep up morale on wet & windy days (or occasions such as one very hot day, when our site was at the downwind corner of a field where the farmer had just begun to spread fresh pig manure ***!~#!), by singing something with our own made up daft lyrics.

One I remember which we used several times, was sung as a round to "Down Down" by Status Quo, and went roughly like this:

"WE'RE DRILLING DOWN! Deeper and down,
Down down, deeper and down . . .
I want all the world to know, that I've found gravel at the bottom of this hole;
It's not exciting but we get paid for this;
Again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
DRILLING! Down, deeper and down,
Down down, deeper and down . . ."

(Repeated many times with "gravel" changed to "sand", "mud", "fossils", "pebbles" or "shells" as appropriate to whatever we were raising at the time, until reaching the bedrock, when "clay" or "chalk" would be the usual call, and if it was getting near lunch time, followed by a verse such as:

"We've finished drilling
Down down, deeper and down.
Now it's time to fill in this hole, and we can go off down to the pub;
Down down, down to the pub."

Pete N.

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