Pioneer vessel had long life in Gulf

By Jim Bradshaw
jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net

n 1947, when Kerr-McGee decided to try the risky adventure of drilling for oil out of sight of land, nobody was sure that it could be done. After all, drillers had to work through all of 15 feet of water.

It’s true that there had been a couple of other wells drilled off the coast, but those were within wading distance of the shore. The idea of drilling way out in Ship Shoal 32, where there was nothing to protect a rig from winds and waves, was something altogether different.

That’s why Kerr-McGee decided not to invest too much in new technology on that first venture. Company officials figured it would be best to see how this well went and then decide whether it would be prudent to invest in fancy new machinery for the offshore business.

Luckily, there was a good deal of World War II surplus equipment on the market about that time, and the oil company was able to make a good deal for the purchase of the YF-893, a 260-foot utility boat that had been launched July 30, 1945 at the Boston Naval Shipyard.

The craft was renamed the Frank Phillips in honor of the founder of Phillips Petroleum Company, which partnered with Kerr-McGee on the drilling project, and sent it into the Gulf as a drilling tender.

Engineer John T. Robinson reminisced about those days in an article written in 2001. He recalled that things were pretty primitive.

“The drilling derrick … [was] supported by a 38-foot by 71-foot wooden decked platform built on sixteen 24-inch pilings driven to a depth of 104 feet,” Robinson said. The Frank Phillips was moored to the platform and held “electrical generators, drilling mud tanks, pumps, drill pipe, quarters for personnel … all the equipment, men, and material needed to support the drilling operation. It also began the concept of housing crews offshore for several weeks at a time and then rotating them to shore.”

Every oilman and oilman’s son knows the outcome of the drilling experiment. The well was a success and, in fact, continued to produce until the middle 1980s. That success opened a whole new venue for oil and gas exploration and made south Louisiana the pioneering place for an industry that has now spread from the North Sea to the Arabian Gulf.

The original platform became doubly famous when Jimmy Stewart came to south Louisiana in the early 1950s to film “Thunder Bay,” a story about the beginnings of the offshore industry. The Frank Phillips continued to work in the Gulf for Kerr-McGee until 1977, when it was sold to Norman Industries, renamed the Pipeliner 8, and put to use burying pipeline beneath the Gulf floor.

The boat was under lease to Ingram Marine when it ran aground on the jetties off Freeport, Texas, in 1979 while coming in from a storm in the Gulf. Bob Norman of Norman Industries then leased it to Delta Construction Co., which renamed it Delta I. When Delta closed its doors some years later, the boat went back to Norman and was sold in 1996 to Global Industries.

Global continued to use it in the Gulf until 2000, establishing a record for the longest continuous use of an offshore construction vessel that probably still stands. But the economics of the oil patch finally caught up with the YF-893-Frank Phillips-Pipeliner 8 – Delta I. It couldn’t compete with younger, sleeker, more sophisticated craft and was taken out of service and cut to pieces.

In 2003 Bob’s son, Bryan Norman, who worked aboard the boat as it neared 60 years old remembered it as “a good working vessel,” that the competition “was glad to see … sold for scrap.”

“I, for one, thought she still might have a lot of life left in her,” he said.