Just watched the new tv series from the creators of Deadliest Catch for the second time today.  Also read into the forums to see what people's thoughts were on the show.  While I don't work on the rigs myself, my wife does, she also happened to be watching the show with me.  The show certain has potential, it is about time that someone captured what really goes into the gallon of gas the lemmings put in their SUVs.  Although I must agree with many of the posts I read in the forums, while the show has potential, they certainly slipped where it counts, they're chose rigs that use dated and extremely unsafe techniques.  While this makes for an exciting show, companies such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, and especially Shell could not possibly be happy with this show.  I work for a part of the industry that supplies the service companies, I sell wire rope, wire rope slings, synthetics slings and many other lifting and rigging tools.  From my experience with Shell, and my wife's experience working as a wireline engineer we both found the show enjoyable to watch, but we spent the majority of the time picking at the errors in safety.  While we all know this to be a very dangerous job, and I have the utmost respect for the roughnecks, I would have preferred to see more precautions taken.  I want to also iterate that this job is an unforgiving job, when the temperatures are 20 and 30 below with a 30 mile an hour arctic breeze blowing through, these men AND women are working 24x7, 365 days a year... yea that means Xmas, and any other holiday you can list.

A quick note, as I was reading the forums, I came across one post asking if rigs were really that close together.  I can tell you from my own sights, they can be even closer.  From the town of Pinedale you can see 3 rigs on the mesa, and if you drive 20 minutes out of town you will stumble upon a cluster of approximately 15 rigs all within a good stones throw apart.  I'll post a couple pictures from mid May.  Also, environmentalists beware! Roughnecks don't like being screamed at and told to stop what they are doing by some tie-dye wearing, beatnik!  Hell, my wife doesn't like it either, and she doesn't spend 14 days straight on the same rig, she jumps from rig to rig as they reach their target depths.