No, they have to be working out. The crazy driller with the tribal arms seems to have a bit of a roid rage, too.
Don’t get me wrong, it’ll get you in shape and extremely strong, but it won’t sculpt you like a workout routine. I’d love to have the physique I had back in the day, but I didn’t look anything like those guys. The driller I worked for for the longest was one of the strongest guys I’ve ever been around and he wasn’t really ripped.
They gloss over some of the really punishing parts. The derrick hand, besides working the derrick, mixes mud. You only go up in the derrick for a trip, like to change the bit or some other reason all the pipe needs to come out. The rest of the time, every day, you mix mud. All the stuff in mud comes in 100# bags, so lots of toting 100# bags. 100 bags a day wouldn’t be out of the ordinary on a decent sized rig.
And while I chided the TV derrick hand for giving out, it is hard work. Lots of grip strength needed to pull on a wet piece of rope for hours on end. And after you pull all that pipe back and your hands are trembling, you have to pull back the drill collars. They are just about solid sticks of steel, 6 or 8 inches in diameter and 90+ ft long. The worst nightmare a derrick hand has is dropping one of them across the derrick. Now, instead of being nearly vertical, it’s really leaning away. Some rigs even have winches in the derrick to help pull the collars back. Theirs doesn’t, and ours didn’t. So don’t let one get away.
The really fun part of working the derrick is tripping back in the hole. Coming out of the hole is a hard, wet, gruelling slog. Going in the hole is fast and exhilarating. Instead of pulling back, you lean the stand of pipe out just shy of where the blocks won’t hit it. Then after the blocks pass, you dive out into the void holding onto the pipe with one arm and guide it into the open jaws of the elevator and latch them shut. The momentum of latching the elevators pushes you back onto the board. All this happens with the driller trying his hardest to go as fast as possible, he won’t stop and let you latch. If you don’t get the elevators latched, they whizz on by and the pipe will probably fall across the back of the derrick unless you can grab it right quick.
And that’s where I think the guy on TV was doing it wrong coming out of the hole. He had the rope connected to his harness too long for coming out of the hole. You want your butt to be right over the last finger of the board or even a little further back. So when he unlatched the elevators, he had to haul himself and the pipe back into the board. This means you are quite aways away from the pipe as it’s being unscrewed, so tossing your rope and catching it is key. If you can touch the pipe, you’re too far out.
The key is to pull the pipe back towards you as the guys on the floor are pushing the bottom back. Then when you unlatch the elevator, there’ll be a natural spring in the pipe that you can time with a tug on the rope and the pipe will come sailing your way with much less effort than trying to dead pull the thing back.
I was the daylight derrick hand for years, passing up promotions to driller, because I loved doing it. It’d kill me dead now to even try, but I really enjoyed it on the whole (there were some bad days, for sure).