Hit 10,000 cubic yards on my cutter suction last night and it messed with my head

Honestly, I was just finishing up a shift on a harbor deepening job near Galveston and glanced at the totalizer on the barge. It read exactly 10,000 cubic yards pumped since I started running this dredge solo six months ago. That number caught me off guard because when I first started out, I was lucky to move 200 yards a day in that old clunker of a bucket ladder. Seeing that milestone made me realize how much the cutter suction changed the game for me, even though it was a pain to learn at first. The boss just gave me a nod and said "keep the mud flying" which felt pretty good. Has anyone else had a production milestone that snuck up on you like that? What number did it hit and how did you react?

2 comments

2 Comments

simon_davis23d ago

Man I totally get that. Hit 15,000 bbls on a booster pump job in Louisiana and I just stood there staring at the gauge like it was some kind of alien number. The funny thing is you spend all those months grinding away and the number just ticks up slow, then one day you look and its way bigger than you ever expected. My senior operator walked by and just said "she's earning her keep" and that was it, but I felt like I'd run a marathon. That moment where the totalizer flips to something round like that really does mess with your head, makes you step back and realize how much dirt you've actually moved.

anthony88323d ago

...and then the next day the pump packing blew and we lost half a shift fixing it. That's the way it always goes, you hit a nice number and the machine reminds you who's really in charge. I remember hitting 4000 hours on a old Cat 330 with zero downtime, went to grab a coffee to celebrate, came back and found a coolant leak that took me three days to track down. Good on you for the 10,000 though, that's serious dirt moving.