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Circa 1982 North Sea:

I was working the North Sea on a Sedco drilling rig. We had a big storm and a freak wave. Our Helideck was 115 feet above the water. The waves were running about 40 feet and that is even big by North Sea standards. We pitched into this freak wave and it tore off all the equipment (they were secured down) and the netting on the Helideck. The wave was a monster. It also broke down one of the doors to the crew quarters. I heard all the noise and jumped of my bunk into cold sea water.

The Alexander Kieland had went down the year before and 113 went down with it. Some were my friends. When my feet hit the cold seawater I grabbed my survival suit and ran up the stairs with water pouring down them. All I could think was “please god” let me make it to the deck and not drown like a rat like my friends on the Kieland. I thought we were going down. I did not even stop to tell the other guys in the room to run. If I had of stopped they would have run over me up the stairs. We all thought we were fleeing for our lives. All of us were running up the stairs with our survival suits in our hands.

Luckily we were stable and our semi-submersible rig was good for the storm. As we were pitching into the wave troughs 10 or 15 degrees although the helideck was 115 feet above the water that means that wave was at least 100 feet or more. On the deck huge steel containers were batted about like toys. It scared the hell out of me and I had been working on the water for 15 years at that time.

Click Link Below to see the Borgholm Dophin (Norwegian Sector North Sea) in a storm. To put it in perspective the air gap between the bottom of the vessel and the sea is about 60 feet. The wave that hit us was higher, much higher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98HUCFbaUGY