The new drill crew arrived in Hodeidah late in the day. They left Beirut early in the morning of April 30th, but they traveled to Flexia by the most circuitous route. Having stopped at Damascus, Cairo and Aden before crossing the Felixan frontier, it was late afternoon before the five stepped down from the plane to the desert at Hodeidah.
Pat Delise was glad to be back near the work. It was not that he would ever mind a holiday or a chance to travel, it was just that he accepted a certain responsibility for the work and preferred to be on a job site until the coring was completed. The other members of the crew were excited to be in Arabia for the first time.
During their time enroute from Montreal, the four new drillers formed personal alliances that spoke well for David's choice of personnel for the job. Ken Holby became good friends with a younger driller, James Smitty Smith, who worked for COREX in eastern Canada--in northern Ontario and the Maritimes. Maurice Leblanc, the other senior driller, worked out of Montreal as well, drilling around Hudson's Bay in the north and in the urban Montreal-Quebec City areas. A natural partnership formed between Maurice and the other younger driller, Tom St. Martin, an Indian from the Prairies who worked in the western region. Tom had once worked a job in northern B.C. with Ken Holby and considered him a good friend as well. It was Ken who had recruited Tom for Felixa. Pat was interested to see how these partnerships worked and allowed human nature to arrange the crew staffing for him. Ken and Maurice were the obvious leaders and it was curious to see the east/west pairing occur quite naturally in each case. |
