In this line of work, you get used to trusting the numbers—volts, amps, counts, depths. But every now and then, the numbers throw you off. That’s what happened the first time we ran a Titan CCL alongside a Dyna firing system on a cased hole wireline job. It wasn’t a misfire. It wasn’t a failure. …
There’s a sinking feeling you get when the logging cable goes tight and doesn’t bounce back. When you realize the wireline truck isn’t moving the string an inch. When it’s not a plug, not a gun, not a debris problem—but a mechanical failure built into your own toolstring. That’s exactly what happened to us on …
There’s a kind of silence that hits after a near-miss. Not the loud kind that follows a gunfire or a tool drop—but the kind that creeps in when you realize how close you were to losing control. That’s what we faced the day we had an unintentional pull off (UPO) at surface. A simple lift, …
You don’t forget the sound a plug doesn’t make. If you’ve worked in wireline and perforating long enough, you know what I mean. You prep the wireline tools, verify the shot sheet, check your wireline control systems, and go through all the motions—only to realize the plug didn’t set. The power charge never lit. And …
In wireline, it’s not the catastrophic blowouts or lost strings that haunt you—it’s the close calls. The near misses. The little moments when the job should’ve been shut down, but momentum kept it going. I’ve seen plenty, but one of the most sobering happened during a pump down perforating run when we nearly left 30 …
It’s funny how something as thin as a few strands of armor can derail an entire wireline and perforating operation. I’ve always respected the details in this business—how a logging cable is spooled, how a perforating gun is assembled, how every O-ring gets torqued. But it wasn’t until a misrun during a routine horizontal wireline …
I’ve run enough wireline strings to know when something feels off. You get that subtle tension shift, or the switch test just doesn’t sit right, and you know deep down: something’s not right inside the string. But this one had me scratching my head. We’d done everything by the book—gunstring checked, logging cable verified, switch …
In the wireline world, failures don’t always explode—they erode. One misfit sub here, a mismatched thread there. And suddenly, your gunstring is in the hole, your logging cable is hot, and your continuity check just failed with no clear explanation. That’s exactly what happened to us on a recent cased hole wireline job. It was …
In wireline, every run is a high-stakes operation. Between the pressure control systems, the electrical diagnostics, and the explosives packed into every perforating gun, the only thing standing between a flawless job and a flooded gunstring is attention to detail. A while back, during a pump down perforating run on a horizontal well, we learned …
If you’ve been in the wireline game long enough, you know this job isn’t just about gear—it’s about discipline. And sometimes, a close call is the only thing that forces a lasting change. One of those moments came for me while assembling a high-shot wireline perforating string for a horizontal wireline job on a multi-stage …
