A There I Was story   

This stupid glue-eating idiot has to be the dumbest mother f**ker ever to fly a helicopter. What an embarassment to aviation. Read on:

"Years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, I left one of PHI's shore bases in a BO-105 to help with a rig crew-change. A 412 left the base behind me, VFR, giving me enough time to get on and off the deck before they arrived. The rig was waaaaay out, over an hour in the Bolkow. Weather was fine on "the beach." The rig was reporting "clear, blue and 22." Fifteen miles or so from it, I ran into an unforecast (and unforcastable) line of crap weather with a fog bank that I could not get over or under. Taking a deep breath and counting on my two RR-250's to keep running, I got down on the deck and hovered along for several tense minutes until I broke through to clear skies the other side. I radioed the 412 that they'd run into a line of sh*t, and things were bad down to about 10 miles from the rig but that the rig itself was in the clear. Once on the deck, I had a decision to make. I couldn't stay there because there wasn't enough room for me and the 412 and the rig didn't have fuel. Taking another deep breath, I launched and headed north. Hitting the fog bank, I got down on the deck again. Ghostly platforms appeared and slid slowly by on our left and right. My front seat passenger complimented me on knowing the right path through them. But I was just lucky that there weren't any directly in front of us. It was horrible. I promised God that if He got me through that mess, I would never, ever do something so stupid and I would devote my life to rescuing topless dancers from that industry if I had to visit every titty bar in Pensacola and tip them accordingly so they'd have enough money to switch careers and get a real job...like Helicopter Pilot. I broke out of the fog and found my refueling platform. The VFR 412, being able to take round-trip fuel, beat me back to base. All they said was, "Yeaaahhhh, it got pretty bad there for a while." None of us were newbies. The three of us knew what we had done. And we weren't proud of it. Sh*t happens, as they say. I'm sure we weren't the first Gulf of Mexico pilots to ever have that particular kind of sh*t happen, and we certainly were not the last."