I think the registrations were G BJVZ and BJVX?
I can't read my own log books so I have corrected that.
March 1981 and North Denes had two out of their three Wessai unserviceable so down I went with a S76 to help them out. I arrived in the afternoon and after the hotel had been fixed up I got the briefing for the evening shuttle. I was taking one of the unit's cabin attendants with me so I had to fill him in with emergencies, doors and luggage bay etc. My briefing from the chief pilot consisted of an A4 sheet of paper with the route from North Denes to Leman and Indie with a side route for Bacton. The platform positions in their nav folder was in Decca co-ordinates so I had to find out the lats & longs for the TANS. There appeared to be one main platform for each field so I put those in; traffic gave us the route and off we went.
The weather was lousy; low cloud, poor vis and getting dark. I picked up the first platform on the Leman and as I approached it the CA beside me confirmed that it was the right one. I landed on and thought I was on a ship. It had what looked like wooden decking and rails like Brighton Pier. Not to worry; off we went for the next place.
This was more difficult as there were so many platforms close together. For the Wessex it was easy. Once they had landed on the first one they just reset the Decca pen and it would guide them everywhere but you could not do that with TANS. Not having a positive position for the next one I decided to circle the field, establish the destination on radar and go at it that way. I had to do this because the weather was really too bad to continue but the Wessex was still steaming around so I could not throw it in with my super-dupa modern helicopter.
I got outside the field and got a good picture that matched the sheet of A4 I was holding. There were a couple of trawlers floating around and one of them was just off track as I drove towards my next destination. Allofasudden out of the gloom came this massive chunk of steelware with SHELL LEMAN written all over it. This was one of the Shell platforms that they hadn't bothered to tell me about or mark on the map.
Just at that point the Wessex announced that he was chucking it in and so did I. I should have climbed and come back for an NDB at North Denes as was explained on this sheet of A4 but I had had enough of North Denes briefings. 300ft because the Wessex was at 500. Undertook him, comfirmed the track with a light ship. The CA guided me pointing out the lifeboat station, along the coast until the ADF needle went across, right turn and over the dog track to the runway.
I was not happy and I had a fifteen minutes jump up and down. The next morning the CP apologised and they spent a day doing a proper situation map in case it happened again.
The next time I went down it was because of Ben Breach's crash. They could not recover the aircraft because of shifting sands so they did not know whether he was still in it. On the basis that he may have never be found I flew a party consisting of his wife, priest etc to lay a wreath at the site.
The next day he was found in the nets of a trawler.
The Wessex was grounded after that so we had regular detachments to Yarmouth until they got their 212s organised. On amusing episode was that the 76 was so fast in relation to the Wessex that some of the day trippers would get home half an hour or so earlier than usual.
One of them did; to find his wife and the neighbour weren't expecting him.