Here’s a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time about the work I used to do in the diving business. Although I worked for several different companies during those years the images below are from one company in particular. It’s name was Santa Fe Engineering and Construction and I worked in the Diving Division as a Systems Engineer and a Dive Controller. The company is no longer in business under that name as far as I know because it was bought out and absorbed by some huge offshore company in Dubai in the middle east. That put me out of a job but it was no big deal at the time because I had been offered a better job with another company.

The first picture is a view of one side of the diving complex with the diver’s living quarters (steel pressure chambers) underneath and the diving bell being hoisted over the side into the water in the Gulf of Mexico. The arrow in the photo is pointing to me watching the hull clearance as it’s lowered down. The divers lived in the system for up to 30 days at a time where they stayed under constant pressure equal to the water depth we were working in. This allowed them to save all of their decompression to prevent the bends until the end of the job. This also allowed them to stay underwater using the diving bell for up to 8 hours at a time where they worked in shifts. Notice the 20,000 pound anchor on the vessels deck in the foreground, there were eight of these used to stabilize and hold the position of the ship we were on.

Two divers could ride to the sea floor in the diving bell at one time where one would go outside and work for 4 hours and the other one would stay inside to tend the hose and the diving bell controls, then they would swap out for 4 more hours before returning to the surface. Then, 2 more divers would transfer into the bell and they would go to the seafloor to continue the work. This type of diving was called “total saturation” and allowed underwater work to be done around the clock, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Up to 8 divers could live inside the system at one time. The quarters were extremely cramped, but the divers pay was extremely high.

Total saturation meant that the divers body tissues could absorb no more gases no matter how much longer they stayed down, allowing a fixed amount of decompression at the completion of the job. Sometimes it took to up 3 days of slowly releasing the pressure in the chambers before the divers could safely emerge from the system. It was not very much unlike going into outer space actually, if the diving system were to become quickly depressurized the end result would be deadly, sort of like losing cabin pressure in a space capsule.

This next photo shows the back side of the system and most of it’s auxiliary equipment, including hydraulic power units, air compressors, an emergency chamber, breathing gas bottles and much more and also the control room sitting on top. That’s the small white building with the 2 rear access hatches open. Again the arrow in the photo is pointing at me. That’s an offshore oil drilling platform off in the distance

It took a shitload of equipment and personnel to put men on the bottom to do this type of work where only one man could work at a time. Although the vessel we were on was capable of doing many different roles, when diving was going on the entire crew of up to 300 men did nothing but support for that one task including technicians, mechanics, cooks, clerks, welders and riggers.

Below is a photo of the inside of the control room where 2 dive controllers would sit and converse with the divers on the bottom and in the living quarters. They had a lot of responsibilty because they had to monitor the divers environment pressure and control the mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and other gases in the divers breathing air. They also had closed circuit tv monitors and specialized radio equipment. You can see part of the diving bell thru the window.

The job that these photos were taken from was actually the trial runs for this particular diving system as it had just been completed construction. Everything had to be thoroughly tested on the job site before it could be certified safe to use as life support capable. At this point in my career I didn’t normally work offshore very much, not like I had used to. I was now only going out for initial trial runs because I was in charge of construction of the control rooms and the final asembly of all the major components. That was all done inshore at the companies main base where we completed 5 of these multi-million dollar systems. They were capable of being broken down into it’s smaller components and then reassembled and used at almost any location around the world.

Most often they were used in the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea and in the middle east but I was always on call to go wherever they were to trouble shoot or help with technical problems that may come up. I loved doing this type of work, it was actually a lot of fun and the pay was damn good too. Not to mention traveling to lots of cool places. One job I was on I spent over a year in Europe. Eventually, after 12 years I did get sick of it and after missing dozens of family holidays and spending time at home with friends I gave it up.

Hope you guys are having a good weekend! The N.O. Jazz Fest started yesterday and I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to go or not. If I do, I’ll certainly get some photos and video to post!

Well guys I’m so busy with blog work that I even forgot about my blog’s 2 yr anniversary that passed back in November nearly 2 months ago! LOL I used to write a lot of stories about my experiences in the deep sea diving business and I haven’t put any up in a long time. But today I have a rerun story from way back in my archives, one of my favorites. I hope you enjoy!

One of the funniest things I ever saw was a diver that was pretending to be working. He was supposed to be guiding an undersea pipeline about 12″ in diameter into a set of saddles going up one leg of an offshore platform. There were cables attached to it from winches and a crane through sets of pulleys rigged up to handle the task. The diver in this situation was supposed to be just guiding the operation from below, giving instructions to the dive controller on how tight each line had to be to get the pipeline into position and then he would bolt the pipe into the clamp in place underwater.

But, once he had the pipe guided in to the clamp he decided he had done enough and took a little nap of sorts underwater. He was working at about 30 feet below the surface and the water was incredibly clear that day and you could see him from the deck. He apparently didn’t realize this because he just sat there on a horizontal brace of the rig giving out imaginary instructions to the dive controller. I was standing on the edge of the vessel tending his hose and had been watching his progress as he did his job, but, once I realized he wasn’t doing anything I motioned the dive controller over to the edge of the deck and pointed to him. After about a minute of watching him do nothing but pretend to work he ended the dive and fired the dude, told him to catch the next boat hitting shoreside. The look of shock on his face was priceless when the dive controller told him he was being watched from the surface!

Another funny one was a newbie diver that nearly bit his own tongue half off because he was too anxious. One of the diver tenders jobs was to make sure the divers breathing hose was clear and snag free at all times, you actually stood on the edge of the deck holding the hose and tried to gently feel the amount of slack in the hose at all times while the diver was in the water. It needed to be lightly taut at all times to ensure there was no slack or droop in the line that could cause his lifeline to get tangled or damaged in any way. Sounds easy but it’s not, the hose asembly is fairly heavy and it takes quite a bit of experience to tell the difference between the divers pull and the pull of sea currents.

When you help dress your diver out with his diving hat and tools you have to feed enough slack over the edge to make sure he can make a clear jump into the water from the deck from as high as 20 ft sometimes in full gear. Once you ensured everything was clear you tapped the diver on the shoulder to give him the sign to jump. This one guy didn’t wait for the high sign from his tender, there was no slack in the hose and he jumped overboard. The hose caught an obstruction on deck and he didn’t hit the water, the hose jerked him up like a hangmans noose to his harness and the sudden stop made him slam into the hull of the vessel and nearly sever his tongue with his own teeth! They took him away in an emergency chopper, not a good way to make one of your first deep sea dives!

I recall one of my first jobs as a newbie tender, me and one diver were on a small barge working in very shallow water. Just me and him were the entire diving crew, that meant I had to care for his gear, the radio equipment, the air compressor (an old hand cranked diesel that was a bitch to start up) plus whatever tools he needed. I was barely seventeen I think and I was stuck with a lot of responsibility. I had to tend his hose and talk to him on the radio to relay instructions to the rigging crew to assist his job in the water, meanwhile making sure everything on deck keeping him alive was working properly and just generally johnny on the spot if shit went wrong. He had been going in and out the water all day, very shallow work and we fell into a routine getting a lot of work done. Since the diesel air compressor was so noisy we shut it off between every short dive when he came up for a break.

He took this one break and I forgot the compressor was off and I got him back into the water and after a few minutes he says on the radio, “hey my air is gettin’ kinda short down here, don’t you think you should start that compressor?” HOLY SHIT! I looked over and sure enough the compressor was off and the gauge on the air tank on deck showed nearly empty! I grabbed that crank handle for the diesel and cranked that damn thing for all I was worth, nearly having a stroke at 17 years old! The bastard thought it was funny, he knew the thing was off before he went in the water and just wanted to hear me panicking on the radio thinking I was killing him! The water was shallow enough there was really no danger of injury and he had a bottle of air on his backpack for emergencies. In the end it was funny but that little incident kept me on my toes for later years, what an experience!

That was a slang expression for: “I’ve had it with this fucked up company and I’m walking off the job now!” I know it was used mostly in the oilfields and construction businesses all across southern La. and Texas. I’m not sure about where the expression originally came from or how widespread it was beyond those two states, but it was a very colorful way to express your disgust about working conditions or company policies.

Back in the days when I used to work in the deep sea diving and underwater constuction business I worked for one company in particular that had just about the worst vacation policies I’ve ever run into. The way it was set up was that after one year of service you got one weeks paid vacation but you HAD to take at Christmas week. The entire company would shut down from the day before Christmas until the day after New Years day and everyone went home, no matter where you were. Even if you were out to sea. If you had less than a year with the company, you got the time off like everyone else but with no pay. After two years with the company you got two weeks paid but you were still forced to take one of them at Christmas no matter what.

Now normally I didn’t mind this set up very much because being offshore a lot meant you were going to miss a lot of holidays but you always got the one that mattered the most, and that was Christmas. You probably missed Thanksgiving and birthdays and Easter and whatever else but you still got Christmas off. On one particular job though the company decided to throw that policy right out the fucking window which pissed a lot of people off, giving them the “red ass”. And of course they wanted to “drag up”, including me.

On this job I was in charge of the entire diving crew and I was responsible for making sure we had enough people to keep the diving going on around the clock. The underwater construction we were doing required a large support vessel with huge cranes, heavy offshore construction equipment and a couple of hundred support personnel on board to assist the diving crews to get the job done. It was a very important job for a major oil company that was trying to get an offshore oil drilling platform up and running to get oil out of the sea floor. This was not possible without the diving crew.

The job was long and arduos and the entire crew had been out for about 3 months with no relief, which was pretty normal for diving crews. Once you went on the job you stayed till the project was completed or three months. We were tired and beat down from working 12 hour days 7 days a week. That’s just about all a guy can handle without a freaking break! We had already missed Thangsgiving for craps sake!

Of course we were all looking very much forward to that week off at Christmas and I for one couldn’t wait, I mean we were counting down the minutes till it was time to catch the helicopter to shore. At the very last minute though the company decided the job was too important to shut down for the week and sent the department heads notices that the company was only going to shut this one job down for ONE FUCKING DAY! We would leave the vessel during the day of Christmas eve and have to be ready to fly back out to the jobsite offshore on Christmas day in the evening! That would have given us barely more than 24 hours off the job! Did I say I had the “red ass?” I was absolutely furious. And to top it off they left it up to me to tell my crew this extremely shitty news!

That was it for me, I decided I had had enough BS and I plotted my evil revenge. I figured that if I didn’t tell my crew that they would have to return the next day and I didn’t pass on the info as to when to meet up to head back offshore that it would shut the entire operation down for a couple of days. This would kick the company right in the ass err.. pocket book, because they would have hundreds of other support personnel just sitting out there at sea getting paid to do nothing because there was no diving crew on board to continue the work! This would cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars!

Revenge can be so deliciously sweet! Hell yeah!

Very early the next morning after Christmas day the phone rings. I was sound asleep but I knew who was going to be on the line before I even picked it up. It was the head of the diving division and he started chewing me out big time because none of the diving crew had shown up, I swear the fucker sounded like he was gonna have a stroke right over the phone! I quietly and calmly let him finish screaming at me and then when he was done, I replied…

“I’ve got the red ass and I’m dragging up!” Then I hung up on the bastard and I never heard from them again!

Have a great weekend everyone!

One of the cool things about deep sea diving is a situation where there is so much work to be done at a relatively deep depth that it makes much more sense to “saturate” divers for up to 30 days at a time. Saturation technically means that your body tissues can not absorb any more gas from the environment at pressure and that decompression time will not increase any further because of that fact. To do this you need chambers large enough to live inside and be able to lock out of into a diving bell and ride in it to the sea floor to accomplish your job. The pressure on your body remains the same for the entire 30 days. Decompressing is accomplished at the very end of the job one time only instead of every single time the diver surfaces. Divers generally love it because the pay is very high compared to other forms of diving.

Ok, now that the techie stuff is done with lets move on to the fun. Living at depth in a very small chamber crowded with 3 other men can be tough, especially when there is no privacy at all when it comes time to take care of business. There are specially designed toilets for this and they use the pressure inside the hull of the chamber to evacuate waste thru a large valve on the outside, thru a large fire hose that has its end in the ocean. When the diver is finished he has to call for a flush and a deck tender must go and manually open the valve for a few moments and allow the piss and shit to blow thru the hose into the sea. The highly pressurized waste is too much for the shipboard waste systems to handle so letting it fly overboard is the easiest solution.

Unfortunately, sometimes the seas can be rough and very windy and if the flush is done when the tip of the hose comes up out of the water you can have a huge vapor cloud of waste blow back up and over the deck. What fun it is to watch the riggers on deck run for cover when the control room calls for a flush on one of the chambers. They quickly learn how nasty it is to get caught in the cloud and the smell is incredibly bad. The would often be tripping all over each other when they hear that call over the deck speakers.

Tugboats and supply boats often come alongside and eventually wear a hole in the side of the hose above the water line and if they are tied up alongside when a flush is called for they get sprayed down with some truly godawful stuff all over their decks and hull. Of course this is a lot of fun to watch if there is some activity on their deck and we would find a strategic location on the top deck of the ship to watch the fun when a flush was imminent. The looks on peoples faces when they realize what just happened to them is priceless! You ever see a grown man cry because he was just sprayed down with a high pressure mist of finely vaporized piss and shit? It’s hilarious!

I recall one job in particular where the shitter hose was taking a constant beating from tugboats coming alongside and we had to change the hose often. I was a technician on the job and I scrounged around below deck in the machinery rooms and found some hose that I thought would work ok. I had a couple of tenders move the reel up to the deck and instructed them on how to replace the old shitter hose. I told them to put 2 new clamps to hold it to the valve assembly and to make sure it was very tight so that it couldn’t blow off when a flush was done. They turned out to be a couple of wimps apparently because the hose was not tight enough…

The very next time that a flush was done the hose blew off the valve right there where the hapless tender was standing when he cranked the valve wide open. The explosion of vaporized piss and shit was literally right in his face and the vapor cloud engulfed that area of the deck and chambers and the man was soaked to the bone with some of the absolutely nastiest stuff you could imagine. His screams were heard all over the deck at the moment he realized what had just happened to him. He started cursing and crying and running to the stairwell to go below deck and get into one of the showers fully dressed. That entire area of the deck and chambers had to be scrubbed down with soap and water over and over again and they still could not get rid of the smell. No one ventured over that way unless they absolutely had no other choice.

The tender smelled for days afterward, the odor seemed to have permeated his skin almost permanently and of course he became the butt of many jokes about what had happened to him. I was certainly glad it wasn’t me although I did get yelled at about the whole thing, the superintendent on the job tried to reprimand me for not installing the hose myself, but he could barely contain his laughter the whole time he was supposedly yelling at me. Me? I thought it was one of the funniest things ever!

You can read part 1 two posts down.

I had been working offshore in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland and England for several months on my first overseas contract when I got a message from the company headquarters in New Orleans. It seemed that there was a lawsuit that had been filed by John’s family citing wrongful death and negligence on the part of the company. I wasn’t aware that it had even been filed until that moment. The man had died on the job almost 2 years previous and I had put the entire episode out of my mind. The message said I had to be inshore and that I would fly back to New Orleans and be there for the court dates. An entire week in New Orleans, paid and with all my expenses covered to boot! It was like an awesome vacation invitation except I might be called in as a witness in the state court of Louisiana. The company had no choice but to ensure that I was there for the trial in case I was called upon.

I flew in and I was not given any instructions except for what dates and times I had to be there and just wait outside of the courtroom in case I was called. Of course the first thing I did was visit family and friends because I showed up on the weekend and made myself ready for court that Monday morning. When I arrived I was brought into a meeting with the lawyers in the DA’s office and given the statement that I had written 2 years before the day of the death. It was scrawled on a yellow legal sheet in my own handwriting and I was sort of dismayed that it had been filed and now put before me in such a way. It looked worn like it had been viewed many times over and over again. I was told to read it over and to make sure everything that I had written was to the best of my recollection. I did so, but now looking over it I wondered how accurate it was regarding the blur of events and it seemed ok so I handed it back. I suddenly realized that I may be a key witness and this of course got me very nervous.

The first day of the trial passed and I wasn’t called, I just anxiously waited in a nearby room. I had to wait till the 2nd day to get the whole mess out of the way and It turned out to be a very strange and unusual situation to be in. I was still very nervous as my name was called and I made my way thru the huge room. I had not been inside until that moment and it was very strange seeing all those faces looking at me as I walked in, some I knew most of them though were new to me. It was easy to spot the family, the wife was dressed in mourning clothes and held a tissue to her face. I thought it odd she might be mourning so hard 2 years later but I decided it must be for show to the jury.

The bailiff swore me in and I took my seat in the witness stand and the plaintiff’s attorney started questioning me. His questions sometimes seemed out of line to me and he seemed to be trying to make me look like I did not know what I was doing on the job the night of the mans death. In other words trying to make me look stupid because I didn’t use certain technical terms in my handwritten statement. One thing he seized on in particualr was that I used diving jargon in my statement to describe some of the equipment instead of the precise technical terms. One in particular was that I had used the words decompression chamber in my statement to describe what is technically known as a hyperbaric re-compression chamber like I didn’t know the difference between the two. I did know the difference, but he tried to make it appear that I did not.

I was very young of course and hell I was only 21 at the time of the trial. The only training I had ever received was within the company itself and they deemed me fit to do the job that was given to me. He would ask a question and I would try to elaborate on what I meant on my statement. This made him angry and he asked the judge if he could treat me as a hostile witness. The man was intent on making me look as undertrained and irresponsible and incapable of doing my job as he posssibly could. Maybe his entire case hinged on making me appear to be incompetent which of course would put the company at fault for any damages that I “might” have done as far as improper care for the deceased diver during the mans death. Being a hostile witness meant that I could only reply with yes or no answers, with no elaboration whatsoever. This made me angry of course and I think that’s what the asshole was trying to do all along. In trying to defend myself it just made me seem foolish and at the mercy of this bastard that was a part of suing the company because the man had a heart attack. I suffered thru a few more of his stupid questions and I was finally allowed to leave the stand.

The next day I arrived not sure if I was going to be called upon again and I was in the hallway outside the courtroom. After a time passed I was approached by one of the company lawyers and was told to go home, the case had been settled out of court for an undisclosed sum with the company admitting no wrong doing. I had the distinct feeling that the plaintiff’s lawyers had also had a field day shooting down the dive contollers statements and the so called dive doctors statements as well. The company had caved in to save embarrasement and the deed was done. The family presumably got wealthy over a natural heart attack and the company lost it’s ass.

The entire ordeal left a sour taste as I realized just how much of what I had done that day and night was scrutinized over and over again as though I had something to do with causing the man to die. I didn’t like it of course but I was able to use what I learned a few years later in another situation involving 2 divers that died on the job. Two friends of mine that suffered needless deaths and it would haunt me unless I could find some way to prevent that from happening again.

We were working off the deck of an ocean going workboat about 200 ft long in water that was about 175 ft deep. I was a well seasoned tender, maybe 19 at the time. We were diving around the clock and the work for the divers was strenuous and cold. They were digging an underwater trench in the mud to bury a pipeline near an oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico a few hundred miles offshore. Using firehoses pressurized with salt water fed thru a nozzle to blast out the mud on the sea floor under the pipe, as they dug along under pipeline it would slowly lay into the underwater ditch. The pipes always had to be buried so they couldn’t be snagged by anchors and cause a major oil spill.

I was assigned to a diver named John, it was my first job with him, a really nice guy. The word on him though was that he was too old to be doing that type of work. He was 48 and the scuttlebutt among the crew was that he may have been having heart problems. Most of the divers felt he shouldn’t be there because of the nature of the job. Many divers seem to retire at about age 40 to 45 anyway because of the extreme working conditions you might encounter on the job. I wasn’t really prepared for what was going to happen to him the next day and It was quite disturbing.

It was about 10PM and he was in the water trenching and he was having a very difficult time. I was on the edge of the deck tending his hoses and lifelines and listening to him on the helmet radio. The radio conversation between him and the dive controller was piped over a loudspeaker on deck so we could hear everything that went on while he was working. This saved time as far as relaying all information to the deck crew when he needed surface assistance and it kept us aware of unusual conditions. The man was breathing very heavily, obviously out of shape and struggling with the forces of the firehose. Usually you see 2 maybe 3 men handling the back-pressure of a firehose on land, imagine one man trying to do it alone underwater with poor footing and weighted down with full diving gear!

He started complaining about chest pains over the radio and huffing and puffing so badly the dive controller ended the dive so I pulled him up slowly for decompression. He made his “stops” at regular intervals in the water and we finally got him on deck and got his gear off. He still needed further decompression though and he had to go inside a hyperbaric chamber to be recompressed and then further decompressed to insure there were no air bubbles in his blood to cause the bends. As I was his tender that meant that I would be at the controls of the chamber to ventilate it to remove CO2 and to keep his oxygen fresh and change the pressures of the chamber to do the decompression necessary. I could also talk to him on a radio and see him through a porthole.

a hyperbaric chamber with an airlock

Once inside the chamber he was ok for a few minutes then suddenly started breathing fast and very loudly and yelling “ventilate the chamber” over and over again. I started doing as he requested, letting huge amounts of air in while exhausting huge amounts of air out to circulate the air inside with fresh air. Not an easy task to do while trying to hold the pressure inside at a constant level, but I adjusted the valves as quickly as I could while watching the depth gauge closely. Meanwhile I yelled at someone to go get the dive controller to come over and assist me and see why John kept requesting a total ventilation. I was now using so much air I it was taking down the reserves for the entire shipboard operation, including air for the next diver that was already in the water to replace John on the firehose detail.

It fell silent inside as I was ventilating, only the very loud rush of air going in and out could be heard, almost deafening. I tried to raise John on the radio but he was now silent and I could no longer see him inside the porthole, he had moved in such a way that he was no longer visible. Finally the dive controller arrived and asked me a few questions and then he tried to raise John on the radio and I stopped ventilating for a few minutes so we could hear. No answer, no nothing. The chamber had an airlock and the dive controller climbed in the outer lock and I compressed him in to the same depth as John until he could open the inner door. Once inside he too started to yell ventilate the chamber. I cranked the valves wide open and after a few minutes he yelled over the radio to have someone come help me and to have a dive Doctor on a nearby vessel brought over to help. He would not tell us though what was going on inside. i could barely see inside the porthole because there was so much condensation inside the glass was constantly fogged up.

Finally, the doctor arrived after he was rushed over from a few miles away on a small crew boat and I locked him into the chamber as well after he asked a few questions. Once inside they continued to request plenty of ventilation and I could barely hear what was going inside, and, by now we had a small crowd watching the entire operation and wondering what was going on.

Eventually the dive controller was air-locked out and he said he thought that John was dead and that they had no idea what had happened to him. He left to make a call to inshore operations on what to do next and I was told to stay at it. I stayed on duty for about 17 hours straight manning the controls of that chamber and I was getting quite exhausted by now. There was no one to relieve me on deck because the other diving operations were continued and everyone else was needed on that front. After he made the call he came back out and had us stop venting the chamber and to get the dive doctor out and leave the chamber sealed at depth.

After several hours the Coast Guard showed up along side and they shut down all the operations onboard and sealed all the equipment and took statements from everyone involved, including me. I had to write down every detail of what happened as I recalled it and I was so exhausted I’m sure that I was recalling things in a blur. I was going to regret not recalling certain things 2 yrs later on, but I had no idea at the time. We were ordered to remain on board and to have the vessel put to port while the Coast Guard investigated the situation. We found out that our so called dive doctor was not an actual licensed MD and could not fill out a death certificate or even legally declare the man dead. It would not be till we reached port the next day that an actual doctor would come on and do the declaration. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard decided to impound every single piece of diving equipment in use on board while they completed their investigation which included doing tests on everything that we had used.

The MD that came onboard declared death by natural causes of a heart attack, pending the results of the Coast Guard testing and investigation to insure that he wasn’t carbon dioxide poisoned or death by other unnatural means. I was finally allowed to leave the scene and I went home that day.

Next up, the lawsuit…

One of the funniest things I ever saw was a diver that wasn’t working. He was supposed to be guiding an undersea pipeline about 12″ in diameter into a set of saddles going up one leg of an offshore platform. There were cables attached to it from winches and a crane through sets of pulleys rigged up to handle the task. The diver in this situation was supposed to be just guiding the operation from below, giving instructions to the dive controller on how tight each line had to be to get the pipeline into position and then he would bolt the pipe into the clamp in place underwater.

But, once he had the pipe guided in to the clamp he decided he had done enough and took a little nap of sorts underwater. He was working at about 30 feet below the surface and the water was incredibly clear that day and you could see him from the deck. He apparently didn’t realize this because he just sat there on a horizontal brace of the rig giving out imaginary instructions to the dive controller. I was standing on the edge of the vessel tending his hose and had been watching his progress as he did his job, but, once I realized he wasn’t doing anything I motioned the dive controller over to the edge of the deck and pointed to him. After about a minute of watching him do nothing but pretend to work he ended the dive and fired the dude, told him to catch the next boat hitting shoreside. The look of shock on his face was priceless when the controller told him he was being watched from the surface!

Another funny one was a newbie diver that nearly bit his own tongue half off because he didn’t think. One of the diver tenders jobs was to make sure the divers breathing hose was clear and snag free at all times, you actually stood on the edge of the deck holding the hose and tried to gently feel the amount of slack in the hose at all times while the diver was in the water. It needed to be lightly taut at all times to ensure there was no slack or droop in the line that could cause his lifeline to get tangled or damaged in any way. Sounds easy but it’s not, the hose asembly is fairly heavy and it takes quite a bit of experience to tell the difference between the divers pull and the pull of sea currents.

When you help dress your diver out with his diving hat and tools you have to feed enough slack over the edge to make sure he can make a clear jump into the water from the deck from as high as 20 ft sometimes in full gear. Once you ensured everything was clear you tapped the diver on the shoulder to give him the sign to jump. This one guy didn’t wait for the high sign from his tender, there was no slack in the hose and he jumped overboard. The hose caught an obstruction on deck and he didn’t hit the water, the hose jerked him up like a hangmans noose to his harness and the sudden stop made him slam into the hull of the vessel and nearly sever his tongue with his own teeth! They took him away in an emergency chopper, not a good way to make one of your first dives!

I recall one of my first jobs as a newbie tender, me and one diver were on a small barge working in very shallow water. Just me and him were the entire diving crew, that meant I had to care for his gear, the radio equipment, the air compressor (an old hand cranked diesel that was a bitch to start up) plus whatever tools he needed. I was barely seventeen I think and I was stuck with a lot of responsibility. I had to tend his hose and talk to him on the radio to relay instructions to the rigging crew to assist his job in the water, meanwhile making sure everything on deck keeping him alive was working properly and just generally johnny on the spot if shit went wrong. He had been going in and out the water all day, very shallow work and we fell into a routine getting a lot of work done. Since the diesel air compressor was so noisy we shut it off between every short dive when he came up for a break.

He took this one break and I forgot the compressor was off and I got him back into the water and after a few minutes he says on the radio, “hey my air is gettin’ kinda short down here, don’t you think you should start that compressor?” HOLY SHIT! I looked over and sure enough the compressor was off and the gauge on the air tank on deck showed nearly empty! I grabbed that crank handle for the diesel and cranked that damn thing for all I was worth, nearly having a stroke at 17 years old! The bastard thought it was funny, he knew the thing was off before he went in the water and just wanted to hear me panicking on the radio thinking I was killing him! The water was shallow enough there was really no danger of injury and he had a bottle of air on his backpack for emergencies. In the end it was funny but that little incident kept me on my toes for later years, what an experience!

there’s nothin’ wrong with me!…. Play this while reading this post! Idea shamelessly ripped from THE LAST GIRL ON EARTH! (and she’s hot too!)

Often times working at sea could get just downright boring, so damn boring that you just hoped some horrific acident or the vessel sinking or someshit would happen just to break the monotony. After you’ve read every dime novel in the ships library, seen every single movie the company ships out with the weekly supplies and wanked off about a bazillion times undercover in your bunk at night to the outrageous quantities of XXX porn that gets passed around, theres just not much else to do, dammit. So, I took up pranks as a hobby, yes, I said pranks, and not just any pranks mind you, some were really quite bad and incredibly funny! One of my faves was short-sheeting bunks.

If you don’t know what that is, all you do is pull back the blanket and take the lower half of the sheet and pull it up to the pillow and remake the bunk/bed with the sheet folded back upon itself, when you try to get into the bed you find that there’s just no room!! To the unititiated this is a most unexpected thing and it’s hilarious watching some one try to get all the way in and yet it’s impossible. I did this one night to a buddies bunk and he was coming back from shore leave, BUT they asigned a visiting companies VIP to the bunk instead as there was no room in the VIP quarters. Here is this big fat old guy trying to get in the bunk and it’s pitch dark and we (4 in a room) can hear him gruntin’ like a bitch trying to get in the upper bunk. Then suddenly we hear a loud RIIIIIIPPP!!!! and the bastard stuck his feet right thru the sheet! He knew we had rigged the bunk cause we started like gigglin’ like little girls but the old fart didn’t say a word about it!

Tooth paste under the pillow trick, ok, this one is just a variation on the shave cream in the hand trick except the paste is under the pillow, who doesn’t stick their hands up under their pillow at night and then ends up smearing the goop all over their face?

The I glued your boots to the floor trick, ok, this one is just insane, I once got back at a guy that pulled the toothpaste gag on me by pouring an entire bottle of super glue on the bottom of his deck boots and put them back next to his bunk while he was asleep. The next morning he shows up on deckside in slippers with a boot in each hand and each one had a full size floor tile securely stuck to the bottom of each boot! It took him hours with a hacksaw to carefully cut all the floor tile off each one and damn he was pissed! But, he called a truce, he knew I had whipped his ass and he gave up.

Organized pranks, ok these were just plain rude, getting the diving crew together one time we had a cook onboard that just plain sucked ass, this guy was mean and honery, smoked while he was serving the chow and couldn’t cook his way out of a frikkin Home Ec class in jr. highschool. We agreed to ask this bastard for pancakes every morning when it was your turn to put in your breakfast order, he never cooked pancakes anyway but we all still asked just to get on his nerves. Then one day the sumbitch actually gives in and makes up a huge batch of pancakes we ALL say naaa, no thanks. This really pissed the sucker off and he whined about it for a week but he was a bit nicer afterwards, although the food still sucked ass.

My buddy Diver Dave (see post below and more on him here)once engaged in a prank war and I kicked his ass, too. One day he put a huge, live blue crab in my top desk drawer at my inshore office. He was across the shop and watched me open the drawer for a pen and I did a double-take because the damn crab moved and made me jump like a monkey! He laughed his ass off but he knew he was gonna get paybacks. Oh yeah, and it was gonna be juicy!!!

He tiptoed around the shop and offices all day, peeking around corners, opening every box and drawer with slow deliberation expecting some heinous prank of doom to befall him at any moment, but part of my return prank was to keep him in suspense as long as possible. He was getting really antsy by the end of the day and finally started begging me to just do it and get it over with but nope, I let him stew all day long. Finally at the end of the day it was time to go home and he started saying stuff like na-na I couldn’t do a good prank and other BS just to pick on me, but I just gave him my evil grin and let it go, and then, just as he thought he got away unscathed he grabbed his hardhat at the front of the shop to pass thru the construction yards to leave for home. He put the hat on and looked at me and said OH F*CK!!! you got me, you got me good you bastard that’s it, I’m done I can’t handle this anymore, TRUCE please!

I had put a huge gob nasty black axle grease inside his hat and smeared it all around the liner. Don’t mess with the dog!

My friend diver Dave and myself and another guy I worked with in the diving biz used to go out and shoot off some heavy duty weapons whenever we had a chance. Of course this meant gettin’ drunk on beer and hauling a frikkin’ trunkload of guns and ammo for us 3 to just kick back and unload into the woods. Kind of expensive fun, ammo for automatics and shotguns isn’t cheap by any means and you can go thru a box of 50 rounds in a few minutes pretty easy with the right weapons. Of course, it just ain’t fun unless you unload shitloads of ammo.

One day we had come across this area in the woods down in a swampy area near Houma, La. not far from where all lived. It was an impromptu dump in the woods, in the middle of bumfuk nowhere and had only one way in and out. You know the kind of place, old mattresses, washing machines, piles of rotted furniture and even had a few junked cars all sitting in the middle of this huge clearing way off the main roads. A country repository for the crap people have no idea what to do with except for using it to decorate the woods and forests. This ended up being our favorite spot for drinkin’ and shootin’.

Did I say we had weapons? Let’s see, the collection we 3 could muster was pretty decent, we had a couple of 12ga shotguns, one pump the other double-barreled, a couple of automatic handguns, one a .45 and the other a .9mm, two hunting rifles bolt-action with scopes, an old lever action Winchester and a couple of homemade guns, one was a zip-pen gun that fired .22 shorts and the other was a home made rebarreled flare gun that fired 12ga. shotgun shells with a barrel only as long as the shell itself, yeah, this badboy was a 12gauge handgun folks. A one shot streetsweeper that was quick and easy to reload. Oh, and don’t forget the ammo, we had boxes full everytime we went and the beers popped almost as frequently as the guns.

We had a nice bright sunny afternoon one day and decided to go for some fun, we loaded all the gear up and hit the shops for ammo and beer and hit the dump. The other guy in the group, I can’t recall his name so i’ll call him Bobbie got this bright idea of making cars go BOOM like in the movies. He had read somewhere that they often used gasoline straight up as an explosive for the huge fiery ball of flame and black smoke effects you see in the movies. He figured that if we put a plastic milk jug of gasoline inside a junk car we could scope shoot it from a distance and the fuel would vaporize and explode like a mo’fo. Sounded great but just shooting it might not ignite it so we set up a small candle inside the car near the gas jug propped up inside and lit it.

Have you ever wondered just how much energy is stored up in a gallon of gasoline? Well, let me tell you, it’s a fukkin’ LOT, just think how many miles your car can go pushing all that steel and yourself along the highway against wind resistance at high speeds and with just one gallon, you sort of get a handle on how much raw power is inside that innocent looking jug full of gasoline. Of course, until you see it in close up real live action those thoughts just don’t occur to you. So here’s the scenario, we have one junker car, a gallon of gas, a candle and a high-powered hunting rifle (can’t recall the caliber) and 3 drunk dumbasses in the middle of nowhere. We set all the stuff up and move back a ways from the “scene” and Dave takes aim with the scope while leaning against an antique washing machine.

Dave pulls the trigger and sets up a cataclysmic eruption of raw fuel and rifle energy that actually lifts the entire vehicle off the ground and sends flying glass and auto parts and debris of every description flying at warp speed in all directions surrounding the violent explosion. The fireball that ensued was incredible, rising a hundred feet into the air just like what you see in the movies and the searing heat could be felt from, uhmm did I say we moved back a ways? Well we could have been twice as far away and it would have still been too damn close. My hair and eyebrows were singed and the blast nearly knocked me off my feet, my ears were ringing for days afterward and we laughed so hard at what we had done that my sides ached from the straining muscles for days afterwards.

Did we ever do it again? Hell yes we did, we’re guys dammit and blowin’ shit up is what we do, and damn if it ain’t just sheer outta’ this world fun. So next time you’re havin’ a cold beer and think about guns, be careful, ya’ might just get your hair singed.

I was working on a vessel in the North Sea and we had some highly specialized and valuable diving equipment onboard that needed to be transported to Rotterdam harbor in the Netherlands in a big hurry. The only passage available was a small barge that was being pushed by a Belgian ocean going tug boat. The equipment was loaded on the deck in the open and I would ride in with it on the tug to make sure that it arrived safely. When we arrived in the harbor area the barge was boarded by about 6 dutch longshoremen to assist in the handling of the barge and seeing that it got tied up properly at the correct docks .

The tugboat captain sent a deckhand to wake me up and explained to me in his broken french/flemish dialect that the equipment might be in danger of theft from these men and that I perhaps should go aboard the barge and have a look. It was still quite dark, yet just before the sun came up and the captain urged me to take his flashlight.

I climbed up aboard the barge and was halfway across the deck when the flashlight quit and I continued on in almost total darkness when I hear some rustling noises, and as I got close to the bow, I could see the outlines of several men rummaging through the boxes and crates and some of the equipment had actually been pulled out of their boxes ! Now being all by myself and that I can’t speak a word of dutch and these guys don’t look all that friendly, I was scared as hell to do or say anything, I mean they could have killed me I realized later after thinking about it.

What I did was strode right up into the middle of the group and asked loudly what the hell did they think they were doing! I suddenly realized they had not noticed my presence until I spoke up, in english, and they all turned and looked at me kind of startled. They looked confused for a few moments, looked at each other then slowly wandered off to their positions without a word.

A little while later after I realized what I had done, I thought it was maybe the stupidest thing I have ever done!. No way was the equipment in those boxes worth my life or even injury! What do you guys think?