In my previous post I talked about Ritchie and Tommy and I want to expand on Ritchies story a bit. It seems that the neighborhood I grew up in as a teenager had several commercial deep sea divers, so it was natural to be inspired by these men and want to go on the very same semi-romantic type of adventureism for yourself. Ritchie and me were two of those kids and he became a really great diver in his own right.

One of the jobs we had to do in the diving business was regrettably not a very easy task, we were often called upon to look for bodies in plane and helicopter crashes at sea. I remember one such job I was assigned to when I was 18 yrs old was to help a crew search for a downed helicopter. It had clipped it’s tail rotor on the edge of the landing pad where it was taking off from an offshore platform and crashed into the sea. It was in an area just south of the Mississippi river where the underwater current moved swiftly and the water was very muddy making it very difficult for the divers to do their job. Here is a picture of a platform, notice the helicopter deck at the very top edge.

The pilot and front seat passenger were able to get out and swim to safety when it hit the water but the two men in back went to the bottom apparently unable to get free of their seatbelts as we were soon to find out. We spent almost a week on the site sending divers down around the clock doing search patterns in a circle surrounding the platform in fairly deep water until we located the wreckage. It had been rolled along the sea floor by the strong underwater currents and was almost 400 ft away from where it had crashed. When you can’t see your hand in front of your face because the water is so muddy that is a long ways off. We were on board a 200 ft long ocean-going work boat tied along side the platform where we had all of our diving equipment on board, here is a picture showing just the front half of a similar vessel.

Thankfully the weather was decent at the time and it was nice to be on deck with the sun shining and the seas calm, perfect for shorts and sneakers. One very odd thing was the sighting of a waterspout, a tornado at sea not more than a mile away from us. Really strange and I understand fairly rare occurence. It was quite beautiful actually with the sky so clear and only a dark patch of clouds over the spout itself. We watched it churning up the sea throwing huge quantities of water into the air as it moved off away from us. Simply amazing. A remarkable thing about offshore is if there is a strong breeze blowing it will blow very steady and not gusty at all. You can actually lean your weight into a strong breeze and depend on it to hold you up.

After nearly a week of around the clock diving, we finally located the chopper upside down on the bottom. We were sent to recover both the the chopper and the bodies, but they decided to bring only the bodies on board and set a buoy on a cable to the chopper for later pickup with another vessel. I was unfortunate enough to be on duty when the first body was hauled in and I had to help pull him over the rail and get him on deck. I really don’t want to describe how the man looked after small fish had been eating on him for the past 4 or 5 days, lets just say it was quite horrible. We then tried to put him in a body bag but that was not easy as rigormortis had set in and the man was in a seated position with his knees up, like he was still strapped in to the chopper seat. That was one of the most life changing experiences I have ever had, and I would learn that working offshore could be quite deadly in the years ahead of me. Including several close friends being killed on the job, but, I will tell you about those later.

So for now, keep tha faith people and tell me how lousy you guys are doing on your New Year resolutions!

There was a supervisor at the offshore construction company that I used to work for who’s last name was Long. I can’t recall his real first name but he picked up the nickname “Shorty” when he was in the Navy. Why? Because he was quite short, maybe 5′ 4″ or so. It was one of those nicknames where people didn’t have to ask him why he was called that. He was likable enough but really quirky and had some odd ideas on how, and why certain things needed to be done. If you worked beneath him you automatically hated his guts even though he was very friendly to everyone. I didn’t have to worry about that because I was also a supervisor.

Once when I had been offshore for nearly 3 months I got a weekend break and got to go home for 2 days. That meant I would spend almost as much time travelling to home and back as I would get to spend at home, but after that long you will endure most anything to get some good luvin’. Even an 18 hour long boatride in rough seas where everyone is pukin there guts up from seasickness. Upon my return, Shorty, in his dumbass way, actually asked me if I had done any hunting. Now almost anyone would know that 3 months at sea would make you one very horny boy and huntin’ would be the LAST thing I would do, and besides I wasn’t a hunter anyway. I replied yeah, Shorty, I had done some great huntin! I was looking for some double breasted, split-tailed mattress thumpers while I was in and I had a great time. The man actually looked at me shocked like he could not believe that I wouldn’t have gone huntin’. What a dope. Everyone in the area laughed at him and he got pretty embarrased.

The man also had the worst luck of anyone I had ever seen. One day me and a diver friend named Mike were on our bikes and we stopped in at the diving yards to pick up some parts for his diving helmet. Shorty was there and he was admiring Mikes brand new Harley, and wound up asking if he could test ride it. Now I can tell you right off there would be no way in hell I would let that dumbass ride mine, but Mike felt like he couldn’t refuse, because Shorty was his boss on the job, and not mine. Anyway the area of the dive yards is heavily populated with some super heavy duty equipment like diesel generators and hydraulic power units that weigh tons. Well Shorty got on Mikes bike and revved it up and took off hard and didn’t go 30 ft and he slammed head on into a generator, and actually made the generator move! Needless to say he did lots of damage to the bike that he had to pay. He was lucky he didn’t kill himself to say the least.

Shorty was into fishing and hunting and had a nice bass boat and trailer. He got off one weekend and, yup you guessed it, he went fishing! That is sad all by itself, but he had some serious bad luck that weekend. He had a friend with him and they were cruising out in the boat when the steering cable broke and he wound up running the boat quite a ways up in to the swamps and got stuck. They wound up stranded there overnight waiting for someone to pass by that could pull them out and tow him in. When they got back to the boat launch he backed his car down the ramp and loaded the boat up and locked the keys in the car with the engine running right there on the ramp.

There were many people waiting to use the ramp and he ended up breaking a window out of the car to get in. Of course he broke the drivers window so he had to sit in broken glass on the way home. Now you would think that would be enough for most people but not for Shorty! Hell no, he backed the boat into his driveway and accidentally rammed the outboard motor clean thru his garage door! Many times when I feel like things aren’t going my way, all I have to do is tell myself, at least I ain’t Shorty!

Back in the days when I used to work offshore in the diving business, I would be gone for long periods of time, up to 3 months. I was concerned about my wifes security while I was gone and so I thought a dog would be a great addition to the household. We agonized for a while over what type of dog we would get and settled on a Doberman Pinscher. Back then nothing said don’t mess with me better than the appearance of a dobie next to you, never mind if the dog was actually mean, it just looked mean as hell. We bought one and decided to train it well, so we purchased several books on training that breed. This is highly recommended by the way, as most dogs have a great capacity for learning almost anything, provided you know how to teach it in a way that is creatively fun for the dog. And yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks, provided you do it correctly.

We quickly learned we had a dog with some exceptional talent for being trained and proved to be the most wonderful companion everywhere we went, even to Europe. We named her Dana, short and easy to say, making it easier for the dog to respond when called upon. Dana eventually learned about 40 different commands, including hand signals and learned a lot of them in french as well, yep my dog spoke french! She also amazingly was a lip reader, if you got her attention she would watch for you to mouth the words silently and actually do what you said for simple words like sit and stay and come. Here are some of the fun things she did:

• She hated hats, if you put a hat of any kind on your head she treated you like you just beamed in from the planet Zylon and would bark at you like a fool, scaring you silly.
• Roach murderer, she hated roaches with a passion and would go out of her way to destroy it. She would lie in wait for a roach out of reach on the wall and when it came close enough she would pounce on it and bite it then spit it back out. Lots of fun first thing in the morning to find half chewed roaches on the floor, eww. Very fun to watch though, and she always got her roach!
• Restaurants in Europe allow you to bring your dog inside, and she loved to lie under our table like she was a queen, with her front legs crossed and watch quietly at everything going on. Waiters would usually bring a small bone or a small bowl of complimentary soup for her and she never failed to draw lots of admiring attention from the other patrons of the eatery. She was very dainty and never made a mess.
• Very possessive, we walked her in the park a lot and would let her roam free but she would never get out of sight. We would “hide” behind a tree or other object when she wasn’t looking and then when she looked and couldn’t see us would frantically search for us. When she “found” us she would greet us like we had been gone a week, stubby tail waving and everything. She never failed to do that!
• Crotch sniffing, the one thing she did that I never could break her from doing. She would do it so very quickly and unobtrusively so that I wouldn’t have a chance to rebuff her for it. She was good at it and did it to everyone she got close enough to.
• She scared the bejeesus out of a cop one day. He came to the front door to take a report on some items stolen from my garage and had a hat on when he knocked at the front screen door. She saw him and charged the door barking like a dog from hell with teeth snarling and he ran to safety outside the front gate, shutting it behind him. I asked him to remove the hat and suddenly he was her best friend and wouldn’t stop bothering him for attention.
• Loved alcohol, never leave an alcohol drink unattended, she would sneak some and not leave any sign that she had lapped some from your glass, she got tipsy very easily, and was fun to watch.
• Loved to play on stairs, she would run up and down them like it was a roller coaster ride or something and was lots of fun to watch. The first time she encountered stairs though, I had to physically carry her up because she refused to try it. Never heard a dog scream in fear before, but she quickly got the hang of it and ran them so much she drove me nuts!
• If I left any clothing laying about she would pick it up and sneak it to her bed at night and sleep on it, even dirty socks and underwear and she would get huffy if you retrieved your dirty sock or whatever she had stolen.

So now you’re saying finally a post about dogs on it’s a dog’s life! Needless to say I miss her very much and hope to have another like that someday.

Now, tell me about some of the cool stuff your favorite pet has done!

Many years ago I was employed in the deep sea diving business as an apprentice diver aka a tender, because you attended to your assigned diver and took care of his personal equipment. This included his diving helmet, wetsuit, gloves and harnesses and kept his knife sharp and tended his air hose/comm cable bundle while he was in the water. This was intended to prepare you to become a diver yourself. I never became a diver and I’ll tell you why further down. These guys looked upon scuba divers with disdain and called them scubydoo’s. The type of work being done here was underwater construction, repair and stuff like connecting huge pipelines together undersea with huge bolts as thick as your arm. They had to be physically strong and know how to work with real heavy duty equipment and put up with extreme temperature variations for long periods of time. In other words, girly men need not apply.

Practical jokes were part of the daily routine and it was pretty wild the way an entire crew of 20 or more diving personnel would stick together to perpetrate a prank on a newbie. One tender we called Diver Dave was really gungho about the entire diving scene, fresh out of dive school and annoying as hell to everyone because even though he was a nice guy he drove everyone nuts with constant chatter about diving. One day the plan was put in motion, we took an old diving air hose/comm cable assy and chopped the end off all the sections in a rough fashion and threw that end in the water and had a guy tend the hose right at shift change. When Diver Dive came on deck the dive superintendent told him to relieve the guy with the hose, the crew then pretended there was an actual diver in the water, even getting the rigging crew involved with radio commands to adjust the rigging the phantom diver was using. When the super announced the diver was coming up he signaled Diver Dive to pull up the hose slack and eventually he saw there was NO DIVER on the end and the hoses were cut. Needless to say Diver Dave nearly went in to convulsions thinking the diver had gotten injured or killed somehow before surfacing. He started shouting and ran around trying to drum up some help but after a few minutes he finally realized he had been had, big time, very funny and very cruel I know, but that was the nature of life at sea.

Real Diving

Why didn’t I become a diver? After a couple years I realized that these divers didn’t need to be real smart, they are basically underwater ditch diggers and I wanted more challenge, so I became a technician that designed, built and repaired diving equipment. I’m not taking anything away from these guys because they were real hardworking men with guts and courage to take on tasks that no one else would dream of doing, without them we wouldn’t have oil flowing from offshore to keep this country fueled.