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.

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.