Hit 2,000 feet on a single dive last week and it got me thinking

I've been doing inspection work in the Gulf for about six years now and last Thursday I finally crossed the 2,000 foot mark on a single bell dive. It wasn't anything special job-wise, just a routine pipeline check, but seeing that number on the depth gauge made me realize how far I've come since my first 60 foot training dives. Has anyone else had a depth or time milestone that caught them off guard like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

jana88113d ago

My buddy Mike hit 1,500 feet on a job off Louisiana and his wife texted him a pic of their kid's first steps right when he surfaced. He said he just sat there in the wet suit staring at the phone for ten minutes.

susan_adams13d agoTop Commenter

Wait, what about the fact that he was still under pressure when he got that text though? I mean, at 1,500 feet the decompression stops alone take hours, so he probably had to sit in a decompression chamber for days after that dive. That picture of his kid's first steps would have been the only thing he had to look at during all that time stuck in a tiny tube breathing pure oxygen. Imagine staring at that photo over and over while your body slowly adjusts back to surface pressure, knowing you missed it in real time but at least you have the proof it happened. That ten minutes he spent staring on the boat was just the start of a long, lonely decompression where that picture became his whole world.

leo_black7612d ago

Think the way decompression works in saturation diving is a little different than a long surface decompression. At that depth they're living in a chamber system for days before the dive even starts, so the decompression is gradual and spread out over a week or more. That text probably hit him while he was still in the bell or on the boat, not during some lonely solo decompression marathon with nothing but a photo.