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The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver

atlasobscura.com

91–93 of 93 posts

Re: The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a Commercial Diver moving into Life Support Technician/ Superviser work. Then got a lot of free time (the mentioned boredom) so started getting into Linux, Scripting, C, ... then wrote a program that would implement the Oceaneering Manual in code (how much gas do you need for a 30 day job with 6 divers in a chamber, how much soda for the CO2 scrubbers, if they work on 500 ft and live at 470 ft and you do X numb…

You're in good company. Linus Torvalds wrote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software)

LMAO I had no idea. Thanks for this :D

Re: The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver

#92
post #53
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so romantic if you have a family - and from the other side, as a kid, it wasn't nice for us having my dad away for weeks at a time.

It appears to be well paid. And as a kid that grew up poor if the choice was 3 weeks of parental non contact or mayonnaise sandwiches for dinner, well see you in a few weeks, mom!

It's only well paid when you're away - when you're onshore the pay goes down.

Re: The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver

#93
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to be well paid. And as a kid that grew up poor if the choice was 3 weeks of parental non contact or mayonnaise sandwiches for dinner, well see you in a few weeks, mom!

There's a lot of training involved in going offshore, and if you're able to go through training to get out of poverty, there's a hundred other careers to go for that don't involve multiple weeks away from family.

To be fair, we lived in an area where oil and gas are the biggest industries, and my dad was a geologist. But still, I wish he'd just been around more.
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