Saturation deep sea DIVER diving as a way of life. underwater scuba deep sea Portsmouth -

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What's it like to be in Sat?

Listen to Chris Evans interview Sat Diver Joe Putnam in the North Sea live on his BBC radio 2 program. Let the interview play while you read the page below. The 'Lads' sing the whold of Tom Jones's 'DELILAH' for you further down the page.

Part One

PLAY↑

These are two short films I made on a Saturation dive in the North Sea. I hope it explains a lot.

Part One: www.youtube.com/watch

Part Two: www.youtube.com/watch

Why bother with Sat? Extracts from the Saturation part of the book. Exiting the bell.

Say you have a long, complicated job at around 100 metres, lots of intricate work. To do it conventionally, with air (too deep – remember nitrogen narcosis, narcs?) or even with oxy-helium (heliox), it would take you years and you would need hundreds of divers. Why?

Well for a start your bottom time would be so short, say five minutes, and your decompression stops so long, that it would be completely impractical. Not to mention the danger from the bends, and the sheer distances involved, and being at the mercy of the weather during decompression stops.

Even with a conveyor-belt system of divers you would soon run out and there would be no continuity of work. Everything under water takes longer. Except getting tired, and cold. Well, not everything, then. Any work, I should say, takes longer. To find our job in poor vis, and it probably won’t be great at 100 metres, would be hard enough, so it’s time-consuming, which is exactly the element you don’t have. Even if you have a line going to the job in hand, it will take you time to orientate yourself with what is going on, where you are, where the tools are. Too late, time’s up, leave bottom.

Rushing when you are deep is a no-no also, a lesson you learn very quickly because once you are panting you can rarely get your breath back without stopping and resting. Now, if you are breathing an oxy-helium mix and in a rush because you have a short bottom time, you will quickly become exhausted. Your time in the water and your gas (helium) works out very expensive, so you are always under pressure to get a move on. On top of that you have the need for long, in-water, weather-dependent decompression stops. You may argue you could do them in a bell, but how may bells can you get on a ship? Usually two comfortably, and if they are being used to convey divers up and down your conveyor-belt system has already broken down!

How can you not decompress then? Well you can’t, but you can save up all the decompression and do it all just the once, at the end.

Bobby Boyle’s law

John Boy Walton takes a picture of me coming in. Then passes me the camera. See below.

I am no expert at all this, I just do it, but this is how I remember the laws. As you sit reading this, you are saturated. Your tissues are saturated with the nitrogen at the current partial pressure (PP), that is at atmospheric pressure (one bar). That is the weight of air above us. This is measured in weight per area, usually ‘pounds per square inch’ (PSI). If you travel up from the earth, the pressure decreases because there is less weight of air pressing down on you. So take a balloon up a mountain and it will get bigger, less PSI on it, and as there is less air you will find it harder to breathe.

Back at sea level you cannot absorb any more nitrogen unless you increase your depth (PP) or increase the percentage of nitrogen you are breathing.

So take your balloon and drag it under water with you. It will get smaller. Water is approximately a thousand times denser (heavier) than air at the sea’s surface. So, look up at the sky and it takes all that height to give Me looking up into the bell.

us the weight of one bar, one atmosphere. Go beneath the surface of the water and it only takes a depth of 33 feet (10 metres) to give us our next one bar of pressure.

Now exchange your balloon for something else that is full of air/gas, the diver’s lungs. At only 10 metres you have twice the normal atmospheric pressure and twice the amount of gas in the diver’s lungs. Assuming that the lungs are the same size as we keep breathing but the gas is compressed, you have double the amount. Go down to 20 metres and you have another atmosphere of weight and pressure in your lungs and you now hold three times as much as you did on the surface. At 30 metres (third atmosphere), a diver’s lungs hold four times the amount of gas, and so on. The deeper you go, the more you hold, the longer it will take to ‘fizz off’ on your long slow ascent back to the surface.

Click the Tharos bell for close up >

A slightly 'Un-typical bell'. The Tharos's 'Flying bell.' The ultimate in luxury sat bells.

That is Boyle’s Law. Bobby said, roughly, that under a constant temperature, gas will compress as pressure is applied. And if the amount of gas is fixed, its volume is inversely proportional to the total amount of pressure applied. If the pressure doubles, the volume shrinks to half.

Bob Boyle’s law for idiots basically means: If you increase the pressure on a flexible gas-filled object (balloon or lungs), it will get smaller; if you decrease the pressure on it, it will get bigger.

In the bin

If you are not diver types you will still be wondering about the practicality of staying in the water for all these hours, nay days, to get saturated. Then the days to decompress and fizz off all the bubbles in your blood. Well, you don’t have to stay in the water.

Imagine you drive to the garage and you put one bar of pressure in your tyre. You know that because it tells you on the gauge. You haven’t gone underwater, but you have the same effect. Inside your tyre you have one bar or an equivalent of 10 metres water depth in your tyre. If you took it down in the ocean to 10 metres and opened the valve, nothing would come out. The two pressures are equal.

So put your divers into a decompression chamber and blow it down to the equivalent depth of the seabed (using a heliox mix) to say 100 metres (or where you want to work). They are ‘at depth’ and they haven’t even got wet.

Inside what would be home for a month at a time. This one is on the surface still as can be seen by the open door.

These chambers will be the divers’ home for as long as the dive takes, usually a maximum of 28 days. As it is your home it has to have everything you require. Now you cannot take 28 days’ worth of meals in and cook for yourself. Apart from a range of hazards such as fire, it would not be very practical.

So in every chamber you have a medical lock. Through a series of very thick metal doors and valves that isolate the medical lock from the chamber and the outside world, it is possible to pass food, medicines, washing, hot drinks, diving equipment, rubbish etc in and out of the living chamber..

Chris Evans on Radio 2, got the Lads in Sat to sing him a song. Listen and Laugh.

Tom Jones's 'Dililah,' like you've never heard it before!

This shot is JB and I waiting for our last dive, then 5 days decompression and out and home. It is taken from the heads. Nodody I know has taken a shot of the heads. Here's why....Below.

Inside the chamber, it’s not pretty, and you had better not be claustrophobic. They are all decorated in the same shade of putrid, monkey-sick, fire-retardant, hospital green. I have lived for months in chambers that have six or eight divers inside and it’s no bigger than a rounded garden shed about fifteen feet long. You usually have two bunks on either side, which just about leaves enough room to walk between them, and maybe two at one end.

Some have tables, some do not; there is usually a separate toilet and shower compartment, but not always! You can become quite close to your fellow plungers’ personal habits and routines in the more primitive of these systems. The chambers are small because helium is expensive and because they are under a great deal of pressure from the inside. Everything inside is built of either heavy-gauge steel or aluminium. The smell in the chambers is of other men, and in the bell and wet pot, of wet rusting steel.

This was the decompression chamber, so rarely came to the surface. The shower head is directly above. Nice eh? The brown is mostly rust....Honest....it is...! Nature’s strongest shape is round. The diving bell itself is round, the chambers are cylindrically rounded, a submarine’s pressure hull is round, and the space shuttle is round inside. It is the only shape to take such pressures.

So for simplicity and cost’s sake let’s say we will put in four teams of three divers, in two interconnecting chambers, so we have a 24-hour diving capability. You will pack everything you need for the month, which will not include cigarettes and alcohol, but will include personal diving gear, toilet bag, light clothes, lots of music and books.

On getting the go-ahead to get into your new home, the Life Support Technicians (LST) will shut the three-inch-thick round metal door and that is you for a month.

The only time you can get out is when you go diving or in a month’s time. Yes, it can be a depressing thought. What keeps the doors from leaking out gas? One 10 mm rubber ‘O’ seal between the door and the chamber. If that goes, it’s good night Vienna.

A typical chamber layout. The symbols on them make it obvious the only reason you would live in one for a month at a time!

In the Navy we would all LST for each other, which is good training to see both sides of how it all works. In the North Sea and around the world, the LSTs are professionals and do that job only. They will pump the gas on board, mix it, check the gas you breathe, then check it is right, then check it again, then again before you get it.

They figure out the depths and the gas mixtures required, get the meals and the diving gear, look after your personal wellbeing, and a great deal more besides. It is a full-on job, with a lot of responsibility, and other people’s lives in you hands. Get it wrong once, and you may easily kill someone. It has happened on many occasions.

As I write this I have just heard of one LST in hospital, having been hit in the shoulder by a medical lock door as it blew open when he tried to open it with pressure still in the system..

Typical LST panel with LST's hard at it!

You have to think about everything you do in the chamber, and so do the LSTs. One lad called Danny Webster was in what he thought was a pretty safe place in the chamber. He was sat on the loo. Whilst doing his paper work, if you know what I mean, he asked for a ‘shitter flush’. The LSTs will then come round to your chamber and open a series of valves so the pressure inside blows the waste away and into a holding tank. You also have to open a valve on your side for this to work. Double valves at least, all the time, everywhere. On this occasion, though, Danny was still sat down, and his valve was already open. Can you see where this is heading? The LST came around and opened his valves and the waste was sucked out of the bowl. The only thing was, Danny was almost a perfect shape to form a seal over the loo. It sucked out his large intestines. He did live, but ...

From the book. All drawings by Chris Drake.

When you are locked in and they start to squeeze in the gas, you talk like Donald Duck immediately – and that is your voice for the next month. If you go really deep, say over 200 metres, the depth and the helium acting on your voice can make it almost impossible to understand each other.

During the blow-down, you check that all airtight containers (tomato sauce bottles, shampoo, mayonnaise) are slightly open, because if you miss one it will implode (explode on the way up) under the pressure – and what a mess.

Sat Rat

"Every day draws us closer to death. . . . the poor man’s friend."

This shot is taken from an ROV. The diver is in the middle facing the camera, the tool basket is to his left and a ten ton lift bag taking the weight of the spool being installed.

You have to be a bit individual, a bit unique, if you like, to do any amount of time in sat. The money can draw you in, but if you get to need it too much, you are in trouble, because then you can’t say no. The taxman knows how much you are on, so you do more days in the bin to keep paying him, so your tax bill goes up. Two hundred days a year in sat is perfectly possible. You will start out with good intentions to save your hard earned money and not "Piss it all up against the wall," to coin a nice naval phrase. You will say, "I'm gonna be different and put 40% away," etc – but then comes the big house, the kids, the car. It’s easy to lose it all.

Saturation diver Joe Puttnam and colleague who Chris spoke to on Monday 27 October 2008.

I’ve been in the bin with all sorts or characters, and there are a few wild ones out there. There’s a guy I was with on one of my first courses in the Navy who’s been a 200-days-a-year man almost since he left the mob in the early 80s, and he still hasn’t really got ahead. When I worked with him last he would do a full sat, 28 days, then go on deck to either supervise or be standby diver for about two weeks, then go straight back in for 28! That’s only because of the new-ish ruling that stops you doing back-to-back sats. What used to happen is he, or they, would come out, make a phone call home to someone who could still remember them, then go straight back in.

There are that many divorced or thrice-married men out there it is amazing. They all have their own stories to tell, how they’ve made and lost a fortune over the years and how "I got home and the bitch had taken everything whilst I was offshore!"

North Sea Sat

I got my first sat in the North Sea with a company called Svitzer. They were a Danish outfit with just the one ageing sat boat, the Maersk Defender, but it was a steady month on month off for most of the year. The first one you feel the heat a bit, as in the pressure is on for every minute you are in the water. This was a cheap boat, say 40–50 grand a day to hire. This was in the early 1990s. Nowadays a modern boat will cost you 100–150 thousand pounds a day plus! You may have about 150 men, and in reality their job is to get just two men on a single bell system to work.

You do rush everything, you have to. The client who is paying this money will have a representative on board all the time making sure his pound goes as far as possible. As the bell is leaving the ship, you in the bell as ‘diver one’ will be getting your hat on. As soon as the bottom door of the bell is open, you have to drop out and be off to work. Time is money. This attitude is easing a bit as the powers that be realise that rushing is often the slower way of doing something. The rushed jobs invariably have to be done again. I have leapt out of the bell like a young gazelle, dashed over to the job, and then waited for five hours for the rig above me to operate one valve. ‘Yep, it moved.’ OK, that’s it, back to the bell. Yes, you can fall asleep underwater in these situations. You find yourself a comfy spot, ask the supervisor to turn your hot water up a degree, then ZZZZZZ.

It's not always oilfield work. This Harrier 'Jump Jet' was picked up in 600 ft of water just off Italy by the AquaMarine.

The hot water suit is a diver’s godsend. The umbilical down to the bell and on to the diver carries an insulated pipe. Through this is pumped hot water, sometimes close to boiling at the surface. It will cool considerably on its long journey to say 220 metres (700 feet). As bellman, one of your jobs is to connect the diver’s hot water pipe to a push fitting at his hip just before he drops through the bell’s mini moon pool. This fitting has a simple quarter-turn valve on it: open it and all the water goes to you, close it and you ditch it into the sea. You, at the end of your 70 metre umbilical, can then regulate how much HW you have. The HW suits are nothing more than a neoprene set of overalls with sprinkler pipes inside that transport the water to the limbs and torso. It is open at the cuffs, ankles and neck and has a zip up the front. All the excess just spills out of these openings. Sat diving in the northern hemisphere would be impossible with out it. ‘Number ones’ is therefore not a problem in a hot water suit: it’s gone before you can say aaaahh. Number twos, well that is another story. It is possible, and it involves a quiet five minutes to undo your bailout, unzip, squat and scoop. Need I say more? After years of sat and six hours at a time in the water, you will get caught short. It ain’t pretty but that’s the reality.

Other times they will say go back to the bell and you can’t believe six hours is up because you’ve been so busy. You will then get into the bell, remove your hat and drink a litre or two of water down in one. Six hours of often very physical work without a drink is hard. Around three hours into the dive they will ask, ‘Do you want to go back to the bell for a drink?’ You are allowed to, but the unwritten rule is to say, ‘No, I’m fine thanks.’ Lying through your back teeth.

From the Book Diver. O'Leary's Luck.

Sometimes things go wrong and usually it will be at the worst possible time, in the worst possible place. This is the short version. Micks words.

I had not left the bell long as diver 2 and the first I knew anything was wrong was when everything went black, and it is black that deep (over 500 feet) with no artificial light. I had just touched the Gravity Base and a perfectly normal day was turned upside down. I turned to look back along my umbilical and there was nothing. No bell lights, no ROV lights and no other diver’s lights, my partner was out here with me, somewhere!

It was deadly quiet with nothing in the way of instructions or updates were coming through the comms. I grabbed my umbilical and started feeling my way along it to the only sanctuary there might be, the bell. On my way back the battery-operated emergency comms came on, so at least I could talk with the supervisor. Within seconds I knew we were in big trouble, I was at 500-odd foot with no hot water. At this depth, that is a situation that cannot go on for more than a minute or so.

I don’t know how I did it to this day but l positively leapt into the bell, took off my bailout bottles and my own hat and just threw it on the untidy pile of my umbilical. I then helped Glynn the bellman pull like mad on Duncan’s umbilical. It was pretty eerie with just a hanging torch in there and one bloke missing. It was around this time we heard and felt an enormous crash that knocked us both off our feet. It was metal on metal. This should never happen in a bell. We had just made contact with the biggest anchor chain you will ever see in you life. I knew then that if our two-inch bell lift wire had a fight with those links, we were going to lose.

The bell then started jumping over the links. Crashing its way along, one link after the next. What in effect was happening now was the bell, with us in it, was catching on the Balmoral’s cable, acting as an anchor to try and stop the 12,000 ton Wellservicer moving through the water.

All this time, in the bell, we could hear Pete Waller, the supervisor, trying to get a response out of Duncan. He was saying ‘Duncan ... Duncan ... Speak to me Duncan ... Duncan ...!’

Nothing! There was no response. At one point the bell tipped a long way over and begun filling up as something on the bell caught on the huge links. Glynn and I exchanged a brief look at each other. We had to get this bell door shut, now, but Duncan's umbilical was still hanging out through the bottom. I thought he’d been crushed or at least badly injured. He may have been dead already. Would we have to cut his umbilical with a hacksaw? I could see it out of the corner of my eye and was within easy reach. Should I cut it, to save our own lives? The thought crossed my mind. Then the next thing that I thought was even scarier, I thought, ‘Fuck it, if he goes, we all go!’ With that Glynn and I redoubled our efforts to pull on Duncan's umbilical and get him back into the bell, dead or alive....

The North Sea can be a calm, tranquil place....

Almost romantic?

Or it can be your worst nightmare....

Frigg Field TCP2. When it's like this, hot meals don't come around that often!

Click below to see the same rig on a calm day.

Bobby Boyels Law, with a difference! Read on...

To lean about Boyle’s Law, let’s make it interesting; give it a twist if you like.

Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most people write their proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One diving student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving.

I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell!

Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that ...

"In order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added."

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my first ever diving course that ...

'It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you!'

And take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct......

Leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting...

'Oh my God !'

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+.

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