My first commercial diving contract was a 4 month stint in the Bay of Campeche', Mexico in 1981. I was hired as a diving tender - the bottom of the rung in the hierarchy of the deepsea diving world.
The barge I called home was designed to bury large diameter oilfield pipeline. It did this utilizing a large "Claw" ( a dredge-type affair ) that used jets of high pressure water to dig a trench in the soft goo of the Bay.
The diving system included a 1000' saturation diving spread with a diving bell that could be tracked out over the stern of the barge & lowered down into the sea. Diving operations were carried on routinely around the clock in support of dredging, but one night, things were anything but routine.
The bell was on bottom late one night when the weather started to kick up a fuss. The Supervisor decided to bring the bell back up & go w.o.w. ( wait-on-weather ). As the bell broke surface a large wave smacked into it & sent it swinging. A subsea camera housed in a stainless steel canister was mounted over one of the bell portholes. As the bell swung upwards, the camera housing struck the steel frame of the bell tracking skid & punched the housing right through the porthole!
Now to understand the gravity of this situation, you must understand the divers in the bell were saturated to a depth of 180'; a sudden, rapid loss of bell pressure means explosive decompression sickness like you don't want to know!
The instant the Housing struck the frame, three things occured simultaneously: The Supervisor orderd the bell back to depth at flank speed & the Life Support Technician ( responsible for the saturation complex / bell & works in the "control van" - a sort of "mission control" ) opened the bell blowdown valves wide in an attempt to maintain the required internal bell pressure. Lastly, the divers in the bell donned their dive helmets & reconnected the hot water supplys to their suits...
...back at 180', two divers in a flooded bell, shaken, stirred, but thankfully alive. Problem was, we had no way to plug the 5" dia. hole that was the porthole, thus we could not bring the boys home.
Luck would have it that a Norwegian dive vessel, specially designed for oilfield diving ops. was working nearby that night. Theirs was a state-of-the-art dynamic positioning vessel ( they could maintain station with computer-controlled thrusters ).They steamed over, dropped their bell down with two divers onboard, & did the first bell-to-bell transfer of stranded saturation divers ever attempted.
Our guys were treated onboard their ship in their sat. system, though fortuneately, both divers were asymptomatic of d.c.s.
So there you go, if your gonna get stuck u/w, do it in an offshore oilfield where the ultimate in diving technology is operating, otherwise - keep the area over your head free n' clear!
Be sub-safe,
D.S.D.
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