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Am I the only one who changed how they do surface decompression after a tender called me out at the dock?
I was working a job in Morgan City about 8 months back and my tender, who has been doing this for 20 something years, pulled me aside after a dive and said my surface interval timing was sloppy. He told me straight up that I was cutting it too close on the chamber runs and that if something went wrong on the boat I would not have the margin I thought I did. At first I got defensive because I have been doing this a while and nobody had ever said anything. But I sat with it and watched how some of the older guys handle their logs and table checks and realized he was right, I was rushing the 02 time and treating the tables like a rough guide instead of a hard rule. So I started adding a full 3 minutes buffer on every surface interval and writing down my actual times instead of rounding. The wild part is half the crew thinks that extra margin is a waste of time and the other half thinks it should be mandatory. Where do you all land on building in that buffer, is it smart practice or am I just slowing down the whole deck?
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henry_knight1d ago
Did your tender explain why those 3 minutes matter more than they look on paper? I had a similar thing happen on a pipeline job where an old hand told me the tables assume everything goes right, and nothing ever does. I started logging real times down to the minute and adding a small cushion before the chamber, and it saved me once when the boat lost an engine and we sat on the surface way longer than planned. The deck hands grumbled about the extra wait, but the DMT backed me up, and nobody argues with a guy who can show his math.
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