My name is Kermit Wilson, and I grew up on a farm in Southeast Oregon.  Vale, Oregon, specifically. We eventually moved to Tieton, Washington just outside of Yakima where I went to high school.  After graduating I messed around for a couple of years working for a construction company, mostly in Twisp, building a new school, but my home base was always the Yakima area.  Within a short time of graduating high school meth started to show up in my circle of friends, so I joined the Army when I was 20.  Kind of an emergency parachute to get away.  Most of my active duty time was spent as an artillery meteorologist at Fort Riley, Kansas. It doesn’t sound sexy, but it had its moments.  It was a rare a specialty, it wasn’t unusual to see colonels and generals craning their necks to watch a balloon ascend while an entire division artillery unit of 155 mm howitzers were firing right behind them.   

After four years of the army I applied myself to Washington State University with miserable results, and after 3 unsuccessful semesters I realized it was an environment I was completely unsuited to, so I decided to readjust my goals to something I’d enjoy, and something my father couldn’t tell me everything about in 5 minutes.  Which is difficult to do — how do you have no idea what you’re looking for when the only criteria is “something my father doesn’t know anything about”?  Luckily, I ran across an old copy of a National Geographic magazine with an article about Dutch divers salvaging a Soviet submarine.  I was hooked.

I spent the next few years working as a commercial diver in the Gulf of Mexico, working for the offshore oil industry.  Truly the wild west of commercial construction, no unions, limited safety guidelines, a boom and bust industry based on the price of crude oil, full of characters, and every job was unique.  Initially, it was a struggle to get started, but right after I arrived hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit, and the rebuilding process coupled with an enormous influx of government money drove a huge boom.  There suddenly weren’t enough boats or personnel available for the workload, where a boat plus crew had demanded $6,000 a day to operate, they were now commanding $30,000 and going up by the week.  Oil companies were flush with cash and they were spending it hand over fist.

The thing to remember when thinking about offshore diving is the wages, which were paid by the hour and by the dive.  An 8 hour day, and a 40 hour week.  After 8 hours in one day, everything after was time and a half.  After forty hours of straight time, Saturday and Sunday overtime.  Offshore, there are no weekends.  Once you leave port you work 7 days a week, and you get paid 12 hours a day (standard rate) just for being on the boat.  8 hours straight time, 4 hours overtime, and weekends were all overtime.  You might travel 3 days to get to an oil rig at standard rate for travel, and once you tied up you were working 16 or 20 hour days.  140 hours a week was normal.

On top of that you had dive pay, measured in vertical feet.  At the time the first 50 feet were free, any dive 50 feet or less and you were only paid by the hour.  From 50 to 100 feet was $1 a foot.  Think of it as a bonus check. 100 to 150 ft. was a $1.50 a foot.  150 to 200 was $2 a foot.   200 to 250 feet was $2.50, and so on. You were paid to the deepest depth of your dive, if you went to 240 feet even for a minute and then spent the rest of your dive at 40 feet, you were paid to 240 feet, or $325.

Oddly enough my best months were on a shallow water job with a maximum depth of 45 feet.  All my dives were free as they were less than 50 feet, but we were working 18 to 20 hour days.  It was the most physically demanding work I’ve ever done.  In water that shallow there isn’t much pressure, so you’re not absorbing much nitrogen.  All the work was on the bottom, which was slick mud, and in a heavy current.  The dives would last 4 to 6 hours, and you were crawling across the bottom.  It was like climbing a wall, the current was pushing you and your umbilical, and the further you got from the boat the more umbilical you were dragging behind you.

A quick description of the dive gear: a hard dive hat, typically a fiberglass Kirby Morgan product that weighs around 30 pounds and a dive belt with enough lead weights to make you slightly less than neutral, so around 50 pounds of lead.  The water in the Gulf is usually pretty warm, so most divers wear nothing more than coveralls or a light 3mm neoprene farmer John style wetsuit.  It’s a little awkward on the surface, but no problem underwater.  The trouble was the current, anything more than a knot or two and you have to crawl.  We used metal paint scrapers to drag ourselves across the bottom, it was like climbing a rope that could be as long as your umbilical. You might be 40 feet down but 600 feet away from the boat.

When you’re not diving you work on the deck, supporting the other divers.  Everything goes into and comes out of the water by hand.  An umbilical consists of a 5/8th yellow polypropylene rope for strength, tied to that is a 3/8ths video cable, a 5/8ths steel braided primary air hose, and a 3/8ths pneumo (secondary air) hose.  The pneumo was used primarily to confirm your depth, but if your primary air line failed you could shove the pneumo up under your neck dam into your dive hat for air.  An umbilical doesn’t weigh a tremendous amount per foot, but when you might have a diver 10 feet away from the boat and 300 feet straight down, picking it up isn’t easy.  It’s all hand over hand, you build some hefty shoulders, and a pretty good grip.  Some jobs require hydraulic tools, and the hose for that is very heavy.  It’s a closed system for the hydraulic pump, with send and return hoses fused together, heavy rubber reinforced with steel braid.  Very heavy. We used to hear stories about power assists to pull the hoses out of the water, they were the unicorn stories of Gulf divers.

TMR: Have you ever experienced the Bends?

I never experienced the bends as a diver.  The bends are nitrogen bubbles that are trapped in your body, usually the joints, or your skin.  Worst case would be your lungs, heart or brain.  When you dive, the gasses in your body are compressed.  Every 30 feet is one atmosphere of pressure, and with every atmosphere a bubble of gas will halve in size.  So a bubble of gas at surface will be half the size at 30 feet, half again at 60 feet.  When you dive, the first 60 feet is the most difficult, as you have to clear your ears, or equalize the pressure.  On the way down you have to blow air into your eustachian tubes.  Normally you could just pinch your nose and blow, but with a hard hat you can’t touch your face.  The helmets have a stick you can jam under your nose to help.  After 60 feet the gas is so compressed it’s easier.  Getting back to the surface can be a problem, the rule of thumb is if was hard to get down, it will be harder to get back up.  Sucking air out of your ears is trouble, and it’s always with 60 feet of surface.  So close, and so far.

Think of nitrogen as CO2 in a can of soda pop.  If you shake it up and open it, all the gas comes out of solution at once and foams out.  Same thing with diving.  Nitrogen gas is in solution in your tissues and your blood, come up too fast and it comes out of solution too quickly.  Small bubbles merge together and become big bubbles.  Too big to escape your body, and they jam up in your joints, or worse, your lungs or brain.  Your tissues absorb the nitrogen over time on the bottom.  Spend more than 10 minutes at 180 feet and you have to decompress.  Rising back to the surface you take your time, typically 30 foot per minute ascent rate, with a few minutes of stop time at 60 feet, then ascend to 30 feet to stop again.  Then ascend to surface to climb into a hyperbaric chamber for some more time.  A diver has 4 minutes from breaking surface to strip, get into the chamber, and get pressed down to 40 feet.

I never personally suffered the bends, but I did witness it in 3 other divers.  One guy had a pneumothorax, air got into the chamber around his lungs causing them to collapse.  He had finished his surface decompression and was in his bunk when it began.  He started having trouble breathing while he was sleeping, it sounded like his chest was rattling.  We woke him up and he said he was having trouble breathing, so we tossed him back into the hyperbaric chamber on a treatment table.  Basically pushing the guy down in depth until he feels ok, the pressure collapses the gas trapped around his lungs allowing his lungs to inflate.  Then you bring him up very slowly, it takes hours.  Afterwards he went to a hospital and he was fine, but that was that.  He was finished diving.

Another guy had the skin bends, little pockets of air like rice crispies under the surface of your skin.  He’d had a deep dive, over 250 feet, and on the way back up he started jumping around on the lift.  If you’re working on an oil rig you can climb back up the platform, but in open water they lower a platform about the size and shape of a telephone booth on a cable with a crane.   Anyway, he starts jumping around like a monkey, and we warned him to knock it off.  He was wearing a 3mm farmer John suit wetsuit, and they’re a little tight.  You off gas through your respiration, but also through your skin, and with restrictive clothing you can have problems, especially if you’re being too active on the way up.  He was fine, it’s itchy for a few days but not very serious.

The third guy had his kidneys explode while he was doing his hyperbaric decompression.  We never knew what happened, he was laying flat, if you curl up or put your arms behind your head you can pinch off the blood flow to your extremities.  The speculation by the doctors was that he had a congenital defect with the circulation to his kidneys, basically restricted blood flow.  So the nitrogen built up in his kidneys and they popped.  One minute everything was fine, and then he started screaming and had a pretty heavy flow of blood coming out.  Seeing a guy pissing blood is terrifying.  There isn’t much you can do.  We got a helicopter out and he made it, but he lost his kidneys.  I’ve been told Louisiana has more organ donors than any other state, I don’t know if this is true, but they do have a lot of drunk driving deaths.  He didn’t have to wait very long to get a transplant.

TMR: What’s the worst memory you have about boats?

My worst memory about being on boats was a piece of shit that got hauled out of mothballs because of the hurricanes.  Remember how much boats were making per day?  That was just for the boat and the boat crew, not including divers and equipment leases.  Altogether a 200 foot work boat could run $60,000 a day, easy.   So anything that could float was put to sea.  Rumor had it this boat had been mothballed for 6 years, scheduled to be sent to India to be turned into razor blades.  They got the engines running (barely) and put it back to work.  One of our first dive jobs was to patch a 6-inch crack in the hull.  We called it the Floating Tetanus Shot.

TMR: Have you ever feared for your life?

I was afraid for my life a few times, but usually it was after the fact.  Like my first job offshore.  We travelled for 3 days and arrived at site.  In the Pacific Northwest I’d assume there were 20,000 leagues beneath the boat, but offshore of Louisiana it was 160 feet of depth.  Go figure.  There were 8 to 12 foot swells, and we had to transfer a dozen pieces of equipment to an oil rig with a crane.  The crane operator was amazing, he’d drop the cable onto the deck when the boat was on the way up, and I’d grab the hook, climb onto whatever was next, and slam the hook onto the lifting point.   Then roll off and run like hell, because as the boat dropped into the trough between swells he’d lift.  If the boat slid sideways or caught a wave on a short interval, the piece of equipment would swing sideways or slam back down on the deck.  Plus the lightning.  It was a pretty good storm.  Most of the equipment was the size of a VW bus or larger, for comparison.  Air compressors, hydraulic pumps, water pumps, all bolted inside tubular steel cages.  Offshore equipment is shipped that way to make it easier for crane lifts and to protect it in case it breaks loose on the deck and starts sliding around.

The only time I remember being afraid of dying in the moment was the time I was nearly electrocuted.  We were cutting 24″ gas pipe on bottom, it’s generally the same as a welding rig only you’re using burning rod.  Something like 400 amps of electricity or better.  The voltage kept cutting out, so we decided to pull the lead out of the water and put a new head on it.  Turns out the head on the cable was fine, the copper cable inside the rubber insulation had a break in it.  The dive supervisor had forgotten to turn off the switch.  Easy mistake to make, it had quit working so nobody was thinking about making it cold.  As I was pulling it out of the water, one hand landed on one side of the break in the line and one on the other, so my body was completed the circuit across my chest.  I was standing on a steel deck, wet, covered with sea water, so I was pretty well grounded. There was so much amperage I couldn’t let go, after a few dozen seconds the dive supervisor noticed my rigid posture and had the presence of mind to look at the switch, and realized the line was hot.  As soon as it went cold I toppled like a felled tree.  It was a few days before I felt right after that.

TMR: What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen on a job (huge squid, explosions?)

The craziest thing I ever saw offshore, that’s a tough one.  The most beautiful thing, one of the few moments where it all felt like something straight from Jules Verne, were the whales.  By regulation, anything above 200 feet that was decommissioned had to come out of the water and get hauled to shore.  So we were removing a satellite well, a 40 foot diameter vertical pipe.  Cutting it every 20 feet and lifting it onto the deck, piece by piece.

I had the last cut at 200 foot, and as they were lifting it out of the water I had to stay put on the lip of the remaining pipe until it was on deck.  At that depth in clear water with a high sun, everything is blue going on black.  Looking up, I could see the silhouette of the boat hull far above me, my umbilical trailing slightly to one side, and my bubbles slowly rising, expanding into ever larger circles as they rose, silence over the comms.  Just above me, two pilot whales were circling the rising column of my bubbles.  I don’t know why, but they were just there, dark silhouettes in a blue sea, circling just above my head as I stood on the rim of that pipe, we had a few minutes until the cut section of pipe was out of the water.  They kept circling even as the tenders pulled me to the surface, dropping below me then following me up until I could see them clearly, with their domed foreheads and dark eyes, until I was nearly to surface. Then they turned and dropped away into the depths.  I’ll never forget that moment, it was perfect in every way.