Worst week I ever had was on a bridge job in Portland

Back in 2021, I was doing inspection dives on the St. Johns Bridge and my drysuit got a tiny pinhole leak I didn't notice until hour 3 of a 4 hour dive. Came up shivering so bad I could barely climb the ladder, and the surface interval was only 30 minutes because the tide was coming in. The next day my heater failed completely and I spent the rest of the week doing cold water dives with a backup suit that was two sizes too big. Anyone else had a job where everything just went wrong at once?

2 comments

2 Comments

evand653d ago

Dude that pinhole leak sounds brutal. I remember one job on a pier where my mask kept flooding and I had to keep purging every 30 seconds, made me want to quit halfway through. Cold water is no joke when your gear fails.

betty_shah3d ago

And that's EXACTLY what makes it so dangerous, the small failures that compound. A pinhole leak is a slow killer because you don't realize how bad it is until you're already hypothermic. I saw a guy once who ignored a tiny leak in his boot for a weekend job and by Sunday he was shaking so bad he couldn't get his fins off. The tide pressure thing is real too, it makes every minute count and your team gets sloppy rushing the interval. When your backup suit is baggy on top of that, you're basically fighting the water every second instead of working. It's those little gear issues that turn a normal job into a DISASTER real quick.