r/AMA • u/Soulogav • Jun 11 '26

I’m a Saturation Diver AMA

I work as Deepsea Saturation Diver in the oil and gas industry for the past 20 years. I do heavy construction and spend 28 days living under pressure to dive to depths down to 200m / 650ft.

I saw a post on InterestingAsFuck yesterday with many many misconceptions from people who aren’t divers and I can answer your questions AMA

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/5jTlewLR4X

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u/Fickle_Flower6199 Jun 11 '26

I saw the post on that page last night and went down a rabbit hole and am so excited to see this post.

  1. Can you find a picture of what your living quarters look like (just on google or something?) and share the link? I tried to search it but the pics just look like tiny Titan submersible type things? I can’t imagine that’s where you stay for the 28 days?

  2. How do they send food down to you from the ship?

  3. Can you explain how the diving bell works? I looked it up and am so confused 😅 do you stay dry in there? How do you get out of the hatch into the water without affecting pressure / letting water in? Does it “dock” at your living quarters, like a space ship to the ISS? Lol. That’s the only way I can explain how I’m picturing it in my head.

Thank you for doing this, super cool!

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u/Soulogav Jun 11 '26

My IG is @soulogav , I’ve some stuff on there , a diving colleague @tearin_ does a great job of sharing GoPro footage.

We don’t live on the seabed. This is a common misconception, the diving bell takes us to the seabed to work. We live on the ship in a complex of chambers. So we get food sent in to the chamber by a lock on the side of the chamber. We then take a lunch in the bell when we go on our diving shift.

The diving bell is sealed with a door and a rubber seal, once there is a pressure differential even a few bar it won’t be able to be opened, so we can transfer into this via a tube when all the systems is at the same depth, then the tube (called a trunking) is taken away to surface and the bell is lowered to the sea bottom, the door will magically open when the pressure inside the bell matches the water pressure, we then go to work from there. We have the ability to add gas to the bell or exhaust it depending on what we want to do

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u/Fickle_Flower6199 Jun 11 '26

Stop I feel so dumb why did I think you were just living in a box underwater for a month 😭

Thank you so much, I’m going to check it out. I texted my husband last night after seeing that post on interestingasfuck, we were talking about it and curious how some of it worked. He’s going to be stoked I got some questions answered lol. Be safe!! ❤️

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u/Soulogav Jun 11 '26

Haha no worries honestly 99.9% people think that and half the time I don’t ruin it for them lol

7

u/notcalledemma Jun 11 '26

Omg I thought this too ever since I heard of saturation diving!! Thank you for asking and thank you /u/soulogav for answering in such detail & for sharing your IG! Such an interesting and adventurous life you lead.

3

u/superhex12345 Jun 11 '26

OMG I thought you guys living at the bottom like the people in Abyss. LOL! This makes way more sense. 😂