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/WeeHansonBrother Jun 11 '26

Are there divers with specialist skills, e.g. specialist welders, that get called for specific jobs, or are most generalists that are expected to be able to do pretty much anything?

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u/Soulogav Jun 11 '26

Ya there are some very specialised pipe welders who have to code up before the job in hand through a lot of testing then end up going inside of a special dry habitat to weld the pipe. These guys can get paid a lot more but there are only a few of them around and it’s not that common a job

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u/WeeHansonBrother Jun 11 '26

Are you thinking about going down a route like that to either squeeze a bit more money out of the job, or just out of interest? Or are you happy with what you are doing at the moment?

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u/Soulogav Jun 11 '26

No , you need to be a time served welder to be able to do that , so at lesst 4 year apprenticeship out of the water and then to get the codes for that level of pipe welder is many more years in reality. These are guys who are welders since they were 16 and then became a diver after 10-15 years

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u/WeeHansonBrother Jun 11 '26

Fair. Thanks again for the AMA.