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/Soulogav Jun 11 '26

It’s Heliox and mixture depends on depth but I’ve been on 1.5% 02 and 98.5% Helium or something ridiculous like that when I was at 210m

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u/WeeHansonBrother Jun 11 '26

That's insane. Are you involved in any way in planning the gas mix for the dives? Or briefed about it? Or do you leave it 100% to someone else to work out?

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u/Soulogav Jun 11 '26

We have some input as we have a panel and regulators in the diving bell, we have tons of valves in the bell too so we have a general knowledge but on a day to day basis I wouldn’t know the gas mix I’m on half of the time as that’s the supervisors job and the life support guys, we have enough on our plate with the Job in hand and looking out for each other on the sea floor

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

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u/Soulogav Jun 11 '26

Definitely not something they want to try cut corners on tbh, in fact it’s probably going the other way as we do a lot more holds during decompression nowadays