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A tender on a Mississippi River job said my dive hose looked "half drowned" and it stuck with me
I was working a pipeline crossing near Baton Rouge about three years back, and a tender named Ray, who had maybe twenty years on me at the time, watched me come up from a 60 foot bounce dive and just shook his head. He said my hose was trailing in a lazy loop behind me the whole descent, and that if the current had picked up even a little, that loop would have wrapped a piling before I ever felt a tug. I told him I had been diving that way for years with no trouble, and I meant it. He didn't argue with me, he just pulled a stencil out of his truck and painted two marks on my hose at the 30 and 50 foot points so I could see slack building in my own line. Two weeks later on a job in Mobile, I felt one of those marks pass my shoulder and stopped to fix my trim, and there was a half hitch forming around a riser clamp I never would have caught. Ray was not trying to bust my chops, he was trying to keep me from getting hurt, and it took me seeing it myself to admit he was right. I still think some old hands exaggerate about how tight is tight enough, but I was wrong about the direction of drift. Anybody else here ever get a dressing down from a tender that turned out to be the best lesson of the season?
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paulk8918d ago
Ray sounds like every guy who ever saved my ass without saying much.
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