Hit my 500th dive last week and it caught me off guard

I've been doing commercial diving for about 7 years now, mostly inland work like bridge inspections and dam repairs. Last Thursday I was suiting up for a routine underwater weld inspection on a lock wall in Kentucky and my supervisor mentioned it was my 500th dive. I had no idea I was even close to that number, you know? It just snuck up on me because I never really kept count or anything. 500 dives means I've spent something like 2,000 hours underwater total, which is wild to think about. Every one of those dives had its own little surprise, from tangled lines to weird currents that came out of nowhere. I wonder if anyone else here hit a milestone like 100 or 1000 dives and it just kind of happened without planning?

2 comments

2 Comments

gray_schmidt815d ago

Hold up, you gotta fix your math there. 500 dives at an average of 4 hours per dive is 2,000 hours, but commercial dives are usually way shorter, like an hour or two max for most inland stuff. I've done a ton of bridge inspections and they're barely 45 minutes sometimes. Realistically you're probably closer to like 500-750 hours underwater, still a ton but not 2,000. I only noticed I hit 100 dives because I had a logbook from my first year that I finally filled up, felt kinda surreal flipping through all those old entries.

lopez.brooke15d ago

Totally changed my mind, I was way off on those dive times.