I’ve had the “diving bug” for most of my entire life.

When I was a kid, I watched a television show titled Sea Hunt, which was filmed in the kelp forests off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Sea Hunt is almost unbearably cheesy when viewed from an adult perspective, but as a kid I tried to never miss an episode.

As soon as I was old enough to get a scuba certification, I did. I worked doing construction in High School so I could buy my own equipment. I’ve been diving ever since.

I also looked into the professional diver trade schools. As Bryan notes, a lot of the work is on oil rigs, so its very boom bust. However, when it’s good, the pay is high. But during the busts (like now), you’re unemployed.

I got to know a couple of guys who were professional divers. They had started in the Navy and continued when they got out. What they described was a tough dangerous life. They told me about the 100 hour work weeks that Bryan describes. Oil companies are spending huge amounts of money when they are working on a rig and, as we found out with the Deep Water Horizon Rig that blew out in the Gulf of Mexico, they sometimes cut corners. This corner cutting can endanger the diver’s life.

Even without a rig company being careless about diver safety, there are unavoidable safety issue. One of these is decompression sickness (commonly called “the bends” in reference to the joint pain that it causes). Professional divers sometimes breath “air” composed of oxygen, helium and small amounts of nitrogen so they can stay underwater longer. Even with mixed gas, the inert gasses can can build up in the blood to dangerous levels and divers can suffer from the bends as a result. Because of work schedules, professional divers are often pushed close to the limit of what is safe.

Fortunately, in addition to being bitten by the diving bug, I was also bitten by the software bug. I became a computer scientist instead of a professional diver. Bryan sounds like a tough resourceful individual, but its still a hard life.