Oceaneer: From the Bottom of the Sea to the Boardroom

By Mike Hughes

What do the world's richest man, the Mafia, an astrologer, the world's heavyweight wrestling champion, and the world's oldest bank robber have in common?

They are all entwined in the early history of what is now the world's largest underwater service company - OCEANEERING INTERNATIONAL, INC.

This memoir by Mike Hughes recounts his journey from commercial diver to Chairman of Oceaneering International, Inc. and the evolution of that business into the Oceaneering of today.

Mike Hughes is a founder of Oceaneering International, Inc.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9780996402705

Book preview

Oceaneer

From the Bottom of the Sea

to the Board Room

Mike Hughes

Copyright © 2015 D. Michael Hughes

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

FOREWORD

IMAGES

CHAD

FIRST DIVE

TVA

WHEELER DAM

HALES BAR DAM

GRADUATION

MORGAN CITY

BAD DEBT

KERR MCGEE

GULF COAST DIVING SERVICE

THE FIRST HELIUM DIVES

THE BLUE WATER RIG

WORLD WIDE DIVERS

SMITTY

HURRICANES AND BLOWOUTS

GULF OIL BLOWOUT

TROUBLE WITH FISH

GRISLY WORK

RISKY BUSINESS

BURIED ALIVE

GROWING THE BUSINESS

TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS UNDERWATER

WORLD WIDE DIVERS AND CAL DIVE

MERGER PROPOSAL

DIVCON

DEEP SIX

LAVAN ISLAND

DEEP WORK 1000

PHIL, JIM, AND WASP

TRAVELS WITH LAD

PUBLIC OFFERING

SALVAGE WORK

MOVE TO SANTA BARBARA

PROXY CONTEST

REPLACING THE CEO

ED WARDWELL

WES ROGERS

JOHN HUFF

EPILOGUE

CONCLUSION

FOREWORD

What does the world’s richest man, the Mafia, an astrologer, the world’s heavyweight wrestling champion, and the world’s oldest bank robber have in common? They are all part of the early history of Oceaneering.

This is not a complete history of Oceaneering. Although it includes accounts of many things that happened in Oceaneering during the first 15 years or so, it does not attempt to provide the reader with a complete history of that period. I also acknowledge that this is written from my perspective and that others may have seen the same accounts differently.

Many people who made significant contributions to the growth of the company during that period are not mentioned at all. This is not a deliberate attempt on my part to ignore them; it is just the result of trying to keep the length of this book under control. Those people deserve to have their contributions remembered, and I hope someone will produce a definitive history of Oceaneering that will include them.

In part, these are my memoirs. All divers have their stories. They usually include the phrase and there I was at …… feet, which I have tried to avoid.

I encountered some unique characters, some of whom are incorporated into my stories. These guys made my life interesting, and I treasure their friendships. All of them have stories worth telling, and I hope they will.

None of us were heroes. We had just found a way to make a good income doing satisfying work alongside some interesting people.

My stories are no better than any others, but they are mine and recounting them brings back some very pleasant memories and a few sad ones. I hope you enjoy them.

IMAGES

Collapsed lock wall at Wheeler Dam – Tennessee River 1961

Collapsed lock wall at Wheeler Dam – Tennessee River 1961

Danny Liston and Mike Hughes at Hales Bar Dam ready to be lowered to the bottom of the Tennessee River for their “qualification test”.

Danny Liston and Mike Hughes at Hales Bar Dam ready to be lowered to the bottom of the Tennessee River for their qualification test

Mike Hughes checking mask before helium-oxygen dive.

Mike Hughes checking mask before helium-oxygen dive.

Norman Ketchman being congratulated by Norman Knudsen after surfacing from first helium-oxygen dive in the Gulf of Mexico. Mike Hughes was s

Norman Ketchman being congratulated by Norman Knudsen after surfacing from first helium-oxygen dive in the Gulf of Mexico. Mike Hughes was standby diver and is in the background.

Mike and Johnny standing in front of the carport at 21 Neptune Street, Bayou Vista, La which served as my home and the first “headquarters

Mike and Johnny standing in front of the carport at 21 Neptune Street, Bayou Vista, La which served as my home and the first headquarters for World Wide Divers. The organizational meeting was held at this house in 1964.

The feed store building on old highway 90 in Bayou Vista which served as office and workshop for World Wide Divers from 1965 to 1970.

The feed store building on old highway 90 in Bayou Vista which served as office and workshop for World Wide Divers from 1965 to 1970.

Johnny and Mike standing by the Cessna 180 which served as the “company plane”

Johnny and Mike standing by the Cessna 180 which served as the company plane

Johnny operating diver held sonar unit to locate the “pinger” in the foreground. This was the first acoustic location device ever deploy

Johnny operating diver held sonar unit to locate the pinger in the foreground. This was the first acoustic location device ever deployed in an oilfield application.

Two “teacup” decompression chambers loaded in Johnny’s truck.

Two teacup decompression chambers loaded in Johnny’s truck.

The “teacup” chamber which could be loaded on small offshore diving boats due to its portability and small size. It was cramped and unco

The teacup chamber which could be loaded on small offshore diving boats due to its portability and small size. It was cramped and uncomfortable but saved many divers from the bends.

Mike Hughes dressed in diving gear typical of the Gulf of Mexico. The Desco mask was the standard.

Mike Hughes dressed in diving gear typical of the Gulf of Mexico. The Desco mask was the standard.

Bob Ratcliffe and Lad Handelman on the CUSS 1 drilling rig

Bob Ratcliffe and Lad Handelman on the CUSS 1 drilling rig

Blowout at Gulf Oil block 117 West Delta.

Blowout at Gulf Oil block 117 West Delta

Dinner following the first Oceaneering board of directors meeting. Left to right – Lad Handelman, Phil Nuytten, Ian Cumming, Johnny Johnso

Dinner following the first Oceaneering board of directors meeting. Left to right – Lad Handelman, Phil Nuytten, Ian Cumming, Johnny Johnson, (wife) Jodie Johnson, Steve Halprin, Martha Culbertson, John Culbertson. Picture taken by author.

Directors group in 1980 – left to right: Steve Halprin, Wes Rogers (standing), Bruce Gilman (seated in front), Ed Wardwell, David Hooker,

Directors group in 1980 – left to right: Steve Halprin, Wes Rogers (standing), Bruce Gilman (seated in front), Ed Wardwell, David Hooker, Bob Etnyre, Chuck Evans, Mike Hughes, and Ned Broun.

Fuse recovered by Oceaneering divers from the wreck of the Lusitania. Proof that the ship was carrying war materials.

Fuse recovered by Oceaneering divers from the wreck of the Lusitania. Proof that the ship was carrying war materials.

Ship’s bell recovered from the bridge of the Lusitania.

Ship’s bell recovered from the bridge of the Lusitania.

Founders of World Wide Divers –Mike Hughes, Johnny Johnson, James Smith and Norman Ketchman.

Founders of World Wide Divers –Mike Hughes, Johnny Johnson, James Smith and Norman Ketchman.

Founders of Oceaneering International, Inc. Left to right: Gene Handelman, Kevin Lengyel, Mike Hughes, Lad Handelman (seated), Bob Ratcliffe

Founders of Oceaneering International, Inc. Left to right: Gene Handelman, Kevin Lengyel, Mike Hughes, Lad Handelman (seated), Bob Ratcliffe, Johnny Johnson, and Phil Nuytten.

CHAD

I’m sorry, Mike. I really screwed up. And then he died. With three of us in the decompression chamber, there was only enough room for one of us to lie down, so I had been sitting upright cradling him in my arms. Dr. Thibadeaux reached over, felt his pulse, looked at me, and said, he’s gone.

To save heartache for his family in case they should ever read this, I’ll call him Chad. He walked through the door of our little office in Bayou Vista and applied for a job as a tender. He had just graduated from a West Coast diving school and hoped for a chance to break in as a diver as soon as possible.

Chad was the all American boy. His father was the mayor of a large midwestern city. He had been an athlete in high school and college. Unlike some of the guys who came through our doors, he was clean cut and always had a smile on his face. His dream was to become a commercial diver, so I hired him and he worked for a few months as a tender on several jobs.

Gulf Oil Company had a platform that had been severely damaged by hurricane Betsy, and we were hired to secure the wells by pumping cement into them before the platform was salvaged. The platform had been smashed by the storm, and the whole superstructure was missing. Wellheads that had originally been located thirty feet above the water were now about sixty feet deep. Our job was to hook up hoses from cement pumps on the surface to each wellhead so the wells could be killed permanently.

We had a crew of ten divers divided into two twelve-hour shifts. I supervised one crew and Johnny Speers took the other. We worked around the clock.

Asleep in my bunk, I was awakened by one of the divers from the other shift with something’s wrong—you need to come on deck. I arrived to find everyone crowded around our decompression chamber. It was a typical double-lock chamber—about twelve feet long with an outer lock about four feet long and an inner lock of eight feet. It was forty-eight inches in diameter—not large enough to stand up in.

The diver operating the chamber told me Speers is inside with Chad. Following standard bends treatment protocol, he had pressurized them to sixty feet and had been holding them there for about ten minutes. I entered the outer lock and had them pressurize me to the same depth so I could lock into the main chamber.

When I entered, Chad was semiconscious and doubled over in pain; Johnny was doing what he could to help him. Johnny told me what had happened.

A diver was working on a wellhead at sixty feet and had indicated he needed a wrench. The water was so clear you could see the diver from the surface. The weather was calm.

Chad, who was working on deck as a tender, asked Johnny if he could make a dive to deliver the wrench. Standard procedure for getting the wrench to the diver would be to just tie it off to his hose and let the diver pull the hose down to retrieve the wrench. However, knowing Chad’s background of diving school training, Johnny decided that this was the perfect time for Chad to break out as a diver. The dive should be quick and easy.

Chad strapped on a hose, weight belt, and Desco mask and jumped over the side with the wrench in his hand. Johnny watched as he descended to the diver’s location, handed him the wrench, and then suddenly returned to the surface at a high rate of ascent. When he surfaced, Johnny could tell Chad was in trouble.

Chad was pulled from the water and Johnny accompanied him into the chamber, where they were immediately pressurized to the sixty-foot treatment depth. This was absolutely the proper response to the situation. That is when I arrived on deck and locked into the chamber.

Johnny and I mulled over the possibilities and could reach only one conclusion: Chad had an embolism. That results from the diver holding his breath as he ascends from depth. His lungs are filled with air at a pressure equivalent to the surrounding water pressure. At sixty feet, the pressure is three times as great as at the surface, so the amount of air in the lungs is three times as much. It is just compressed to one third its volume at the surface. As the diver ascends, the air expands. If the diver breathes normally and exhales sufficiently, the lungs don’t overexpand. If he holds his breath, the lungs expand until they rupture. Air bubbles are injected into the blood vessels and a large pocket of air can form in the chest cavity outside the lungs. This pocket is a mediastinal emphysema, and it impairs normal heart expansion and blood circulation.

A mantra during diving training is do not hold your breath as you ascend. However, if the diver panics for any reason, it is a natural inclination to not exhale. Subsequent examination of Chad’s equipment did not show any signs of malfunction, although it is possible that he experienced some mask flooding if his mask somehow became dislodged. Whatever the reason, he had all the symptoms of massive mediastinal emphysema—severe chest pain, difficulty breathing, and signs of poor blood circulation.

Compression to sixty feet had not resulted in any significant relief. The only option was to compress to a greater depth and hope that the additional compression would reduce the size of the bubble enough to allow some relief for his heart function. The U. S. Navy diving manual included a Table 4 – Extreme Exposure treatment table that I decided to try next.

I told Johnny to lock out of the chamber and take charge of things on the deck and that I would stay in the chamber with Chad. As soon as Johnny locked out, I told him to compress us to 165 feet, which would put us on a treatment table requiring forty hours of decompression. This was the most severe treatment schedule in the U. S. Navy Diving Manual. We reached 165 feet as prescribed by the treatment table and it did not seem to provide much relief for Chad. He was still basically unresponsive and in a lot of pain.

After a few minutes at that depth, I made a very difficult decision. We would try compressing to greater depth. I told them to just keep compressing us until we reached a depth of 220 feet. We were entering unknown territory. Given the time we had spent at sixty feet and the time it might take for Chad to get relief at 220 feet, I knew that there was no prescribed decompression table for returning from that depth other than some untested procedures for air saturation decompression. Just prior to this, the U. S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had done some limited testing of a decompression profile that would limit our ascent rate to four feet per hour. Even then, there was not much confidence we could decompress without contracting the bends.

I was committing us to at least three days of decompression in a chamber that was uncomfortable for even a few hours and not equipped with any form of climate control or place to lie down other than on the floor grating. It seemed the only chance to save Chad.

I also told the surface crew to see if they could locate a physician willing to join me in the chamber as well as a barge nearby with a supply of helium cylinders.

The temperature in the chamber was stifling. It was summer in the Gulf of Mexico. The heat of compression added to the temperature. I told the surface crew to start running water over the outside of the chamber to provide some cooling and to locate a block of ice they could lock into the chamber for additional cooling. The chamber was equipped with a small medical lock which was large enough to allow supply of some food and water.

When the crew reported a futile attempt to locate one of our usual diving physicians, I recalled a recent discussion with a doctor in Morgan City named Verne Thibodeaux who had expressed an interest in becoming involved in diving medicine. He was contacted and agreed to fly out. I am sure his idea of assisting did not anticipate spending several days in a small chamber.

Chad and I remained at 220 feet for several hours before Dr. Thibodeaux arrived. Briefed on the situation, he did not hesitate to join us in the chamber. I doubt he knew what he was committing to, but it was a brave thing to do. When he was pressurized to bottom depth, he suffered severe symptoms of nitrogen narcosis (rapture of the deep). He was pretty much out of it for the first several minutes, but he eventually became more lucid. When I thought he was capable of helping, I gave him the background on the incident. Chad was still semiconscious and in considerable pain. All the compression we had done had not seemed to provide him with much relief.

Dr. Thibodeaux examined him and concluded that he had incurred an embolism that resulted in severe mediastinal emphysema, a large bubble of air that had entered his chest cavity when his lungs ruptured during the rapid ascent. The only way to actually remove the bubble was by injecting a long hypodermic needle into Chad’s chest and withdrawing the air with the syringe. This can be a relatively safe procedure if you have x-ray capability to precisely locate the bubble. That was obviously not an option for us. Barring that, it would be foolishly risky to attempt the procedure with the likelihood that the needle could just as easily penetrate Chad’s heart. The only option was to remain at depth and hope the bubble would slowly dissipate into Chad’s vascular system. Very gradual decompression might actually help that process.

Some pure helium gas cylinders had been located on another diving job and the surface crew began a slow injection into the chamber. This had the beneficial effect of reducing the heat slightly and the narcotic effect of the nitrogen in the air. It also put us in a totally unknown situation regarding proper decompression procedures. We had no way of testing the gas mixture to determine the composition of nitrogen, helium, and oxygen. The oxygen level was at least high enough to eventually create severe oxygen toxicity that could cause all of us to suffer seizures similar to an epileptic fit. We had no choice but to begin decompression.

All we could do was fall back on uncertain air saturation decompression techniques that had not been adequately tested. One way or another, we had to get back to the surface, so we began our long trip back at the rate of four feet each hour.

As we slowly decompressed, Chad’s condition did not change much. He was incoherent and in pain. Administration of pain medication was out of the question. Virtually no testing had been done on medications at pressure and the few tests that had been conducted indicated that the effect was amplified by the pressure. A dosage that would provide appropriate relief at surface pressure might actually be fatal at depth.

To make him more comfortable, I sat upright on the chamber floor and let him lie down with his head in my lap.

At this point we had been under pressure for about 24 hours. Various body fluids—including perspiration, vomit, urine, and water from the melting block of ice—had accumulated under the chamber floor grating. A drain valve allowed the venting of the accumulated fluids, which produced an overwhelming stench outside the chamber. Inside the chamber, we were almost oblivious to the smell. The situation worsened as decompression continued over the next several days.

After two days of decompression we had ascended to a depth of about sixty feet. Chad was clearly not responding to the treatment. That was when he died in my arms. I wept and held him closely. We told the surface crew that Chad was gone and they should make preparation to lock his body out of the chamber. Dr. Thibodeaux helped me move him into the outer lock and we closed the inner door to allow the surface crew to release the pressure in the outer lock.

When the outer lock was vented to surface pressure, Chad’s body was lifted out. The massive amount of dissolved gases in his body tissues had expanded as the body was decompressed, causing massive swelling. The last view I had through the viewport was of what had been a great looking young man being carried away, his body grotesquely disfigured. It was a sight I can never forget.

Dr. Thibodeaux and I continued to decompress. From a depth of about thirty feet, I noticed him rubbing his knees. I asked him if he was bent and he assured me he was OK. That continued until, several hours later, we had reached a depth of fifteen feet, only about four hours from the surface. At that point, he was clearly in pain. He pulled a syringe out of his medical kit and withdrew a full syringe of fluid from a vial. He jabbed the needle into his knee.

I asked him what he was injecting and he replied that it was a pain killer. When I asked him if he had any idea how much was safe to administer under pressure, he pressed the plunger all the way and said, yeah, this much.

Now I had a dilemma. He was clearly bent and the only proper treatment was recompression to sixty feet. With the effect of the pain killer, he could not even tell me when he had gotten relief. I told the surface to recompress us, knowing that I had just added another fifteen hours to our decompression time.

We finally reached the surface after a total of almost four days. We were a mess. To combat the heat, we had stripped down to our underwear. Our bodies had absorbed all of the odors in the chamber and nobody wanted to get close to us. We headed for the showers and