Introduction

Don was born he was born in Tampa Florida and is a Native American, nicked named by his some of his earlier diving associates the "Wild Indian". He was in the Korean War for the U.S., I don't recall what branch of Armed Forces. 

Don is flamboyant in that he was a good leader, divers and tenders loved him for his unique character. A funny showboat of a diver. He could get tenders to polish his helmet without a groan. On one job Don decided to build a divers log book. He got the whole crew, about a dozen divers and tenders to contribute words for his divers dictionary which was to be in the back of the log book. The dictionary was standard Inman, he normally kept words jotted down there so he would have the correct spelling for his dive reports. So there is the reason for a dictionary. The words were given meanings from the crew, not exactly Webster's version, more from a divers point of view. An example for the defination of diver is" Oilfield whipping boy", or the defination of a Tender is " A nesessary evil". I drew a few cartoons for it also and created a four aces logo. The book had guide lines or blanks to be filled out that would adhere to the United States Coast Guard Standards for Commercial Diving on each page. It also had Treatment Tables in the back. The log is long and thin (but thick) and could fit in the back pants pocket of a divers jeans while on deck. Don used an actual dive of mine as the sample page to show how it was to be filled out, I was honored. I helped Don in the completing the publishing when the shop owner started getting jealous of his wife's attraction to Don and his work. Don had a CB radio in those days where anybody who had one could converse on the highways. His handle was "Four Aces". 

Don used to drive a Caddillac convertible and he told us that he once had a girl friend that was a nun (I believe it). Don smoked cheap cigars and placed a tooth pick in the end. Another of his trade marks. You would find them cigars laying everywhere! I was on a Gas job that he was running on a Brown & Root Derrick Barge when it was time to dive, near mid-night, the seas had come up but Don wanted to squeeze a dive in anyway. This barge has a pedestal crane of 2,000 tons capacity and a very large walking deck crane. Well, our open bell handling system wasn't in place yet so Don opted to use the walking crane to handle the bell. We were diving two divers, one to tend the working diver from the bell while the main diver did a bottom survey of 300' diameter (150' from the bell in all directions) in the 240' foot of sea water Gulf of Mexico location. This two diver configuration was not the norm through my diving career, generally one was all ever down on surface gas diving. This was Dons way of spreading the wealth and it is a safer way to dive. Well, I was the diver who was to tend from the bell and I descended down the bell cable, after it had been lowered to depth near bottom. The bell had been purged by topside as was our procedure. Diver one, a good friend on mine from Montana, descended down a survey buoy rope not too far from the position of the bell. On descent I realized my comms were going in and out and I suggested we abort the dive. 

Don decided to keep it going and knock it out before the weather had us shut down out there, waiting on weather for days. This would put the monkey on the barges back and off ours for completing the work for the oil company. When I got to the bell (I had kept my friends' umbilical in my arms on the way down, he was descending just ahead of me 20' to 40' away on the buoy rope) I realized another Dilemma. The 3,000 pound bell was surging 15' to 20' like a rocket through the water. I had to hang on for dear life and tend my buddy in the process. I tried to communicate the problem but my comms were defective. I made it into the bell and expressed to topside the gravity of the situation by pulling my neck-dam out with my finger and using the comms in the bell but they opted to continue ( thinking it wouldn't take long to complete the dive). I exited the bell and got back on top, (I don't know how I had managed to keep up with my friends' umbilical) it felt like a wild bull ride for twenty, thirty minutes. I finally stopped worrying about dying and figured it was out of my control anyway and just rode it out. 
When my buddy had completed his work on bottom, topside told me to come up on him. I tried to communicate the importance of a carefully synchronized arrival for him to the surging bell but the message was lost or not heeded. As he came close to the bell it came down and hit him back to the bottom into the mud. He must have caught it near the end of its path down as anything else would have killed him. His second attempt was A OK. He made it to me where I had been tending him for a half a hour, wrapped around the bell cable and it's umbilical, surging up and then hanging on for dear life. 

When my friend got there he was as scared as I had been earlier before my exceptance of the situation. He grabbed on to me and the cable as if to tell me to hang on for dear life. I already was. Well, the dive was completed but the seas were getting worse and the surge was not going to permit us proper decompression. So they started us up on our exclusive tri-mix tables ( I helped test J&J tables as a guinea pig when I was a tender) and opted to skip the last stop or two and bring us out early and put us on a treatment table instead. I forgot to add one little detail, our umbilicals had become twisted around the bell cable odd infinitum times and we were hopelessly tangled around that cable. If the cable were to have broken ( and I have seen that happen), well it wouldn't have been good. You see the problems with using a long boom on a crane as we had done is that any movement of the barge accentuates the end of that boom way up there and that transfers the movement to what ever is attached to its cable. The barge itself was surging six feet but the end of the crane boom was moving fifteen to twenty feet ( as the boom was over a hundred feet long, angled out over the side). Another problem with it is, that the cable is the standard twist lay and not the non-twist type (which is the only way to go, on a bell with umbilical) and so with the weight of the bell untwisted the wire rope causing our umbilicals to become entangled around the cable many times. Well they brought us out of the water entangled to the max, holding on to one another, straddling the top of the bell and on too the deck of the barge some 10' above sea level. Tenders threw ladders in place and began to unravel us from our mess, in order to get us in the chamber ASAP (as soon as possible). Which they did. Once at depth, the outer lock was being brought down to us, it was Don, he was near as shaken as we had been. He apologized to us disappearing back into the outer lock. Like I said he was really shaken over it all. I really didn't sweat it, I felt a hell of a lot safer than I had for the previous couple of hours, although my friend was a little more ticked (temporarily) as he hadn't been dealing with it all as long as I. He had been unaware while on bottom all that I had been going through! Our decompression went OK and that is that story!

The breather bag is a little known Don Inman/John Galletti invention that added a unique facet to diving a breast-plate type helmet! Any breast-plate type of helmet could use one of these to allow the diver to dive using a wet suit instead of bolting to a dry suit! This was or is an advantage for the diver to eliminate inverted blow-ups which occur in a dry suit! It gives the diver the option of controlled assent without help! It allows the diver to be wet and cool in warmer waters, compared to wearing a dry suit! With nothing more than air it cushions the divers body, keeping the heavy breast-plate from cutting into one's shoulder's! It is without doubt the most comfortable way to dive a breast plate type helmet, if cold water isn't an issue! A unique helmet and Diver! 

It was used many years and Don attributes it to saving his life, at least once! A long story short, Don's umbilical became trapped at the same time the barge he was working from broke anchor! The sea's had come up and the anchor wires had snaped! He had to cut his own umbilical as it's limited supply was nearing it's end, the barge was drifting away fast! With only the air in his helmet and breather bag, he droped his weight belt and surfaced in the dark of night, only to survive alone while the barge drifted at a much faster pace! He used his one of a kind snorkle (made from a water heater valve) to breath fresh air every so often, while bobbing in the rough sea's for hours, until daylight finally came and help arrived! WOW! I love that story! Don's hat has a second stage regulator in the cavity just below the face plate that he used to dive on mixed gas. Did I mention the depth guage in the comm port? He could view his own depth from inside the hat (self dependent)! This same hat allmost cost him his life at least once that I know of! Oh well, that's another story and was more about a stunt than his diving apparatus!

The last dive

Don's last dive was made using his own home made helmet offshore from Louisiana. He was on a job for an oil company if I remember right and we were working on one of there Big derrick barges. These have a 2,000 ton pedestal crane on the stern and walking cranes on deck with 100 ton capacities. The job was to salvage a 20' diameter coke bottle shaped conductor that was lost by one of there barges previously in 177' of water. I do not recall the length of the casing but would just guess it to be 50' to 80' in length and I believe it was 1 3/4" thick ( it must have been over a 100 tons). The large casing had dropped to the bottom when, as it was being launched, the wires snapped from the 2,000 ton crane boom! The seas were a little too rough for the installation and the surge wa s too much for the crane to handle the load. The momentary slack and the sudden jolt of weight was too much for the wires. The huge casing went down and the boom went back over its own pedestal, (this is according to second hand information and what I can remember). The boom was there first salvage job at that point. I don't recall if our dive company was there during this episode but I believe that it was. No one was killed in this huge accident amazingly! Phase 2 of the oil companies' installation, was a salvage job. Don was supervisor and the job was to remove from the sea bottom the wrongly installed Coke Bottle Casing that had been dropped into the bottom and had stabbed it's self up right but at a pretty good angle. It was a lost cause to salvage it intact, as it would be too dangerous to try and pull it from the bottom, it would be asking for a repete performance on the huge crane boom . We had to burn it off at or a little below the mud line. 

I was on the start of the job and much of the burning but was pulled from the job to go to another when we had come in for weather. This is where the story of Don's last dive begins and told by myself from all that I had gleaned afterwards. Don had made a dive (he occasionally would make a dive to inspect the work or pull us through some pinch). While at the end of his water decompression at 40', Don decided to entertain the troops with one of his off the wall antics. He had taken off all his wet suit, weight belt, boots, well everything but his hat (with breather bag). He hadn't been thinking of the results because his buoyance was too much for him to control. I don't know his actual assent time but it was suppose to be one minute. I expect it was much faster. He climbed the ladder (if I recall the story correctly he needed help) and crossed the deck to the chamber with help. He was pressed down (I expect with a diver to help him) and was taken to treatment depth. He was in sever pain ( I can't say if he received any relief at depth). The office was notified and emergency procedures were informed. They flew mixed gas for the treatment out, by there large chopper. Our company sent a eighteen wheeler to Beaumont Texas where the barge would come in and doctors were going out while it was en route. It was a major undertaking to set up a decompression chamber to function like a saturation system. Once the barge got into the beach, the chamber was carefully loaded onto the 40' flat bed trailer, including compressors to constantly maintain the venting and holding the depth of Don and his aid inside. Bottles were put on the trailer along with a crew. The big truck then preceded down the highway with a load of gear and few personnel tending the chamber. It was a slow careful process I'm sure. They arrived at the Hospital in Beaumont to set up or continue there support of Don's emergency in the parking lot there. It was a week or more before Don would surface alive but only after he had to endure a pneumothorax and the relief of that lung crushing disease, which was performed by a doctor who had to puncture his side with out anesthesia, to allow the trapped air to escape and his lung to re-inflate. Afterwards, doctors told him he had a blood clot or bubble on the brain (I don't recall which) and that he would be foolish to dive again! I believe he may have supervised a while longer, my memory fails me there. He had always said "Being a diver was the best thing you could do but being a has been diver was better than to not have been a diver at all".

The author of this article would like to remain anonimous

Thanks to Mike Dorsey for contributing this article

• Last update: 16th January 2010