Hot take: 300 hours in the chamber snuck up on me and I want to hear your counts

Holly Brown · 2026-10-26T00:10:03.975981+00:00

I logged my 300th hour in the decompression chamber last month and it honestly caught me off guard, because I stopped counting around 60 and just started signing the log sheet like it was routine. Here is what got me: those hours came from 14 separate dives over about 9 months, mostly short inspection work on a pier rehab down in Port Arthur, and I thought I was barely getting wet. I ran the numbers after a buddy asked me how much chamber time I had, and seeing 300 written out made me sit back and think about how fast a surface interval turns into a real number. What bothered me was not the 300 itself, it was that about 40 of those hours were unplanned, meaning somebody went down a little hot and needed a table. I started keeping my own tally on the fridge after that (the wife thinks I am nuts) and it made me a lot more careful about ascent rates and my own bottom times. Has anyone else actually tracked their chamber hours long term, and did it change how you bid or plan a job?

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Hot take: 300 hours in the chamber snuck up on me and I want to hear your counts | Commercial Divers - The Community Guide