A dive supervisor in Galveston taught me to trust the knots, not the chatter

Out on a pipeline job last spring, this old supervisor I barely knew walked over while I was double checking my lift bag rigging for the fifth time. He just squatted down, looked at the knot for a second, and said "that's not gonna hold if you keep tugging at it like a nervous puppy." He retied it, left one tail longer than I ever would, and walked off. It held a 300 pound spool piece no problem. I spent 10 years obsessing over extra wraps, turns out my tension was the issue, not the knot. Anyone else had an old hand give a tip that went against everything your cert course drilled into you?

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lindab4917d ago

The "nervous puppy" line got me, lmao. I had to read that twice because I've been that person, absolutely obsessing over wraps until my hands were sore. It's wild to think all that extra fuss was actually working against me, like my anxiety was making the knot worse. Ten years of cert courses telling you one thing, then one salty old dude flips it upside down with a single sentence. I bet your face went red when he said that, I know mine would have. That's the kind of lesson you never forget, even if it stings at the time.