Port of Hamburg, Joerg Butgen, diver

Joerg Otto Meier

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Joerg Butgen
Diver, 33 years
May 1995

»I put on my diving gear like other people put
on their underpants in the morning.«

Excerpt: The most important thing when you’re working under water is to keep calm. I put on my diving gear like other people put on their underpants in the morning. And that’s a terrific advantage. Anybody who starts working as a diver and who’s never had anything to do with it before has to get used to the water first of all. It’s a foreign element, after all. And you should never underestimate it. You can sometimes get pretty frightened under water. You have to be able to listen to your inner voice, ask yourself how you really feel. Are you strong enough to carry on? Especially if it’s strenuous work.

Under water you can run out of energy very quickly and then you collapse when you come up because you didn’t really notice it. Well, I’d already been through that kind of thing when I was a little boy; I can handle that sort of situation well. Or if the air supply is cut off, or water gets in, you’ve got to be prepared for things like that all the time. If you experience it for the first time in the dark water in the harbour, the risk is a lot higher. But I can handle it. It doesn’t bother me at all. Then I stay completely calm and open the other valves. And if I still don’t get any air, I start surfacing slowly along the air hose and the line. That’s why I always make sure they’re as free as possible.

A big safety factor for me is that I do a lot of sport and still go snorkelling in the sea. And if I don’t get any air when I’m 20 metres down, I just say to myself, You can get up without any equipment. What the hell! And if you seem to be caught, you have to find out as calmly as possible what you’re caught in and where. Then I have to ask myself if I’ve got any air. Is everything ok? As long as I’ve got air – maybe it’s only that water is getting into my suit – and filling it right up, then I say; Ok, you’ve got air, now see to it that you get yourself free. But if I’ve only got the air that’s left in the tank and I won’t be able to get free in the remaining time, then I have to cut the hose and the line and come up like that. So there are a few possibilities. But luckily nothing that bad has ever happened to me. ...