When you start out thinking about diving for a living, you ultimately come to a fork within the road, as there are, simplistically speaking, two professional diving paths: the recreational side and the commercial one. A career in recreational diving is what most scuba divers fantasize about: tropical islands, white sand beaches and easy, shallow reefs exactly where persons fin around and marvel on the marine existence. Follow the commercial diving path, and you enter a entire world of underwater roughneckery. Scuba tanks are replaced with diving hats and surface supplied air. And clinging for the struts of an oil platform, laying down a bead with a welding torch even though fending off sharp-toothed creatures with the deep is just another day on the office.
Commercial diving is labor-intensive function that typically demands divers devote months at sea or abroad in less than appealing destinations. But the money’s great. A commercial diver fresh out of teaching can command close to 50 thou a year–not bad for somebody with out a college degree. And then there’s the lifestyle. Like commercial fishermen, the stereotypical commercial diver loads up on women and booze among 1 fat paycheck along with the up coming. “There’s a reason so a lot of of us marry strippers,” jokes Mike Oden, career advisor for the Ocean Corporation, one of the leading industrial diving schools in the country. “When you’re offshore for months at a time, you go a little crazy once you get back on land.”
Ten years ago, as an 18-year-old fresh away from higher school which has a penchant for underwater adventure, I stood at that fork inside road, simultaneously carrying out my divemaster training and putting my feelers out to industrial diving schools like the Ocean Corporation–which actively seek out impressionable youths in search of adventure along with a decent paycheck. Ultimately, I took the leisurely fork in the road and created my way being a dive instructor in some of the world’s most enviable diving destinations. But 1 query usually lingered in the back of my mind: What if?
And last August, the Ocean Corporation gave me, and 14 other average Joes from all walks of life, the opportunity to see how the other half lives. By signing up for the school’s annual Industrial Diving Knowledge (CDE), I got an all-access pass to spend a weekend in a industrial diver’s shoes–and diving hats–and answer that query for myself.
Nestled into the urban sprawl which is Houston, Texas, Ocean Corp has an unassuming appearance. From the front, its gate opens onto a little parking lot, and its façade gives every single impression that it really is just a single additional in the string of office buildings sharing its street. But when I crack the front door, a shelf of antiquated hats, spearguns and photographs greets me, and by the time I pop out the back again finish to the staging area, I’m transported to some far more familiar earth. Gear cages hold racks of drysuits patched with duct tape, banks of compressed air, scuba equipment and huge coils of hose. Plus a multilevel wooden platform behind the building is in which the magic happens. The 4.2-acre campus has six diving tanks–three eight-foot tanks for underwater welding and cutting training, two 12-foot tanks and also a 24-foot tank complete having a mock oil platform inside–not to mention a permanently installed medical decompression chamber, a portable decompression chamber including a 400-foot-rated lock-out diving bell.
Saturday morning, I join my fellow campmates, the student helpers plus a handful of Ocean Corp instructors. The schedule says we’ll commence off with an equipment orientation and safety meeting just before we “mobilize” on the 12-foot tank for some hat time, basically a meet and greet while using gear we’ll use throughout the weekend. Two by two, we each strap on a harness with an emergency-bailout scuba tank, pull the neck dam–a metal ring with a drysuit-style neoprene seal–over our heads, and lock the hats down previous to leaping into the tank. The hats weigh 30 to 40 pounds each and every, so a weight belt isn’t essential, and topside, the weight puts a fair bit of strain on my neck. Underwater, I’m only slightly negative, albeit top heavy, and I hop my way around the tank like an astronaut on the moon, obtaining a really feel for your flow adjustment valves as well as the less-than-clear communication technique before running an out-of-air drill.
That afternoon is devoted to a mock work-dive scenario. I gear up around the edge of the 24-foot tank with my dive buddy, and when we’re both ready to go, we make the leap and grab the down lines running towards bottom. Using a loop of rope around one hand, I use the other to force the hat in and up on my face, which crams the hat’s nose plug into my nostrils so I can equalize as I descend. As soon as I touch down within the bottom from the tank, my primary job is making the switch from nitrox to mixed gas–a helium, nitrogen and oxygen mixture. “Crank your free of charge flow, and count to 20,” says the voice in my hat. “One, two..
.breathe..
.3, four..
.breathe,” I respond. By about 14, my voice takes about the twangy, high-pitched character that lets my tenders know the mixed gas is flowing, and I turn to make my way hand-over-hand, low-gravity style, about 10 feet up the mock oil platform to the pipe flange we’re here to assemble.
It really is a relatively complex procedure requiring lift bag maneuvers and indirect communication with my work partner–we can’t talk directly, but rather speak via the tenders within the surface–made even much more challenging by the limited field of vision offered from the hat’s faceplate. After aboutಏ minutes, we finish the task, put our resources back again within the basket hanging from the surface and I return to my down line to switch more than to nitrox and make my controlled ascent.
Since it’s a simulated operate dive, we feign a lengthy, deep bottom time, and when we get out of the water, we have five minutes to strip down and climb into the decompression chamber just before our blood starts to “boil.” It is 100-plus degrees here in Houston, and a cramped metal tube baking in the summer sun doesn’t look terribly inviting. But we climb in and make our way over the locks program in the main chamber where we’re taken down to 50 feet and slowly brought back again up to sea level over about 15 minutes. Amply decompressed, we scramble away from the chamber–it feels a bit like climbing out of pressure cooker–and go as a result of a quick neurological evaluation just before the instructors give us the all clear.
While using the next day comes the highlight from the weekend, the moment many of us inside camp have been waiting for: Underwater cutting and welding. The cutting part uses a thermic rod–ignited by direct latest and fueled by liquid oxygen–that burns atņ,500 degrees and cuts by means of damn near anything. The welding, in terms of the equipment and basic concept, is similar to welding above water, but undertaking it underwater needs different techniques and an added protection concern–namely avoiding the electric existing running from the water. Les Joiner, the former president of Ocean Corp, is on website nowadays to take us with the two processes. “Like every thing else in this industry, the safety rules for underwater welding and cutting are written in blood,” Joiner says in the commence of his safety briefing. “And all you have to do to avoid electric shock is not uncover yourself among the ground plus the lead. If you get involving where the plate’s grounded along with the end of this torch, you’ll uncover out why they call it direct recent.” It really is a straightforward rule. As lengthy as we don’t walk to the other side on the tank or point the end from the torch toward our bodies, there’s no true risk of shock.
1st, I hop to the cutting tank. A length of pipe stands upright on the cutting table. I pull the handle to let the oxygen flow, spark the torch and pierce the solid steel pipe using the tip of the rod. It slides through like the proverbial hot knife via butter. Which has a slight sawing motion, I attempt to cut a straight line across the pipe, but the result is a jagged mess. The welding process is equally basic to enact, but equally difficult to complete with any dexterity. Pulling the torch along what I hope is often a straight line with 1 hand, although holding the bucket bouncing on my head while using the other and trying to see anything over the billowing bubbles of smoke plus the one- by three-inch welding lens duct taped to my mask, I gain immense appreciation for that focus and skill this school’s students master on their way with the program. And when I get away from the welding tank and head with the showers, I realize my query has been answered.
Everything we’ve done this weekend is set up in the controlled environment so we can get a really feel for your deliver the results these divers do each and every day devoid of experiencing the true danger and desolation of a genuine working situation. But I get the picture. These divers are essentially living equipment employed through the massive machines–usually the oil business–that they function for. They hang like bait on a hook inside open ocean, power equipment in hand, carrying out work that’s not only unsafe in and of itself, but also simply because of its depth and offshore location. The instructors who’ve been showing us the ropes are survivors. They beat the odds inside a dangerous planet and came out the other side to train the up coming generation, but the hardened looks on their faces plus the gruff tones in their voices tell more about this life than any words could do. It is a career for that young. It is a work for the brave, maybe even the stupid. It is not the career for me. But for divers who have that same question gnawing from the backs of their heads, Ocean Corp is alone in the industrial diving world as a place that provides this camp to let people come across that answer for themselves.
The Ocean Corporation is one with the world’s leading industrial diving facilities. It can be an accredited technical school that offers a variety of diver and nondiver instruction. The Industrial Diving Experience is offered annually in the beginning of August. Participants must be scuba-certified and 18 years or older; cost is $499 per person.
