Commercial Diver's Story

Still frame memoirs of a Commercial Diver.

I left the Parachute Regiment in 1993 to become a commercial diver. I was told the only thing I needed to know before I started was that I didn’t freak out or burst blood vessels underwater. I did the course on Army time by joining blocks of leave together. I enjoyed the course, enjoyed my stay at Fort William in Scotland. With my diving certificate from the Health and Safety Executive in hand I left the familiarity of Army life and stood there at the gates of Civvie Street without a clue.

The first dive of my new career was a disaster. Not only did I drop the very object I’d been sent in to recover but while searching for it ran out of air.
  The job was to recover two clam cages that were bolted to the anchor chain of a navigational buoy so an environmental scientist could take monthly samples. We also had to clean the cages of unwanted marine growth before putting them back. A simple enough task: shallow, calm waters, I just needed to know how to use a spanner.
  I’d been in Hong Kong just a week. It was six months since the course, six months of failing to find a single days diving in the United Kingdom. Sixty-five CVs I’d sent out and had three replies stating they now had my name on file. Fat lot of good that did me, I wanted to show the world that this ex-paratrooper wasn’t going to be beaten down by civilian life. I got to Hong Kong with two hundred quid in my pocket and a commercial dive qualification that found me work within three days of my arrival.
  Complacency was what caused an appalling first dive. There was no lifeline attached to me, no down-line attached to the job, nor a messenger line to allow the people on board to assist in hauling up the cages, it was just a matter of, ‘go in and get it.’ So with the boat tied to the buoy I jumped in, swam down the chain, links a foot long, unbolted the first cage and brought it to the surface. There are a lot of ‘what ifs’ at this point, mainly what if I’d had even a few dives under my belt. There was no rope thrown to me, and none of the ropes mentioned above to assist. I let go of the chain, was immediately taken by a worsening tide that had come out of nowhere, sank like a rock and made bottom in 40’ of water.
  I was naïve enough to think I could find the anchor block attached to the chain of the navigational buoy so stomped around in the seabed mud for a while until my cylinder was all but up. It is nil visibility in Hong Kong’s waters. I could not leave bottom carrying the cage so left it there and made the surface on my last breath of air.
  I cannot point the finger, my lack of experience being mostly to blame, but you’d have thought having done this task several times before they’d have known about tides, the weight of the cage and the use of lines. How had they done it previously? When you’re green you do as you’re told, thinking, the supervisor’s done it before; he must know what he’s doing.
  I received both a bollocking for not releasing my weight-belt instead of the cage, and also an apology because he had forgotten about the quickening tide. The supervisor sent me back in on a line to do a sweep search where he would signal me with pulls to let me know which way to go. I was to sweep from side to side as he slowly came up on the line so that I covered an arc over where he last saw my bubbles when I had the cage.
  I was only six months away from my commercial diver course at the Underwater Centre in Fort William, Scotland, and the instructor’s words were still fresh in my memory, ‘as a working diver you sometimes have to breathe a bottle down to its last to get the job done’. It was remembering this in the nil visibility that my hand finally came down on the cage just as my cheeks sucked in because my bottle was empty. There was no immediate panic, but it was building quickly as I seemed to take forever to reach the surface. Again my inexperience played a part in this because instead of just kicking for the surface I was being smart – playing it cool even though by then I was holding my breath – and had signalled with four pulls that I was coming up. This meant the supervisor – it was only a two-man team – was pulling me through the water towards the boat at an angle prolonging my ascent.
  When I left the Parachute Regiment to do the commercial diving course I was a full corporal and not used to messing things up so badly. Once the samples were taken and the cages were cleaned the supervisor started to get dressed in to put the cage back. I was supposed to do this and told him I wanted to finish it off. It had got me down but it would not beat me. I was still within my decompression limits. We set up the ropes we should have used in the first place, I dived and had no problems reinstalling the cage.
  After a subdued lunch the supervisor dived to recover the second cage.
  The supervisor and I were still talking at the end of the day and he said I’d done well to get back in the water a third time, shown a bit of grit. I also worked for that company again so it didn’t do my prospects too much harm. It seems such a minor thing now compared to what I have done since, but never the less it was the slap in the face of things to come. I’d done one day’s work, one none too successful, and was having doubts about my leaving the Paras.

The second bit of colour in an otherwise dull career was the sight of 10m of my yellow air hose wrapped so tightly behind a boat’s propeller the heat had moulded it together into one lump.
  We were live boating (diving with the prop still turning to keep the dive vessel in position) to measure the gaps between newly installed pre-cast concrete units. They would eventually become a seawater intake for a pumping station on an island. We were using surface supplied air where the diver is on the end of an umbilical and fed air from a low-pressure compressor. The umbilical is made up of four lines all neatly taped together: a main air hose, a pneumofathometer hose that measures depth, the communications cable and a strengthening rope. The umbilical is connected to the diver by a karabiner. It was only shallow at less than 10’ so we weren’t bothering with bail out bottles (a basic SCUBA cylinder attached to the diver’s hat; should his main air stop a knob on the side of the hat opens the line from the bottle. A non-return valve stops the bottle’s air going down the umbilical and away from the diver).
  It was getting towards the end of the dive when I felt a couple of light tugs on the umbilical immediately followed by a series of very sharp yanks in quick succession that pulled me off the job. My air was gone and the full-face mask was sucked to my head by my attempts to get a breath. I screamed the supervisor’s name, I don’t know why and probably sounded like a girl, but I was getting dragged towards a spinning propeller. The tugging stopped almost as soon as it had started and I was able to kick to the surface and pulled off my hat. The heat from the sun and the fresh air had never felt so good.
  It had all happened so quickly I don’t think I really knew what was happening until I started paddling towards the boat and saw where my umbilical was leading.
  The dive vessel, if you can really call it that, was one of Hong Kong’s famous sampans. A six meter long, snub-nosed wooden boat with disused car tyres tied along both sides. Half forward deck space and half aft cabin where the driver sits. Do-Tim’s sampan had no instrumentation, save his wristwatch. To start her he pulled a rope that led to the engine below and to steer he sat beside a tiller, a pole connected directly to the rudder post. It had two levers: one for the two gears, forward and reverse, and the other was the throttle. We used to joke Do-Tim had lived on his sampan so long if he ever went ashore he would scuttle along sideways like a crab. Do-Tim was at one with his boat. Sitting there barefoot he could feel the slightest abnormality through the tiller and through the floor of the vessel, and long before any of us knew anything was wrong. He once sailed us in thick fog for six kilometres in a straight line and when land finally appeared we were faced with our destination. He did this with no land or reference points to guide him and like I say no instruments. It was this understanding, this being as one, the living with his sampan that stopped me getting any closer to the propeller. He had felt the difference instantly, had throttled back and cut his engines before I was anywhere near my end.
  The linesman who had been tending my umbilical apologised, he was affected worse than me, his mistake really shook him up. I didn’t have much to say to him, said something like I wasn’t impressed but we have learned a lesson and not to let it happen again. Not all Paras are thugs you know. We remain friends.
  When the propeller was cleared of my fouled umbilical we realised the extent of what had happened. In that short space of time from the blades catching the hose until Do-Tim – did I mention he’s a fabulous guy – cut his engine 10m of my hose had been pulled in. Pulled in so tightly the coils of hose had superheated and fused the plastic material together.
  It had cut my air off in an instant, I have always worn a bail out bottle since that day, however shallow – mind you on that occasion it would not have helped me fending off a spinning prop. I was only glad the communications cable had broken and the supervisor had not heard me scream his name like a girl.

A similar incident happened about a year later.
  I was on a job installing 200ton concrete pipeline units, that was to be a sewage outfall. During one dive I lost my air. We were diving from a derrick lighter: a barge with a hold and no form of propulsion, a crane at one end and some minor living quarters at the other. We were diving on surface supplied air and decompression was carried out inside a decompression chamber using pure oxygen.
  There’s not a lot to say really, I can’t even remember what task I had on that dive. One minute I was doing whatever I was doing then the next the Kirby Morgan band mask had sucked to my face because the air had gone. Immediately I turned the knob that allowed the bail-out bottle’s air to flow to the hat. My air had disappeared instantly, there had been no short breaths or air pressure reduction, one minute I had air and the next breath it was gone.
  I called the supervisor but got no answer. I could feel the slack had been taken from my umbilical, that a linesman was now holding it, and was given four pulls, the signal to ascend. A went back to where the down-line was tied, gave a single pull on the umbilical to say I was ready to leave bottom and was replied with another telling me to leave bottom.
  On deck the team showed me where my umbilical had travelled through a running wheel that guides the crane wires along the deck. It had severed the air hose and crimped the communication cable. They repaired the damage, got me dressed back in and I finished my dive.
  All in a days work; glad it’s not every day. In fairness to the industry, the safety standards and quality of equipment used, this has been the only time I have needed to bail out, with the exception of that one propeller getting cuddly with my hose.

It was shortly after that incident I found myself inside Hong Kong’s sewers.
  We called them sewers but the engineers’ drawings said they were Storm Water Drains. What the drawings didn’t show was the illegal feeds coming from the toilets of the many restaurants that lined some of the streets we were diving beneath. Don’t ask me how they were constructed; I just know they are there.
  The worst one I had to dive in was a solid blockage. The drain was 2m square, so you could stand up in it but couldn’t touch both sides at once with your arms outstretched, and fifty meters long. Not only was there toilet waste coming down but the restaurant refuse was a major factor causing the blockage. The amount of oil thrown down the drains was outrageous. And of course it floats, then solidifies, then catches all the toilet garbage and it builds and builds and builds. The waste material was a combination of many things, all matted together in a mesh of human hair. Solidified cooking fats made up the bulk of it, and amongst that was the garbage, plastic bags, toothpicks, kebab sticks, chop sticks, condoms, sanitary towels and my all time favourite the syringe. So the dive was like this: I was in blacker than black water, faced with a 2m square wall of solid waste and a pump nozzle under my arm that was meant to suck it up. The pump was overly powerful so it had to be controlled, you couldn’t just let it go because it would worm it’s way into the gunk and get stuck. The best way to do it was to squeeze your hands into this wall of slime, the consistency of lard, and break out lumps feeding that into the nozzle head. A friend of mine came across a dead dog that wouldn’t fit into the pump. First the legs had to be broken off then the head.
  Civils diving most of the time is carried out at somewhat of a frenetic pace, time being all-important, divers working like bulls in china shops. In these sewers however, surrounded by so many horrible things willing to rip holes in you and your suit, the pace of our diving slowed considerably.
  My very first dive into this soup was to retrieve a length of the pump hose. I was to take a rope’s end down the culvert, attach it somewhere and the on site excavator would use its arm to haul up on the other end. It couldn’t be pulled by hand because of the stickiness inside the sewer. It was to be done in stages so that the lengths of hose could be uncoupled. I was on my fifth trip, worming my way through the slime, when I felt trickles of water entering the hat at my temples. I instantly smelt the fetid rot and sickly waste of the surrounding environment. I stopped to pull up the rubber straps but by then everything was so greasy they just slid back through the buckles. I explained my predicament to the supervisor with a hand over the visor keeping the mask on my head. I was already 30m up the tunnel, the boss told me to tie the rope’s end where I was and then make my way back. Again this was a 2m square tunnel that had been blocked solid. The cleaning hadn’t been done that well and a lot of the muck was still covering the walls, floor and ceiling that reduced the square tunnel to a round wormhole about 1m across. I had to tie the knot with one hand, and it had to be a good one so not to slip on the greasy hose. I found my way out and still had my hand to the visor keeping the mask in place when I was stood in the road being washed down, pedestrians holding their noses as they went by.
  I have since learnt the error of my ways. We dived in dry suits that exposed our necks and wrists, and had only a temporary seal around the outside of the mask. We were given no real chemical wash down facility, only got jabs after the work had been going on for some time. How no one got hurt or sick down there I’ll never know.
  I know one lad who went home after another gruelling day in the dirt. He’d had a good shower and was making love to his girlfriend, his shoulder length hair hanging in her face. Her nose curled up, she threw him off the bed and told him to go and wash it again. It was true the smell stayed beneath the fingernails for days.
  They were the worst of times... I don’t speak about those sewers to other divers I meet, they would think me mad. There was a few Westerners diving in Hong Kong at the time and whenever we get together to swing the lamp nowadays our memories always come back to those horrid sewers. What we did strengthened friendships as well as our own characters, we had some good times, made of it what we could, but you’ll not see me there again. Not for all the money in Hong Kong.

When the work in the sewers came to an end there was also a shortage of marine contracts overall in Hong Kong. Any doubts I’d had about leaving my beloved Parachute Regiment were quashed by a respectable bank account in the Channel Islands. The sewer work, as well as being extra pay for confined space, was based on working 12-hour shifts so over the course of a year or so most of us had earned a small fortune. But then all this work dried up. I was also faced with a huge tax bill. I was stupid enough to stay in Hong Kong waiting for the work and it never came. Companies dangling the carrot telling me there was a lot of work coming, but then they always say that. My savings all got brought back until I was almost down to dollar one, I had to make a decision: whether to try going offshore and do some work in the oil and gas industry.
  With my last dollars I flew to Singapore, had a medical with an HSE recognised diving doctor and sat a weeklong course in Offshore Survival. The only two things of interest on the course were the fire fighting and the helicopter rescue where a simulator dunks the students into a swimming pool and you wait for the thing to stop moving before unbuckling your seat belt and swimming from a window. The last exercise has the simulator turning upside-down, quite fun for me but intimidating for the stewards and chefs, some of whom could not swim.
  I was glad to pick up offshore work straight away because by then I’d acquired a wife and child, and needed money.
  Working offshore turned out to be far safer than the diving I’d done in Hong Kong. Everything is bigger offshore, the vessels, the tools, nuts, bolts, back up supplies and the budgets that are spent on everything. So where I was used to a medical pack being kept in something the size of a sandwich box, the offshore pack that came in three separate holdalls was quite a pleasant surprise. There were multiple spares for everything because at sea with no land in sight if something breaks you can hardly go to the nearest dealer or phone the office to drive one down to you. It does happen though, the unexpected requiring a chopper flight or transport on a supply vessel to get something out to you.
  Something else that is bigger offshore is the weather. In a field off the Southern rim of Vietnam our dive vessel went to carry out an inspection of an oil tanker, or rather an FPSO (Floating Production Storage and Offload) that sits in the field permanently. We arrived with the weather looking unfavourable for diving but sat it out hoping at some point to get calm weather. It worsened considerably that night and things needed to be tidied away on deck. The deck wasn’t just awash, the open stern was underwater as we rode the swells down into the trough of each wave. I was tying up some loose electrical lines when the boat lurched to port and I got hit with water up to my waist. I’ve never tied knots so quickly, finished securing the cables and went inside to dry off and retire to my bunk as the seasickness began to affect one and all. The skipper of the vessel reported 5m swells throwing us around like a toy.  We waited four weeks in those waves, the break in the weather never materialised and the job was eventually aborted.
  Another difference I experienced, not with all offshore work though, is the visibility. I’d only ever dived in the black murk of Hong Kong where silts from the Pearl River keep visibility to a few inches. Offshore in the gulf of Thailand I suddenly had 50m. It was on a gas platform sitting on a horizontal member at 165’ that I looked up and could see the soft marine growth dancing in the splash zone. I said to myself, now this is diving. I could see quite clearly the underside of the diving vessel, the diving basket waiting at my first in-water decompression stop of 80’ and all the various fishes that make these isolated platforms their home.
  The instructor at Fort William flashed in my memory again, I could remember him telling the class that dive time was money and we weren’t to stop work to take in the pretty marine life, not for a second, especially with the dives being videoed from our helmet mounted CCTV cameras that would later be viewed by the client, generally an oil company. In Hong Kong I had been swimming around in blissful ignorance, but now with 50m of visibility my head was snapping towards every little thing that made the slightest movement. I completely ignored the instructor’s words when, again at 165’, drilling a hole to flood a horizontal member, Nitrogen Narcosis making me giddy drunk, I was visited by a whale shark. It is the ocean’s biggest fish and this one swam directly toward me to see what I was doing in his kingdom. I was glad when he opened that meter wide jaw I saw no teeth. The supervisor asked me to lift my head to get a better shot from the camera. This baby 4m long whale shark kept me in its eye the whole time, turned away at the last moment, swept by majestically, and then was gone, leaving me to continue drilling my hole.
  Charlene the Whale Shark swam around Charlie platform the whole week we were there. It mostly stayed on the surface, mouth agape where the diver’s bubbles broke the surface. Our in-water decompression after each dive lasted over an hour and sat there in the diving stage all we had to do was watch Charlene. I’m afraid to say the novelty of this once in a lifetime encounter soon wore off.
  One experience I would like to share is diving on surface gas, again in the Gulf of Thailand and again to 165’. I did this work first on normal air (Nitrogen and Oxygen), and had guys onboard saying they weren’t affected by Nitrogen Narcosis. Liars I called them, I certainly felt heavy headed, not drunk as on alcohol though. My next offshore job was the very same task but using a gas mix of helium and oxygen. On my very first dive I could not believe it when the supervisor told me I was at 165’. It felt more like 10’. I was glad to have done these two jobs so close together and been able to see just how badly we are affected by ‘The Narcs’ while breathing normal air at depth. 
  I have enjoyed my limited amount of trips offshore, but do prefer to be at home with the wife and kids. I had done enough living away from civilisation in the Paras. Most of the vessels had E-mail, although it’s generally a work facility found on the bridge and in most cases its constant use is frowned upon. Some of the bigger vessels had internet rooms that are there for all to use. Sometimes there is a satellite phone but due to the cost not often. The food is generally quite good... However, I was on one dive vessel that had a Chinese crew and the food each mealtime was either greasy noodles or dusty rice with either tough-as-old-boots steak or pork chop. It’s always handy to carry a tub of multivitamins: scurvy and all. All the work I’ve done offshore has been done from dry vessels, meaning no alcohol, except this one Chinese vessel. While our dive team, British or Canadian, were abstaining, some finding it harder than others, the boat captain opened a bottle of beer for himself with his every evening meal. There is a four-letter expletive for the likes of him.
  Working time is generally a 12-hour shift, so after an evening meal and a shower there’s little time for recreation. Most commercial divers have a laptop for entertainment. Music, porn, games, movies and more porn are essential to while away the hours when the weather closes in and you’ve nothing to do on deck. Some work that requires the dive team to be on standby requires a varied amount of entertainment to be taken offshore. The laptop has saved the diver from a life of boredom and a fair amount of trouble; I’ve broken up full blown fights over games of chess because divers are bored and getting on each other’s nerves. I would have been lost in Vietnam’s rough seas without my lap top.
  Professional divers are also well known for their skills at unwinding from a lengthy trip, some of the getting ashore parties have been wild and in the offshore towns there is always an area of Go Go Bars. Personally I tend to get drunk quickly after having not a drop for so long and the other divers once or twice have either carried me back to my hotel room, or wheeled me there on a baggage trolley. I think I’ve already said enough about stepping ashore.

I have saved the darkest episode of my diving until last because it is the hardest to put into words. I did not want to open old wounds but this brief synopsis of my career would certainly not be complete without it. It involves my part in a fatality during a diving operation I was supervising. I exorcise no ghosts by reliving this. I will be granted no vindication.
  Just like with the clam cages it was a simple enough task: shallow, calm waters, the diver just needed to know how to use a spanner, and again it was using the dreaded SCUBA. It happened around the time we were finishing off all the sewer work. We were diving to change out sensors for a survey company, the task coming around every ten days or so. I dived that morning to change out the first sensor and out of my two colleagues the one who had carried out the same dive the previous week volunteered to do the second one again. Something happened to him while he was exchanging the sensors and he took that to his grave. We were keeping an eye on his bubbles and when they stopped I sent in the stand-by diver but it was too late. His body was found six days later eleven kilometres away from the dive site.
  We have speculated endlessly as to what could have happened, even dolphins that were present that day have been blamed. We will simply never know how a good friend lost his life in just 36’ of open water.
  I took from the Paras a policy of the safety of the men comes first, while still obeying orders, on this day I failed, failed to bring the boys back home. His death will be a burden for the rest of my days.
  When I met the divers who were on other jobs most didn’t blame me, only those who had to make themselves look good by relishing the faults in others said anything of an accusing nature.
  The main point of contention in this horrid affair is how could I have let him untie his lifeline. I faced the problem of supervising my peers, we were equals, all good friends and all had supervised each other at one point or another and so were very familiar, too familiar. Months earlier I had interrupted a diver telling another that tying his lifeline to the job was the easiest way to do it. They both looked at me as if I was stupid when I told them not to. They sulked away and obviously took no notice of me and continued to untie their rope lifelines every time we went on this job. I compromised by telling them if they wanted to tie it off they should take a bite in the rope and tie the loop off, still not ideal but at least the diver was still attached.
  The whole incident, especially the coroner’s inquest where the diver’s father got to ask me questions, made me want to leave diving, made me want to quit.
  Every time I go out for a drink now my first glass is always raised to him and the other divers I have known who have lost their lives doing what they love.

Do I still enjoy my diving? Yes I do. Will I still be going when I’m 50 years old? I hope not although there are still guys out there diving at that age and beyond. Am I glad I chose diving when I left the Paras? Yes and no. Diving has led me to Hong Kong where I met the wife, so I’m glad of that. I’ve also made some very good friends in the industry, but unfortunately have also lost a couple too. An Army friend enticed me into diving. It seemed an easy option because he had done all the research, knew what diving entailed and knew that the ten-week course at Fort Bill cost 5,000 pounds (this was in 1993). My friend had been lied to by one diver he’d met, been told about the guaranteed riches he was sure to make. Diving, it has turned out, is a constant search for the next job. It is keeping yourself connected with a circle of divers so you can find out where the work is. It comes in bursts when you’re inundated and droughts when there is nothing. At time of writing, in Asia at least, there is a lot of work if you want to go offshore. My finances have been up and down with work drying up and just when things were looking good with me and a company it went into liquidation.
  What else could I have chosen after the Paras? A Postman perhaps, or even a bus driver, or maybe working in the packing and dispatch department of a supermarket, I don’t think so. Do I have any regrets? One, like almost all commercial divers I have met: I wish I’d tried harder at school.