Making the transition from recreational to commercial diving
By Kim C. Halliday
Introduction
Recreational scuba diving is extremely popular and, while estimates on the exact number of recreational divers vary, there are believed to be between three and six million recreational SCUBA divers in the world. Yet despite the sport’s popularity, there are less than a few thousand commercial divers currently working in the industry worldwide.
The worlds of recreational scuba diving and commercial and deep sea diving could not be further removed from each other. Whereas the scuba diver can generally be found enjoying good visibility and interesting marine life in tropical locations that are often very conducive to diving, the commercial diver can often be found diving in very cold conditions in water that is more like murky soup than clear tropical water, often in situations that involve great personal risk.
That said, every year some scuba enthuses are propelled by their love of the ocean to explore the possibility of becoming a commercial diver, a transition that requires quite extreme retraining at a considerable expense.
Then again, in today’s gloomy economic climate commercial and deep sea diving are possibly one of the few industries that are poised to experience both a boom and a manpower shortage at the same time. The trend towards ‘in-water salvage’, for example, means that shipping companies can save millions by paying divers to do what used to require laying a ship up in a dry dock to accomplish. There is pressure on the commercial diving industry needs to expand sufficiently to accommodate this growing trend, which means there are now great opportunities out there for dive-minded individuals.
True, there is an element of danger associated with the job, which attracts a certain type of thrill seeking individual, but the diving industry also attracts a wide variety of people from many different cultural and professional backgrounds. Included in the ranks of trainee divers are ex-military personnel, university graduates, people who are looking for a career change, trade professionals, and people who have been sports divers and simply enjoy diving.
Whatever your background, if you want a career as a commercial diver you must:
- Be competent to undertake the commercial dive course.
- Hold a valid certificate of medical fitness to dive, after examination, by an approved doctor.
- Be a competent swimmer.
- Be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide whole numbers, decimals and fractions; calculate percentages; and transpose and solve simple formulae e.g. Gas Laws.
- Be able to understand and make written and verbal communications, and communicate easily with others. This is particularly important where trainees are of different nationalities.
- Be willing and able to work as part of a team.
What a commercial diver does
Needless to say, a commercial or deep sea diver does practically anything except gazing at pretty fish and nice coral reefs. A career in commercial diving can potentially take you into some of the murkiest places you can imagine, including inland lakes, harbours, streams fed by industrial waste outlets and even sewage pipes.
You may be required to inspect the foundations of a bridge, check the filter on a dam, or inspect the hull of a ship for corrosion. A good deal of the profession is focused on the oil and gas industry, so as a commercial diver you may be working off an oil rig or a dive support vessel (DSV) on the open ocean.
In many ways, a commercial diver is like an underwater construction worker. You could be called upon to display the kinds of skills found in the shore-based construction industry, and then some. Underwater welding and lancing, inspections and salvage, exploring, drilling and underwater testing, are all part of the job. Professional commercial divers often find their own preferred niche in the industry, choosing to specialise primarily in this area quickly gaining advancement and better pay grades as a result of this conscious specialisation.
Types of commercial diver
Some commercial divers are known as air divers, and will dive at depths of up to 30 meters using only normal air tanks comprising those normal gas mixtures found on the surface, which we all breathe. As a result, there is no need for long decompression times to allow the bodies of air divers to readjust to the surface atmosphere. It’s quick in and out work with only basic supervision.
A saturation (or SAT) diver, on the other hand, dives to enormous depths of 100 to 300 meters, where the pressures on the human body are almost unimaginable. To enable them to function consciously and healthily at these depths, the SAT diver breathes a complex mixture of gasses determined both by the depth and the health needs of the diver. Because oxygen is compressed greatly at these depths, in some cases the oxygen component of SAT divers’ air may only be at just 2%, with the rest made up of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other inert gases. This means that at great depths the SAT diver may feel as though the air mixture he or she is breathing is almost fluid-like. SAT divers are a very special breed of divers, many of whom come from military or naval dive schools.
Although women can and do have careers in commercial diving, there are, in fact, very few working in the industry. This is because commercial diving takes an extremely heavy toll on the human body. Commercial diving involves very hard manual work in extreme conditions and women are often not physically equipped to handle the heavy demands of the job. In addition, female commercial divers are required to live in a dive decompression chamber in a predominantly male environment for weeks on end while a project is in progress, which can make the job even more challenging.
While the demands of commercial diving may not suit all female divers, more and more women are finding their niche in other critical areas of the industry, such as working as Life Support Technicians (LST) or Assistant Life Support Technicians (ALST). People working in these roles provide vital support to divers while they are inside the chamber and both of these roles are key positions in a dive support team.
Whatever type of diver you are, there is usually a large team supporting and backing up your efforts while you are on the job. This is especially the case on dive support vessels, as these ships are completely given over to diver-related activities.
Where do you train?
Recreational divers are ordinarily trained through one of a number of different organisations, such as PADI, IDEA, SDI, SSI, NAUI, PDIC, or the YMCA. Individuals who take one or more recreational courses learn about the equipment they will use, as well as about elementary diving physics, essential safety, and other basic skills.
While these organisations teach individuals to safely enjoy the marine environment, such training falls far short of what is necessary to safely and effectively perform complex tasks underwater as a commercial diver.
Commercial divers are highly skilled and trained. The standard training undergone by the vast majority of commercial divers begins at either an accredited commercial diving school or at a school sponsored by one of the branches of the military. This formal training is then supplemented by extensive on-the-job training.
The first thing you need to evaluate before embarking on this level of training is whether you are at a viable age to become a commercial diver. The commercial diving industry favours youth and strength, so it is best to train while you are in your twenties or early thirties. Most commercial divers have done their time and retired by their late forties or early fifties.
Next, decide very carefully what areas of commercial diving you might be interested in going into. You might be surprised how incredibly wide and varied the field is. Do you want to go into those heavily industrialised areas like oil and gas or sub-sea construction? Do you want to defuse underwater ordnance in the world’s troubled spots? Would you like to focus on inspecting bridges and other underwater structures near land? Or do you want to collect life sciences samples under the ice in Antarctica or off the Great Barrier Reef? Your interests and your imagination will help you to visualise where you will end up when you are qualified.
What does the training involve?
Commercial divers are trained in, among other things, diving physics and physiology, hyperbaric medicine, first aid and CPR, decompression chamber operation and maintenance, decompression and treatment tables, diesel engine and equipment maintenance, rigging, navigation, salvage techniques, underwater burning and welding, and underwater inspections. Such training is necessary to prepare commercial divers for the myriad of complex tasks that they will face in the field.
Remember, the more skills you can acquire in diving the more attractive you will be to potential employers out there. You should also be sure to choose a commercial dive school that’s near where you live. Not all schools are even on the coast, which means some of the preliminary and basic courses might be taught in a dive tank, in addition to theoretical aspects of the course.
What is the lifestyle like?
As a commercial diver, the first thing you must be prepared for is travel. Commercial diving is one of those careers where you can certainly see the world. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Arabian Gulf and the Far East, the possibilities for travel during the course of your career are endless.
Secondly, get used to spending weeks at a time on rigs and DSVs in rough water and big seas. An average “swing” is six weeks working and one month off. If you’re a SAT diver working at depths of 200 to 300 meters on a daily basis, expect to spend several weeks living in a deck decompression chamber no larger than a small trailer, while you “commute” to your work on the ocean floor in a pressurised diving bell. Having spent weeks in this pressurised environment, it can take one day for every 100 feet for you to decompress to get to normal one bar atmosphere again.
What is life in a decompression chamber like? Well, aside from the obvious cramped conditions, it is humid, smelly and divers lacking mental and psychological strength will find themselves suffering the effects of cabin fever – isolation, loneliness and anxiety. The Life Support Technician (LST) supported by the Assistant Life Support Technician (ALST) will monitor your every minute inside the chamber, checking you for signs of gas narcoses, infections and other physical (and mental) ailments. They will also help you with special meal and snack requests, as well as practically anything else you need help with during your segregation in the chamber. You are in a completely isolated situation in a decompression chamber. Should the DSV encounter difficulties or sink, you will need to be transferred, still in a decompressed condition, to your own life raft, which is also fully self-contained and pressurised.
Like many engaged in extremely hazardous jobs, commercial divers are a very superstitious bunch. They have their lucky hats and their lucky charms and wouldn’t dive without them. And while the hazards of diving are many and well known in the commercial dive community, generally divers will not discuss the hazards amongst themselves.
What are the risks?
Let there be no mistake, commercial and deep sea diving is one of the most hazardous and risky professions in the world, which partly accounts for why the pay can be so rewarding. A diver gets one chance and one chance only to get it right. When you are diving at depths of 200 to 300 metres you rely on an umbilical for your air and sometimes your heat as well (it can get very cold at those depths), and it is literally your lifeline.
Falling debris can block, snag or sever the umbilical. Savage currents can take hold of the all-important lifeline and drag it way out of position from where it needs to be. Divers carry a set of emergency ‘bail out bottles’ for use in the event that the umbilical is compromised, which may only give you two to three minutes of air, enabling you to scramble back to the pressurised diving bell. That’s not much buffer should anything go wrong during the dive.
During SAT dives you are often on a complex mixture of exotic gasses, designed to keep you pressurised and conscious at quite terrific pressures. Incorrect mixtures can result in such dangerous conditions as the drunken nitrogen narcosis, a sense of inebriated euphoria in which you may do something foolish or inadvisable. Should anything go wrong, the diver must be brought to the surface in the diving bell, as the body can’t adjust quickly enough to be brought directly to the surface at those pressures. As a diver in these situations you are often on your own, or close to only one or two other colleagues who are in a position to assist you.
What are the rewards?
Of course, with great risks come rewards. In the case of a senior commercial diver at the top of his game those rewards are predominantly financial (it’s certainly not the social life that’s rewarding) A fully qualified SAT diver has the potential to earning around US$1,000 to US$2,000 per day or more depending on the dive location and depth. That said, if you don’t get your training in the military, you may have already had to invest up to US$100,000 to be trained to the higher levels, so you will need a good income to pay off that investment in your career.
Pay rates differ wherever you go in the world. Sometimes they are determined by simple supply and demand, whilst in other places strong unions set the standard rates for different types and grades of diver.
Where do I get started?
There are currently several "Internationally accepted" certificates for commercial diver training. The most common are recognised by the International Marine Contractors Association (IMCA) whose members adhere to a Code of Practice, which includes only employing personnel with recognised training qualifications. IMCA is currently liaising with the International Diving Schools Association (IDSA) in an effort to standardise certification internationally. It is hoped that IDSA certification will become the norm. IMCA and IDSA are both a good source of information and resources for beginners and trainees.
There has never been a better time to be in the commercial diving industry, with demand and salaries at an all time high. So, if you are thinking of embarking on a diving career, now is the time. Whatever your background, if you have the right aptitude, joining the world of commercial diving can be an extremely rewarding experience.
Kim C. Halliday is a former commercial diver who now works as a Marine Chief Engineer on dive support vessels. Kim is also the Managing Director of Flip Flash Cards Pty Ltd (FFC), a company that creates flash card formatted learning aids. Together with his wife Kerri Halliday, who is an Assistant Life Support Technician (ALST), Kim has created a series of Dive Learning Aids designed to assist both recreational and commercial divers, More information about Kim C. Halliday and Dive Learning Aids can be found at: www.flipflashcards.com
