So I flew down to Ocala, Florida for 2 weeks of commercial dive training at the 40 Fathom Grotto.

Along with 4 other guys from the company I'll be doing deep, in-water decompression dives, down to 165'. We'll also be doing some surface decompression in an on-site hyperbaric chamber.

In addition the dives, we'll also be training with underwater chainsaws, underwater welding, underwater steel cutting and other under water construction type tasks.

It'll be long days, starting at 6:30am and for the first week, diving till 8pm or later. Accommodations are in a 20x20 room I'm sharing with the other 4 divers.

The dive site is an ancient sinkhole/spring that goes down to 240 feet.



In addition to the 5 of us (all engineers) there's a class of about 25 younger guys getting trained to be commercial divers. They're about 4 months into a 6 month program. You can see some of them milling about down there. The platform can support 10 surface supplied air divers at a time!

We're also using the new Kirby Morgan 77 helmets, make entirely of stainless steel! (vs. the fiberglass KM 37s at work)



For the 165 foot dives we ride down in this:

It's a wet diving bell and is typically used to get the divers to their working depths, especially when working really deep.

This is the on-site hyperbaric chamber we use:

It's essentially a giant scuba tank that you can ride in. It's used to treat Decompression Sickness (nitrogen bubbles in the blood that can block arteries and kill you) by compressing the person inside the chamber and forcing the bubbles to go back into solution.

We'll be using it for surface decompression, where instead of coming up in stages, we go right to the surface, strip off all our gear and haul *** into the chamber before the bubbles can form and cause damage. We'll then get pressurized in the chamber and breathe pure oxygen to help get the nitrogen out of our bodies.

- NCSU

 

Holy crap! Sounds intense. My wife is a certified diver..i lived in Florida 35 years and never got certified...dumb on my part.

 

Don't fart!

Sounds pretty scary to me , does it come with a pay increase too?

 

That's pretty cool!

What kind of work do you do?

 

I read a while back that commercial deep diving is one of the highest paying and dangerous jobs.

I have only done some free diving at around 25/30'... that was enough for me

 

Can't say as I would want to go that far underwater......

 

I'd rather do that than jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

 

It's never too late! I got my open water cert and master diver card and barely do any recreational diving.

Farting is a critical part of the process! Otherwise you could blow your guts up when the gas expands on ascent.

No pay increase,, but I'll be one of 11 (soon to be 16) people in the company with this cert.

I work for an engineering consulting company. The dive work we do is mostly waterfront inspections at places like ports, dry docks, shipyards, refineries, etc.

Saturation diving is where the money's at! You get paid by the depth and time spent under pressure. Sat divers stay pressurized 24 hours a day because it takes too long to decompress each day. A guy I work with used to be a Sat diver for another company and his record was something like 30 days straight. $$$$

When you can see 75+ feet it's no big deal. When you can't see your hand 6" in front of your faceplate, then it's a little more unnerving.

I've got a few more pics and will try to get video of the u/w chainsaw, burning and welding tomorrow.

-NCSU

 

Man, that is so cool!! Good luck and take all knowledge they're willing to give.

When I was in the US Army at Ft Lewis, a squad of us got a chance to cross-train with Navy Seals at the Puget Sound. We did equipment recovery, underwater navigation, day and night dives and, even dove this ice-covered river in the Cascades once.

Anyway, the coolest thing we did was a Free Ascension from about 100'.

I envy you on the great training and experience you are about to get!!

Pics (if you can)!

Good luck!

 

Are you still in Ocala? I'm bout 45 mins north of you.

I believe the same chamber you use is the same one we send patients to. Our county has a couple hundreds springs and cave diving spots that are popular. It seems every other month we have to MedFlight some divers due to the compressions to Gainesville, they might even be going to Ocala, I've never looked too far into it.

 

what company do you work for? i need this kinda job

 

Cut some plate steel with a 10,000 degree Broco torch today, fun stuff!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0PkWj006IQ&sns=em

Cool deal! I worked out at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard a few years back...
https://www.f150online.com/forums/ge...-shipyard.html
Had a really good time out there. One of our structural engineers/divers is a retired Seal. He's got some CRAZY stories!

Yup, still here for another week. Drove up to Jacksonville for our cutting, welding and burning training.

I can pretty much guarantee you don't send patients here, for insurance reasons if nothing else. If someone gets bent (decompression sickness) they'd be taken to a hospital with a chamber.

You can see the chamber in the first pic I posted, it's used to train the commercial divers how to do surface decompression (vs. in-water decompressions) and is there because you must have a chamber on site if diving beyond a certain depth for commercial purposes.

I work for an international engineering consulting company. If you want to be a commercial diver NC probably isn't the best place. The demand just isn't there.

I got into it because we do inspections of waterfront structures, piers, bulkheads, mooring buoys, etc. Clients are beginning to require that all divers on the job have their commercial certifications, regardless of the underwater task.

I'll never weld, cut or burn anything underwater for the company I'm with now, but after this training I'll be certified to do so.

Most guys go looking for work with oil companies, marine salvage operations, marine construction contractors, etc.

- NCSU

 

After doing all that stressful work, I really hope they let you drink a beer in the decomp chamber...

 

Thx for the link. I've got about a dozen pics of Pikes Market that are almost identical to yours! LOL!

 

Ah okay. I wasn't sure. All i knew is if they got sick, the flew south towards Gainesville.

Let me know if you make your way up 75, I'm always bumping around the Lake City area.