Scuba Diving Trip

(continuation)

On the seventh day of our scuba diving trip to Sulu for refloating a sunken ship, the sky is dark but it's not raining. As you expect its a bit wavy but not too much but enough to confuse the sonar. We have to repeat the scanning 3 times before we got the exact position. Our captain anchored down and we inspect the current underneath. Water is darker than we expected. We thought it's going to be clear since it is a province and only few ships passed by within the area.

We dropped our bathymetry or sounders; our pre-measured rope tied with a heavy u-clamps. First is to measure depth of the sunken ship. Second purpose of our sounder is for our decompression guide as we ascend. We drop it thrice to make sure since the current is strong. On the third time we put heavier metals to stabilize descension. Some commercial divers or professional divers use computerized bathymetry but since we dont have budget for other gadget.

Refloating 2

(continuation)


Mananahong or local scuba divers from the Philippines learned diving through experience but they dont have any knowledge about decompression since most of them are diving only on the safe zone. So they dive without worrying of bends and they dont even know what it is. They only use air compressor to supply air below and they never used scuba diving gears like scuba tanks, wet suits but they use improvised fins made out of marine plywood and improvised facemask.

This fishing company hired them to dive down 210 feet below to install the bouy and to refloat the fishing vessel. Five divers died in that operation and 2 got hospitalised suffering from bends. Before that happens they succesfuly installed bouys but the refloating operation was not succesful. Bouys were installed but it is a potential danger above since it will serve as torpedoes if anything happens to the cable between the bouy and the sunken ship.

Our friend from the this fishing company called us and ask if we can do the job.
That is how we got the scuba diving trip to Sulu.

To be continued...

Fishing Vessel Refloating

I would like to discuss my scuba diving experience in Sulu Sea for refloating a vessel from one of the biggest fishing company here in the Philippines.

One of their old fishing vessel sank and they would like to hire us to salvage it hoping that they can still use it again.

Their fishing vessel starts in Manila on Monday and goes to Palawan or Sulu Sea near Zamboanga in Mindanao and goes back to Manila around Friday to drop all the captured fish in Navotas. But one of their vessel sank in the middle of Sulu Sea with more or less 200 feet or around 60 meters deep. That is the maximum depth reachable by a French level 3 diver accompanied by another level 3 diver, breathing air.

One of their helper happens to be our friend and recommends us to do the diving job. He knew about the sunken vessel and heard about the job order but he just ignore it before. But the team leader of the project wanted to resolve it as soon as possible. To get the job done in the most economical way, he decided to hire "mananahong" or scuba divers from the Philippines that use air compressor and a hose to supply air below. They thought commercial divers are too expensive to hire.


(To be continued tomorrow)