Re-floating Vessel 4th

(continuation)

The supervisor of this operation set up a meeting in a nearby restaurant. We negotiate for the diving job and agreed on one thing. We have to survey first and approve the reflaoting if it is still possible.

Preparing for the equipment

We bought "O rings" for the scuba tanks and 2 new face mask since me and my son are the only divers that will survey in Sulu Sea and we lost our face mask because someone borrowed it and never returned back. Since we have a new one provided by the company we considered those as scuba diving gifts. It is part of our job anyways. We also request for gloves since our gloves are all worn out. We brought our hoses for alternate supply since according to them they are using air compressor for their divers. They only used air compressor for the entire operation until we came. After completing our scuba diving equipments for the job, we set to sail morning on Monday from the port area. We have a 2 sets of check list for everything that we brought from this operation from our custom knife, our life line, etc...

Refloating Third

(continuation)

Since I have years of experience re-floating vessels, he called us hoping that we can still save the ship from Sulu Sea. We never said "we can" immediately since we do not know yet the ships situation. So we set up a meeting.

While we are waiting, we prepared our equipment for the diving job offer. We checked our scuba diving equipment hoping there are only few damages and then fix it as soon as possible because we might be called anytime. First we check our scuba tanks that needs to be filled by compressed air. Currently we have 5 sets of scuba tanks. 2 double scuba tanks and 3 single tanks. We also have 2 full body or 2 one piece wet suits and 2 two-piece wet suits. 3 pairs of boots and 3 fins.

(To follow)

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)

Commercial Diving Careers

Some are wondering what jobs do we have if you want to work as a commercial diver. No it is not just for fish viewing or checking corals and taking pictures from the oceanfloor. Serious jobs are waiting if your qualified and I am talking about < US$1,000 / Month salary here and that is only for minimum depending on your employer and your location.

Here is the list:

Survey and Inspection Photography
Survey and Inspection Videography
Pipe Laying
Salvaging Vessels
Re-floating Vessels
Pier / Jetty Pile Cleaning
Hull and Propeller Cleaning
Underwater Cutting
Underwater Welding
Dredging
Search and Recovery
Pier Pile Repair and Rehabilitation
Pile Jacketing
Commercial diving services
Exploration of site
Installation, Repair and Maintenance of mooring buoys

SCUBA Diving

SCUBA stands for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA).
You have two options for scuba diving. Open circuit or Rebreather sets.
For Open circuit system you can use scuba set, diving cylinders containing breathing gas at high pressure.
For Rebreather sets or AKA Closed-circuit breathing system. This will allow you to recycle what you exhaled that will reduce the volume of gas use thus making rebreather lighter compare to open circuit. It was initialy design for covert operations for military but later used for scientific and media divers.
The alternative for the open/close circuit system circuit would be using air compressor on the surface paired w/ umbilical. It could be with diving helmets, full face diving masks or connected to the mouthpiece with a regulator. But there are groups in the Philippines that use air compressor with umbilical only to supply air without mouthpiece! They are called Mananahong. They dive to get tahong or saltwater mussel.

Commercial Diving Schools in the Philippines

If you checked online for Commercial Diving Schools in the Philippines you will come up with thousands of site.
But is there realy commercial diving school here?
What is PADI all about? You might wanna ask.
PADI stands for Professional Association of Diving Instructors.
Check out there website and you will see exciting things.
But its not really for commercial diving, its only for sports, their goal is to give more people a chance to enjoy the underwater world by offering relevant, instructionally-valid scuba diving training to create confident scuba divers who dive regularly.
Its a sport side of diving like snorkling, cave diving, underwater photograhy and the likes.

Commercial Diving is different.
i'll discuss this on my next post.