Careers in diving

[MDTzak]

i am currently a student at santa barbara city colleges marine diving technologies program. i am learning all that you need to enter the commercial diving world. i want to go off and work for a few years but not in the gulf. i would like to stay on the west coast and eventually start instructing scuba classes after a few years doing the whole commercial diving thing. i love the idea of having a job to do underwater but i dont know how long i could take the life of a commercial diver. where are the instructor schools? are they expensive? did anyone have the same career path as im looking down?

 

[Al Mialkovsky]

Instructor schools are at many dive shops. There are some instructor factorys out there too.

 

[Tom Winters]

Commercial diving is way different from recreational commercial diving. You seriously want to get a spot in the commercial dive industry that's the hard -hat stuff, then learn accounting and marine vessel management. Wait a sec, that's how I got all my recreational commercial jobs too. I wound up making a lot of money doing it too, although after 10 years, I couldn't do it anymore. I dive for fun now.
Divers with no other skills are a dime-a-dozen except for a few at the top.

 

[pipedope]

Commercial diving is not so much diving as it is working someplace very wet.

Diving is just the commute to the job site.

The more skills you bring to the game the better, especially if you can do useful work on the surface between dives or even when you cannot dive.

Lots of the work and better pay is often found inland where the work is often construction related. If you know pipes, concrete and other construction related skills it can help.
I am not sure that I want to think about how much concrete I have pumped both on the surface and underwater.

Ever wonder where my name on here comes from?
Pipe for diving inside stormwater and other underground and underwater pipes. And Dope for doing it again and again.
I can still get through an 18" pipe, a 24" is roomy. I used to be able to turn around in a 36" pipe but I don't know that I could do that today.

 

[DementialFaith]

Hey MD watsup, from what I've seen/heard, going into the commercial arena simply doesn't pay as well as the tourism part of the ballgame. But if you really wanna get serious with all the fancy gear, you might want to consider a master degree in ecology/marine biology since field research positions might treat you a lot better tham commericial opportunities.

By the way, if you wanna go diving, go through the ucsb website in my sig.

 

[PaulSmithTek]

You can make good money on the commercial end of things, if you can get in at the right time and place. I just landed a job down in the gulf doing inspection work. Here is the break down of pay.

2 months on.
7 days a week
12 hours a day.
8 hours of the 12 is regular pay.
The other 4 hours is double time.

Regular pay $16.00 x 8 = $128.00
Overtime pay $32.00 x 4 = $128.00
Daily total $256.00
Weekley total $1792.00
Monthly Total $7168.00


Now this doesn’t include depth pay with is as follows.
1-49’ = $1.00 per foot (i.e.1’ = $1.00, 2’ = $2.00+$1.00 for 1’ on top.)
50-99’ = $2.00 per foot. And so on. The depth pay goes up one dollar every 50’

Yeah now that is great money. This is a contracted job with a oil company. Now I think for that pay and the hours are not bad ( 2 months on 1 month off) I would be stupid not to take the job.

 

[hullscrubber]

Commercial diving is not so much diving as it is working someplace very wet.

Diving is just the commute to the job site.

The more skills you bring to the game the better, especially if you can do useful work on the surface between dives or even when you cannot dive.

Lots of the work and better pay is often found inland where the work is often construction related. If you know pipes, concrete and other construction related skills it can help.
I am not sure that I want to think about how much concrete I have pumped both on the surface and underwater.

Ever wonder where my name on here comes from?
Pipe for diving inside stormwater and other underground and underwater pipes. And Dope for doing it again and again.
I can still get through an 18" pipe, a 24" is roomy. I used to be able to turn around in a 36" pipe but I don't know that I could do that today.

Pipedope summed it up perfectly! Diving is just your ride to work. Do some research and find what suits you. I did the gulf thing for a while, then dove papermills and inland pipeline surveying, then just got tired of roaming around. Now I clean boats and do prop work, working for myself in Florida and having a good time doing it!

 

[rmediver2002]

Having done both I can assure you commercial diving rates are higher.

That said money is not my incentive for diving, if you ask yourself what you would do if you won the lottery and did not have to work? Having the ability to work in that trade makes everything else seem like icing on the cake...

 

[Gary D.]

The money is not what it used to be. Today it can pay everything from minimum wage to a very good salary with the upper pay being harder to reach.

I have been very fortunate in having it as at least part of my source of support over the past 37 of 43 diving years. That has been a very good way to go for me.

The pay, well, lets put it this way. For 30 of those years I have gotten my hourly rate as a LEO to dive which include any over-time. Then over the past several years I have gotten an additional $.50 an hour added to my hourly wage for dive, or hazardous duty pay. So that brakes down to $5.00 a day (we work 4-10’s) for diving excluding over-time. That’s $20.00 a week, $80.00 a month or $960.00 a year. Add that to a bunch of OT and it’s an OK deal. Not a bunch but all, or most, of our gear is supplied.

Not bad deal at all.

Gary D.

 

[rmediver2002]

Who are you going to work with Paul?

Kind of odd them paying double time after 8 but good for you.

Most of the companies I have worked for only pay depth deeper than 50 FSW.


Are you getting any equipment rental rate?

Stay safe,

Jeff