Commercial diving vs navy diving?

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JV

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​Hi I'm new to the SB forums, I'm trying to get in into the commercial diving field and I wanted to know what you guys think "dive school" vs navy diving?. I Was thinking of getting my associates in marine technology at Santa Barbara City College being that it's one of the best technical dive schools out but I'm trying to figure out what would be more beneficial to help me break out in the field and help my chances. Any advice helps, thank you.
 
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It has been a long time since the Navy was ahead of the curve in diving technology… like the 1960s through the early 1970s. Advancement as a Navy diver is also pretty slow right now. I got a great education in the Navy, but those days are long past.
 
A commercial diving school would be a faster way to go and probably cover more diverse types of work that you would be doing underwater. I would not waist too much time or money on the technical diving aspect as scuba has almost nothing to do with commercial diving.
 
There is no grantee that one will get into Navy dive school. If you do, and finish, you will be diving until you decide to leave.

Any commercial diving school will take you, getting a job afterword's is iffy. Especially right now with the cost of oil being so low.

SBCC is the best. So I agree with that part of your plan.
 
... getting a job afterword's is iffy. Especially right now with the cost of oil being so low.

US oil rig count is plummeting, while oil production is cranking up. The world will look different when all this is over.

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Descent

Divers aren't used that much anymore on exploration rigs. Mostly work is for construction and maintenance of production systems including pipelines and platforms. The problem is a lot of that work is deferred when the price of oil drops too low. Every industry has to manage cash-flow even when the balance sheet allows borrowing.
 
... a lot of that [maintenance] work is deferred when the price of oil drops too low. ...

Such a bummer for the working divers.

I have been running a series of Craigslist searches for Kirby-Morgan hats and others personal gear to try to see if any patterns emerge. I assume the prices will shoot up and/or the supply of used hats for sale will shrink down to nothing as rumors about jobs start circulating.

For a new diver ready to enter the field, a good time to finish up at SBCC would be right before the upturn.
 
Commercial diving, versus navy diving...apples and oranges, as is said above, there's no guarantee that you'll get as far as being a diver in the forces (UK or US) and if you want to be a commercial diver, then waking up in a tent in Helmand would not be pleasant....

of of course most forces diving courses are intensive, in depth (no pun) and will not allow you to proceed if you are not good enough....but when you leave the forces and try to get a job, say, on a pipeline tie-in in quatar on surface gas, maybe, then there are 'children' who have been diving much less time than you that will get the job because they are experienced in tie-ing in flanges on deep surface gas jobs.

bottom line is, if you want to sign up and serve your country, go for it.
if you want to become a commercial diver, then go to a cheap school, and spend all your time learning about being a good commercial diver and keep at it.
(I always think this is kinda similar to someone who wants to drive trucks- do you go pass your driving exam, then your HGV, etc, or sign up to drive tanks for a few years first....)

oh, and yeah, if you want to be a diver after all this, then think long and hard...the downturn in oil prices is verging on catastrophic in the North Sea, and I can only imagine how it's going in the GoM, as I believe things were already in the ****ter for the last few years before this recent drop there. Boats are tied up, contracts cancelled or postponed indefinitely, and we are already seeing unscrupulous 'dog-****er' companies offering desperate divers work at over 60% less than the agreed rates for the North Sea. Now, the price has already levelled off, I believe, and we will see small increases, but companies want to 'streamline' so that profits go up, and when the price of a barrel increases, everybody's great again ('cept for the poor bastards that have been laid off). For most companies, it is not about loss as much as less profit. There's a big difference...
 
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