Commercial & recreational diver new to site!

[Sekeli]

I am 23 years old, I got certified when I was 18 and have been diving ever since. I have over 1,200 dives, and want to continue learning and expanding my knowledge of ALL diving. A lot of people in the commercial industry are hard headed and only do things one way, my philosophy is sort of like Bruce lee's, learn something from everything, take what you need, create your own, and throw the rest out. I'm getting off track but I've done a lot in the past 4 years. I started out golf ball diving, and diving in rainforest cafe cleaning aquariums, cleaning hulls and spearfishing and crabbing diving for fun.

After that I was hired with a local commercial diving company here in seattle. There I did more hull cleaning, houseboat/ floating home floatation, USCG cutter inspections and maintenence, pile splicing, dock rebuilding, welding and fabrication, hull blanks, underwater welding. My experience had even landed me in Papua new Guinea recently working with discovery channel over the summer.

I am a basic open water and nitrox scuba diver but I have a ton of experience. I've always came to this board to search forums when I had questions with compressors, hull cleaning, nitrox, or just about anything else so I figured it was time to join! if anyone has any recommendations or advice I'm always willing to learn! Cheers.

 

[Killerflyingbugs]

Have you done any oil field work? I did that for a few years and was fun.

 

[Sekeli]

No oil field work. It seemed to me that just about anyone could get hired on in the Gulf regardless if they were bone heads or not and that didn't appeal to me. but the pay rates for tending were also super low, I just wasn't willing to relocate to make less money.

How was it? where did you work?

 

[iamrushman]

howdy and welcome aboard from south Florida.....

 

[Killerflyingbugs]

It was fun, worked out of Houma, LA, the pay was great when I was doing it (post Katrina) I have been out of just about every port between Pensacola, Fl and Port Aransas, Tx.
I worked for Chet Morrison Diving.
They hire every one because of the high turnover rate I was working 12-18 hrs a day 7 days a week for 3-4 months at a time. Not a lot of people can do that.

I had a lot of fun, 20' seas in storms, salvaging platforms, setting the explosives to remove well heads, diging miles of ditches with the Jet... my starting hourly wasn't that great but overtime made up for it. We also were getting paid depth pay from the surface $.50 a foot from 0-50 fsw, $1 a foot from 50-100', $1.50 a foot from 100-150', $2 from 150-200' and $3 deeper than 200'. Inspection diving was great 130-180' no D dives usually 2 a day with 6 hrs OT. I heard the pay went to hell not long after I had to stop working the GOM. If it wasn't for my Ex I would still be doing it I loved the work and the diving was always different.

If you want to try Oil patch work I would go to Europe and get an IMCA cert (unless you got one) and dive the north sea or the south china sea. I had a few buddies that worked off Africa and said that was fun in a scary "are they going to kidnap me" kind of way. Oh yeah there is also Trinidad, I heard that place is grate to do hard hat work.
I do miss the being out 100 miles from shore and not seeing land for months, I'm getting chills just thinking about it.

 

[Sekeli]

As much as I have thought about it and I would love to because I know I would be great at it... I don't want to spend a year or supposedly more like 2+ years tending and barely diving, I love and miss hard hat diving but not that much. I'm going to be working on getting a small dive buisness together and hopefully a start my own scallop harvesting not too soon after.

And yes the pay rates dropped drastically and from what I heard, so did safety...
A company had the nerve to call me back and offer $12/ hr to dive.

 

[Killerflyingbugs]

Wow. I can't believe that, I started at $17, full bennies and a hotel for 2 years. I was in the water at least 2 days a week tending, stuff like jetting or barnacle busting but you at least you got wet.