Cool old photo on Ca Diving News cover.

[Eric Sedletzky]

I saw this old photo on the cover of California Diving News and thought it was pretty cool. I love the old gear and the slick skin out wetsuit.
What kind of face plate and reg is that?
I didn’t know that Santa Barbara was the birthplace of deep diving?
Does anybody know much about the Purisima?
@Akimbo?

 

[Kupu]

Looks like a Scubapro second stage, 108 perhaps?
Maybe even left hand 108, there does not appear to be lp hose on the right side of the diver and first stage although perhaps that's just the photo angle and difficulty seeing a black hose against black wetsuit.

 

[Akimbo]

What kind of face plate and reg is that?

Bev Morgan and Ramsey Parks modified a free-flow Widolf mask by adding a Scubapro demand regulator.

That photo was taken by Bev Morgan and the Purisima Diving Bell is on display at the Maritime Museum at Santa Barbara's harbor. The same photo was used on the cover of the October 1967 issue of Skin Diver Magazine. As you can tell from all the links, it is a pretty historic event in modern commercial diving.

​

Does anybody know much about the Purisma?

@Oceanaut's (Christopher Swann) excerpt from The History of Oilfield Diving: An Industrial Adventure is full of information.

If I remember correctly they were both 66"/1676mm spheres. The upper sphere stayed at one atmosphere and the lower sphere was rated for internal and external pressure. A hatch was between the two spheres and is pressure seating in the top of the lower sphere.

The idea was the client's oilfield engineers could man the upper sphere and divers in the lower sphere. They could survey the job site and discuss the work to be done before sealing the lower sphere and blowing down so divers could exit the bottom hatches.

You have to remember that there were no experienced deep water oilfield divers so abalone divers stepped in to do the work. Remote CCTVs were huge, B&W, and very grainy plus directing divers over the REALLY bad comms was awful. Decent helium speech unscrambles didn't come along until the early 1970s.

The whole rig would be raised to the deck where divers would decompress in the lower chamber while the engineers could exit the top hatch. AFAIK, it was never designed to mate to a deck chamber. Nobody was thinking in terms of saturation diving in those early days.

 

[covediver]

The Purisima is on display at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum in the Santa Barbara Harbor. Well worth the visit and price of admission. The effort to refurbish the apparatus, which if memory serve was in the Oceaneering yard nearby, was led by SBMM board member Don Barthlemess, a former SBCC Marine Techonology commercial diving instructor. The museum has an excellent exhibit on the development of commercial diving gear in Santa Barbara. The need for deep divers was due in part in the 1950s and 1960s to oil and gas development in the Santa Barbara Channel. The Marine Technology program was created as a vocational education program to fill that need. SBCC was the only publicly supported institution to offer commercial diving instruction and an Associates degree, many friends went through that program.