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) I leave serious salvage work to the guys that really know what they are doing, and that generally means divers with hard-hat experience. There's good money in it, but also high expenses, liablity and hazards. If you don't know what you are doing, you can really take a bath (no pun intended) or wind up hurt or dead.
That particular job was a floating home built on a catamaran-style hull that sank in shallow water. The $1000/day was what I was paid. We ultimately were unable to raise the boat and the insurance company brought in the big boys with a crane to bring it up.
There is nothing simple or easy about unsinking boats and they almost never go as planned. For instance, a buddy of mine (who does a lot of serious salvage work here in the Bay Area) recently had a crew of 4 divers on a job unsinking a sand barge over the holidays. Took 19 days, almost all with overtime. He is $30,000 out of pocket in crew expenses and now the owner of the barge is disputing the invoice. He billed the guy $100,000 for the job (which was successful) and now it looks like he'll be lucky if he doesn't lose money on the gig. That's an extreme example for sure, but it makes my point. Even very experienced divers can get financially screwed doing salvage work.
I don't know all the details, but my buddy seems to be at a disadvantage because he didn't dot all the "i"s and cross all the "t"s as regards his divers (all union workers, BTW). The barge owner (apparently pissed about the final bill) did some digging, found out about it and told Ted he wasn't going to pay the invoice. I guess there's some state arbitration process for union issues like this, and they are in the middle of it now. Takes months. Ted is simply hoping to get enough to cover what he paid his guys. The 19 days of his labor? Forget about it. Ted could have spent those 19 days cleaning boat bottoms, made a pile of money doing it and not had any of the headaches.
For hull cleaning, I have never used contracts. Yes, I have been screwed by a few deadbeat non-payers, but you know what? That's what God invented prop pullers for.
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