Oceanaut
Registered
Excerpted from an interview by Christopher Swann in July 1991
I still hadn't broken out diving [working for Ocean Systems in Santa Barbara]. I was a diver on the Purisima , but that was all showmanship for the oil company and there was no money involved in it, just a pittance. Bob Christensen wasn't getting enough diving either and he had called up Bob Rude at Associated Divers in Alaska and been hired at $4,500 a month, which was big money in those days. It's still pretty good. In those days you could buy a new car for $4,000, so at that rate you could buy a new car every month. Three months of work and you could buy a house. So Bob went to work in Alaska for Bob Rude in Cook Inlet. He called me up and said, "They're short of divers up here. Call up Bob Rude and come on up." That was when I took my brand-new heavy gear dress and ran over it in the driveway and poured oil and dirt on it. I rolled it up and put on the appropriate costume I had seen all the divers wearing, and showed up in Alaska.
I was met at the plane by a guy who walked me across the apron and loaded me in the back of a small bush-pilot's plane - which was running. I was going diving right then! They took me out to Kenai and landed on a dirt road, and a chopper was sitting there with the rotors going. They loaded me into it and the damn thing caught fire on the way out to the rig. We had to land on the beach and put the fire out. Anyway, we got out on the rig and they said, "There it is. Go for it!" The current was running about eight knots. I looked into the moon pool and it was like a Bendix washer. I said, "Hey, I've never dived in a current like this before." The guy said, "No, no. You dive in-between tides." They didn't tell me that at the change the tide runs one way on the bottom and the other way on top. Anyway, I was able to jump in the water. I'd been in heavy gear enough to know what to do.
WODECO drilling barge in Cook Inlet (Collection of George "Woody" Treen)
Bob Christensen told me you started in heavy gear on a job [with Ocean Systems] in Morro Bay.
Yes, at the dock. When we were off-duty we'd take turns going down in heavy gear at the dock. That was it. So I broke in right away in 135’/41M of black water in Cook Inlet. But I'd worked in a darkroom a lot so black water didn't bother me a bit. I ran down to the bottom and I could feel everything.
What was the job?
It was stabbing on and off. First of all, they put down a base-plate, which they cemented in. You went down and checked the returns. You could tell when the cement returned because you'd hold your hand over the return line and you'd feel your glove getting warm. They started with a 36”/91CM hole. While the cement was still green, they drilled through it with a 24”/61CM and ran it down deeper. Then they cemented all that in. Then they came in and stabbed on again. Each time they stabbed-on you had to go down. They didn't have much in the way of video in those days and they couldn't use it in the black water anyway. (There was one outfit in San Diego that made underwater TV cameras for rigs. They're still in business). They would drop the drill string down to where it almost touched. You could feel it come down. You felt the drill string and you felt where they wanted to stab-on. It had a little bell on it; not much. You'd feel back and forth, and make sure your hose was out of the way, and tell them when to drop it. Even in Cook Inlet there's a surge. So you had to tell them when to drop it. They had no hydraulic bolt-on system. Once it was on, you had to go around it with a big air-gun and ram in all the studs. You dived four times a day in-between tides. In some areas of the Inlet you could get an hour's dive, but in most places the dives were about 20 minutes.
Platform with the "diver tube" (Bob Christensen)
Close up of the "diver tube" (Bob Christensen)
Then there were other jobs we had to do. The job I ended up quitting over, and getting on the next plane out of Alaska, was on a platform they had cemented into the bottom. It was the first time they had put a fixed platform in Cook Inlet. You get an eight-knot current running through there on the tide runs - sometimes a little more - and they were worried about scouring, and a bunch of other problems. They couldn't just put a leg down. Because of the current, they had to put spoilers on the leg; otherwise, it set up a vibration which would tear the platform apart. They figured out how to get more diving time out of the divers by putting a 36”/91CM casing down to the bottom. Actually, the pipe was more for when the ice came in than the current: so you could dive through the ice. That way they could extend their season by about three months. The diver went down inside it and unbolted a marine door and went out and went to work. I was there as stand-by diver. I forget who was out diving - it wasn't Bobby Wick. Anyway, the guy was out the door diving and I was standing-by. It was about 120’/36M of water. The diver said, "Hey fellows, my air's down." In heavy gear, you've got six minutes or so before the CO2 builds up. They had just flown me out there. I was a diver; I wasn't supposed to take care of the gear. But I started looking around and I saw that the compressor wasn't running. The hoses weren't even hooked up to the damn thing. I said, "Hey! What kind of air are we using?" They said, "We're using ship's air." I said, "Where the hell's the ship's air?" They said it was about three stories down on the engineering deck. I said, "For Christ's sake! Didn't you guys red-tag the thing so the maintenance guys don't shut it off?" They didn't have much of an answer. They sent one guy down to the engineering deck - so we lost a tender there. We were always short-rigged. The other tender ran over and hooked up the compressor and I took the phones. He was trying to get the compressor started and the pusher's telling me, "Your diver's got no air. Get your ass down there and save him!" I said, "Hey! That helmet right there ain't got no air either." What was the stand-by diver going to do? Hold his breath and go rescue the other guy? They should have had a crow's foot and a switch-over so they could supply from our compressor, and our compressor should have been running as a back-up - whether we were using it or not. You couldn't undo the guy's hose, because if his one-way valve didn't work we would have had a dead diver.
It was becoming more and more crazy all the time. I was against that diving in the pipe anyway. I thought the whole thing was a dumb idea. They got our compressor on deck running and got me hooked up to it. They bolted me in and the crane operator was going to pick me up. This is the interesting part: the crane operator had to pick you up and stuff you into the top of the pipe and lower you down to the water. We were in 120’/36M of water and our dive deck was about 80’/24M above the water. So the crane operator lowered you down in this pipe to where you hit the water, then you reached down between your legs in heavy gear and swung up the trapdoor you were standing on; then you went through. They had it figured so that they lowered the stage to about 10’/3M into the water and your hose went through the trapdoor in the stage. They had pulled the stage back up but a second diver couldn't hinge the trapdoor back down or he'd pinch off the first diver's hose. So they were going to send me down, but because the trapdoor was open, I had nothing to stand on. In heavy gear you weigh about 120 pounds more than normal. They couldn't get me down through the pipe. They'd never had a stand-by diver go down through the pipe, and they couldn't do it.
In the meantime, somebody rigged a whip over and figured out how to get it into the other diver's hose. They still didn't have the ship's air compressor going. The guy had the head off it down on the third engineering deck, overhauling it. So they got air to the diver and they got the stage down to him and got him up on deck, and everything was fine. Then they turned to me and said, "Okay, your turn." I said, "You bet it's my turn! Unbolt all this ****. I'm out of here!" They were running around in a panic. They unbolted me and I flew directly into the beach, got in my rental car and went to the airport and came home. Besides, the ice was coming.
For a detailed biography of Bev Morgan by Akimbo please go to Bev Morgan, Diving Industry Pioneer
I still hadn't broken out diving [working for Ocean Systems in Santa Barbara]. I was a diver on the Purisima , but that was all showmanship for the oil company and there was no money involved in it, just a pittance. Bob Christensen wasn't getting enough diving either and he had called up Bob Rude at Associated Divers in Alaska and been hired at $4,500 a month, which was big money in those days. It's still pretty good. In those days you could buy a new car for $4,000, so at that rate you could buy a new car every month. Three months of work and you could buy a house. So Bob went to work in Alaska for Bob Rude in Cook Inlet. He called me up and said, "They're short of divers up here. Call up Bob Rude and come on up." That was when I took my brand-new heavy gear dress and ran over it in the driveway and poured oil and dirt on it. I rolled it up and put on the appropriate costume I had seen all the divers wearing, and showed up in Alaska.
I was met at the plane by a guy who walked me across the apron and loaded me in the back of a small bush-pilot's plane - which was running. I was going diving right then! They took me out to Kenai and landed on a dirt road, and a chopper was sitting there with the rotors going. They loaded me into it and the damn thing caught fire on the way out to the rig. We had to land on the beach and put the fire out. Anyway, we got out on the rig and they said, "There it is. Go for it!" The current was running about eight knots. I looked into the moon pool and it was like a Bendix washer. I said, "Hey, I've never dived in a current like this before." The guy said, "No, no. You dive in-between tides." They didn't tell me that at the change the tide runs one way on the bottom and the other way on top. Anyway, I was able to jump in the water. I'd been in heavy gear enough to know what to do.
WODECO drilling barge in Cook Inlet (Collection of George "Woody" Treen)
Bob Christensen told me you started in heavy gear on a job [with Ocean Systems] in Morro Bay.
Yes, at the dock. When we were off-duty we'd take turns going down in heavy gear at the dock. That was it. So I broke in right away in 135’/41M of black water in Cook Inlet. But I'd worked in a darkroom a lot so black water didn't bother me a bit. I ran down to the bottom and I could feel everything.
What was the job?
It was stabbing on and off. First of all, they put down a base-plate, which they cemented in. You went down and checked the returns. You could tell when the cement returned because you'd hold your hand over the return line and you'd feel your glove getting warm. They started with a 36”/91CM hole. While the cement was still green, they drilled through it with a 24”/61CM and ran it down deeper. Then they cemented all that in. Then they came in and stabbed on again. Each time they stabbed-on you had to go down. They didn't have much in the way of video in those days and they couldn't use it in the black water anyway. (There was one outfit in San Diego that made underwater TV cameras for rigs. They're still in business). They would drop the drill string down to where it almost touched. You could feel it come down. You felt the drill string and you felt where they wanted to stab-on. It had a little bell on it; not much. You'd feel back and forth, and make sure your hose was out of the way, and tell them when to drop it. Even in Cook Inlet there's a surge. So you had to tell them when to drop it. They had no hydraulic bolt-on system. Once it was on, you had to go around it with a big air-gun and ram in all the studs. You dived four times a day in-between tides. In some areas of the Inlet you could get an hour's dive, but in most places the dives were about 20 minutes.
Platform with the "diver tube" (Bob Christensen)
Close up of the "diver tube" (Bob Christensen)
Then there were other jobs we had to do. The job I ended up quitting over, and getting on the next plane out of Alaska, was on a platform they had cemented into the bottom. It was the first time they had put a fixed platform in Cook Inlet. You get an eight-knot current running through there on the tide runs - sometimes a little more - and they were worried about scouring, and a bunch of other problems. They couldn't just put a leg down. Because of the current, they had to put spoilers on the leg; otherwise, it set up a vibration which would tear the platform apart. They figured out how to get more diving time out of the divers by putting a 36”/91CM casing down to the bottom. Actually, the pipe was more for when the ice came in than the current: so you could dive through the ice. That way they could extend their season by about three months. The diver went down inside it and unbolted a marine door and went out and went to work. I was there as stand-by diver. I forget who was out diving - it wasn't Bobby Wick. Anyway, the guy was out the door diving and I was standing-by. It was about 120’/36M of water. The diver said, "Hey fellows, my air's down." In heavy gear, you've got six minutes or so before the CO2 builds up. They had just flown me out there. I was a diver; I wasn't supposed to take care of the gear. But I started looking around and I saw that the compressor wasn't running. The hoses weren't even hooked up to the damn thing. I said, "Hey! What kind of air are we using?" They said, "We're using ship's air." I said, "Where the hell's the ship's air?" They said it was about three stories down on the engineering deck. I said, "For Christ's sake! Didn't you guys red-tag the thing so the maintenance guys don't shut it off?" They didn't have much of an answer. They sent one guy down to the engineering deck - so we lost a tender there. We were always short-rigged. The other tender ran over and hooked up the compressor and I took the phones. He was trying to get the compressor started and the pusher's telling me, "Your diver's got no air. Get your ass down there and save him!" I said, "Hey! That helmet right there ain't got no air either." What was the stand-by diver going to do? Hold his breath and go rescue the other guy? They should have had a crow's foot and a switch-over so they could supply from our compressor, and our compressor should have been running as a back-up - whether we were using it or not. You couldn't undo the guy's hose, because if his one-way valve didn't work we would have had a dead diver.
It was becoming more and more crazy all the time. I was against that diving in the pipe anyway. I thought the whole thing was a dumb idea. They got our compressor on deck running and got me hooked up to it. They bolted me in and the crane operator was going to pick me up. This is the interesting part: the crane operator had to pick you up and stuff you into the top of the pipe and lower you down to the water. We were in 120’/36M of water and our dive deck was about 80’/24M above the water. So the crane operator lowered you down in this pipe to where you hit the water, then you reached down between your legs in heavy gear and swung up the trapdoor you were standing on; then you went through. They had it figured so that they lowered the stage to about 10’/3M into the water and your hose went through the trapdoor in the stage. They had pulled the stage back up but a second diver couldn't hinge the trapdoor back down or he'd pinch off the first diver's hose. So they were going to send me down, but because the trapdoor was open, I had nothing to stand on. In heavy gear you weigh about 120 pounds more than normal. They couldn't get me down through the pipe. They'd never had a stand-by diver go down through the pipe, and they couldn't do it.
In the meantime, somebody rigged a whip over and figured out how to get it into the other diver's hose. They still didn't have the ship's air compressor going. The guy had the head off it down on the third engineering deck, overhauling it. So they got air to the diver and they got the stage down to him and got him up on deck, and everything was fine. Then they turned to me and said, "Okay, your turn." I said, "You bet it's my turn! Unbolt all this ****. I'm out of here!" They were running around in a panic. They unbolted me and I flew directly into the beach, got in my rental car and went to the airport and came home. Besides, the ice was coming.
For a detailed biography of Bev Morgan by Akimbo please go to Bev Morgan, Diving Industry Pioneer
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