"You'll Never Get Anwhere in the Diving Business"

[Oceanaut]

Excerpted from The History of Oilfield Diving: An Industrial Adventure
by Christopher Swann (Oceanaut Press)​

Walt Thompson wanted desperately to get into diving. Born in Minnesota, in 1947–48 he drove a truck through the Middle East and Africa on an expedition led by Wendell Phillips to collect insect specimens for research into the transmission of tropical diseases. After returning from Africa, he went to the San Francisco Bay area where he spent five years working for Pacific Gas & Electric as a crane operator, after which he got a job in a paper mill. Then he saw an advertisement for the Coastal School of Deep Sea Diving in Oakland, started by Sparling School of Deep Sea Diving graduate Al Mikalow with equipment, including the diving tank, bought from E.R. Cross when he closed Sparling.

Before enrolling, however, Thompson thought he should investigate the employment opportunities. Having heard about the oilfield diving in Santa Barbara, he drove down to take a look, but got little encouragement. Associated Divers, the dominant company, had most of the work tied up and they were not looking for trainee divers. Nonetheless, when Thompson returned home he signed up at Coastal anyway and switched over to the night shift at the paper mill so he could attend the course.

The school left a good deal to be desired. Mikalow did not yet have any instructors and he taught all the classes himself. His standard routine was to give a lecture, dress a student into Mark V heavy gear and put him in the tank, then disappear to take care of business, leaving his pupils to their own devices. Thompson thought Mikalow should at least be on hand to answer questions, and he objected to the idea of paying good money to muddle through for 13 weeks with people who were as much in the dark as himself; so he reported the school to the Better Business Bureau. Naturally, this did not greatly endear him to Mikalow. At the conclusion of the course, Thompson received a just-passing grade and was sent on his way with the considered opinion that he would never get anywhere in the diving business because he did not have the right attitude.

Despite the shortcomings of the school, Thompson did manage to learn the basics. After completing the course, he went to Santa Barbara where he got a job as a boat operator with Bob Colomy, an abalone diver who like many others later went into oil. Colomy gradually eased him into doing some of the diving; and it was not long before Thompson thought he knew enough about the abalone fishery to make a go of it on his own. Before the next season started he bought a 20-foot tin can of a boat and signed up his cousin as tender.

At the end of that abalone season, Thompson went to work for Richfield on the drilling vessel Rincon as a clean-up man. Shortly thereafter, the company reassigned him to run the crane on an anchor-handling vessel. Like everyone else offshore except the divers, he worked on a rotational basis, which during the season allowed him to dive for abalone on his time off.

Two years later, Thompson went to Peru. Richfield told him the job would last three to six months; it turned out to be three years. At the end of the three years, Associated Divers obtained a contract to remove the hoses on a wellhead and replace them with pipe. Since the job was in only a few feet of water Murray Black and Jerry Todd told Thompson that if he wanted to stay on, they would give him a chance to dive. He could hardly believe his ears; in Santa Barbara, Associated would not even let him tend.

"My first dive was to take off the clamps, which were like hammer unions. They were just above my head and I was swinging the hammer, pounding away on them. Meanwhile on deck Murray Black was saying,'Goddamn it, Walt, we're taking longer on this than we'd really planned.'I was grunting and groaning and I said, 'I'm doing all I can. It's just coming hard, but there is a little gas trickling out.' He said, 'Hold it! We'll check with the beach.' They checked with the beach and the word was that the lines had been cleared. Murray said, 'Hit it with all you've got!' So I kept hitting it. Fortunately, it was above me because when it came off it lifted the boat about five feet in the air and moved it about 100 feet to the side. Blackie and Jerry Todd were throwing my hose over the side as fast as they could. I was just underneath it and I was thrown backwards into the mud, but I was okay. That was my first working dive."

After returning from Peru, Thompson left Richfield and joined Associated as a tender, with the promise of being put in the water at the first suitable opportunity. The difficulty he, and any tender who was efficient and conscientious, faced was that the company did not want to break him in as a diver, because good tenders were hard to find.

One day he was in the office when an oil company telephoned to say they needed two divers for a job in 40ft/12M of water. Thompson thought his big moment had arrived. "Forty feet of water, tightening up a flange!" he exclaimed to Bob Rude, the diver who was then running Associated. "It's me, I can do it!"

"Gee, Walt,’ said Rude, "That's good but what kind of insurance have you got?"

"Insurance?"

"I can't send you; you've got to have insurance."

So, again, Thompson went out as a tender.

When Thompson arrived on the barge, he found that the diver he was to tend was Lad Handelman, the future co-founder of Oceaneering International. As he tightened up Handelman's breastplate, he asked what kind of insurance he had. "Insurance?" replied Handelman. "What insurance?"

Shortly afterwards, on another job, Thompson found himself in charge while the other tenders were having a meal in the galley. He had one diver on the bottom, another decompressing at 30ft/9M, and a third in the chamber. At the same time, he was taping a cutting torch and manning the telephones. Despite the three-ring-circus atmosphere, things were going remarkably smoothly. Before the other tenders returned, Murray Black came on board. He told Thompson he was going to start a new company called Divcon. "In three months," he said, "I'll have you in the water."

Sure enough, before long Thompson got the chance he had been waiting for. The job was installing a riser on a platform.

"They'd used up two or three divers and Blackie had just finished a dive. He'd got the clamp down over the riser but he couldn't get the bolt through to cinch it up. They were going to call it a day and then Blackie said, 'Why don't we put Walt down?' The oil company representative said, 'Where's he been diving?' Blackie said, 'He hasn't, but he's got some experience'—which was my dives in Peru."

"The oil company guy said, 'All right, we've got to wait for the boat to come out anyway. Go ahead and give it a try.' He obviously thought it was a waste of time. Well, I got the clamp stabbed. If I'd had to eat it I would have stabbed it."

The Glomar II off California (A.J. Field)​

Towards the end of 1963, Divcon obtained a contract with Shell on the Glomar II, off Point Reyes just north of San Francisco. The Point Reyes lease, with depths of over 300ft/91M, was the deepest yet explored. Because of the depth, Black enlisted Captain Albert Behnke on an informal and unpaid basis to advise Divcon on modifying the navy helium tables, which the company had hitherto continued to use essentially as written.

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Continued in the next post

 

[Oceanaut]

Continued from previous post

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Walt Thompson, Murray Black and Hugh Hobbs with the Divcon Integral Canister Helmet (Hugh Hobbs)​

The work at Point Reyes, with the Divcon recirculator helmet, of which the company built four, was record-breaking. On Christmas Day Thompson spent 16½ minutes at 338ft/103M; on December 27th and December 29th two other divers went to the same depth, for 12 minutes and 19½ minutes. Alex Metson, the drilling superintendent for Global Marine, was reported in the Santa Barbara News-Press as saying it was the first time commercial divers had worked at that depth. A few weeks later, Thompson, Black and Hobbs each made a dive to 370ft/113M with bottom times of from 23 to 36 minutes. Again, the Santa Barbara News-Press, and later the industry magazine Offshore, stated they were the first working dives to that depth. Although Offshore made it clear the divers were doing routine oilfield tasks, Black was careful to dispel any notion his company was out to set records. "We're not like mountain climbers who climb a mountain because it's there," he said. "We had a job that happened to be in 370 feet of water, so we did it."

Launching the observation chamber (Ted Benton)​

At Point Reyes, the divers made as much as $1,200 a dive. Barney Clancy, who managed Divcon's office while simultaneously running his abalone business, was submitting bills of $112,000 for a week to ten days’ work, not only because of the depth but also because of the enormous amount of standby time spent waiting on the notoriously rough weather. Furthermore, Shell was using the Mobot, a cyclopean robot with a television camera and an extendible arm, powered by thrusters and equipped with sonar and a gyrocompass, which proved to be a veritable cash cow for divers. Had Divcon not rented an observation chamber from Charles Isbell—a cylinder with an expanded upper section, with viewports in top and bottom, that he had had built in 1951—for inspection dives, the bills would have been still larger.

In March 1964, Murray Black obtained a contract in Libya on the Glomar V, drilling in the Gulf of Sirte for Libyan Atlantic, a subsidiary of the Atlantic Refining Company.

Divcon's contract stipulated that it was to provide diving services to 410ft/125M, the depth at which the navy helium tables stopped. Black thought most of the work would probably not exceed 350ft/107M. This proved to be a gross underestimate. A month or two after the start of the contract Libyan Atlantic announced that in August the Glomar V would move into 525ft/160M of water. Could Divcon go that deep? All Black could say was, "We'll try."

Through Dr Albert Behnke, or through a computer programmer in Las Vegas, the brother of a Divcon tender in Santa Barbara—or both—Black managed to get the Navy tables extrapolated from 410ft/125M out to 525ft/160M. By the time Libyan Atlantic spudded the 525-foot well, the eighth of the campaign, 24 miles/39KM off the coast at a point 60 miles/97KM east of the town of Sirte, he and his team were ready to go.

They had been operating in the Gulf of Sirte for 18 months; so far all the holes were dry. Now the surface casing for the new well was in and the blowout preventer stack locked on. The drillers were ready for Black to go down in Charles Isbell's observation chamber, which Divcon had bought after renting it for the Point Reyes dives, to guide the locking-on of the marine riser onto the blowout preventer stack.

Before bolting Black in with the two oxygen bottles and the flow meter, the divers lowered the bell unmanned to 500ft/152M, with an alarm clock set to go off in 15 minutes in the bottom. If the bell leaked, so the thinking went, the clock would be under water and the alarm would not go off. The alarm—heard over the intercom—did go off, and Black climbed in.

The dive started routinely enough but once Black had guided the marine riser—some 460ft/140M of it—into place, all hell broke loose:

"I told them to come off the load and suddenly I heard this poing! poing! poing! through the water. What was happening was that they had dropped the pipe from the surface and it was going over sideways. All the strain was thrown on the bottom, and the bolts around the flange—these were 1¼ or 1½ inch bolts—were busting. I said, ‘Pull me up!’ But there was no sense in pulling me up because if that pipe was going to hit me, that was it. Thankfully, it went whoosh! right by me—which was great—but now they had a problem, because they hadn't got any more riser pipe. They had to get it back. It wasn't a case of going to the corner hardware store and buying another."
It took eight dives to recover the riser, which was now in several pieces, and straighten out the mess. Black made the first dive. After a descent in the observation chamber to assess the damage and draw up a plan of attack, he put two lifting bridles around the first piece of riser, at the top of the wellhead at 468ft/143M.

On the next dive, the only one of the eight to take place at night, Walt Thompson went all the way to the bottom, to 525ft/160M. The procedure Divcon was using was to lower the diver on a stage to 30ft/9M on air to check for leaks, then switch him to helium. The dive started when the diver received the gas. Since for decompression purposes bottom time is taken from the moment the diver leaves the surface—or with helium from the switch to gas—in the days of deep heavy gear diving the faster a diver got to the bottom, the better. Black and Thompson were both masters of the rapid descent, and in this instance Thompson got to the bottom in five minutes, the tenders throwing his hose over the side from the 785ft/239M figure-of-eight coil as fast as they could go. "It was decompression we were worried about, not compression,’ said Black. ‘We never thought about the possible consequences of rapid descent."

The main object of Thompson's dive was to sling another section of riser for lifting to the surface. The conditions were ideal and the current negligible, but lugging cables across the bottom at 525ft/160M was hard work. Part way into the dive Gene Mogis, the rack operator, told him to rest. Thompson sat down on the pipe and thought about the vastness of the universe. In his mind's eye he zoomed in from the farthest reaches of space, past the sun and the moon to the earth, to the Western Hemisphere, to the Mediterranean, and so to the Glomar V and finally to ‘this little guy sitting on a piece of pipe down on the bottom, wondering what the hell he was doing there.’

At 9:35 p.m., 28 minutes after leaving the stage, his job finished, Thompson started for the surface. His first stop was at 420ft/128M. At 2:41 a.m., on schedule, he arrived at 50ft/15M and was switched to oxygen. Thirteen minutes later he reported that he was feeling dizzy and nauseated, and then that the guide wires appeared to be twisting. The words O2 poisoning’ were no sooner out of his mouth than Mogis put him back on helium and instructed the tender to bring him up to 40ft/12M. Black then got on the telephone and told Thompson to ventilate, but he felt no better. At that point Mogis decided to treat his condition as a central nervous system bend and lowered him back to 100ft/30M, which produced immediate relief. Thompson was then dropped down a further ten feet, and his decompression started again.

At 4:21 a.m., cold and debilitated, Thompson again arrived at 40ft/12M, where he breathed oxygen for 32 minutes. The surface crew, which included two hands from Global Marine willingly pressed into service as tenders, then brought him on deck and put him in the chamber, with Black in attendance. As a precaution, Mogis recompressed him to 110ft/34M, from where he was brought up to 50ft/15M in trial stages. As Thompson said, they were on the thin edge: he was vomiting in a bucket while Black was consulting the US Navy Diving Manual. However, at 9:58 a.m., nearly 13 hours after the start of the dive, and after one minor recurrence of nausea, Thompson emerged from the chamber, weak and tired but otherwise all right.

This dive and a subsequent dive by Black, also to 525ft/160M for a bottom time of 14 minutes, almost certainly remain the deepest working dives ever made in heavy gear.

One can only wonder whether Al Mikalow at the Coastal School of Deep Sea Diving heard the news.

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End of Multipart post

Edit: New images added by request of Oceanaut​

 

[Akimbo]

Wow, 1963 was really the bleeding edge. I visited the Coastal School of Deep Sea Diving around 1966. It wasn't very impressive even to my naive 15 year old eyes. Ads like this ran in the back pages of Skin Diver Magazine.

My dad told me that Al Mikalow had a reputation as a conman. This probably stemmed from Mikalow's efforts to find the "treasure" that went down with the SS City of Rio de Janeiro in 1901. She sank in the Golden Gate entrance to San Francisco Bay.

 

[Oceanaut]

Wow, 1963 was really the bleeding edge. I visited the Coastal School of Deep Sea Diving around 1966. It wasn't very impressive even to my naive 15 year old eyes. Ads like this ran in the back pages of Skin Diver Magazine.

View attachment 532850​

My dad told me that Al Mikalow had a reputation as a conman. This probably stemmed from Mikalow's efforts to find the "treasure" that went down with the Rio de Janeiro in 1901. She sank in the Golden Gate entrance to San Francisco Bay.

Walt Thompson would certainly have agreed!

 

[Akimbo]

@Oceanaut

Thanks for updating the thread with the new images. There might be a cable hiding in the rigging somewhere but I can't see a telephone cable. Do you know if there was one? It is hard to imagine that this bell would have much value without it.

 

[Oceanaut]

@Oceanaut

Thanks for updating the thread with the new images. There might be a cable hiding in the rigging somewhere but I can't see a telephone cable. Do you know if there was one? It is hard to imagine that this bell would have much value without it.

View attachment 533529​

There definitely was a telephone cable, although it's not obvious in the photo.

 

[Mason Gierke]

That was a great read, thank you.