Martin Woodward on Diving

When I came back from being at sea, I decided that wasn’t the industry for me, there was a seamen’s strike and I thought no, I don’t want to get involved in all this, so I came out of the seagoing career and thought well, what can I do now?

I just happened to be in the right place. I did a couple of jobs and then I was asked if I would do navigational sexton plotting for a local diving company on pipelines across the Solent.  They were doing all the remedial work on the cables and gas pipes off Gurnard over to Lepe, and they wanted someone who could dive and who could also use a sextant to plot horizontal angles ‘cos that’s how you did it in those days.

You didn’t have GPS and things like that, so they said, “Oh well, we’ll see what you’re like on the diving” and I was fine on the diving ‘cos I had been doing quite a bit on my own, and I’m at home in the water.

So they said, “Well, we’ll give you a job as a diver stroke hydrographer. You can do the plotting of the positions and be part of the diving team as well” and in those days, if they spotted that you weren’t any good at it, then you would be out.

There’s a lot of people obviously wanted to get into the industry at that time, but I stayed with that company for a while and then I moved on to another company in Cowes and that’s how you did it in those days.

You didn’t go off and do a course and get a piece of paper and say, “Oh, I’ve got a piece of paper.” They wanted people with practical experience that they knew and could see you were OK in the water because the conditions in the Solent are pretty awful. Visibility no good, tides are strong, you’re working in black water all the time and a lot of traffic, you know Ferries and things going over the top.

So, that’s how I progressed and then from that you progress up the ladder and go on to do other things. It’s like a natural progression. You go from commercial inshore diving, civil engineering diving, salvage work, and then I went to the Middle East on the oil fields out in the Persian Gulf so you get in to deeper work and then I was asked to go back to the people that I worked with before had gone to the North Sea on the deep work, and I was asked to … they asked me to come back to England and go on that. And then I went to the North Sea for quite a few years, doing the very deep diving, the saturation diving where you actually live in a chamber on the ship for a month, under pressure.

It’s quite complicated to explain, but to save constant decompression from deep depths that used to happen, you could only do a short dive and then a long decompression, but they found that if you actually lived under pressure on a chamber which was pressured to the equivalent pressure … say you were working at 500 foot at the bottom of the North Sea, then they’d pressure the chamber to the same gas pressure and then you’d live in that environment and just commute back and forth in the diving bell under pressure which saved constant decompression. You could just do the decompression right at the end of the one month.

It’s quite complicated to explain, but it meant that your decompression would be the same after a month as it would be after being down there for a few hours because your body can only absorb so much gas so you just stay under pressure, the decompression at the end will be the same. It was about 100 foot per day. If you were 500 foot, it would take five days at the end of the month to decompress you back to the surface.