Keeping on the 100-metre fish freaks

Written by staff reporter Wednesday, 04 March 2009 00:00

What an atmosphere: Mike deGruy continues his descent in the one-atmosphere suit Richard Bull worries professionally on board Big Blue Explorer Betty boo: Kate Humble in a Betty bomber while presenting Pacific Abyss Down lighting: deep lighting technician Mark Thurlow dives the blue holes of Palau Target practise: a cameraman films a bow gun at Chuuk Lagoon Newted and suited: Mike deGruy at home in a Newt Suit Gone fishing: Richard Pyle and Brian Greene – the 100m fish freaks with their trapping rigs Richard Bull

Last spring, a 30-strong team of divers and cameramen spent six weeks filming in the Pacific Ocean. The majority of that time was spent aboard the support vessel Big Blue Explorer, voyaging through the islands of Micronesia. There were cameramen from the UK, USA and Germany. Sound recordists from the USA, the UK and Hong Kong. Kate Humble and Mike deGruy led the expedition. The result was Pacific Abyss, a hugely popular series for BBC1. I was diving supervisor.

I reckon you can always spot the diving supervisor when a diving operation is in progress. He’s the one with big space in front of him – and that’s for the buck to stop if something goes wrong. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a commercial job in the docks or a filming job in the Pacific, there is a chain of command. In that chain of client- contractor-supervisor, it’s the supervisor who is in charge on the day and responsible for getting the job done and getting it done safely. It would be easy to be super-safe by working so far within all limits that nothing whatsoever could possibly go wrong and there is definitely a temptation to do this when you are filming in a remote location on the other side of the planet. The problem is that you wouldn’t get the film made. Let’s get one thing straight. There is a risk in going diving and don’t let anybody tell you different. The idea is to minimise that risk and reduce it to an acceptable level.

Pressures of budget and time don’t make life any easier, but the pressure the camera teams inflict upon themselves is enormous. There is no one more driven than an underwater cameraman who thinks he might not get the shot that is essential to complete the sequence, or one whose camera is pointing at some unique animal behaviour. Nor are the guys shrinking violets. They would speak out in no uncertain terms if I started imposing limits for the convenience of giving me an easy time but which restricted their ability to get the job done. No – it’s down to balance and judgement. You have to have a can-do approach and I have always found that if I’m not over-zealous about ‘elf ‘n safety we can make it safe and we will make the film.

An awful lot of underwater filming takes place in shallow water. This is certainly true of dramas, but in general whatever sort of film you are making, the shallower it is, the better the light is and the longer you can spend pointing a camera at something. Inevitably the depth on a documentary or wildlife shoot is dictated by the whereabouts of the subject. If they live between 6m and 40m there has to be a very special reason to go deeper than 10m.

Enter Pacific Abyss. They didn’t live at 6m. They didn’t even live at 60m. The new species we were after were residents of the twilight zone – between 90 and 120m beneath the surface of the ocean! I was going to be working with some old friends such as Kate Humble and Mike deGruy. Among many other shoots, I’d spent six weeks up the Amazon with these two and, indeed many of the Amazon Abyss team were going to the Pacific. Cameraman Mike Pitts was also on the team.

But there were two people on the team whom I had never met but had admired at a distance for years. Richard Pyle is well known to the technical diving community as a pioneer of open-circuit gas diving and rebreathers diving. Even in the early days of the tekkie thing, Pyle was doing everything his way, mainly because most of the things that he was doing hadn’t been done before, so there was no precedent for the kind of diving he wanted to do. He’s an eccentric guy who likes to dive in a denim shirt instead of a wetsuit, but as far as deep diving is concerned, he is one of the pioneers, and still a truly original thinker.

Phil Nuytten is less well known among sport divers and if he is known at all it is as the inventor of the Newt Suit – the most successful one-atmosphere hard suit ever. This is a fantastic suit, no doubt about it, but there is so much more to Phil. He has designed or invented so many bits of underwater kit from submersibles to helmets to special tools. He was co-founder of Oceaneering International Inc, itself a pioneer and leader in the world of commercial diving. Oh, and among other things Phil is an expert totem pole carver.

Pacific Abyss was a big job for me. The world’s best deep divers, all from different diving cultures. A powerful production team passionate about the film and pushing every minute of the day to get the best out of the camera crews. We had five weeks aboard the Big Blue Explorer to do the job and I knew that there would be many times when the demands of the story board would be a world apart from the reality of deep trimix.

It’s not often I supervise a film shoot without the palms sweating a bit. In fact, a Hollyoaks shoot in a swimming pool about six years ago is about the last one that I can remember where I didn’t twitch at least once. I had the feeling that Pacific Abyss was going to make up for that.

The shoot kicked off for real in Chuuk Lagoon but by that time most of the dive team had spent a week diving in Guam without production staff. Richard Pyle and his team couldn’t make this shakedown, a pity as I had never worked with the guys before and this was the outfit that was going to be doing the deepest and most adventurous diving for the series. These were the guys who were going to be doing the most dangerous diving.

Never mind. Their first dive in Chuuk had to act as a shakedown. Good job it was a shallow one (for them) – 50m on the Nippo Maru! Now, there many reasons to have a shakedown at the beginning of a serious dive expedition. Team members need to get to know each other. Procedures need to be tested and may be modified. Had the kit survived the airline baggage handler drop test? We would find out the hard way.

Though I try to prepare myself for the unexpected, I didn’t expect rebreathers to start falling to bits on the first dive. John Earle’s Cis Lunar started to give him some strange information and in next to no time, no information at all. In fact, the last bit of data that the rapidly failing screens displayed to John was that his PPO2 was so high that he was actually dead!

I had good voice communications with the guys and they seemed to agree that John appeared to be alive and well. There was nothing I could do except get everything in place topside, keep monitoring the situation underwater, and keep wiping the sweat off the palms of my hands as the guys guided themselves and John through the decompression schedule. What a start to five weeks of deep diving! If you saw episode one of Pacific Abyss, then you will know that it all worked out and that the cause of the failure was a flood of the display caused by an O-ring failure. That’s what shakedown dives are all about, but for me there was a much more positive aspect to this episode. We had experienced a problem, a big one. Nobody panicked and everybody did the right thing. I had the advantage of seeing the team perform faultlessly under pressure… so maybe we could push the deep diving sooner than I had planned. Maybe.

My working day usually started with a meeting with the series producer, Dale Templar. I knew Dale quite well from working in the production office with her in the weeks leading up to the shoot. It had proven easier to give me a desk at the BBC than to phone me 20 times a day with diving questions. She is one of the best team builders I have ever come across. She listens and she leads – you can’t fault that. Our meetings were mainly concerned with last-minute alterations to the day’s diving plan which had been agreed the night before at a meeting of the whole crew.

However, those morning meetings did give me the opportunity to prime Dale about things to come. I had to look ahead. If there was some essential, serious deep diving coming up in three or four days time, it was at one of our get-togethers that I was able to make my case. ‘Look, let’s dive the deep teams today as discussed, but I’ve had a look at the next few days and there is some big stuff coming up. I pretty much know how shattered those guys will be feeling if we don’t keep them out of the water for a day or two. Can you plan to rest them tomorrow so that they are fresh when we really need them?’

We had a successful week in Chuuk and eventually set out to voyage through Micronesia, doing as much diving as possible on the way. Evenings were spent planning bailout requirements for the deep diving and among other diving contractor and diving supervisor duties I had to appoint, in writing, diving supervisors for the shallower excursions the following day. I was quite relaxed about the shallower diving because Kate Humble and Mike Pitts were spearheading it. I’ve worked with Kate everywhere from the Shetlands to the Amazon and there is no doubt about her diving ability. Mike Pitts is an ex-marine, oil field diver, veteran of Blue Planet, Amazon Abyss and virtually every other big BBC underwater production. Enough said.

In Puluwat we did our first 100m dives. We made an unscheduled detour to the un-dived Grey Feather Bank where Richard Pyle, John Earle and Brian Greene dived to 80m – into a cave! At Fais Island there was more 100m diving and then it was on to remote island of Ulithi. My logs for the diving at Ulithi state that the guys dived to 320 feet. The imperial/ metric conversion will always be a niggle when there is a mixed team of Americans and Europeans – and if you are not inclined to do the maths, that’s just short of 100m. And so it went on. At the end of each day I collected the logs from whoever had been supervising the other dives and had a chat with all involved in those dives. My cabin on the Big Blue had become an office as cluttered as any in your local business park. Logs were checked and filed and paperwork prepared for the following day.

Palau was our last stop on the trip and the place where the last contingent was to join us. We were all full of anticipation, but it wasn’t a person we were most looking forward to meeting, but a machine – the Newt Suit (although I have to say that I was just as excited about meeting its creator – the legendary Phil Nuytten). The Newt Suit is an unbelievable piece of kit on any level you care to look at it. The ultimate boy’s toy; a space suit; a triumph of underwater engineering. It looks like something out of science fiction, but thanks to Phil’s vision, it is very much part of reality. Putting it as simply as possible diver is encased in a sort of waterproof suit of armour that keeps him at one atmosphere – surface pressure – no matter how deep he dives. This means that very deep, very long dives are possible without racking up any decompression obligation at all. Hard suits have been around for a long time but all have had their share of problems – until Phil Nuytten came along with the Newt Suit.

How was I going to cope with this? Sure, I wasn’t going to be handling the Newt Suit itself but the divers and camera crews were going to be in the water with it so I was going to have to liaise closely with Phil and his team. Luckily for me, the Newt Suit team was a model of calmness and professionalism. They knew what I had to do and what I needed to know and with co-operation the name of the game, we worked well together. The real task was keeping checks on the camera crews and divers. We had been on Big Blue Explorer for four weeks by this time. We had had a great time, but the end was in sight, and now we found ourselves playing with the ultimate diver’s toy. This is exactly the sort of situation where the guard is dropped and complacency creeps in. And as we all know – complacency kills.

At this late stage of the expedition, it’s the job of the supervisor to remain focused not only on the big picture but also on the detail. Has the kit been checked? Has the gas been analysed? Dive plans have to be made and dive plans have to be implemented. Logs have to be kept. I think I just about managed to keep my eye on everything. The Newt Suit provided a fantastic finale to our expedition but, I have to say, I still couldn’t relax until the last diver, on the last dive, was safely out of the water. After a six-week, 2,000 mile voyage that was the first time I began to relax. I do believe I opened a can of beer.

It’s a good job I like what I do because that relaxation didn’t last long. The next one was a massive project – Oceans for BBC2 – and filming for this kicked off shortly after returning from Pacific Abyss. You should be watching this eight-part series by the time you read this article and hopefully you will have had the chance to read the excellent Paul Rose article in the October 2008 issue of DIVE (and now available to view on http://www.divemagazine.co.uk ). Oceans was a completely different project to Pacific. Filming was carried out over a series of three-week shoots, spread over a year, in eight locations all over the world. But the message was the same, whether it was with the fearsome Humboldt squid in the Sea of Cortez or the mantas of Mozambique. Make it safe. Make the film.