MONTY: In awe by the exploits of commercial divers

I’ve just watched the best diving film I’ve ever seen, and I’m going back a long way here, right to Jacques Cousteau and his lads. It was called – appropriately – Real Men, and although that might come across as a tad cheesy, that’s not something you’d say to the faces of the guys involved.

It told the remarkable story of commercial divers operating in the North Sea. We all have a vague notion about hard-hat diving, of course. Mine tended to be that of blokes wielding large tools (ahem…) adjusting gigantic bolts at the base of oil rigs. Sure, visibility might be pretty bad on occasion, and it always seemed to me that it could get fairly rough out there, but the commercial divers I’ve met have always been rather modest, if possessed of a certain understated confidence. I’ve always looked upon it as tough work, but nothing too exceptional. How utterly, massively, completely wrong I was.

The programme showed the divers preparing for the work they needed to carry out at 187m. I’ll say that again. The programme showed the divers preparing for the work they needed to carry out at 187m. Crikey!

This involved spending 28 days together – all six of them – in a chamber the size of a minibus. Part of their preparation involved lifeboat drills, where they had to cram themselves into a pressurized lifeboat. ‘Essentially a coffin with a propeller,’ one of them mumbled, chin on chest, as his mate was crammed in beside him. The other five guffawed heartily at this.

To do the dive itself, three of the team were lowered from the dive vessel into the darkness of the North Sea in a tiny bell, with barely enough space to kit up. Having reached 187m, the lead maniac kitted up the other two maniacs, who lifted the hatch and, with a cheery wave, plodded into the darkness. Casually booting aside a conger the size of an anaconda, they spent the next few hours wrenching, hammering and generally tinkering with a sinister looking bit of kit festooned with electric cables as thick as my leg. The absolute best bit was when they were waiting for something to be lowered to them – a bolt the size of a shire horse, if my memory serves me correctly – so they decided to go for a little dive! They trundled around, picking up crabs, filming anglerfish, grinning at each other, and generally doing what you and I would do under Swanage Pier. At 187m. Barking!

The thing that really struck me was their absolute isolation. This tiny dive team, three-strong, was huddled in an airspace about as big as a telephone booth, an oasis of light and life in an icy-cold sea of absolute darkness. They were connected to the surface by a gossamer thread, which in turn was connected to their mother ship. The ship had to keep itself precisely in position using a complex sequence of bow and stern thrusters, coordinated by a computer, while the sea did its very best to push them around and snap the aforementioned cable or drag the bell along the sea floor.

Saturation divers are as remote as any astronaut – should something go seriously wrong, they are in all sorts of trouble, and have only each other to rely upon. After all is said and done, they are people, and if you take your average person and subject them to the battery of intense sensations (fear, claustrophobia, cold, physical exertion) required to conduct commercial diving operations, you’d very swiftly end up with a gibbering wild-eyed idiot. That they all seemed to be cheerful Geordies was probably not entirely coincidental. My good mate Karim is a Geordie, and as he noted with a glint in his eye: ‘I grew up on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in a tiny town where the rule of the gun was absolute, a lawless, godless, bandit-riven benighted hellhole. Then I moved to South Shields and it was precisely the same.’ He was being thoroughly tongue-in-cheek, of course (wasn’t he?).

We all have a place on the diving scale, from occasional scoobydoos, regular divers and us mincing media types, right through to the technical gurus and the exploratory divers. I’d like to suggest that out there in the deep, dark waters off many an oil rig are a group of divers that are quietly getting on with it, occupying the far end of the diving world every moment of the week and working in an environment we can only begin to imagine. Just another day at the abyssal office.