It was defiantly warmer underwater!!!

Fort William Diving Course
By Christopher Harvey
Published in Entropy Magazine, Cranfield University, 4th July 2006

Although this has been a little bit late coming, it seems fitting that a trip for some of students on the MSc Offshore and Ocean Technology course get a mention in entropy magazine. Coming to the end of the year we are still talking about the 5 days spent at the commercial diver training school in Fort William, where 10 members of the master’s course became acquainted with the intricacies of commercial diving. Upon arriving in Edinburgh having a rather cold wet reception where we boarded a bus for the 3 hour journey to Fort William. After arriving and squabbling for the rooms with a loch view we were briefed about the up coming days diving.After some food and a quick journey to the pub all we happy to get into bed ready for the 6.30am start. After a huge breakfast (which was a continuing theme of the whole trip) our first “dive” was a simulation of nitrogen narcoses at a depth of 45.9 meters in a decompression chamber, termed a bounce dive.
This began a running joke for the course as I had previously been in a chamber for very different reasons and became the butt of the continuing joke. Anyway nitrogen narcoses was excellent to experience especially for the non-divers of the group, it gave the feeling of being drunk while still having money in your wallet!
After that the team now on “bend” watch got to grips with some Broco cutting. Basically a very big boy’s toy that uses oxygen to cut stuff, or burn in many of the students first attempts. Anyway after this was precariously mastered we were to be doing this underwater while using surface supplied diving apparatus. Helmets donned, hot water suits plugged in and armed with some marigolds the students attempted to cut shapes off a piece of pipeline laid out on the bottom of the loch. Only two divers managed to cut (melt) anything and this was the cause for celebration.
The next day the students conducted again some surface supplied diving but using a pneumatic grinder to do some grinding of some anodes off the pier structure which then was followed by the correct usage of an airlift. As it sounds using compressed air to lift the seabed, lots of fun, but due to the amount of silt it removed the visibility was reduced to very little, where one of the students managed to get slightly lost (how you can be lost while being attached to the surface is a mystery even now).
The last day of diving was a very rare opportunity of doing a saturation dive in a saturation complex. The Red Baron was our home for the day (a rather rusty WWII barge with a commercial sat complex stuck on top of it). But this was the highlight of the 5 days for many. Upon getting into the chamber, sat control “blew down” the divers to 5 meters and then they transferred to a closed bell where they then were taken beneath the water line to 5 meters to have a dive. The whole process was time consuming but well worth it.
The experience of being in a diving bell and actually doing a dive from it was amazing as no one on the course will every again do one. This is because it is deemed the panicle of commercial diving giving the divers up to £1000 per day wage, but then again who really wants to be living in a baked bean can for 24 days at a time breathing a Heliox at 300 meters pressure underwater?
The whole team enjoyed the 5 days and held it as the best time while at Cranfield, the organisation by Dr Steve Tetlow was excellent and everything went according to plan……didn’t it Steve what happened to that £50 in your wallet! Lastly it is also possible the only reason we all passed the Diving Science and Technology exam as all we had to do was remember what had happened on the 5 days at Fort William.