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Award-winning filmmaker would like to speak with saturation divers
I'm an award-winning filmmaker who would like to speak with experienced commercial divers about their work and life experiences. Please get in touch if you'd like to be part of this interesting project.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mike Colton on
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What films have you done
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Permalink Reply by Nadav Kurtz on
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Here are two recent ones. One was a short doc**entary about high-rise window cleaners in Chicago which won awards at a bunch of festivals and was short-listed for an Academy Award:
http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000002426198/paraso.html
This one is about a man who lost his legs in a tractor accident [spoiler alert] and how he got his life back together with the help of his family.
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Permalink Reply by stuart anderson on
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I'm a certified saturation diver that is unlikely to see any value in conversing with you. Why do you want to speak to divers? Do you want to hear about the boredom, the stresses of family life, the fear and giggles of work, or do you want to hear about how I stare a watery death in the face every time I put my oxygen bottle on my back and strap my flippers on, or how much gold/crab I can get?
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I haven't come across much about gold or crabs from what I've read so far about the job. I'm more interested in life in dry bells and hearing from people who've done welding or cutting work. It's research at this point, not interviews. There's a few docs out there about the job but in my experience always better to get it directly from someone who's lived it.
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Well, I've done plenty of cutting and welding earlier in my career, when I worked inshore, but in the last 10 years of Sat diving, I've only been on one burning job, and no welding jobs.
Try googling or searching YouTube for 'real men under pressure' it's quite a bullsht free doc**entary based on the Seawell.
Most diving doc**entaries start off factual, and end up as a Subaqua 'whale wars' which never impresses the actual divers
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That's a good, straight-forward doc. Lots of great details in there. Thanks, Stuart.
I have a question for you that I haven't seen addressed anywhere else. Other than oil-prices being currently low (which go up and down and will probably go back up at some point), what do you see as the biggest threat to sat divers' jobs? Is it foreign competition or the possibility of robotic rovers doing more and more of the work?
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Well, when the Oil price is/was good, then the biggest threat to your job if you didn't work in a region where the pay was regulated would probably be cheaper workers from the cheaper corners of the globe. It has kinda been happening for a couple of decades, anyway- in the early days, the Americans, French, Norwegians and British had the know how, skills and equipment that was needed in the oilfields everywhere. Over the years, 'local' guys got the training from them, and slowly but surely many of these regions set up their own outfits (and with a lot of political interest in 'nationalising' their areas) so when the oil prices rocketed a few years ago, then the related boom in work meant there was almost enough work for anyone that wanted it, and unscrupulous companies around the world began to realise they didn't need a team full of full-price divers, just a couple and a squad of cheap labour to do the donkey work...
So, yeah, in many regions of the world, you are part of the global economy, and a guy that see's $100 a day as a fortune that can buy him a house back home in a month is going to be hard to compete with.
As for ROV's, well don't believe the hype! The Norwegians were confident they would be diverless by the end of the '90's...
Much of the new oil being found nowadays is in the extreme depths that no one really looked at before, and putting in the infrastructure at say 2000m is possible with ROV's but it's incredibly expensive and time consuming too. In shallow waters where a diver can go, there is still plenty of work where a dive boat is cheaper (and remember, huge amounts of the steel down there from more than a decade ago were designed in an age before ROV's and even with 'retrofit' ROV panels, etecetera they still need divers...
After that, well the next threat to your health and wealth is cheap companies utilising sub-standard safety procedures, or 'Dinosaurs' Offshore cutting corners....like many have said before me, Diving isn't 'dangerous'..its 'risky', and Risk can be managed...when someone wants to ignore the risk a****sments, that's when it becomes dangerous.
But when it's all been chewed over, the biggest threat to my job is getting old, and failing a medical...
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