137: Alan Krell | Maverick & Pioneer Of Deep Sea Saturation Diving

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The following is with Alan Krell - who is one of the pioneers of deep sea, saturation diving - which from the outside, feels just like one of the most high stakes professions you've ever heard of.

We are talking about risk and danger that few lines of work would ever expose you to, and as you hear in this interview, those risks and dangers take their toll.

We try to tell a linear story of Alan's career in deep sea diving, but as well, address the dangers, the near death experiences, the lifestyle, the people, the corruption and everything else that goes with it.

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• 00:00 - Introduction
• 02:35 - Nigerian Oil Rigs In The 90s
• 19:20 - Paul Cleary & The Risks Of Diving 
• 26:56 - Explaining The Bell & The Unbelievable Living Conditions Of Saturation Diving
• 54:09 -  Alan’s Journey Into Diving 
• 1:3:11 - Timeline & Crazy Diving Story's
• 1:22:00 - Life & Death & PTSD
• 1:53:35 - 10% Of Everyone Died

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Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode

• Paul Cleary

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

The following is with Alan Krell, who is one of the pioneers of deep sea saturation diving, which from the outside feels like just one of the most high-stakes professions I've ever heard of. Alan and his comrades would routinely climb into a confined chamber and then stay there for up to 28 days at a time as they dove to depths of 400 feet plus at the bottom of the ocean to do critical engineering to oil rigs that were mounted to the ground and a lot of other sort of deep sea engineering that happens. And they were in these chambers, so they become they could become acclimatized to the immense pressures they would be diving in. It is truly crazy. There is really, I don't know. I I'm lost for a better word there, but we are talking about risk and danger that few lines of work would ever expose you to. And as you hear in this interview, those risks and dangers take their toll. Me speaking Alan was born out of a previous episode on this show, episode 97, with Paul Cleary. He wrote this fantastic book called Trillion Dollar Baby, which analyzes how Norway maximized the natural resource windfall and avoided the resource curse. Paul said that one of the things that stayed with him most from doing the research for that book was the role of the North Sea divers. They were mavericks, they were wild men, and they were precision engineers whose role was largely underappreciated, or you could even say forgotten altogether. So Paul set me out with Alan and here we are. We went back and forth for a while and then decided that it made sense to record a podcast. We try to tell a linear story of Alan's career in deep sea diving, but as well address the dangers, the near-death experiences, the lifestyle, the people, the corruption, and everything else that goes with it. Alan is going to publish a book detailing his experiences, but this is the first time many of these stories have ever been made public. So, while this podcast took me about five hours to put together, it will only take you five seconds to review, therefore, pump that good juice into the algorithm with a five-star review. And as well, I'm trying to grow my socials. So check me out on Instagram. The link to which is in the description. And a big, big, big thank you and message of appreciation to you, Alan. Thank you for being so generous with your time and as well with your stories. I cannot wait to read the book when it gets published. With no further ado, here is the great Alan Krell. No, no, that's okay. Let me prompt you and we'll go from there. Okay? Okay, alright. Alright, right, right. Alright, Alan. You wrote that this book is about offshore oil field diving operations in West Africa and the North Sea. You wrote about the men who died needlessly and just what it took to live through it all. So it's quite a compelling uh jumping off point to hear the story.

SPEAKER_04 2:59

Yeah, it um I I don't think as young men you we as a male species really understand what we're getting ourselves into a lot of times. Um it all sounds very glamorous and very romantic to pursue these careers. Um but it's not until you're in that you actually realize that what you're doing is it's pretty it's pretty fucking dangerous. I'm sorry. I'm gonna try not to to swear.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

No, uh swear away. You're a sailor after all.

SPEAKER_04 3:39

It's yeah, yeah, yeah. Um yeah, I worked with some pretty rough crews out there, so I I've I've I've tried to um recondition myself to exist in normal in a in a normal uh uh a normal life back on the beach is is as I used to say. Um yeah, I was very I was I think I was naive in a lot of ways, Ryan, you know. I just I I assumed that good work good work ethic, um professionalism and moral integrity would be enough to get you into a successful position in this business or the business, I should say. Um but as the years rolled on I realized that's not the case. And uh a lot of money is involved, a lot of money not just made by divers in the North Sea, but also money made by the companies who are the diving contractors, and they then service the clients, i.e. Shell or SO Mobile Texco BP. Um and within within the companies how do they say it in the United States? The company I don't want to say mantra is the wrong word. Um ethos companies ethos, yes. Um are not always aligned with safety ultimately comes down to this is how it used to be. I don't know if anything's changed today. It may have changed a lot. But during the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, it was all down to the money. And the risks that were taken because of it uh were were unacceptable in a lot of our definitions as divers.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Alright, well, um you're laying the groundwork for quite a bit of intrigue, but rather start with what what were you doing? What's the time period? What are you talking about here?

SPEAKER_04 6:03

So I'm talking about the so I got into the business 1988. That's when I completed my diver training in Fort William in Scotland. And then wore out shoe leather, I knocked on a lot of doors in Aberdeen and Scotland. Uh had a good interview with a company called Oceaneering, which is a US-based outfit in Texas and Houston. They had a subsidiary in Aberdeen. Uh the ops manager, Kurt Hendricks, who I'm still in touch with, uh, he basically got me my first slot in West Africa. Three months later, I'm on a British Airways flight into Lagos, and then my first tour was with uh on a Texco contract at Aware, and then the second half of that uh campaign was with Shell for the second year.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Talk about uh Nigeria in 1988.

SPEAKER_04 7:11

That place was a three-ring circus shit show, Ryan. I kid you not. There just isn't. Um, Africa's Africa. You ever spend any time there?

SPEAKER_02 7:25

No. Bit of time in Morocco, but no, you have to I highly recommend it.

SPEAKER_04 7:31

Alright, well paint a picture of it. Three circuits Yeah, it'll test your sense of humor. So you land in in in Lagos, you get to the airport, you're going through the airport, just getting through customs, not customs, getting through immigration is very, very difficult. Then once you get to the other side, getting your backs, then exchanging money for local currency, getting to the hotel, staying in said hotel, getting to the job site. It's it's it's absolutely I've written it, I've written about it all, but I I want to try and condense it for you. So imagine if you will, you're told that as soon as you land, you you're in a hotel for one night. You're gonna get picked up by the company driver the next morning to supposedly take you back to the airport so you can get an internal flight from Lagos to, say, Port Harcourt or Wari. Those are the two oil bases. One's own really by Texco, the other is is predominantly Shell. Then all of a sudden, there's no flights. So the driver says, We have to go cross country. I'm gonna drive you. Drive takes pretty much, for the most part, almost actually over a full day. It's about a 12-hour haul. Going through some of these highways, they are systematically conveniently littered with uh roadblocks and checkpoints. And the said individuals who are checking documents and licenses are also brandishing AK-47s. And if you don't come up with the money, you ain't going anywhere to get through their state or their section of the of the highway. So that for me was a real eye-opener. Having guns pointed at us was not in the contract when I signed it. So that's just one little aspect of the whole episode. Um you get to your destination, you're put up in a staff house, and you wait patiently for your flight to go off to your job with Texco. Uh what I didn't understand at the time was we were based on a super tanker offshore. Super tanker called the Alloibri, had a nickname, the green meaning, it was run by Texco. Um the divers jobs were there. All we were there to do was troubleshoot. If there was a problem, get in the water, fix it. For the most part, 80% of the time there wasn't a problem. So all we did were routine maintenance on these berthing buoys that export tankers lock into and take on their crude. Um fill up the batteries with fresh water, grease the bearings on the buoys, check diving equipment, run some chamber checks for the decompression in case we needed a chamber, do equipment inventories, and that was it for six weeks.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

Alright. Give us a sense though, you're diving. So Well, I thought we were diving.

SPEAKER_04 11:24

I thought we were diving. We didn't did any we didn't I didn't do any diving. You didn't jump in the water once. No. Oh so why'd they bring you out there? You're there on standby. You are there in case something goes wrong.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

So maybe to add more context to it then, explain what just the general role of divers is in a off um in an oil rig operation.

SPEAKER_04 11:48

Yeah, so so let's I'll I'll nail it down to specifics for you. That definition changes by region in the world. So in that specific arena with Texco, the role of the diver is you are there in case something goes wrong. You're an insurance policy. Um, with those specific single berth moorings, there are sub-sea hoses that go down to the sea, but they lock into what we call a pipeline and manifold. That connects a pipeline back to 100 miles back to shore, where the crude oil is then pumped from tank farms on the beach and refineries through that pipeline to the pipeline and manifold, and then uh pushed up the hoses into the berthing buoy, and then floating hose strings attached to the buoy are then attached to export tankers who come in and load up their crude oil, and then they sail off to different parts of the world with their cargo. So our job specifically on that contract for Texaco was uh general maintenance of the buoys and the berthing buoys, and in case it was a sub-sea hose leak to to replace the hose string underwater.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

And the depths you're working at the uh in that condition of the water?

SPEAKER_04 13:21

Yeah, so in that region the water depth is 100 feet, which isn't too deep. Okay. Now, what made it challenging in that part of the world was the Niger River that flowed out into the ocean, that's that fresh water and mud created a thermocline for over 100 miles out to sea. So you would imagine this jumping into a water, jumping into water equivalent to the Caribbean, gorgeous blue, nice and warm, tropical fish, the likes of which you have never seen. And you drop down into the depths, and then all of a sudden there is a dark, icy um layer ten feet above the seabed. And that's where you need to go. And as soon as you drop into that, temperature drops by 10 degrees, visibility goes to zero, you can't see anything. And that's where all the the manifold, the pipes, the vowels, and the pipeline are that you have to. If you if there were if you ever needed to change a host string, that's the business end of where you need to be.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

And in the uh initial setup of the rig, is is it also divers doing all the heavy lifting there as well?

SPEAKER_04 14:47

Um well, this isn't a rig, it was actually a super tanker that was moored there. So there are no rigs out there. This is just a tanker, um, a big berthing, a floating terminal, if you will, probably about the size of a school bus. Circular, maybe 20 feet in diameter, and they're anchored down to the seabed. And there's two of them, and they're about half a mile apart. Cool. And the and the Eloy Bri, the R tanker, is set up permanently moored to Alpha Berth as a floating storage facility. And then the other berth, Bravo, is for the export tankers from whatever country come in, and they are helped to berth up by Smit tugboats from the Netherlands. They then take on the hose strings and then they fill up their cargo. Takes about three or four days to load because they come in and they're riding really high on the water with the with the water line. And then as they as they tie up to the berth, hoses are connected, and these are big hoses. You'll see them settle in the water over a three-day period till there's only maybe a draft of of above surface from the surface to the deck of maybe 20 feet. The other 30 to 40 feet is below the surface. That's how heavy. That's how crude laden these tankers are before they depart. So the entire the entire contract was fly out for six weeks, get bored, do some work, work on your son tan. Make sure you got lots of copper ton. Um, and then fly home for four weeks and then come back out. Now, in my first trip out there, this is what happened in six weeks of me landing. I wound up getting guns pointed at my face, getting tawari. Saw my first dead body in the street of bullet holes across his chest, coming out of a a bar near the expat compound before I flew out. What else? Um heat stroke, because I s because I got invited to uh to an expat beach party at a river. Uh flew out, did my six weeks off shore, back to Wari, flew back to Lagos, then got caught right in the middle of a coup d'etat with rebels trying to take over the airport, the radio station, and the TV station. All flights cancelled.

SPEAKER_03 17:47

I was like, I didn't sign up for this shit. That was a good couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_04 17:56

So you're stuck at the Sheraton Hotel for days until the rebel until the rebels their their idealistic crusade is is crushed by the Nigerian army in a brutal amount of gunfire and grenades, and they're usually all taken out and killed, and then you're a return to your regular scheduled programming, and then the flights resume and it's back to business.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

And back to the uh North Atlantic Sea, Aberdeen.

SPEAKER_04 18:29

So, anyway, I'll I'll be brief. So, Nigeria was two years. I just gave you a brief synopsis of what it was like out there. Um towards the end of the two years, I wound up getting malaria. Wound up in a hospital back in the UK. Um uh a professor at the um Tropical Diseases Section at East Birmingham Hospital at the time gave me the he gave me a letter basically said, No more West Africa, you gotta stay out. You're done. I said, That's fine. So then from there, convalesced, got well, and then headed up to Aberdeen, Scotland, and started uh working in the North Sea.

SPEAKER_02 19:18

Could you um again try for more broader context to introduce the audience what we're talking about? The the the way this conversation came about was because of Paul Cleary's book about the oil exploration in Norway and that whole story. And he said that for him the most sort of memorable or impactful part of doing research for that book was the role uh that the North Sea divers played in it. And you're one of the people he interviewed for that book. So talk a little bit about with that as the context, risks of this job. And um, you know, if we just add on to your in your own words, you wrote that you've had more near-death experiences than any man should have. Let's talk a bit a bit about the risks of diving.

SPEAKER_04 20:09

The risks are inherent, and I like to think a lot of preparation is done to limit those risks, Ryan. But unfortunately, uh things don't always go according to plan. As far as near death experiences go, you have a lot of um situations where many times it's not even about the diving, it's it's about just getting to the job site. I mean, I was in a helicopter that almost went down in the southern sector through mechanical failure. Pilots recovered it at the last minute and we made it to the heliport. There were crash trucks and fire engines and everything waiting for us. So we lived through that. Quite a number of divers and other offshore personnel don't, because when the helicopters fall out of the sky in the North Sea, it usually only ends one way, and that's not well. On a few odd occasions with helicopters, they are able to ditch, and the crews are able to escape out of the emergency windows before the choppers capsize. Helicopters are inherently top-heavy and trying to land on a very rough ocean surface, they don't stay upright for very long. Um that's one aspect is just getting getting to and from where you need to be. Um getting out there actually on the vessels. Risk elements are uh there there are safety meetings continuously. There are briefs to the dive operations, always concerning safety. And no matter how much planning you do, sometimes Mother Nature doesn't play along. It just doesn't work that way. So you can have the best laid operational plan you could possibly have. Executed to the best of your ability. And then something happens that you just don't see coming. Storms come up out of nowhere. Conditions underwater can change very quickly. Good visibility can go bad. Currents can increase to a point where they're almost non-workable. Equipment can get fouled on the way down to you. So there's a lot of different things. Now, to better give you some ideas of the how perilous this can be. Brad Westell, who's a friend of mine, I worked on quite a few jobs with him. He died getting sucked into a thruster when he was working for Steno. And a thruster is a propeller or a set of propellers underneath the vessel within the hull that act as positioning systems for the ship to stay on location. Now, from what I understand, and this is all documented, you can read up on this if you like, they were dredging a trench on the seabed for pipeline. His job was to get into the bell with his partner, go down, clear, clear the jetting system, and get back to the bell. Now, unfortunately, the area where he was working, the tides and the currents are extremely high, and your window of opportunity for getting in the water is very, very narrow. You're only looking maybe an hour to a two-hour maximum window before the tide changes to a point where it becomes non-diveable because the currents are too strong. So Brad went down, he they they locked off the system, there they they got down to the to the seabed, he got dressed in, as Bellman did his checks, dropped into the water, and at this point the current had already started to turn. I think from what I understand, he cleared the problem with the dredger. But when he was on his way back, the bite of his umbilical, and the umbilical is your life support system back to the diving belt. It contains your breathing gas, uh, the gas reclaim for the heliox, a closed circuit TV camera, um, communications, and some other some other important stuff, pneuma hoses, that kind of thing. And they're about four inches in diameter thick, and they can be up to 70 meters in length. The a lot of Brad's umbilical, when he was going back to the bell, he was traveling with the current. The bellman wasn't able to pull his umbilical slack in fast enough. Because it was it was the bite of his umbilical, if you can imagine, would go up in a loop, maybe 40 meters high, and then back down again into the bell. So the bellman's not able to pull up the slack and keep it tight horizontally to the diving bell. It's going up in a loop. So as Brad was moving closer and closer to the bell, because he was moving fast with the current, the bite of the umbilical went higher and higher and higher till it got to a point it was within the five-meter danger zone of the nearest thruster. And then the next thing any next everything the next thing everyone knew that was just screams and he was he was gone. Were you in the bell? No, I wasn't on this job. Talk talk a little bit about the bell. Uh what is it? So the diving, yeah, yeah. Your diving bell is your basically your elevator to the job site. It's how you get down. Yeah, that's the easiest analogy I can give you. Um as saturation divers to work at extreme depth for long periods of time, you have to live under uh under pressure in a living chamber that is pressurized to your working depth. So say the seabed's at 400 feet. Your chambers you're living in would be pressurized to 375 feet.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

And living in just for that job or for a long enough period to be acclimatized?

SPEAKER_04 27:17

Long enough to be acclimatized. In fact, your your seal-to-seal time in the UK sector of the North Sea is 28 days.

SPEAKER_02 27:25

So for you to do a job at 200, 400 feet meter uh 400 foot depth, yeah, you'd have to spend 28 days in some type of artificial environment that is pressurized to 400 feet.

SPEAKER_04 27:43

Correct. That's there are some details in there that are minor, but that for all intents and purposes is correct.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Without being able to step outside?

SPEAKER_04 27:51

No.

SPEAKER_02 27:52

Because what would happen to you if you just open up the door and step outside?

SPEAKER_04 27:56

It's called explosive decompression. That actually happened on the Bidderford Dolphin back in the 1980s, and if memory serves four men died within 0.2 of a second.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

Jesus. So that's this is where the big risk element and danger sort of comes into it, right? I mean you're hands around.

SPEAKER_04 28:19

Oh yeah, that's a very that's a very big part of it, is you're effectively you may as well be how can I describe this to you? It's like it's like being an astronaut, and you may as well be that far away from ever seeing the sun in the sky, because your body is saturated with a completely alien gas mix of helium and oxygen. It's just my terminology. Um and you have to breathe helium because it's an inert gas. You cannot, it's it's almost impossible to breathe compressed air at those depths. The problem with breathing compressed air, just to give you a quick crash course in diving physics, is uh nitrogen when it is is under pressure can become very narcotic to our bodies. And so your thinking, your ability to perform is impaired. It's like effectively drinking martinis or having alcohol. Um so really air, compressed air is is is only useful down to limited depths, maybe 100 feet. And even then, your bottom time is very limited to maybe 15 or 20 minutes. So, in order to get around this for more efficient working sub-sea, quite a long time ago, the US Navy figured out you you take out the nitrogen, you replace it with helium, which is an inner gas. It's not narcotic under pressure, and diarrheas can work for days, weeks, even months under under pressure at full normal performance.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

You're spending up to a month, 28 days, in this acclimatized room. Is this chamber? So is this a small enough chamber to move around? How do you how do you occupy your time?

SPEAKER_04 30:22

Well, you the chambers are about 30 feet in length, maybe 20, 25, 30 feet in length. Some of the larger ones on average are maybe 15. Uh anywhere from three to six bunks. That's your living chamber. That chamber is then connected to a transfer under pressure chamber. The transfer under pressure chamber is a smaller chamber, but that contains a stainless steel sink, uh, the toilet, shower, equipment lock. So that's kind of where all the um getting ready to go on your bell rung or your dive takes place, your dressing in, getting suited up. When you come back, it's your shower, your bathroom, um, and everything in between. And then all your wet dive gear gets uh folded up and put into the equipment lock, which is a large lock. That then gets the doors closed on the inside, sealed, and then a live support tech on the outside of that of the chambers who's taking care of all of us, um, and there's quite a few of them. They then remove the wet, damp equipment, and they go rinse it, wash it, and dry it for the next day.

SPEAKER_02 31:41

And so you're on the rig in this 30-foot container, you then get transferred into a bell, you go to the bottom, you do your work for the day, back in the bell, back up to your chamber, and this is a cycle for a month at a time, uh, more or less. Correct. Well, what if you're uh what if you're stuck in that room with a smelly fella or someone who you don't particularly like? You can't even open up the door to go for a walk.

SPEAKER_04 32:10

Well, let's just replace the rig with dive support vessel. Okay. So ship. Now, just to briefly, just to just to segue the the to go off off your question just for a short period here, just to clarify for you in the audience, is during the 70s and 80s a lot of diving was conducted from the rigs from the platforms. During the 90s, that has then not become the case. Uh the main place or how can I explain this? The the main platform for diving has now become dedicated dive support vessels or ships. So very few jobs these days are ever conducted actually on the platforms. Um to get back to your question of uh smelly divers. Well, everybody's everybody's hygiene is usually pretty good. We it has to be. However, there can often be personality clashes.

SPEAKER_02 33:19

I can imagine. I mean, four or five fellas, and as well, I I'm presuming that the deep sea divers are the more eclectic mix of those among us.

SPEAKER_04 33:30

Eclectic is a good term to use. Um they are a very varied bunch of people, and they can be from all walks of life from many different countries.

SPEAKER_02 33:43

But what happens? Have you had a situation where you've been put a month literally in the same room as a guy? Yes. And you just can't stand him. Yes, yes. Yeah. Tell me about it.

SPEAKER_04 33:57

You know. Well, I, at the end of the day, how I dealt with it personally was, and I can't speak for other divers, it's just me. Um I think for me it was just about remaining professional. Because I personally worked a l I worked very hard for a lot of years to get there, and I didn't want to screw that up. And at the end of the day, for me, commitment to the job, trying to stay professional, and ultimately you're there for the client. That was my that was my fault to in my head. But what's the situation?

SPEAKER_02 34:45

Like what was he doing to get in your nose?

SPEAKER_04 34:49

Okay, let's go to specifics. Let's see. Okay. There was a very tense period where the company I worked for subsea. And I I it's I'm gonna try and keep it brief and stay on on task. Uh a crew of divers had come in from another company, they had been promised a lot more work, they were somehow viewed as um far more uh able to pull off lump sum contracts than we were. It was it turned into a big power struggle at the end of the day, uh at much higher up at management levels. It didn't end well. 80% of that crew that supposedly came out with the superintendent wound up going back to Seaway. But that's just a whole different saga. What I will say is that when I was in the bell with there was me, a guy named Mike, and I can't remember the other the other partner in the bell, but this this individual, Mike, and uh he he didn't like me a little bit, and I thought he was just an arrogant twat, to be perfectly blunt. We're on the seabed, we had one job to do, which was put a corrosion protection cap on a pipe end. We were standing literally in ten feet of drill mud. This pipe end weighed a good 75 pounds. He said to me, Pick it up, lift it up over your head, hold it up, and I can slot the ball through. Now I raised this thing up to my chest, and it was like lifting, it was a lot heavier than 75 pounds. It was probably close to 150. And I couldn't, as you as you lift something that high, your body sinks into the drill mud. It's not like standing on the tarmac, okay, or on a sidewalk. You literally you increase your body weight and you fall, it pushes you deeper up to your knees. And we struggled, I struggled with that thing for at least 30 minutes until we finally got a ball through. Now the ideal solution would have been to drop a smaller crane called a cherry picker down with a strop on it, rope the strop through one of the holes in the dead in the flange in the protection cap, lift it up with the crane, put it into position at the pipe end, and then slot your ball through, and it's easy peasy lemon squeezy, everybody. You're in you're back in the chamber in time for lunch. But no, they insisted on doing it the hard way. We finally got back to the bell. Oh yeah, what did he say? He said something on the comms to the effect of if I had a more professional bell partner in the water, we'd have had this done sooner. And I fucking lost it. I just lost it. I did. I didn't say anything right then and there, I waited till we go back in the bell. We got a seal, we're on our way up. I looked at him, I said, You ever speak to me like that again? When we're in the water, I will end you. He just looked at me and he screamed. He said, The only reason you're in here is because I'm fucking permitting it.

SPEAKER_02 38:33

And then how many more days do you have to spend with that fellow?

SPEAKER_04 38:37

Well, our bellman, the third guy in the team, went silent because he knew we were almost going to come to blows. And it wouldn't be the first time there's been punch-ups in there. So that that little escapade lasted uh it was another three weeks. Three weeks since that with that guy.

SPEAKER_02 39:02

And was it icy between the two of you, or did you end up getting along with that? Oh, no, no, it was always icy. It was always icy. What's uh what's the world like? What's it like swimming and observing the world at those depths?

SPEAKER_04 39:20

You know, it's very Spartan, it's very empty, it's very it's like I I don't want to say like being on the moon because I haven't been on the moon, but from what I've seen, you are in a very desolate place. Ryan, it's it's sand, it's dark, because the deeper you go, the less light penetrates. Um the marine life is almost non-existent. And you have you you you're working you're working in a in a place that's it's very um it's very lonely down there. I'll I'll be up front with you there. So if you're not constantly working, you definitely have a lot of time to look around and go, wow, this is this is crazy. You know, you're at 700 feet. And and and oftentimes the you can either have a mud bottom or you can have a sand bottom. Currents can be flowing, currents cannot be flowing. Um if it's August, you're infiltrated by hundreds, if not thousands, of jellyfish. Oh, cool. Those are problematic. Their tentacles get on the umbilicals. Uh by the time your bell runs down and you're getting back in the bell, there you you're getting stung. It doesn't matter how hard you try not to, how much you cover yourself. You tend to get stung a lot across your neck, wrists, your arms, anything can be exposed. Um, as far as the seabag goes. Um no, it's it's not at the depths. Well, you do have exposed skin because you're wearing hot water suits, so they're exposed to some extent, but the suits the suits basically pump hot water around your around your body to keep your warm. Okay. You're wearing steel tocat wellington boots if you're working on the bottom. If you're working mid-water, then usually wearing fins. Um, you'll have a bailout pack for your emergency gas supply if you lose your main umbilical gas. Um what else you got? Close circuit TV cameras on both helmets with full comms to the surface. The closed circuit TV cameras will relay images real time to dive control, saturation control, client's cabin, client's office, superintendent's cabin, superintendent's office, bridge, and sack control. So these so the entire vessel can see what's going on, you know, when you're when you're down there working.

SPEAKER_02 42:02

What about animal experiences? Apart from gentlemen, animal experiences something with a bit of a wildlife. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 42:09

The wildlife.

SPEAKER_02 42:11

You ever get a sneaky, I don't know, whale come down at that depth, or do they stay away from all the human activity?

SPEAKER_04 42:19

No, no, they they tend to stay away. They they tend to stay away. Big fish. Uh in West Africa, yeah. Groupers. Groupers the size of uh VW's uh bus.

SPEAKER_02 42:33

Wow, that'd be amazing to see.

SPEAKER_04 42:36

Well, amazing's not quite my choice of word when you're intimidating for sure, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:41

Intimidating face to face with a bus in the water.

SPEAKER_04 42:46

I Ryan, I've never seen fish that big ever. And they are monstrous. Utterly monstrous. And everything out there uh around the the equator, it's almost prehistoric. Stuff grows down there the sizes of everything is seems to be twice or three times its normal size. Cockroaches, alligators, certainly, crocodiles, the marine life offshore, the barracutas. Um it's it's it's it's a little it's a little intimidate, it's a lot intimidating, actually. Because you're trying to focus on doing a job, and more often than not, these things can be really sometimes very problematic.

SPEAKER_02 43:34

Did you ever find something intriguing on the ocean floor? Something that just blew you away?

SPEAKER_04 43:42

Uh no. No. We we as as a professional diver, you're there to do a job, so you don't get a lot of time to to look. You don't get much free time.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

But I imagine there'd be every now and again some sort of academic exhibition that will tag along with you. Fellas. No. Never. Never. How do they get their do they have their own exhibitions then?

SPEAKER_04 44:10

Or the academic institutions of the world?

SPEAKER_02 44:13

I'm just imagining there must be some bodies out there who are diving simply for exploratory purposes, research purposes.

SPEAKER_04 44:21

Oh, that's a whole, yeah, no, no, no, no, that's a whole different story. So let's just take, for example, what I know of, say Woods Hole of Oceanographic Institute, um, on the east coast of the US. They have their own ships, plural. They have, I'm sure they definitely have their own dive gear. But a lot of their deep exploratory stuff is done with subs. Okay. Submarines. So you don't need saturation diving, you don't need mixed gases, you don't need any of that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 44:54

And is the saturation diving, do you see it eventually being usurped by just much better subs with little mechanical hands that can do the jobs that the humans are doing?

SPEAKER_04 45:06

Well, you know, it's funny you say that because the Norwegian government at some point during the 90s, their target was for the Norwegian sector of the North Sea to be completely diverless by the year, I think it was like 2010. And it's not the case.

SPEAKER_02 45:25

They're still down there.

SPEAKER_04 45:27

No. And I can tell you fact, on one Beleron, I spent six hours looking for a sub that they lost. Six hours doing circular searches on the seabed trying to find one of their toys. And these things are worth a lot of money. I mean, into the millions. Yeah, I'm sure. The RD, the robotics, electronics. I mean, they're not cheap. And when they lose them, it's it's a little embarrassing. So now, don't get me wrong, they have their place, and they are a godsend in many instances when we're down there. Um, they really do help divers immensely. They can provide extra light, they can find a location before you before you are actually ready to go there. They can have it set up, and that they just they'll fly over, find whatever, say, well head you need to be on, if you're on a different location. So it saves you a lot of trouble having to navigate compass headings and trying to get to a place where you it's because it's disorientation down there is a big thing. So you really have to have excellent spatial awareness. You've always got to know, and this is really an important, the very important part of sat diving is you've got to be cognizant of where the bell is, you have to be cognizant of the ship's heading, you have to have you've got to remember where everything is around you in order to get to the right place at the right time at the right speed. Is that track with you?

SPEAKER_02 47:13

So this this uh tech It feels like you're just putting your hand you're you're putting your fate into the hands of a bunch of technology doing what it says. For instance, how were you ever nervous that say the um pressure gauge on your shell was malfunctioning? Therefore, the minute you step out into the water, it's all over. Um and as opposed to the other 25 fail safes that is purely technologically related. I mean, I'm just wondering if you're spending 28 days in a capsule, uh I I assume other people are saying, all right, systems are good. Does it feel hard to accept that, okay, my entire fate now is relying on that that system is not malfunctioning?

SPEAKER_04 48:01

You're putting your fate not in the system, you're putting your your your life, as it were, in the hands of other people. Now, there comes a point in time where you have to trust in their training. And those people are called life support technicians. And their sole job, their only reason for existence, is to be a Tebec and call. No, let me rephrase that. Not Tebec and Call. That is a slight accuracy. They are there to uh maintain life support. They're there to feed you, they're there to water, they're there to make sure you get your equipment in and out that you need. They are there to transmit messages to loved ones back on the beach. And they are, without doubt, the some of the most important people on a ship, and they get they get overlooked a great deal. But I cannot emphasize how incredibly important those men and women are who do that job. Because without them, nothing else works.

SPEAKER_02 49:20

But even they, at one level, are just relying that the technology's not malfunctioning. If you go all the way back to the very first indicator, you're still, in one sense, putting your faith, your your your your life's in the hands of technology that's not malfunctioning.

SPEAKER_04 49:39

Correct. Now, the good news, I'll just be brief with this part of it. The good news with the technology is that the the technology is not very advanced. It's all about physics. Pressure gauges are operated uh with analog gauges for the most part, at least when I was diving. Analog gauges rarely fail, if ever. They're very mechanical. Um, your valves in SAT control that that are controlling the gases that we breathe, they can only be turned on and off or switched by life support technicians. So, for all intents and purposes, to my knowledge, in the entire time that um and in the years that I was offshore, rarely did anybody ever get it wrong. Now, having said that, when they do get it wrong, it usually winds up somebody getting killed.

SPEAKER_02 50:49

Talk a little about these mavericks who trial and errored all of these um systems and protocols. So you're in it in the 80s, 90s. I think they first started going deep in like the 60s.

SPEAKER_04 51:07

I'd say late sixties. North Sea really took off, early 70s, that's when they started discovering oil. And then it was a it was a it was like the Klondike Gold Rush in in the US back in the 1800s. It was the same type of situation in in Scotland.

SPEAKER_02 51:24

So who are the groups of divers and physicians and physics and physicists who had to trial and error this stuff.

SPEAKER_04 51:35

Yeah, they did, you're right, they did. They there was a lot of trial and error. Um a lot of the tech was taken from the US Navy. The diving systems were rudimentary. The training was almost non existent. And no, this is quite serious. A lot of people, the death toll in the 70s was was it was pretty catastrophic, actually. A lot of people died. And there was no official commercial diver training to speak of back then. And and I have guy there are guys that I worked with who were doing it back then who lived through it. And they basically turned around and said, you know, they were a welder or they were an electrician and they just were on a rig doing some work, and somebody came to them and said, Can you swim? They're like, Yeah. Okay, put that shit on and get down, and we need something fixed.

SPEAKER_03 52:39

And they did.

SPEAKER_04 52:43

That that's how that's how that's how loose loose and goose it was. It was just it was just it was sh it was really the the the the early days of pioneering. And you know, you lived through it or you didn't. Um what changed was the Department of Energy in the United Kingdom in London. They then morphed into or set up a different branch called the Health and Safety Executive from from memory. And so when the government stepped in, the when the government stepped in, the death toll had become unacceptable.

SPEAKER_02 53:21

In the US.

SPEAKER_04 53:22

In the UK.

SPEAKER_02 53:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 53:25

US is a whole different deal. So let's just shelve that one for a minute. So in the United Kingdom, because of the way the government's set up, you've got a socialist country, they have final say in what happens. It's not like the United States. Um they then came up with mandatory basic minimum training standards for divers. And it was only then that things started really to get much safer offshore.

SPEAKER_02 54:00

Why did you get into this in the first place?

SPEAKER_04 54:04

Oh. Good question. Um I I was never very academically inclined at school. I I suffered from dyslexia at the time. Uh I had a hard childhood, came from a very dysfunctional family at the time. And I don't think anybody held out any great hopes for me for the rest of my days. Um that's kind of part of the final answer. The other part B of all of this is I started watching these undersea worlds of Jacques Stowe in the 1970s, and then when we moved to New York, I started spear uh uh spear fishing and scuba diving at the age of 15. And I was hooked. I loved it. I I just loved I loved being in the water. Absolutely, it was like a second home for me. And so after I left high school, I I couldn't see myself getting to university and doing a degree in really anything. And so I just had this this epiphany to to become a diver, and that's where the romance came in, you know. We just all all you heard about Norse divers in the UK when I was growing up were Lamborghinis, salvo road suits, jet set lifestyle, and uh divers and Lamborghinis. Yeah, that's true, because it was 70s, I promise you that was the case. Do you know in 1974? And this was this was legend. I'm just calling back memories. Somebody told me this, so I don't know exactly where it came from, but it's quite accurate. You could do one dive trip offshore, come home to England and buy a house with cash.

SPEAKER_02 56:13

Wow. And this is just demand supply. Aberdain is pumping, and this is the same.

SPEAKER_04 56:19

Well, this was this we've got to remember this is early days, and a lot of people were dying, so they were paying a lot of money. Now, tail from what I know of, Taylor Diving and Salvage were contracted in the UK sector of the North Sea. They were paying their divers a thousand dollars a day back then. So think about the math on that. A thousand US a day in 1974 was a bucket load of money. So it's not it's not uncommon that that they could be very wealthy if they lived through the events that took place out there. But also a lot of divers usually wound up in in in divorce courts too. If they were married, they didn't seem to stay married.

SPEAKER_02 57:08

Well, you've got to spend a month a pod in a pod at a time. I I can understand.

SPEAKER_04 57:14

Yeah, yeah. And I I went through that. I was under the misguided conception that I could actually hold down serious relationships with with partners at the time. Um they love the money. They love the fact that you're a diver and you have this unique career.

SPEAKER_02 57:34

I mean, it's quite a romantic kind of high-risk, you could even say maybe a sexy occupation.

SPEAKER_04 57:42

Yeah, and and it's true, it all very is. Is it it is, and but unfortunately, when reality sets in and you're not home for nine weeks, um it strains relationships, it just does.

SPEAKER_02 57:56

Any female divers?

SPEAKER_04 57:59

Not when I was working. Um there were one or two who actually attended their dive courses and they got to their part one air diving. And they got offshore and worked maybe three or four months and then quit.

SPEAKER_01 58:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 58:17

Went up back in the office.

SPEAKER_02 58:19

So But there's nothing about the anatomy that makes that pressure harder to endure.

SPEAKER_04 58:26

No, it's I don't think it's anatomy, Ryan. It's more about physical strength and and I'm not And also the environment, I suppose it's Yeah, the the environment is the the the physical attributes of of the female body don't lend themselves to heavy underwater construction lifting um dynamics. Now, throw into the mix these saturation diving systems that we live in. Every chamber is monitored with closed circuit TV cameras. Every chamber. You brush your teeth, you're on camera, you go to the toilet, you're on camera, you have a shower, you're on camera. Yeah, it is, and it these and it's all all these displays are in SAT control. And they're not there as any kind of weirdness, they're there for for the safety of all of us because, and this is how it works, if one of us were to collapse in a chamber, they can see it. And then start doing some very fast deductions as to why someone just went unconscious. The number one situation would be bad gas. So then you gotta check all the gas mixtures, make sure that the right gas is going to the right chamber for the right depth. Now you throw in a woman into that environment, it just uh it would, I I don't know, by me, I I would welcome it. I mean, I'm I'm I'm all for anybody who wants to be a diver, be it be a female or a male, if if they want to come into the business, that's great. It's just a very different dynamic when I think when you have a woman come in and and they have to do everything that we do.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:23

And live in a box with five other blokes for a month.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:27

Yeah, I I I don't know how well that would work. I just don't. Um today in 2023 things could be a lot different.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:38

You got any sense for why this chapter of history is not represented in the media at all? Because I I when I read the synopsis for your book, when I, you know, listen to Paul Cleary talk about it, listen to you talk about it now, there is so much drama and I suppose, yeah, like intrigue, enough there at least, that it would justify any number of you know interesting representations in the media. Do you have any uh uh any sense as to why maybe that it hasn't happened?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:14

Because it's it's away from it's away from normal everyday life. It's it's it's it's out there somewhere.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:21

But that's but that's that's uh that's a that that goes in the pro column, why it should be in media.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:28

I agree. But but here's the direct answer to your question is the the how can I say this? The the the the the hoops you have to jump through just to get out there are very extensive. So you can't just as a member of the media, you can't just show up at a helicopter port and say, I want to go out and do a story on this and just fly me to the news platform. You know, it's not like walking onto somebody's ranch or or uh or showing up at a traffic accident or uh whatever the story is. Just to get out there is is is huge. You've got to do first aid training, you have to do offshore survival firefighter training, you then have to go through the correct channels, you've got to get approvals from the oil companies, you've got to be scheduled into flights just to get offshore. Then you're entering an environment where there are 24-hour shifts, day shifts, night shifts, people are constantly, constantly busy. And very few people have the the the windows of opportunity to to go in and and do these stories. You know? I think it'd be great. The only the only the only the only guy I knew of that actually wound up in a magazine was uh Mike Klukas. And he wound up in a in in a print of uh FHM or GQ, I think it was.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:09

I think it was GQ. It was a center spread.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:12

There's Mike Klukas with a diving helmet on and there's his hot water suit, and and and a brief interview, and and that was it, you know? No, and I still got that, I still I kept that. It's in my scrapbook.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:26

You got any long-term health implications from being uh pressurized that many times?

SPEAKER_04 1:03:32

Um I implications, I think many divers I'd like I think I I I would like to think I can speak for many of them. Memory can be an issue. Um I'm suffering from sinus problems now. Um that's terrible. What else is there?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:54

Well, I have really bad sinuses always been a problem.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:58

Yeah. I only really started having the effects, you know, the last ten years, but they tend these things tend to manifest years later after you after you finish. Um there was some theories on bone necrosis for sat diving, bones getting brittle because of the environment. Because of a lack of movement or because of the no, I think it was I think it was because of of living under pressure, but yeah, lack of movement, but also living in a helium oxygen environment pressurized for those length for those months that turned into years had a detrimental effect on the bone marrow. Now, from what I understand, some some uh research was done into this in the 70s or the 80s, and perhaps I think some uh some some boss some bones of some old passed away divers who'd been dissected, but then you see you run into other problems where you've got to get permission from families for that to even take place in the name of research. But I think it kind of went away, it didn't go anywhere, as far as as far as I know.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:19

All right, well let's let's return to the timeline. Oh, sorry, was there more on health?

SPEAKER_04 1:05:25

No, no. Well, the health really the only the only thing I can say about the health that I noticed, and this was on Stateive with Shell. Uh State is a dive support vessel, used to be owned by Shell, were the the decompression schedules, i.e., and this is just concerning health issues. Um we Shell had a policy at the time of decompressing all the teams shallow. Just in case there was a problem, because it's easier to it's easier to blow a team down in depth to deal with a problem that's say on the seabed than it is to bring them up to take care of a problem that's much shallower. So at the time show policy was okay, you've got a team on the bottom, once they finish doing whatever it is they're doing, let's decompress them up from say 300 meters to 100 meters. So you finally get to that decompression level after three or four days, and you think great, we're at 100 meters for the duration of stat. I don't know. Guess what? There's a problem, and it's 400 meters, we're gonna blast you back down again instead of chambers pressurize. You're going all the way back down to the seabed, um, you lock out, you take care of whatever problem is. Say it's a pipeline incident. Uh a fishing boat dropped an anchor on the pipeline, it cracked some concrete, you gotta take photos, video, measurements, so then the engineers on the beach can come up with a quick repair package. That dive's done, you go back to the belt, lock on the system, then next thing you know, okay guys, you were decompressing you up to X depth, open up your shampoo bottles, and you're like, okay, here we go again. So in one sat, we compressed and decompressed five times in three weeks. And when I came out of SAT, my knees were killing me. I could barely walk.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:38

Oh shit.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:39

Because you think of the They were aching, they were absolutely aching.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:43

But the bone effect.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:45

I don't think it was the bone effect, I think it was just the muscle joint itself.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:51

And it wore off after a few days. Um but what I will say about the effects of sat diving is when you come out of saturation and you're back on normal atmosphere, breathing air again. I I used to feel awful for three or four days. And it was like, and I will describe awful to you, it's sort of like having flu but without direct symptoms. And I talked to my diving doctor about this in in the UK, uh, Dr. Krishnan, I think his name was. Very smart guy, very smart. Um, and he explained it to me in in uh in very simple terms. He basically said, when you are living under pressure, the O2 is being rammed into your bloodstream. It's like turbocharge. There's less of it, maybe only 4%, maybe only 5% or 6%, depending on the depth, but it's at a much higher pressure. When you come out of, as you're being decompressed, the pressure is decreasing, the partial pressure of the gas is decreasing, but the volume of gas is increasing. So by the time you hit surface, you've gone from breathing 4% oxygen to 20% oxygen. So your body's reacclimating to having to pull the O2 out of the air you're breathing at a normal at an at a normal rate. Does that did I explain that in a way that it makes sense to you?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:38

I I I that makes sense. Yeah and you'd need a doctor to say why that then affects the body then. Yeah. But I but I understand. I mean, it sounds like that you as well, after the 70s and 80s, but even the 90s, the divers are still going through sort of the trial and error of how can you actually optimize it so there aren't there aren't health implications from diving. Or maybe it's actually unavoidable humans just aren't supposed to be that different.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:06

I think, yeah, well, well, here's here's here's the deal. I think to me, the whole concept of sap diving, and I'm sure a lot of divers out there, superintendents, oil companies, will disagree with me. Then that's fine. And maybe I've oversimplified the whole idea. In my mind, it's saturation diving is needed. It's it's as safe as it's ever going to get. I don't think there's anything they can do these days to make it safer from a mechanical or a physical point of view. In that um, where was I just going with this? Um yes. The concept of sat diving for me is you decompress it, you compress it, you compress a team down to a storage depth, and they should remain at that depth for the duration of their sat and then decompress. So the whole concept on certain vessels, how they were laid out with multiple chambers, is that you can have different teams at different depths. Which makes sense, right? So you got a deep team, you got a midwater team, and you might have a shallow team. Well, you might have two shallow teams, two deep teams, and one midwater team, or mid-depth team. Now, that that if if you're on an IRM contract and that stands for inspection, repair, and maintenance, that's usually quite doable. Um, it just depends on the work scope. See, there's so many differing factors. It's not easy to come up with a plan and say, well, this should be this way because it's just simpler. Because diving is never that simple. And you're there to inspect, repair, and maintain the oil company's assets. That's that's the whole reason for being. That's the inception. So it's it's it would be easy for anybody to sit in a chair sipping coffee and go, okay, well, let's just keep these guys here and those guys there and these guys here. And yes, a lot of doctors out there would probably agree with me. I would like to think they would. But in reality, unfortunately, with the way problems occur out there, is that things can happen at a depth unbeknownst to you, but you have to go and fix it, and you have to go where whatever that depth is. So, yeah, you might have to be decompressed up, you might have to be decompressed down. So, it's not always a standardized operating procedure. Most of the jobs are very well laid out. You know exactly what it is you're doing, and you know exactly how long it's going to be for you to be in that one place. But it's not always the case.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:10

All right, let's return to the timeline a bit. So after two years in Nigeria, 1990, you're back in Aberdeen. What's happening now?

SPEAKER_04 1:13:19

Uh 1991, back in Aberdeen. So Nigeria 89 to 91. Um, yeah, I got my first job air diving with back with ocean airing, but at but at the out of the Aberdeen office. It was only supposed to be a job for three days, turned into three weeks. And it was probably the most fun I think I've ever had that anybody should ever be allowed to have. Um I met some absolutely astonishing men who some of them are still great friends even today. And the job was quite simple, was to lay uh what we call concrete mattresses, and they're designed to protect subsea assets. So they're probably 20 feet. Let me think about this. Probably 12-15 feet long and maybe eight feet wide. Um, and they're blocks of concrete laced together with nylon rope. And so those are dropped down by a crane, laid over, say, a fiber optic cable, and then you lay the next mat is overlaid by three or four feet, and then it goes on and on and on. And so you could lay up to 50, 60, 70, 100, 200 mats over the course of a few weeks, depending on what the job needed. And that's all we do for BP. Um, it was all air diving. This water depth is maybe 110 feet max. Uh wet bells. It was my first venture into the North Sea. It was a complete departure from West Africa. Hot water suits, uh, close circuit TV cameras, wet bells, like everything was professional. It was really, it was, it was. It was if if I if I had to look back and say which job was the most fun and the most professionally run for me personally, uh that would have been it. So that went on to three weeks. Then I got called back to Oceaning again. They had a contract for Northwest Hutton, uh, which is an oil field for I think it's Coneco. That was inspection repair maintenance, and that went on for a month. A lot of fun. Right up to the point where I can't even believe this. Um a storm would come in, a squall. We couldn't dive because the the uh the weather was just too rough. Couldn't get a bell in the water. However, there was on the horizon another vessel was working, and it was a newer vessel with uh what they call heave stabilization, and the client's rep on our ship got very upset the fact that they were diving and we weren't. So the superintendent decided to uh assuage his frustrations and asked your volunteers to make an attempt to get in the water. Now, clearly word had gotten out about this, but it didn't reach my ears. And it was like something out of a movie, Ryan. I kid you not, we're lined up like a marine squad at boot camp, and John's standing there like this like the staff sergeant with his hard hat on and his big jacket. I need three volunteers. The entire line of men steps backward except for three people. I'm one of them. Right, you three, gear up, you're going in. I was like, oh god, we're gonna die. We're just gonna die. I just knew it. It's just we got suited up, we got into the wet bell, and I looked out, and it was just horrific. The water was just a nightmare. Gray foam, swells, heaving, and I knew the only way to get past what we call the splash zone, you know, where you actually hit the water, you've got to get through there quick and get to depth. The target is to hit 30 feet. That's where the bell stops, and then and then the the two divers swim out from the wet bell over to the platform and do whatever the hell it is they need to do. So I knew that getting through the splash zone fast was gonna be the number one most important thing we could do. And we started lowering, it's going a little bit too slow. I said to dive control, faster, faster, faster. We we we got down to the w to to the waterline of the ship, and that's when all hell broke loose. That's as far as we got. We lasted, and I wrote the I wrote the uh the bottom time down in my logboat for that dive. I think we never we didn't pass fifteen feet. It lasted sixty seconds. And then they pulled us up. And I think I had a broken rib. Somebody else had a sprained ankle. And I yeah, we just got back on deck and just called it quits. So that that was that was one day. That was that was one day.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:02

I I don't understand. You were in the bell and uh the conditions threw you around.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:08

Yeah, and I I say through year round is is is a loose description. More apt description is tumble dried. Turned us upside down, tumble dried in a spin cycle in a washing machine is the closest thing I can I can Okay, so you're doing these jobs um through Aberdeen.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:24

Um what happens back to the timeline?

SPEAKER_04 1:19:29

So anyway, we move on from uh from Northwest Huntington. I then got more work with uh company called Seaway. Then I in order for me to continue being gamefully employed to be useful, I had to then go and get my uh mixed gas bell diver qualification, which means you're trained to work with saturation diving systems, breathing mixed gas, doing uh bell training lockouts. So I went to Norway for that for three weeks. And that was very expensive. So that was that was an expensive three weeks, but your potential for earning is is pretty considerable. So yeah, so I borrowed some money from the bank, and once I showed the bank manager how much money he can make, he just said, when do you want the money? So I went over there, passed the exams, came back, and then timeline would now be probably 1993, and then I got my first um I got my first SAT with Sub C on on the dive support vessel Mayo, and was with Sub C for the majority of the time of the remainder of my career. Right up until see 2001.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:50

Alright, well, this is what I'm trying to uh steer you into, but I'll just explicitly say it. In the in the promo for the book, you write after the end of a long uh sentence upper management power plays, jealousy, egos, insanity, sheer and brutal heroism, drugs, terror, and deep friendships made along the way. So I'm getting I'm trying to lean you into this this half of the uh conversation. Um what are these power plays? You know, what's the insanity beyond what we've already covered, which is just you know the sheer danger of the diving itself?

SPEAKER_04 1:21:31

Well, the insanity is, and I'll be I I I to give you the backstory is going to be too extensive. I want to keep it brief. The insanity comes in risking crews and risking ships and risking lives in order to bring jobs in under time. It's just that simple. Superintendents that I've had to work under, whether they have ego problems, whether they have mental issues, whether they're trying to make a name for themselves, risk everything for the company. To where we as divers seem to be expendable. And it's all about the dollars, it's all about the pounds. Now this was the way things were back when I was there and uh back in the day in the 90s. I can't speak for what goes on today. Maybe things have calmed down a little bit, I don't know. All I can tell you is what I experienced, what I what I went through, and what I lived through. So that covers that aspect of it. The company power plays extensive. Um, I think a lot of companies were positioning themselves, obviously, for more work, for more ships, make more money. Um a lot of us weren't privy to a lot of things that went on. All I know is that when um when uh some superintendent, when a superintendent came over from C Way, there was a lot of problems with the dynamics in Subsea. And it caused a lot of issues. Um as far as give me some other topics I wrote about there. I'm trying to run through them so I can cover everything for you. The the friendships along the way, when you go through a lot of tough times with people, your bond becomes becomes much deeper with with with good men.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:59

Maybe I can ask specifically about PTSD. What was the events that um caused the PTSD and and how do you manage it?

SPEAKER_04 1:24:09

Yeah, I'm sorry if I'm deflecting or not staying on topic with these things, but it's sometimes it's hard to discuss. But let's talk about the PTSD events. Uh where to begin. Okay, one of them was that helicopter incident that I just told you about. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:29

Where he just last minute managed to fix it.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:31

Yeah, they mel they managed to pull up out of that out of that mess. Um what was a big one for me. I think one that pretty much hits the peak or the uh the the the top of the list had to have been with C-Way on the Osprey, which is a dive support vessel. And we had done inspection repair maintenance on this, on this, uh, on this on the platforms in Ninian. It was the Ninian field for Chevron, when Chevron owned the field at the time. And I had a very specialized skill set. Uh I had been trained uh in ultrasonic flaw detection or non-destructive testing, and that was a career before I got into diving. Uh very few divers had the level two, what we call a 3-9. There were maybe 12 of us in the world. Um six of us were on that job. We had to scan some very problematic welds on the platform. We got through three weeks of work. I was on the air team, and we were due to basically wrap up and head into Norway when there was one last weld to test at 560 feet. All the guys in SAT, the three ultrasonic qualified SAT divers had been burned out of their time, and there was a storm coming in. Now, what should have happened was the vessel pulls off, rides a storm out for two, three days, go back in, test the weld. That would be the logical thing to do. Not this time. So, because it was lump sum from memory, the the faster you finish the job, the more money the company makes. The only guy clear to dive with a sat ticket was me. So I'd just come up from an air dive, it was the end of the shift, and uh a guy named Pete came up to me and said, Have you got your SAT ticket? And something inside me said I should have said no, but I said yes. He said, Get your gear, we're blowing down in 30 minutes. Got to dive control, got briefed on what what what was going on. There was one last well to scan, and uh I had to go do it and and do it fast before the storm hit. I'll cut to the chase, got down to the location, set up this to do the scans, completed them. It took longer than expected, at least four hours, and by this time storm had hit. We were working on the windward side of the platform, and the stars came into alignment in the wrong way, and that these the wind, the swell, the current were all moving in the same direction, and they were overpowering the Osprey's dynamic positioning system. And with each passing minute that shit moved closer and closer and closer to the platform. And I was told in no uncertain circumstance, no uncertain terms, that if I didn't get my ass up back to the bell and locked on, there'd be no point in me even attempting to get back to the dive bell. Because what could have possibly happened was, um, well, definitely not possible. What would have happened is the ship would have collided with the platform, the osprey would have had her hull ripped open, the force of the ship, I don't know how many thousands of tons hitting that platform would have caved it down like a house of cards. So having the responsibility, Ryan, of um of uh probably a hundred men on a ship and a hundred and seventy people on a platform, hinging on whether you finish in time.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:13

So you were given a call over the radio that if you don't get back to the bell immediately, we're going to collide with the platform.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:25

Yeah. Now, here's another dynamic in all this. Um they now they didn't say collide with the platform. Nobody said that. Because those things you ne are never said. The only thing I can tell you is when I left the bell to get to the platform, it was at least 60 meters away. Four hours later, the bell was less than 20 meters away. Now, if the bell is that close, the ship is that close. Do you understand how that works? Yeah, because the bell's fixed to the ship. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:02

Tracking with me now. So although that wasn't explicitly said you you knew instinctually.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:12

It didn't take the rocket scientists to figure it out.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:15

And so um how long did it then take you from that message to so what happens in that moment? You just drop everything and swim as fast as you can back to the bell.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:24

Well, no, because you got a downline attached, you got the ultrasonic set down there, you got tools down there, you gotta derig everything before you can leave the site. And um the because of the swell, the the the heave on the bell, as they say, the heave on the downlines. The fiber optic cable from the UT set took a turn around the down line. That then the messenger line was then wrapped around. It was just uh all the lines together, should have been separate, were now tangled in a mess. And they couldn't pull the set or recover the gear because everything was caught. So I had to swim up the down line, try and clear everything. And in the end, took my knife and I cut the fiber optic cable, I cut the messenger line, and that was it. Because I then I didn't care. I didn't care how much the gear cost, I didn't care if I sent everything to the seabed. Because when it gets to that point, nothing else matters except the bigger picture.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:32

So you you ended up cutting off a lot of stuff, so you did drop everything and just swim back.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:39

Well, swimming back is one thing. Yeah, well I did. I cut everything, everything uh I said clear the surface, pull up on everything, and then I tried to get back in the bell. Now you gotta remember now that the the the ship is is going, is heaving up and down at three to six meters. No, it's higher than that. Three meters would have been a walk in the park. We're talking six to ten meter heave on a ship, which meant the bell was rising and falling anywhere from eight to ten meter distance. Let's just keep it to feet, it's a little bit easier. Fifteen, eighteen, twenty feet heave up and down, up and down, up and down. And you have to get into the bell. Now how do you do that? It's like trying to it's like trying to jump on a moving freight train at 30 mile an hour. Without getting your arms ripped off. So I timed it. Um mistimed it. Um didn't get in, almost put my arm out of my socket, waited, try to time the bell when it came down to its lowest level, and then try and slide in. I wasn't down far enough. The bell came down too far. I got hit by the bell stage, cracked my helmet, broke a collarbone. Although I didn't know any of this at the time. Knocked me out. I came to. Then I heard over the headset, it's this, it's it's the voice that it the thing that I heard was what woke me up was Pete and the bell stand by to lock out and recover Diver 1.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:30

Do you know how long it took you um in minutes or seconds to get from the message into the bell?

SPEAKER_04 1:33:39

Fr I just uh that bought me around and then I got angry. I just got so fucking angry. I'm like, nobody's coming to save me, and I'm not gonna risk Pete's life out here because if he locks out, we're not gonna be living through any of this because it's gonna be too late. So I don't remember much after that except waiting for the bell to drop again, and then this time I grabbed the onboard gas supply tanks that are outboard and push myself in underneath between the bell stage and the trunking before the next heave, where we just launched up into the next up on on the wave set. And then I climbed the ladder to get back into the trunking. By this time, Pete had already flooded the bell, which meant he he'd raised the water level in the bell, which made it easier for him to pull me in. And Pete was built like a brick shithouse. He was a fucking gorilla and a strong guy, and he just grabbed both, he put one arm, one hand around each of my shoulder harnesses, and lifted me like a rag doll up out of the water and slammed me into the bell, hit the gas blow down that f it blows the water out, left leg kicked the door lever that started to drop it, and he did all this in one movement. Got my helmet off and screamed into dive control, got a seal right a leap bottom.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:18

And is this where does this moments is this where much of your uh sort of ill will towards maybe upper management and the the uh uh something you said earlier about how trying to do um a job in a fixed amount of time where a lot of that sort of ill will comes from because they sent you down there when the conditions suggested that it was too risky to do so?

SPEAKER_04 1:35:45

Well, you can you can call it ill-will. It's more it's more of an observation of people's behavior or their lack of judgment. I don't hold ill will towards the superintendent. I mean, in his own way, he was you know, he's one of those guys that you could probably have a beer with on a quiet night and not think twice about it. But unfortunately, people's reputations sometimes when they get out there cloud their judgment. And what really clouds everybody's judgment is the ability to save money for the company. And we're talking millions. We're not talking hundreds of thousands, we're talking millions. So at what point do you as an individual say that this is okay? At what point do you go, is three million worth somebody's life? Is four million worth a ship? Is ten million worth of platform? You know, where where does that line get drawn? The the insurers make that line But that isn't gonna be a plausible reason to tell people's families.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:19

Oh no, I I'm not it that's not a way to justify it. It's just um the you know the obvious answer is there is no cost, or each individual but from the perspective of the of the why there might be a system where they're sort of forcing it to happen. You can imagine this feedback loop where I don't know, one manager he always gets the job done on time, so they go to him, and everyone knows that oh, if they want to get the good job or they want to rise, they gotta get the job done on time, and and then everyone keeps pushing the pressure down, down, down, down.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:53

Yeah, yeah, you're right. But that's exactly why uh these certain superintendents kept getting these jobs because of their reputation, because of their you know, who they are. But here's the thing, you have to remember, is that it's only a matter of time. It's never gonna be if, it's only gonna be when they get it wrong. Now, another just just just to just to finish off this little thing about the osprey that I didn't mention was at what point in that little saga does the captain step into the ship? At what point does he go? My duties to the vessel, my duties to save this ship. And I've and I'm gonna call it, and I'm going to to sacrifice two lives in order to save the ship and the platform. You know. Where does the superintendent captain relationship? What what's the hierarchy there? In maritime law. I don't know. You know, I think I think I th I I'm almost I'm almost uh convinced that the captain has the last and final say, because his job is to is to the vessel.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:24

Do you know how close the captain came to being near to make that sort of decision? I don't know. Could have been minutes. And how does this experience manifest itself as PTSD in your life now? Well, that was just one instance.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:44

Um, another instance was on a DP runoff on the Mail, where were the dynamic positioning systems computers to keep it uh simple failed. The ship went off position fast. Myself and another diver got dragged through the water, and I thought we were gonna die. Because if we hadn't cleared our umbilicals off the seabed, if there there were scaffolding poles down there in debris, and if if the umbilicals had gotten caught, they would have ripped in two, or our bodies would have been ripped into. And that's no joke, that's not being melodramatic, that is fact. And you know, getting back to the bell was top priority, even though you're being pulled at ten knots sideways. And then, you know, you you you think in my mind you're trying to keep your team safe because I had a feeling that this instance was gonna happen, and I and I briefed my team on it, my guys, Bob and Roy. And I think that in part helped save our lives because we were aware, or at least I was aware, that something was gonna happen, and so everybody was on their A-game and not relaxing. But what you don't know is that halfway back to the bell, while we're being dragged through the water, Bob and and his and I umbilicals took a turn, a twist. And while I was climbing or pulling myself back along the umbilical, I kept thinking, well, if Bob can just stay still, I'll loop over the top of him and clear clear his clear his umbilical so we're both okay back to the bell. And he saw me pulling back, and he he assumed it was a race. And I looked into his face plate, his eyes were wide, and he was absolutely fucking terrified. And we both got to that twist and those umbilicals where they took a turn. And then he did something I never saw coming. He took his left arm and he came down hard with his elbow into my faceplate and knocked my ass out.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:44

Out of competition to stop out of some sense of uh survival?

SPEAKER_04 1:42:51

In his mind it was live or die. And he was gonna live. It was you or him.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:58

Oh my god, how did it go when you both got back in the bell after that? By the time I came to and I realized what he'd done, he was already back in the bell. I could see his yellow Wellingtons going up into the trunking.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:15

But but when you eventually confronted him.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:27

Because he Roy was getting him stowed away in the bell, had to get his gear off in the umbilical situated before he could before I could go back. And I had a lot of time to think. You know, my initial reaction was I just wanted to kill him. Take my knife, cut his throat. And if I'd have done that, well. It's a long time behind bars, brother. And there's not a courtroom in the world that's gonna um condone any of that. There just isn't. But I can tell you that thought lasted maybe 0.8 of a second. And then I just thought, you know, that would be grossly unprofessional. To say the least. You know, you haven't come this far to drop yourself down to their level. So you you have to be a professional, and I was, and that's what I did. Um, you know, I looked around at the situation while Roy was getting him squared away in the bell, and I just thought, you know what? You're alive. You've got gas, you're alive, your hot water's flowing, you just took a little bit of a joy ride, you lived through it, you're okay. Um now, Tantry question, how did I face him when I got back in the bell? He couldn't look at me. He knew what he'd done. And for the first time I knew more about him than he ever knew about himself. You know that that person could no longer be trusted. You know that they will always put their own lives before you. And that's not the kind of people you need to have when you're in that environment. You just can't have it. You've always got to have people who will put the team first. It's never about you, it's about them.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:48

Was he a mate of yours beforehand?

SPEAKER_04 1:45:51

We'd worked on jobs. I wouldn't call him a mate. He was always aloof, he always sort of kept himself. You know, we never got into deep philosophical philosophical discussions about anything. Bob was just Bob, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:07

Did you ever get a chance to say to him though, why did you do that? Or can you admit that you did that?

SPEAKER_04 1:46:16

No, I didn't even there's no point. There's no point in any of it. All I did when I got into the bell and I looked at him straight in the eye and I said, now I know who you are. That's all I said. And then we just got back to getting the bell squared away and getting on the system and uh and just carrying on. But we only had we we basically had about maybe five days left after that, maybe four, before we got decompressed out. But here's what I do know is that every time he was Bellman and he was dressing me in, I would always have Roy check me in the water because I didn't trust, I couldn't trust him. And then, you know, we finally got out of sat, and I had a talk with the superintendent, and I said, from now on, I can't have Bob as a bell partner on any job, on any vessel, ever again.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:24

Did other people recognize what he did?

SPEAKER_04 1:47:31

Yeah, you do. Well, people, you know, a lot of things happen out there, and people recognize a lot of it, but you're all there for the same reason. That's because it's your career. And you the last thing you want to do is what do they call it? Shit in your own bed. Shit where you eat. Shit where you eat. You can't do that, you know. And I keep coming back to this, Ryan. It's it's it's never about us, it's about the client. It's about shell, it's about BP, it's about keeping keeping the world's energy supplies flowing. And we it's it's a lot bigger than what we are, this whole thing, you know. That's just how I looked at it. That was my own personal viewpoint. But a lot of people didn't have that kind of vision, they never saw it that way. Yeah. Um, so I think that in and of itself is what got me through a lot of those years. So, as far as the PTSD goes, your your tattoo question, how did I deal with it? When I got home, my life was more or less, I don't want to say a mess, but I drank a lot when I was home. I was no stranger to drugs. Um I needed a lot of quiet time. I couldn't take loud noises, I can't take rock concerts anymore, I can't can't deal with a lot of people in one place at one time. Um so you you have to do a lot of and and PTSD wasn't really a known entity, it wasn't a big thing back then, not that I knew of. It's only been as of late, these last maybe 10 or 15 years, that that it's actually been a thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:26

Before we do, I wanted to ask, is it particularly difficult to relive these moments? Does it somehow is it a hard story to tell, basically? Because I get the sense that from you now speaking, it is rather difficult to go through.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:54

It is. And it's why it's Why many of us never speak of these things, because it's not something you won't have to remember. And so you know, at at at the time when these things happen to you, you're young, you think you're bulletproof, and you just chalk it up to, well, I got lucky, or you know, I got my ticket punched, so maybe I've got eight left. I used to tell myself this is what I signed up for. Okay, I knew this going in. It's not any surprise. Um but telling yourself that and then actually living through stuff like this, that's a whole different story. So yeah, to answer your question, it is it is it is difficult, and I never thought I'd have to relive any of this until I started writing this bastard book, and then trust me, it was it's been a fucking pain in the ass to be blunt. Um people say, oh, it's therapeutic or it's carthotic, uh, like horseshit it is. Um I think a lot of the for me personally, it's much easier to write these things and then I just go away and you know, I I work through it emotionally. But what I do know is through my experiences in all of this, is that people are who they are, you know, and they're gonna do what they're gonna do. And the only thing we can do as as divers, and I again I I hope I'm okay speaking for most of us out there, is that you have to is that we get through them by trying to make the best choices we can and error on the side of safety because you know the money's no good if you're not around to use it. It's no good to anybody. I think some people forget about that sometimes. Especially superintendents. You know? But I was one of the very few who actually started saying no to a lot of stuff. Got to a point where after those few incidents, I'm like, you know what? Oh hell no. Um and I and I did it, and here's here's what happened on those times is that people all of a sudden have a newfound respect for you. That was an eye-opener for me. You know. And in so doing, you know it's I I like to think saves lives or saves bad things from happening. Stops bad things from happening.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:25

Do you know what the death rate was in your profession during your career?

SPEAKER_04 1:53:35

So in in my timeline in the North Sea, lucky for much of us, it was actually very low. Now, other parts of the world is a whole different story. Gulf of Mexico. Off the coast of Louisiana during the 1990s. The kill rate was one in ten. That's those were the numbers. One in ten divers dead.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:12

So that's I mean, ten percent who go into the profession pass away. That's horrible. Give us some perspective, uh, other time periods, other parts of the world, something to compare that against.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:24

So, North Sea. During my years there, only two men died that I knew of, and they were both friends. That was Brad Westel and Gary Carey. Um, I'd been hospitalized once with a finger crush injury off State IV. Um, Allie Strathy, we had to stitch him up because he was in the water with his quote-unquote the strongest man in the world. Well, sorry, the strongest man in the North Sea. And this individual had an ego the size of uh Statue of Liberty, and it was either his way or the highway. And in his reckless abandon on the seabed, it came up on load on the crane too fast before Ali could get his hand clear, and I sliced it wide open. So we had to stitch him up and sat, which was not exactly a garden party. No anesthetic, broke three sutures. Allie Strathy was a tough, tough son of a bitch that guy. And he was a good friend. And I only found out ten years ago that his wife left him and he drank himself to death. Um so yeah, that's that's that's it's basically, you know, what happens to people when we're what what happens to us as individuals when we're diving, who we are when we're home, and who we become after we leave the profession. You know, those are very different things, Ryan. So it's it's uh and all of us have our own individual stories and experiences. I'm gonna replace the word stories with experiences because that's that's more accurate.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:41

Are you still impartial to uh drugs and alcohol to as a as a coping mechanism?

SPEAKER_04 1:56:50

No, no, I I ditched the drugs a long time ago. Um you know I became a father, had a daughter, and that changed everything for me.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:07

You want her to get in the sat diving?

SPEAKER_03 1:57:14

You're only saying that because you want a reaction, don't you? What do you want to hear? Oh hell no. God damn, fuck that. Oh, break her legs, no.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:29

No, she's um my my daughter saved my life in more ways than I can ever count. Um she's 13 now. She gave me she gave me a lot to live for. She brought new purpose and meaning into my life. And I like to think that if that if I didn't get most things right in my life, she's the one thing I did get right. That's her. She she's been my greatest creation, and she's gonna be a very, very bright light in the years ahead. She is already, but she's she's she's lit the way for me in more ways than I can possibly count. Um and I think, you know, a lot of this book I'm writing for her. I need I need her to know who her dad is.

SPEAKER_02 1:58:43

So tell me the the latest with the book. You're trying to shop it around to publishers. Is it finished and competitive?

SPEAKER_04 1:58:51

Well, I well, here's here's the deal. I w I wanted to test the water. I sent it to two agencies in London and and they get inundated. And I this is um that's that's a loose term of the word. Um they are barraged with people writing books. And literally they they blast through synopsis, they blast through very brief overviews of what somebody's got, and it's an instant yes or no. I got obviously two no's, which is fine. I didn't think this is gonna be a Sunday stroll in the park. Um but but the reality is I'm 85% of the way done and I need to finish it. So that's that's my task, is just to wrap it up. I've got I've got epilogue, got prologues, got the ending, got the title, got it's it's just a question of filling in the blanks and polishing it, doing some editing, and then it's it's effectively ready to go.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:55

Book publishing is one of the most um fat-tailed distributions in sort of uh media domains, whereas which means basically 0.1% of all books published uh actually sell significant copies, and something like only 1% of books published um sell past their first print run. It's something absurd like this, you know. And in in any given publishing house, you know, 10% of the authors are responsible for 90-95% of the revenue. Um so it's uh obviously a terrifically difficult uh domain to pop. But like I sort of said at the beginning, and like I was saying to you in our email correspondence before as well, this is a this is a a chapter of history that I think has gone untold and should it be told properly, has huge potential for mass appeal. Um because it is a world unknown to people that's full of you know risk and also significance because it's attached to uh the world's oil, it's attached to the world's energy. Like that's uh that that's just an inescapable part of it. You you write how you were one of 12 people in the whole world to have this special ticket.

SPEAKER_04 2:01:23

I mean Well, um I was that's well let me let's let's just be clear on this. I was and I think it was 12, might have been 15, but we were a handful. We were the 0.1% of the 1%. Right. Yeah. 1215 who had 12-15 who had a level to what they call 3.9 in ultrasonics, and a saturation diving qualification and the experience to go with both of those pieces of paper. Now, the world has thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of of ultrasonic technicians and NDT guys who who do incredibly important work all over the world, and they they test structures for integrity and strength, and they they in their own way help keep people alive.

SPEAKER_02 2:02:12

Finish the point I was I was um I was thinking earlier, you familiar with this fellow called John Perkins, wrote a book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman. No, I've never read. So there's also like uh, you know, Ogilvy Confessions of an Adman, um, Confessions of a Golfer. Uh like it's a it's a sub I don't know if you call it a subgenre, but people who sort of who sort of introduce a field to the broad audience that they put it in as confessions of, right? And I can totally see this this uh confessions of a deep sea diver, right? Because you're sort of telling the the hidden story, the one that the people don't know, but it's great because no one knows it anyway, so it doesn't necessarily need to be the hidden story. Anyway, uh this guy John Perkins he's sold about two and a half million books. Huge bestseller, right? He's onto his third edition now, he's been very successful because of his book. Um, and he chopped it around to 39 publishers, and it wasn't until the 40th that they said yes. And that's an incredible story of resiliency. I think JK Rowling as well chopped it around like hell. Again and again, again, Tim Ferris with a four-hour work week. You just hear these stories of people that shop their books around like crazy, and eventually it hits because publishers don't know what what what people want. It's a total, it's like uh it's a potluck, you know, it's a shot in the dark.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:34

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so um I have I have no I'm under no delusions that this isn't gonna be an easy, easy task to get this published, and that's fine, you know. Um if things that are worth doing, Ryan are never easy in life, they're just not, you know, and and everything I've done in careers has taken a monumental human feat of effort to get to that point, and that's okay. You know, I'm used to this, you know. It took me quite literally, it took me um 12 years of preparation before I even went to diver training school to get my to to start that aspect of that career from the beginning. It took 12 years just to get the necessary skills and aptitude, as Andy Taller once said, to gain to make sure I was employable after I got my diver qualification. So then, you know, all these years later, and I'm in Seattle and I'm moving into a career starting my own business and getting into real estate and new construction and commercial, and that took 10 years before I started getting successful. Because it's it's it's hard. So as far as writing a book goes, you know, for me, it's it's no surprise that it's gonna be hard, and that's okay. Maybe it's just the way it was meant to be. And if it takes me 200 times, double what it took J.K. Rowling, double what it took anybody else, and so fucking be it. I don't care. You know, all I do know is this come hell or high water, this is going to fucking get done. I don't care how, I don't care who, I don't give a shit what language it's written in. If I have to get on planes to go to Tokyo, Stockholm, Sydney, or Chicago, I just don't care. But somebody is gonna read this and go, you know what? This is gonna get published. We're just gonna do it.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:47

Amen. I think it's a good note to finish it on, Alan.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:50

Yeah. Thank you, Ryan. You've been very patient and um patient and understanding with a lot of this, so thank you for that.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:03

Oh, thank you. Thanks for um yeah, deciding to speak with me and sharing the story. I think it's uh incredibly fascinating, and thank you to Paul Cleary as well, the great Australian journalist who put us in touch and wrote about it.

SPEAKER_04 2:06:19

I have to yeah, you know, I didn't I never actually got to read what he wrote about, so I have to read his book. Um I'm ashamed of it actually, but yeah, you should.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:28

You should also just check Paul out more generally. He's uh uh you know terrific bloke, doing good work in Australia. You know what?

SPEAKER_04 2:06:36

He he he connected us, so we need to take him out for for some beers one day.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:41

Yeah, we're literally on three the three separate time zones of the planet, though. You're in the American continent, I'm in the European, he's in the Asian, but uh yeah. How about you guys fly to Stockholm and we make it work there?

SPEAKER_04 2:06:53

Oh, I'd love that. Oh my god, I'd love to go to Sweden and saw my bucket list.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:57

You know what? If we ever do get together, I I would love to dive. Obviously, nothing crazy, but I've never really put on a suit and breathed in oxygen and and gone below the surface. It's always just been goggles.

SPEAKER_04 2:07:09

It will it will it will open your world up to a place that you can only imagine. Never realize you'll thoroughly enjoy it. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:07:19

Alright, mate. Well, uh, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.