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Why Have A Helium Escape Valve?


gioarmani

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Darn, I get an error when I try your link.  I bet it sets some couch divers on their ear.

 

Larry (that was my friend) told me about working under the polar ice cap at some ridiculous depths.  I sure wish he was still alive, I'd love to ask him again.  I was over on WUS talking about Doxas and a guy popped up asking about the early SUB300s.  We went back and forth in PM for awhile and it turned out the guy's father, a something "Maughner" or so... had worked with Larry in SeaLab.  Small world.  Like you said, there is a very small fraternity worldwide of guys that do this work.

 

 

CORRECTION:

 

I was able to get onto that page via another route, here's what they have:

 

"Study shows that relatively few deep sea dives have been undertaken in Norway compared with other countries such as the USA, France and Japan.

The study shows that Norwegian deep sea diving occupies a relatively modest position in an international context in terms of scope and progression to greater depths. International deep sea diving to 300 metres of sea water (MSW) and deeper was quite widespread 10-15 years before the start of Norwegian deep sea diving.

There have been many dives to 300-313 MSW, but relatively few down to 500 MSW or deeper.

The ten deepest (from 600 MSW down) have taken place in the USA, Germany and the UK. The deepest hyperbaric chamber dive was performed in Marseille (701 MSW), and the deepest offshore dive was in the Mediterranean (534 MSW), both by the French company Comex.

The deepest operational dives on the Norwegian Continental Shelf have been very restricted in scope, with a maximum depth of 248 MSW (in connection with the laying of the Statpipe pipeline).

The report, which has been prepared by Norsk undervannsintervensjon AS (NUI) on behalf of the PSA, only covers trial, training, test and verification dives. Such compilations have been published in the past, but none have included as many deep sea dives as in this report.

 

Source: Your Subsea News"

 

 

Yeah so Larry used to say working the oil fields in the North Sea was "pretty deep".  Ummmmm yeah, when it's rated at 248MSW yeah... that's pretty deep.  :shock:

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Hi Doug,

A good friend of mine, a Scottish guy called Ross worked on the bridge repairs at Weipa for two seasons on the trot. He is a Subsea engineer and was part owner of SureSpec the inspection company. Would not want to be the first diver in the morning going into the safety cage in murky water, in case it had an occupant with sharp teeth, ha ha.

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I was on the first dive crew on that project back in'97 (96 days straight with no break) !! One of my jobs in the morning was to check the nets for any holes (ie croc bait), then do whatever tasks to help the UW welders from Hydroweld (ie prepare weld sites, take core samples at the bottom of the piles, etc).

I can put some photos up for anyone interested..

Edited by DiverDoug
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Hey Nanuq, as long as you can keep warm, diving under ice is a whole new world :-) This is how I earned $10/hour in Canada:


photo15.jpg

Much warmer in Australia! ;-)

 

 

Stag,

 

Here's a shot from Weipa. See if Ross recognises anything :

 

photo7.jpg

 

Again, because a commercial diver's time is monitored by the topside (plus I was under the water for about 200 mins at a time), a dive watch isn't really necessary. Plus, the visability for a CD is normally pretty limited (ie measured in inches; feet if you're lucky, dark, etc), so reading a dive watch is pretty hard anyway (even a Super Lume! ;-) )

Edited by DiverDoug
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  • 8 months later...

Hey DiverDoug! I'm glad you resurrected this thread, what a great read with all the old timers.

A bit of an interesting article along the topic of the thread. I still hardly see the point of a HEV, as well as waterproofing a watch much beyond 100m :-)

But hey, that's just my opinion ;-)

DD

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Well there's always the odd chance a carnival worker filling balloons will get trapped inside a semi trailer with his helium tanks while at  the top of Mt Everest, then someone will realize the problem and airlift the semi trailer to the bottom of Death Valley to free him, and after a month of trying will give up ... whereupon he'll get airlifted, semi trailer and all, back to the top of Mt Everest, where his friendly Sherpa will realize he's had the key in his pocket the whole time.  You can only imagine the horror as the Sherpa opens the semi door, to be greeted by a crystal popping off the carnie worker's watch, with the force of a de-fizzed soda pop bottle.

 

Hey......... it can happen.  So we need HEVs. 

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