Belted into the passenger seat of a four-door pickup — the bed full of dive gear — I’m rolling down a narrow stretch of paved road that cuts through a buzzing swath of Yucatan jungle listening to my dive guide, Nat Wilson, explain the mythology behind the freshwater-filled caverns we’ve been diving for the past couple of days. He’s just finished the part about how the ancient Maya believed the openings of these cenotes served as portals to Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, when he hits the brakes and swerves to the shoulder. “You see that?” he asks, his outstretched finger pointing out my side window. “What?” I ask. “The jungle?”

“Through this hole in the trees. See its tail?” I look harder — fairly impressed that he could spot anything through the dense underbrush — and I see it, a blue bird about the size of a pigeon with a twitchy tail. “That’s the motmot,” he says, adding that the Maya considered mot- mots to be the guardians of the cenotes. “In reality, they hang around the caverns because it’s the only access to fresh water out here,” Wilson says. “And these days, us cave divers watch for the birds to help us find the entrances.”

Of course Wilson — the training director and in-house cave guru for Dressel Divers — doesn’t need a motmot to help him find the cenote we plan to dive. Though there are dozens of cenotes open to divers, one of the most popular is the Dos Ojos system — the name means “two eyes” and refers to the two primary cavern openings, called the “East” and “West” Eyes, which when seen from afar look like two eyes protruding from the jungle floor. And while this area is increasingly subjected to throngs of swimmers who splash around the entrances, Wilson assures me that deep inside the caverns it’s a whole different world.

In order to get underwater before the tour buses crowd us out, Wilson rolled up to my resort bright and early. Luckily I’m staying about midway between Playa del Carmen and Tulum — in the heart of cenote country — and when we show up, we have the place to ourselves.

We park next to the trailhead that leads to the main entrance at the East Eye, strap on our gear and head down. I notice smoke billowing up from brush fires around the opening, and when I ask, Wilson explains that the locals, modern-day Maya who own the land around the cenote, build the fires as offerings to the gods. “Really?” I ask hesitantly. “Of course not,” he answers with a laugh. “They’re for the bugs.” I slap a handful of mosquitoes slurping from my ankle.

Despite the bonfires, the mosquitoes are drinking their fill from our exposed feet and hands, so we make quick work of a back flop from the dive platform into the crystalline water, do one final gear check and descend to the floor of the pool, where two guidelines are tied off at the mouth of the cavern. The right guideline, called the Barbie Line, follows an easy, well-lit path. On the left, the Bat Cave Line extends 65 feet into the opening of the submerged cavern before hanging a left into a darkened side passage. We take the latter.

Wilson assumes the lead, hovering skillfully a couple of feet above the line to avoid stirring up the bottom, and I frog-kick gently to keep pace as we slip into the dark passageway, flashlight beams bouncing off the stark-white limestone formations — thick floor-to- ceiling columns and hanging stalactites that formed eons ago before these tunnels filled with water.

After swimming a few minutes, we make another left turn into a large chamber, where a narrow beam of light coming through a small hole in the distance provides dim illumination while we follow the contours of the wall. From here, we follow the guideline as it slopes upward, leading us into the dive’s eponymous feature: the bat cave — another large, circular chamber, this one only partially filled with water, leaving an open-air space in the top of the room.

Bearing left, we circumnavigate a jumbled pile of rock slabs, which had fallen from the ceiling to create a mesalike mound in the center of the room. Along the circumference, we explore a fissure beneath the limestone that constitutes the jungle floor 40 feet or so above our heads. And meandering through the tight maze of stalactites and stalagmites, we pass underneath some of the most delicate formations I’ve seen in any of my dives through these cenotes. The ceiling bristles with soda-straw stalactites — pencil-thin protrusions that blanket the surface en masse like a bed of nails.

At the far end of the chamber, Wilson stops and motions me to the surface of the water, tinged green by sunlight from a small opening in the roof. Popping up into the air pocket, I remove my regulator and take a breath of the cool, damp air. True to its name, the ceiling of the cavern boasts clusters of small bats; occasionally one swan dives from its upside-down perch and — wings spread — glides over the electric-green pool only to arc upward and alight once again.

Eventually we drop back down and continue around the other side of the room, following the line back the way we came and emerging along the edge of the West Eye. Here, our line runs into itself at the passageway back to our starting point. We hold our lights to our chests; from this vantage point, the sunlight filtering through the main entrance puts the cavern in silhouette, and “laser beams” of light stream in along the edges.

After we climb up to the dive platform, Wilson starts back up the trail, but just as I’m about to turn and leave, I see it again: the small blue bird, tail bouncing disjointedly, perched on the lip of the cavern as if overseeing our departure.

Need to Know
Getting There: The majority of Riviera Maya’s divable cenotes are off the main highway between Playa del Carmen and Tulum. Most U.S. airlines fly to Cancun. From the airport you can drive, take a taxi or hop a colectivo (shared van) for the 60- to 80-minute drive down the coast.

When to Go: Water temps (75-77°F) and calm dive conditions are constant year- round. The Yucatan’s high season runs from December through April with cooler air temperatures and less rain. The rainy (low) season runs from May to November, but many resorts offer reduced off-season rates, so it’s worth considering.

Operator/Accommodations: The Barcelo Maya Palace (barcelomayapalace.com) is part of the Barcelo Maya complex, which sports five amenity-rich all-inclusive resorts of varying price points stretched along nearly a mile of white-sand beach. Arrange your dives at the on-site PADI IDC center, Dressel Divers (dresseldivers.com), which has a multilingual staff and certified cave/cavern guides.

Price Tag: Rooms at the luxe Barcelo Maya Palace start at $170 per person, per night, all-inclusive. Dressel Divers’ excursion to the cenotes is $70 and includes lunch. Tanks are about $40, but you’ll get discounts for buying multiple fills.

Can’t-Miss Topside Adventures: Tulum is one of the best-preserved coastal Mayan archeological sites and has some of the region’s nicest beaches. (Tip: Go early to beat the crowds.) You can also explore tropical jungles and coastal mangroves at the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve.

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I know what’s coming. As I exit through an opening in the lava-rock cavern called First Cathedral — a popular dive off the Hawaiian island of Lanai — I hear the high-pitched din of clicks and squeaks building above the noise of my bubbles. A pod of spinner dolphins is approaching, the volume of chatter signals that more than a few are heading my way.

My gut tells me the dolphins will pass through the sand channel alongside the cavern. So, I make a hard right, swimming fast, before I dump the air from my BC, plant my knees on the seafloor and lock my gaze west down the length of the channel.

For about three minutes, the sound grows. Then, just as the cacophony crescendos, the pack leaders swoop into the mini canyon at the edge of my visibility like an undulating bullet train that’s just jumped the tracks. They move in a tight formation, a seemingly endless line. Individuals occasionally break from the crowd, careening down to skim the seafloor, or bolting for the surface.

This is Hawaiian big-animal diving at its best. Many divers link Hawaii synonymously with humpback whales, which congregate there every winter. But most will never see these behemoths below the surface. More common — and more exciting when they arrive en masse — are encounters with the resident spinner dolphins that cruise the coastline year-round, sometimes in pods hundreds of acrobatic animals deep. To be graced with this experience requires about 90 percent luck, because interaction is at the dolphins’ discretion. Make no mistake: These animals are clever, rarely approaching divers by accident. What’s the other 10 percent of the encounter? A mix of awareness and attitude. Divers must first recognize the pod’s approach in time to get into position, and second, avoid any action — swimming after or trying to touch the animals — that will scare the pod.

From my vantage point on the seafloor, I watch the pod, which is some 150 to 200 strong, perform the eponymous spins and loop-the-loops unique to this wild species. They disappear above the surface only to dip back in to perform another curling maneuver underwater. The mothers display less bravado as they swim down the middle of the pod, casting protective glances toward their calves in tow. After maybe seven minutes, even the stragglers pass. The chatter fades and the whole impressive display disappears just as quickly as it arrived.

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]]> http://www.travis-marshall.com/2009/09/28/bullet-train/feed/ 0 http://www.travis-marshall.com/2009/09/24/advanced-adventure-s-s-thistlegorm/ http://www.travis-marshall.com/2009/09/24/advanced-adventure-s-s-thistlegorm/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:12:30 +0000 Travis Marshall http://www.travis-marshall.com/?p=661 S.S. Thistlegorm.]]> Scuba Diving Magazine, Sept/Oct. 2009

It’s a little after daybreak. The quiet on board breaks without warning, replaced with loud commands delivered in terse Arabic as the agile crew swings into position to man the lines. We have arrived.

My dive boat has been motoring along the coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula for nearly four predaylight hours. I walk out of the main cabin, where I’ve slept most of the bumpy ride huddled on the thin cushions of the bench lining the wall, and see the divemaster disappear over the side, bounce-diving to tie a guide­line from our stern to the wreck. I pour a cup of thick Arabic coffee and groggily prep my gear in the early morning light. In a few minutes, I’ll hop off the stern myself and make my way to the seafloor to penetrate the deepest bowels of what is arguably the most famous and histori­cally rich shipwreck in the Red Sea.

A dive trip to the British supply ship SS Thistlegorm requires no small amount of effort, but it’s unquestionably worth it for an opportunity to slip inside this veritable World War II time capsule, bur­ied by a hailstorm of German bombs in 1941 while en route to deliver her cargo of supplies to Allied troops in Suez. After sinking, the Thistlegorm lay undisturbed for about 14 years, explains John Kean, an experienced Thistlegorm guide and author of the book “SS Thistlegorm: The True Story of the Red Sea’s Greatest Ship­wreck.” At which time a budding explorer named Jacques Cousteau — piloting another soon-to-be-legendary ship, the Calypso — moored up to her and made the first-ever scuba-fueled explorations of her decks. Today, the Thistlegorm draws tens of thousands each year.

I make one final check of the condi­tions. Out here at the mouth of the Gulf of Suez, current and surface chop are common, and today has both. So I giant-stride off the stern with an empty BC and make a beeline down the guide rope to the shelter of the Thistlegorm’s hull. Descending over the blast zone — where German bombs detonated munitions holds near the stern — I can see both sections of the 415-foot-long ship: The front half sits mostly intact, upright at the shallower end of the slop­ing seafloor, while the stern, twisted 90 degrees, rests on its port side in about 95 feet of water. As I approach the opening in the hull, I glide over the tracks of a pair of Mark II Bren Carrier tanks, upside­down in the pile of munitions.

Unlike a passenger ship, with an inte­rior full of winding passageways and cabins, the Thistlegorm features wide-open cargo holds and no shortage of vertical exit points. Slipping inside the wreck at Hold 3 feels a bit like walking into a war museum where shafts of sun­light illuminate the displays through skylights in the roof. I find myself sur­rounded by piles of  hand grenades and anti-tank mines scattered in a state of dis­array pretty much as they fell after the ship touched down on the seafloor. It’s an impressive collection, but I know the most striking is ahead of me in the for­ward compartments.

The Thistlegorm’s first and second holds overflow with a payload of large war material. My gaze extends across row after row of Bedford trucks, intact down to the tires and packed in the belly of the ship like sardines. And each truck bed is loaded to capacity with BSA motorcycles. Stacked along walls sit crates of medical supplies, Enfield rifles and endless boxes of ammuni­tion. The gravity of this cargo hits me like a wave. It’s a drop in the bucket of what was required to keep that massive Allied war machine moving, but peo­ple’s lives depended on this stuff — they never got it, and good people died try­ing to deliver it.

My time is running short, and I make my way shallower by traversing through the upper holds and spend a few brief moments exploring the rail cars, davits and a torpedo on the upper deck before finning to my guideline. My bottom time is maxed out, so I make a slow ascent and take an extra-long safety stop.

When I climb back on board, the boat has fallen quiet once again. It seems like we all need a moment to digest the experience. But before we can think too long, the cook swings up from the galley, cracking jokes through a smile as thick as his accent and ushering us inside for a hearty meal before we move on to drift the walls of Ras Mohammed.

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Gearing up on the platform for my last dive of the trip, I peer into the electric-blue water trying to visualize the winding path we plan to follow as Scott “Bear” Fritz, my fast-talking dive guide, fires off directions. “We’ll drop down this pillar here,” he gestures with his right hand. “At about 80 feet you’ll see a small opening. That’s the Secret Tunnel. It’s off the regular dive path, but it’ll get us to the Lake Room in a matter of minutes. From there we’ll follow the wall to the tar boat, go up a set of ladders through Clinton Shaft, follow the railroad ties into the Grand Canyon Bowl and loop back around into the Lake Room.” “Pheew,” I think, “OK, I’ve got it…maybe.” But then he starts talking again, “Then we’ll turn and swim through the Rope Room, pass through the Trail 3 slit into the 1095 Bowl and we’re back to the dock.” My mouth hangs open slightly. “Tell you what,” I say. “I’ll just stay right behind you.”

It’s a good choice. There’s no better guide to Missouri’s Bonne Terre Mine. Fritz has been diving the mine for more than 20 years, and he’s the training director who makes sure all the mine’s dive guides are fully prepared to take tourists or students into this underwater maze. There are more that 50 planned trails open to the public that the guides must know like the backs of their hands. Though, under special circumstances, exploratory dives are possible here as well. Dubbed “Bear” trails, these more advanced dives, lead by the eponymous guide himself, delve into the unlit and underexplored sections of the mine. But Bear Trails, like the one I’m about to dive, are only for divers who prove they’ve got the scuba skills and the air consumption to do them, and once we drop down the aforementioned pillar and enter the Secret Tunnel, I understand why.

We slide one-by-one into the narrow, square-cut shaft under a hundred feet of rock. Along the floor, a pair of metal ore-cart tracks stretches past the edges of our high beams. It’s easy to imagine men in this tunnel, urging stubborn mules hitched to ore carts, lugging load after endless load to the edge of this shaft, tipping the cart over the lip, sending a shower of ore into the bowels of the machine. But imagination time doesn’t last long. When we emerge on the other side, we’re in an unlit chamber, a cavernous void that swallows the beam of my light, and I focus on the bottom to maintain a point of reference until we reach the opposite end, and yet another square-shaped passage. This one is wider than the last, and we swim side-by-side until we arrive at Clinton Shaft, a system of round, tight tunnels, angling different directions as they traverse upward through multiple levels, with fragile wooden ladders leading from one hole to the next. Bear points his hand-mounted light into the narrow shaft and motions me forward. “Here we go,” I say to myself as I fin carefully up the length of the ladders, following, in the still silence, the footsteps of men who lived and died to create this labyrinth in the name of industry.

This is the lure of what the Bonne Terre crew has dubbed “deep earth diving,” a seemingly endless underground world, frozen in time. Fritz openly admits he has “the fever,” a driving desire to explore, to see what’s down the next tunnel, that has kept him coming back for more than two decades. Pillars, shafts, sheer walls and ceilings—hewn entirely by human hands—stretch for miles in all directions, leaving a sprawling, five-level catacomb beneath the town, and at every underwater turn all manner of artifacts—shovels, rock drills, ore carts and blasting caps—lay strewn across the landscape, as if the workers who left them simply went home at the blow of the foreman’s whistle and never returned to clean up after themselves. Of course, back in the day, the mine’s deepest reaches were not underwater. A massive pump system stemmed the flow of encroaching groundwater as the miners pushed ever deeper. But when this, the world’s largest lead mine, was all mined out, the men retreated, the pumps were turned off and the water trickled in to fill the void. These days, mine owners Doug and Cathy Georgens have turned the pumps back on, but it was never their intention to drain the mine completely, just enough to keep the water level constant and provide divers with access to their unique underwater vision.

And a big part of what makes that vision possible is light. The electric blue of the water is a product of the 500,000 watts of high-powered stadium lighting that the Georgens and their team have strung from pillar to pillar, through hundreds of feet of subterranean air space. The crystal-clear, rock-filtered water is clean enough to drink, and the long, blue waves of light that penetrate to the darkest depths of the motionless, billion-gallon lake lend an almost Caribbean illusion. But that illusion disperses as fast as your body heat when you make that first giant stride. Bonne Terre’s dive deck hovers on the water’s surface a full 150 feet into the earth, and though it’s a short walk down from the small shed that covers the mine’s only opening, the environmental change is complete. From the searing Missouri summer heat, it’s like entering the world’s largest walk-in refrigerator, where the air stays a constant 62 degrees, the water a brisk 58, year round.
Of course, those temps sound pretty good during the winter, which is Bonne Terre’s high season. Here in the Midwest, regional dive shops are short on spots to take Open-Water classes, especially when the quarry temperatures dip below freezing. So Bonne Terre Mine’s constant conditions provide year-round diving opportunities for students and divers who don’t have the time, money or desire to go coastal. But the mine has also attracted higher-profile attention. In 1983, Jacques Cousteau’s film team came to document the dramatic underwater scenery, in April 2000, “National Geographic Adventure” named the diving at Bonne Terre Mine one of the top 10 adventures in America, and over the years, a handful of documentaries have been filmed here and shown on the Discovery and History channels.

For everyday divers, the diving experience at Bonne Terre is very accessible. The town of Bonne Terre, Mo., is about an hour’s drive south of St. Louis. The dive operation is only open on weekends, and there are on-site accommodation options. The diving itself is totally safe because it is highly controlled—a necessary precaution in a place with innumerable overhead tunnels that can easily swallow even an experienced diver who doesn’t know his or her way around. Every group of divers has a guide and a safety diver, and every diver’s first visit to the mine starts with a checkout dive, no matter what their experience level. Visitors to the mine dive the 24 trails in sequence—they get a bit a harder as the numbers get larger—so if you make it through Trail 6 your first weekend, you’ll start at Trail 7 on your next visit. Dive lights are not allowed or necessary on the guided tours.

As for me, following Fritz around for a weekend proves a very tempting taste of what the mine has to offer. As we exit Clinton Shaft, I stay right on Fritz’s fin straps through the winding path back to the dock. Like an enthusiastic newbie, I turn my head in all directions—from rock walls and narrow passageways, to discarded drill bits and shovels—trying to take it all in, but at one point, we swim onto a ledge and Fritz stops me short. He puts his hand on my shoulder and points out into what looks like open water. Then he kicks his fins out in front of him, leans back and sits down on a rock like a man settling into his favorite easy chair. He looks over at me and spreads his arms wide. By this time, my eyes have focused, and I see pillar after pillar stretching out into the soft light like a massive forest marching into the distance; I settle down beside him to admire the scene. “That’s my favorite spot, where I go to relax” Fritz says when we climb out of the water. “We call it the Redwood Forest.” I nod my head in agreement, looking back over my shoulder at the water. Fritz laughs, “Looks like you’re getting the fever,” he says. “You’ll be back.”

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From the Philippines to the Solomon Islands, the Coral Triangle is the world’s hottest region for on-the-fringe diving, underwater photography, big animal encounters and so much more. Get the who, what, when, where and why of diving the Amazon rainforest of the seven seas.

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]]> http://www.travis-marshall.com/2009/05/01/cracking-the-coral-triangle/feed/ 0 http://www.travis-marshall.com/2008/10/12/crossing-the-line/ http://www.travis-marshall.com/2008/10/12/crossing-the-line/#comments Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:43:36 +0000 Travis Marshall http://www.travis-marshall.com/?p=315 Scuba Diving Magazine, Dec. 2008

When you start thinking about diving for a living, you ultimately come to a fork in the road, as there are, simplistically speaking, two professional diving paths: the recreational side and the commercial one. A career in recreational diving is what most scuba divers fantasize about: tropical islands, white sand beaches and easy, shallow reefs where people fin around and marvel at the marine life. Follow the commercial diving path, and you enter a world of underwater roughneckery. Scuba tanks are replaced with diving hats and surface supplied air. And clinging to the struts of an oil platform, laying down a bead with a welding torch while fending off sharp-toothed creatures of the deep is just another day at the office.

Commercial diving is labor-intensive work that often requires divers spend months at sea or abroad in less than appealing destinations. But the money’s good. A commercial diver fresh out of training can command close to 50 thou a year—not bad for someone without a college degree. And then there’s the lifestyle. Like commercial fishermen, the stereotypical commercial diver loads up on women and booze between one fat paycheck and the next. “There’s a reason so many of us marry strippers,” jokes Mike Oden, career advisor for the Ocean Corporation, one of the leading commercial diving schools in the country. “When you’re offshore for months at a time, you go a little crazy when you get back on land.”
Ten years ago, as an 18-year-old fresh out of high school with a penchant for underwater adventure, I stood at that fork in the road, simultaneously doing my divemaster training and putting my feelers out to commercial diving schools like the Ocean Corporation—which actively seek out impressionable youths in search of adventure and a decent paycheck. Ultimately, I took the leisurely fork in the road and made my way as a dive instructor in some of the world’s most enviable diving destinations. But one question always lingered in the back of my mind: What if?
And last August, the Ocean Corporation gave me, and 14 other average Joes from all walks of life, the opportunity to see how the other half lives. By signing up for the school’s annual Commercial Diving Experience (CDE), I got an all-access pass to spend a weekend in a commercial diver’s shoes—and diving hats—and answer that question for myself.

Nestled into the urban sprawl that is Houston, Texas, Ocean Corp has an unassuming appearance. From the front, its gate opens onto a small parking lot, and its façade gives every impression that it’s just one more in the string of office buildings sharing its street. But when I crack the front door, a shelf of antiquated hats, spearguns and photographs greets me, and by the time I pop out the back end into the staging area, I’m transported to a more familiar world. Gear cages hold racks of drysuits patched with duct tape, banks of compressed air, scuba equipment and huge coils of hose. And a multilevel wooden platform behind the building is where the magic happens. The 4.2-acre campus has six diving tanks—three eight-foot tanks for underwater welding and cutting training, two 12-foot tanks and a 24-foot tank complete with a mock oil platform inside—not to mention a permanently installed medical decompression chamber, a portable decompression chamber and a 400-foot-rated lock-out diving bell.

Saturday morning, I join my fellow campmates, the student helpers and a handful of Ocean Corp instructors. The schedule says we’ll start off with an equipment orientation and safety meeting before we “mobilize” at the 12-foot tank for some hat time, basically a meet and greet with the gear we’ll use throughout the weekend. Two by two, we each strap on a harness with an emergency-bailout scuba tank, pull the neck dam—a metal ring with a drysuit-style neoprene seal—over our heads, and lock the hats down before leaping into the tank. The hats weigh 30 to 40 pounds each, so a weight belt isn’t necessary, and topside, the weight puts a fair bit of strain on my neck. Underwater, I’m only slightly negative, albeit top heavy, and I hop my way around the tank like an astronaut on the moon, getting a feel for the flow adjustment valves and the less-than-clear communication system before running an out-of-air drill.

That afternoon is devoted to a mock work-dive scenario. I gear up on the edge of the 24-foot tank with my dive buddy, and when we’re both ready to go, we make the leap and grab the down lines running to the bottom. With a loop of rope around one hand, I use the other to force the hat in and up on my face, which crams the hat’s nose plug into my nostrils so I can equalize as I descend. Once I touch down on the bottom of the tank, my first task is making the switch from nitrox to mixed gas—a helium, nitrogen and oxygen mixture. “Crank your free flow, and count to 20,” says the voice in my hat. “One, two…breathe…three, four…breathe,” I respond. By about 14, my voice takes on the twangy, high-pitched character that lets my tenders know the mixed gas is flowing, and I turn to make my way hand-over-hand, low-gravity style, about 10 feet up the mock oil platform to the pipe flange we’re here to assemble.

It’s a relatively complex process requiring lift bag maneuvers and indirect communication with my work partner—we can’t talk directly, but rather speak via the tenders on the surface—made even more challenging by the limited field of vision offered through the hat’s faceplate. After about 15 minutes, we finish the task, put our tools back in the basket hanging from the surface and I return to my down line to switch over to nitrox and make my controlled ascent.

Because it’s a simulated work dive, we feign a long, deep bottom time, and once we get out of the water, we have five minutes to strip down and climb into the decompression chamber before our blood starts to “boil.” It’s 100-plus degrees here in Houston, and a cramped metal tube baking in the summer sun doesn’t look terribly inviting. But we climb in and make our way through the locks system into the main chamber where we’re taken down to 50 feet and slowly brought back up to sea level over about 15 minutes. Amply decompressed, we scramble out of the chamber—it feels a bit like climbing out of pressure cooker—and go through a quick neurological evaluation before the instructors give us the all clear.

With the next day comes the highlight of the weekend, the moment many of us in the camp have been waiting for: Underwater cutting and welding. The cutting part uses a thermic rod—ignited by direct current and fueled by liquid oxygen—that burns at 6,500 degrees and cuts through damn near anything. The welding, in terms of the tools and basic concept, is similar to welding above water, but doing it underwater requires different techniques and an added safety concern—namely avoiding the electric current running through the water. Les Joiner, the former president of Ocean Corp, is on site today to take us through the two processes. “Like everything else in this industry, the safety rules for underwater welding and cutting are written in blood,” Joiner says at the start of his safety briefing. “And all you have to do to avoid electric shock is not find yourself between the ground and the lead. If you get between where the plate’s grounded and the end of this torch, you’ll find out why they call it direct current.” It’s a simple rule. As long as we don’t walk to the other side of the tank or point the end of the torch toward our bodies, there’s no real risk of shock.

First, I hop into the cutting tank. A length of pipe stands upright on the cutting table. I pull the handle to let the oxygen flow, spark the torch and pierce the solid steel pipe with the tip of the rod. It slides through like the proverbial hot knife through butter. With a slight sawing motion, I attempt to cut a straight line across the pipe, but the result is a jagged mess. The welding process is equally simple to enact, but equally hard to do with any dexterity. Pulling the torch along what I hope is a straight line with one hand, while holding the bucket bouncing on my head with the other and trying to see anything through the billowing bubbles of smoke and the one- by three-inch welding lens duct taped to my mask, I gain immense appreciation for the focus and skill this school’s students master on their way through the program. And when I get out of the welding tank and head for the showers, I realize my question has been answered.

Everything we’ve done this weekend is set up in a controlled environment so we can get a feel for the work these divers do every day without experiencing the true danger and desolation of a real working situation. But I get the picture. These divers are essentially living tools employed by the massive machines—usually the oil business—that they work for. They hang like bait on a hook in the open ocean, power tools in hand, doing work that’s not only dangerous in and of itself, but also because of its depth and offshore location. The instructors who’ve been showing us the ropes are survivors. They beat the odds in a dangerous world and came out the other side to train the next generation, but the hardened looks on their faces and the gruff tones in their voices tell more about this life than any words could do. It’s a job for the young. It’s a job for the brave, maybe even the stupid. It’s not the job for me. But for divers who have that same question gnawing in the backs of their heads, Ocean Corp is alone in the commercial diving world as a place that provides this camp to let people find that answer for themselves.

Sidebar: The Ocean Corporation is one of the world’s leading commercial diving facilities. It’s an accredited technical school that offers a variety of diver and nondiver training. The Commercial Diving Experience is offered annually at the beginning of August. Participants must be scuba-certified and 18 years or older; cost is $499 per person. For more information visit oceancorp.com or campcde.com

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Want to see Ocean Corp’s Commercial Diving Experience in action? click the “on assignment” channel at scubadiving.com/video for original video, shot on location by ShrimpTank Productions.

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Ten tips for trouble-free dive travel.

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Ripping drift dives along lush reefs and dramatic walls draw more divers to Cozumel than any other location in the Caribbean. I took a look at the varied reef environments here and gave a service-heavy breakdown of Cozumel’s best dives, along with insiders’ tips from on-island diving experts that help readers dive Cozumel’s hardest-to-get-to reefs.

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When I stepped off the plane in the Bay Islands’ central hub of Roatan, two distinct faces of the dive tourism experience here immediately presented themselves. Outside the arrivals gate, taxi drivers jockeyed for fares for the 25-minute drive to West Bay, where the crowd is young, a variety of languages fills the air and the price tag leans toward budget. There, oceanside dirt streets lined with island guesthouses hum with divers loading docked boats and attending open-air certification classes.

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Know what to do when an alligator attacks underwater? Ike Monreal survived, and you can too.

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Meet the Humboldt squid: Length; up to eight feet. Arms; eight, plus two grasping tentacles. Vitals; an inquisative, calculating brain and three hearts pumping cold, blue blood. Defenses; 40,000 teeth embedded in 1,200 suction discs–and one razor sharp beak. Food; anything it can get its suckers on.

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