Technical divers return to shore after 4 days at sea

Khao Lak, Thailand - The Valentines Tech Expedition contingent of Big Blue Tech return to Khao Lak today after coming ashore from the Mv Pawara after the completion of a 4 night technical diving liveaboard on the Similan and Surin islands.

The liveaboard was the base of our diving while completing a TDI Extended Range course which trained the divers to conduct accelerated decompression dives to depths of 55 meters / 180 ft using 3 mixes of gas with air, nitrox and oxygen over 4 cylinders worn simultaneously.

This course was delivered by James Thornton-Allan and Andy Cavell for students Yvonne Fries, Helen Artal, Duncan Tyler and Thomas Hallstrom.

This would be the second technical diving trip in the similan islands for Big Blue Tech this season and again it proved to be a holiday setting with challenging and interesting dives. While the diving conditions are described below it was the extra touches of relaxing watching movies, sun tanning on the roof and trips in the dinghy to the beaches, which really made this trip relaxing and enjoying as a holiday.

Technical diving is saturated with bravado and peer pressure which have lead to serious diving accidents around the globe, we’re more about having fun on the surface and focusing as a team underwater which allows each diver to relax and progress at their own pace. In addition to our relaxed atmosphere we also encourage a alcohol free environment and no smoking during the diving day which has contributed to our perfect record of no diving related injuries.

The Similan Islands is located off the west coast of the west side of Thailand just north of Phuket from a town called Khao Lak. There are several ways to reach the similans by speed boat, long tail or liveaboard and is listed as one of the best diving destinations in the world.  The Similan and Surin Islands are protected marine parks managed by the Thai government to prevent fishing and destruction to help the marine environment sustain for generations to come.  Divers must pay a park fee to enter the marine park which is enforced by roaming park police boats. It seems the greatest enforcement in the area is getting the money from the dive tour operators rather than protecting the environment from fishing or negative effects like litter or pollution but it’s a better system than nothing at all.

The dive sites we visited on our trip was East Of Eden, Boulder City, West of Eden, Elephant Head Pinnacle, Christmas Tree Point, Koh Bon, Koh Tachai, Richelieu Rock, Richelieu Rock(sunset), Koh Bon Pinnacle, Boonson Wreck.

Over these sites we found ourselves at the mercy of very strong currents pushing us in all directions with changing temperature. On a dive a Elephant Head Pinnacle at 55m a freezing cold wall of cloudy water washed over us making the visibility very limited and giving all of us instant brain freeze that took your breath away. While we were struggling to adjust to the temperature we were being pushed all over the place at a very fast rate, so strong that you couldn’t kick against it to keep in place, our only option was to hide behind rocks and do strategic zig zag movements through the dive site back up to recreational diving depths where is was warm and clear again but it was an experience that taught everyone how to handle vicious currents and how to stay together as a team.

On a dive to Koh Bon we finally saw Manta Rays, thankfully our instructor dropped his mask off the back of the boat, as he went do to get it just below the surface we noticed two large manta rays circling us about 10m below us. This would be a first for some of the divers who have had plenty of chances but never actually seen one. The Giant Manta Ray or “Manta Birostris” is mostly black with a white underbelly, long triangular wings and a tail without stinger. It also has a pair of movable flaps just in front of its mouth. They can grow up to 3-4 meters wide and are recorded as up to 22ft or 670 cm in diameter or “disc” size making these very exciting animals to be witness to. These gentle giants are also one of the few rays that don’t sting so you can get quite close without worry of harm. We spent in total about half an hour with these majestic animals, while other divers were restricted by their single cylinder and no decompression limits we spent over an hour at depth without any concern for air or decompression since the dive was planned well in advance.

As the final night rolled around many started falling asleep after dinner showing clear signs of fatigue from the days diving. It was decided as a group that we would skip the last 2 dives and sleep in, we would come back with the speed boat to visit Koh Bon Pinnacle at a later date. It was also the 11th of February which is Andy Cavell’s 27th birthday. We all knew that coming back from the trip and it being Andy’s birthday that we would be well into a few drinks so it’s good to rest up for such vigorous Olympic style consumption.

Returning to shore we unloaded the boat into our taxi and headed off to our hotel for a nap, shower and relaxed for the next few days until the 13th when we would head off to the big shipwreck off the coast called the Sea Chart 1 which is 85m long in 40m of water.

Special thanks to the staff of Big Blue Khao Lak and Mv Pawara for taking such good care of us and bending over backwards to accommodate our trip.

Big Blue Tech and BSAC Thailand completed Skill Development Courses for Ash Dunn and Mark Slinn during a workshop in Koh Tao on the 23rd of December to ehnace their abilities as scuba diving instructors.

A SDC is a course that teached instructors the ability to deliver different or signature courses. For example, a nitrox course could be considered a SDC because it delivers a specific skill set rather then enhancing day to day diver skills.

BSAC Thailand took Mark and Ash through the  BSAC Oxygen Administrator Instructor and BSAC Compressor Operator Instructor SDC during the day long workshop. During this time the students had to demonstrate their overall knowledge and ability in both disciplines to the instructor examiner.

After a written and practical exam they were issued their certification cards and received authority to begin teaching the courses.

Andy Cavell, our other intern, missed this event because he was teaching a PADI Deep and Nitrox Specialty Course. He will complete this workshop on the 29th of December.

The rest of the SDC will be earned in February with titles such as Gas Blender Instructor, Mixed Gas Diver Instructor and various other accompanying disciplines like service technician skills.

For more information or to attend our next cross-over, sdc workshop or instructor course please contact us or www.bsacthailand.com

Big Blue Tech will be conducting a 4 day  Cavern Course in Khao Sok National Park. The following dates are available.

December 18th - 23th ( 4 spaces )

This trip includes the option of up to 10 dives.

This trip will be open to divers from around Thailand.

Pre-Requisites: Must be minimum Advanced with 20 dives ( Redundant Breathing System Provided)

Conduct: The course will be done on site in the national park over a 4 day period of 10 dives with academic plus dry land skills. Certification as a Cavern Diver will be received after completing 4 dives and a final exam with 6 experience dives to follow.

Included:
- Ferry to and from Mainland Thailand (if required)
- Transport to and around Khao Sok
- 4 nights accommodation in a 4 star resort inside the the National Park
- Manual and Certification
- All gas and cylinder fills
- All equipment (Reels, Torches, Dive Gear)
- All food and drinks (non alcoholic)
- Park Entry Fee
- Boat Fees
- 4 Training Dives
- 2 “fun” Experience Dives

Not Included: Beer

Tekkies: Technical gear is available for those certified, included in the course price.

Certified Cavern Divers:
For those certified we will be running exploration trips in conjunction with this course, this will allow certified divers to use the boat and compressor to conduct 4 days of diving

Gas:
Nitrox, Trimix and boosted oxygen available on site, on request.

Prices: 19,800 Baht

This morning Big Blue Tech, a technical scuba diving school,  started a TDI Advanced Nitrox course on Koh Tao, Thailand. This course runs over 2 days and exposes divers to the use of nitrox to 40m and up to pure oxygen. Today the course was attended by Andy Cavell and Mark Slinn along with Ash Dunn and Emily Billingham.

The TDI Advanced Nitrox Course qualifies divers to use enriched air nitrox from EAN 21 through EAN 100 to a depth of 40 metres/130 feet during dives hat do not require staged decompression. Often taught in conjunction with the TDI Decompression Procedures course, this can be considered the foundation of your technical diving career.  Advanced Nitrox is also a great course for those wanting to extend their bottom times in shallower depths such as scientific diver, and a must for SCR or CCR divers.   The course cover topics like, Equipment requirement, Dive planning, Oxygen tracking, Blending methods.

You will use the TDI Advanced Nitrox Diving manual for your course, which explains in an easy to understand practical manner the complex information that Advanced Nitrox divers need to know.

The course began this morning with a dive to Chumphon Pinnacle, one of Koh Tao’s deep and best dive sites. Since the divers had experience in technical diving gear we were able to begin the dives deeper than normally. Emily had joined us to test out new equipment before joining the January expedition.

The divers had various skills to perform but we distracted by the appearence of over 20 sharks and a minke whale. Only the technical divers saw the minke whale underwater but everyone saw it on the surface as the whale cressed to show all everyone he was there.

After the two dives Andy said ” That was cracking like ” , “I’m well chuffed me”; for those that don’t speak northern english he said “What a wonderful dive i just had, i am very happy with the experience”.

The divers had drifted a considerable distance on their lift bags which attracted the large mamall who swap within touching disance of the divers. On the second dive of the morning the divers were again distracted by the swarms of bull sharks who were feeding on the abundant schools of fish. These sharks have never been interested in dives (knock on wood) and just circle around keeping a safe distance from the divers whom teh sharks are afraid of.

The divers performed really well despite all the action, unfortunately not all the same experiences can be shared by all. This week alone we have seen solo diving with shale sharks, simulated decompression with a whale and gas switching with sharks.

The course still requires an additional 2 dives which will be completed the following day.

Just a reminder, we accept new courses starting in February but spaces are filling quickly leading up till May.

Today Big Blue Tech completed a TDI Decompression Procedures course for Andy Holdaway, Panos Iosifoglou, and Steve Jeffs under the instruction of James Thornton-Allan. Additionally the course was joined by Nathaniel Weiss who is perfecting his skills under supervision of Technical Divemaster Christos Kardana

The TDI Decompression Procedures course, which was combined with TDI Advanced Nitrox, covers a variety of unqiue skills and training to allow the diver to complete decompression dives up to 45m using a variety of oxygen based gas mixes.

The course began with advanced buoyancy skills, equipment orientation, gas planning, task loading and handling advanced mixes of nitrox.

Today the students completed 2 accelerated decompression dives at Chumphon Pinnacle dive site in Koh Tao Thailand. The goal of all dives was to not touch the ground at any point or make contact with any object using their newly honed buoyancy skills. It was also essential to deploy a lift bag on every dive, the lift bag and reel can often lead to problems with loosing depth control or entanglement.

The students final dive exposed them to a 24 minute stop at 4.5m. Although they had already cleared their schedule according to their Suunto Vytec DS gas switching computer (provided as standard on all courses) it was essential for the students to build up tolerance to hanging in water in a controlled manner.

Tomorrow begins the start of the TDI Extended Range course which will begin with advanced oxygen handling, simulated in-water recompression procedures (full face mask), decompression buddy breathing and a variety of unique skills found only in the TDI syllabus. The TDI Extended Range course will then hit the road for Khao Sok where the students will complete their TDI Cavern Course and finish the deep dives on the sunken village in the middle of the national park. This option for training is only open to the most comfortable technical student due to it’s remote and challenging environment.

All images copyright Christos Kardana - Big Blue Tech

Today Big Blue Tech completed a TDI Advanced Nitrox Course for Martijn and Emily which took 2 days with 4 dives.

This course is designed to train divers how to use the basic technical diving equipment, dive to 40m and handle advanced mixes of nitrox up to pure oxygen.

This course is a non-decompression diving course giving the students the option of diving on nitrox, in twin tanks at depth.

The dives began with simple buoyancy, beginner skills and air consumption moving slowly to more advanced and complex skills challenging the divers and creating confident and comfortable tekkies.

Although moments of being attacked by fish, Emily getting caught waving at bat fish and Martijn forgetting his computer it was all relatively smooth.

This course was assisted by Christos Kardana and Andy Holdaway who are working to progress their professional skills for their upcoming examinations for further technical instructor ratings.

By Neil Swidey

The plan was ambitious but simple: Build a 9.5-mile sewer tunnel hundreds of feet below the ocean floor to help clean up Boston Harbor. But 10 years ago this summer, five divers went deep, deep into the project for one final step — with deadly results. Their harrowing story has never been told, until now.

The divers packed themselves into the basket and prepared to be lowered by a crane down the 400-foot shaft. But they couldn’t move until DJ Gillis got into the basket with them, and he wasn’t about to be hurried.

“C’mon, DJ,” one of the guys yelled. “Let’s go!”

Tap Taylor, who was DJ’s boss, started yelling, too. “Let’s go!” It was a radiant summer morning, and they were standing on Deer Island, a peninsula that hangs down like a comma from Winthrop into Boston Harbor, curling in front of Logan Airport. It also happened to be Tap’s 36th birthday, and he didn’t want to waste it waiting for DJ to move his tail.

The two of them had a close if combustible relationship. Tap was a hard-charging guy who logged one 14-hour day after another with the singular focus of building his small New Hampshire commercial diving business into something bigger. Still, he had a soft spot for DJ, treating the 29-year-old more like a kid brother than an employee. A 6-foot-2, solidly built charmer, DJ had developed a reputation as a talented diver who worked hard and partied harder. He’d show up late to job sites many mornings, often dropped off by some blonde or brunette. As DJ would be hurriedly changing out of his dress shoes and pants from the night before, Tap would start cursing, threatening to kick him off the job. But those outbursts usually ended the same way. Before long, Tap would calm down, laugh, and begin pumping DJ for details from his latest adventure hopping bars and beds.

“C’mon!” Tap shouted again.

“If you’re in that much of a hurry,” DJ barked back, “then go without me!”

It was the morning of July 21, 1999, a Wednesday, and the tension was thick, mainly because so many problems had surfaced on the project that Monday and Tuesday. Getting down the shaft would be the easy part. The challenge would come when the divers had to make their way to the end of a dank, dark sewer tunnel that began at the base of the shaft and kept going and going, for nearly 10 miles. Tap, who would be monitoring their progress from topside, was in no mood for DJ’s same old antics.

In reality, neither was DJ. The only woman he had on his mind now was the Virgin Mary. He had been searching the construction trailer for a piece of twine. He needed it to tie a small oval religious medal to the underside of his hard hat. The medal had once belonged to his grandfather, a carpenter who helped construct the Prudential Building that defined Boston’s skyline.

DJ had asked his mother for it the night before, remembering the story of how his grandfather had kept the Miraculous Medal in his pocket the whole time he worked on the Pru, taking comfort in the Blessed Virgin’s protection. Seeking comfort himself, DJ had gingerly asked his mom, “Is that still around?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why?”

“I’m a little concerned about the job.”

As much as he downplayed his growing uneasiness, he hadn’t been surprised to see fear flash over his mother’s face. He had broken one of the cardinal rules he’d learned early on in his career as a commercial diver, when he’d seen oil rigs capsize and cranes collapse: Never tell your family the truth about how dangerous the job was. It wasn’t fair to dump that kind of worry on them.

Still, this wasn’t like any job DJ had worked on before. In fact, it wasn’t like any job anyone had worked on before. That challenge to make history in his field, to do the seemingly undoable, was what had sold him on this Deer Island assignment in the first place, what made him leave a steadier gig doing more conventional work as a pile driver. Yet with everything that had gone down in the last few days, he was having buyer’s remorse.

Finally, he found the twine, fastened the Virgin Mary, and put on his hard hat as he strode over to the basket. Tap was still heated. “What the hell were you doing? We’ve got a job to do here!”

DJ took off his hat and turned it over, so the guys could see the medal dangling from it. “I’m taking care of myself,” he said.

Tap’s steam instantly lifted. “It’s getting that bad, huh?”

Imagine entering a tunnel that’s been bored into the earth hundreds of feet below Massachusetts Bay and continues straight out, for 9½ miles. There is no light, besides what the bulb on your helmet can give off. There is no sound, besides the water dripping overhead or sloshing around your boots. There is no air, besides what you brought in with you, a lifeline pumping through a hose and into your face mask. At the end of the tunnel, there isn’t even enough room to stand up straight, since it chokes down to just 5 feet in diameter before ending abruptly. It’s the world’s longest one-way tunnel, so there’s no way out other than turning around and making the hazardous trek back to where you started.

This is where DJ and four other commercial divers were headed on that Wednesday morning 10 summers ago. They’d been dispatched on a high-risk mission to fix a problem that had confounded some of the world’s top engineering and construction companies for a decade. If they were able to solve the problem, the empty tunnel could be flooded, allowing up to 1.3 billion gallons of treated sewer water to flow out to sea on a heavy day. Left unsolved, the problem threatened to turn the new tunnel into a $300 million white elephant, if not render the entire court-ordered cleanup of Boston Harbor a $4 billion waste of money.

This is the untold story of how a vast engineering marvel of a public works project ended with a handful of divers being given an improvised, untested plan and then sent into the darkness. And how their mission turned into a harrowing race to get out alive.

Boston Harbor was once a national embarrassment, a waterway indivisible from the nation’s history but blackened by the smothering amounts of sewage and sludge dumped into it every day. Musicians mined its sorry state for song, comedians for laughs, and George H.W. Bush for political advantage, hopping aboard a ferry during his 1988 presidential race against then governor Michael Dukakis and leading camera crews around “the dirtiest harbor in America.” It is now considered one of the country’s cleaner harbors, an unambiguous environmental success story.

The state-of-the-art treatment plant built during the 1990s by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority on Deer Island was the centerpiece of the harbor cleanup. On the same spot from which Eastern Massachusetts’s barely treated sewage once flowed directly into the cold coastal waters, the plant now puts the sewage through a sophisticated two-stage treatment process. The sludge is removed and converted into fertilizer pellets, while the treated water travels through the tunnel. In its final mile, the horizontal tunnel connects with 55 vertical “diffuser risers,” pipes that climb up to the ocean floor and are each topped with a domed cap the shape of a mini Apollo 11 command module. The treated water flows through the tunnel, up the risers, and then out into the sea through sprinkler heads in those diffuser caps. It’s an intricate process designed to slow down and spread out the flow of the treated water, limiting its impact on marine life and water quality.

While the tunnel was being built, there were covers fitted to each sprinkler head, to prevent sea water from getting in. But the tunnel’s designers worried that they wouldn’t offer enough protection. What if a ship anchor dragging along the ocean floor accidentally ripped off one of those space-module diffuser caps, opening up the tunnel to a raging tidal wave? As a secondary measure, they insisted that fiberglass safety plugs be installed near the base of each diffuser riser, to protect the hundreds of subterranean construction workers — known as “sandhogs” — from the ocean above.

Yet after the sandhogs left, those 55 safety plugs still had to be unplugged. While the sprinkler covers could be yanked out by divers swimming down to the seafloor, it would be much harder to pry out the internal safety plugs. And neither the MWRA nor its big-name design firms of Parsons Brinckerhoff and Metcalf & Eddy spelled out how it could be safely done. Instead, they left the responsibility for figuring that out to the construction company that won the contract in 1990 to build the tunnel, a joint venture called Kiewit-Atkinson-Kenny, or KAK.

It should have been clear early on how perilous a task it would be to remove those 65-pound plugs, which resembled industrial-kitchen salad bowls and were nestled deep inside 30-inch-wide pipes way at the end of the tunnel. That’s because the MWRA’s team did make one important stipulation: The plugs could be removed only after the tunnel was done and the sandhogs had cleared out, taking their lighting, transportation, and ventilation systems with them.

Yet if KAK managers were worried, they didn’t let on for years. They had their hands full building the tunnel. So, as with the Big Dig and other mega construction projects, in the end a massive, breathtakingly complicated puzzle would nearly be undone by a relatively small piece.

By 1997, with KAK way behind schedule and late fees piling up, it began a battle over the safety (or “offtake”) plugs with Kaiser Engineers, the company managing the tunnel project for the MWRA. KAK wanted permission to yank the plugs while it still had the main ventilation and lighting systems in the tunnel. Kaiser said no, insisting that “all work in the tunnel be complete before the offtake plugs are removed.” Each side claimed worker safety was its paramount concern. Kaiser said it would be unwise to endanger the lives of hundreds of sandhogs by leaving the tunnel exposed to a possible flood for the months it would take to remove the utilities. KAK countered that the diffuser caps had been undisturbed for their six years on the ocean floor and it would be insanity to put a small number of workers at extreme risk by sending them into the tunnel with no air or light, all in the name of protecting a larger group of workers from an exceedingly small risk. By waiting until the end to pull the plugs, KAK said, “the risk of catastrophe would be exponentially higher.”

After a year of sharply, sometimes theatrically worded memos, Kaiser suggested in 1998 that KAK install a new, smaller ventilation line, which could be taken down quickly after the plugs had been pulled. KAK said that would cost millions and asked the MWRA to pay for it. Kaiser said no, it will be on your dime. Not long after that, KAK did an about-face and called in the dive team.

DJ and his fellow divers were used to danger; they were Navy SEAL sort of guys who run toward it when everybody else is running away. They had been hired not because they would be submerged in water — at the time, there was no more than a few feet of standing water in the tunnel — but because they knew how to do construction work in dicey settings where they had to supply their own breathing air. As it turned out, they would be asked to do something so experimental, requiring them to be so utterly cut off from civilization, that they might as well have been working on the surface of the moon.

Two weeks before that radiant Wednesday morning, as the divers were converging in Tap Taylor’s backyard in southern New Hampshire to begin mobilizing, Tap pulled DJ aside. “I know you’re not going to like this guy Harald,” he told DJ. “But I need you to do me a favor. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

Although they were using Tap’s yard as their staging area, Tap was not in charge. Harald Grob was.

When KAK managers had been casting about for a bold team to solve their safety-plug dilemma, Tap had eagerly stepped forward. He presented a plan that would supply divers with compressed air from tubes stacked on a tractor-trailer and sent as far into the tunnel as possible. But his company, Black Dog Divers, was too small to get the bonding insurance that KAK managers demanded. So they awarded the roughly $800,000 contract to Norwesco Marine of Spokane, Washington. Still, Tap’s company stood to earn more than $100,000 for its junior role providing some of the divers, logistical support, and good relations with the Boston unions.

Norwesco’s man in charge was Harald, a bright engineer from British Columbia who had just turned 40. Tap was used to dealing with engineers who always believed they were the smartest guys in the room. But Harald, whose CV distended over seven pages, including attachments, struck Tap as someone who took this self-assuredness to a new level.

That’s not to say Tap wasn’t dazzled like everyone else by the adventurous, military-ops feel to Harald’s plan. Divers would use souped-up Humvees to travel in the tunnel and get their air from a mixture of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen. The liquid gases would be combined right there in the tunnel, and just a few tanks could go a long way. This would make his breathing system easier to transport into the tunnel than Tap’s and allow the divers to work for longer shifts.

In addition to DJ, Tap would be bringing to the project his close friend and former business partner Billy Juse, a friendly MacGyver type whose dark mustache had edges as squared off as tape cut with scissors. A year earlier, Billy had asked Tap to buy out his share of Black Dog. He had been frustrated that he was in his mid-30s, but his 100-hour workweeks were keeping him from building a life with his longtime girlfriend, Michelle. Still, he remained committed to the company’s success and was looking forward to the Deer Island job and working with DJ again.

Standing in Tap’s backyard, DJ had complete trust in Billy. But the handful of divers from the West Coast were a blank slate for him. At first, both camps eyed each other like rival rappers from opposite coasts.

Yet the more they got to know each other that week, doing run-throughs with a sample plug and pipe, the more comfortable the divers became with one another. DJ had originally assumed the West Coast divers were all an extension of Harald. But when the equipment was not coming together the way he had planned, the divers started to bond over their shared frustration with how Harald seemed to be drawing more inward rather than turning to them for input. They also wondered aloud why the centerpiece of his plan, a gas mixer called a MAP Mix 9000, was not on-site for testing. For reasons they could not understand, it was being shipped from Europe, and its arrival had been delayed.

Despite DJ’s growing confidence in the other divers, he regretted that one of his mentors wouldn’t be among them. A few weeks earlier, Ron Kozlowski had pulled DJ aside and told him he was backing out of the job. He suggested DJ do the same. DJ put a lot of stock in what Ron had to say. After all, he had served combat tours in Vietnam, allowing him to see how human nature takes over in life-or-death situations. He told DJ that the way he saw it, the divers were being asked to remove the safety plugs that had protected the sandhogs from a tidal wave tearing through the tunnel. Just what would be there to protect the divers?

“The only way I’d go in is with a boogie board and a .45,” he told DJ. “The boogie board to ride the wave out, and the .45 to keep you guys off my boogie board.”

Donald Hosford, one of the West Coast divers, hoped that when the guys finally began working in the tunnel, the tensions would ease. Instead, they only continued to build. It was clear to him and the other divers that the tunnel project had been going on for a long time and a lot of important players wanted it to be wrapped up yesterday. Hoss — hardly anyone used his real first name, not even him — had a ropy 6-foot-5 build, spiky sandy hair, and the rugged looks of someone who might appear in a magazine ad for the Copenhagen chew he always kept wadded under his lip. He was just 24 years old, but he was already a rising star for Norwesco.

On Monday, July 19, Hoss was one of the five divers who went into the tunnel for the first time using the mixed-liquid gas system, while several other divers stayed back, preparing equipment for the next day’s mission. Just three days earlier, the MAP Mix 9000 had finally arrived at Deer Island. By this time, all ventilation and lighting, except at the start of the tunnel, was gone.

They rode into the tunnel on a Humvee, its engine fortified to handle the oxygen-deficient air. Because there would be no room to turn the vehicle around when it came time to leave, they towed a second Humvee facing the opposite direction. At the base of the shaft, the tunnel was about 24 feet wide, but toward the end it got progressively narrower. After the 9-mile mark, the Humvee could go no farther. Two of the divers stayed on the Humvee, monitoring the main breathing system. The other three left on foot, slogging to the very end of the tunnel, where they would start removing the first of the safety plugs, eventually working their way back.

Hoss was part of the three-man expedition team. They dragged a flat-bottomed metal boat carrying a manifold — a rack with multiple inputs that connected them, through a 1,200-foot hose, to the main breathing system on the Humvee. The hose was called an umbilical because the divers could not survive without it any longer than a baby in the womb could survive without his. In addition, the three divers each had his own umbilical that allowed him to move up to 300 feet away from the boat. As a backup, if their main mixed-gas breathing system failed, there were four canisters of high-pressure, or HP, air strapped to the roof of one of the Humvees, as well as a small supply in the boat.

It didn’t take long for the divers to realize the system was not producing enough air for them. Hoss felt his mask getting sucked into his face, so much so that he’d have to pull it away to take a breath, briefly inhaling the bad tunnel air. The Humvee crew called Harald, who was in his trailer topside. He told them to switch to the backup air, which could be sent through the same umbilicals to Hoss and the other divers who were on foot. Not much later, with the HP air dwindling, they aborted the mission for the day.

Because of the low air quality, the Humvees needed their own air supply and oxygen injection system to work. But when they went to start the Humvee to leave, it wouldn’t work. They ended up having to monkey with the O2 injector for some time until it started.

On Monday night, Harald called the local representative of Topac, a distributor of the MAP Mix 9000, and asked him about the problem of low air production. Harald told the divers the next morning that, at the advice of the rep, he had turned up the regulator inside the mixer.

Around the same time, Hoss called Roger Rouleau, Norwesco’s owner in Spokane, and told him the breathing system was flawed. In his five years with the company, Hoss had grown to view Roger as a businessman focused on dollars and cents, but Hoss hoped that, as a former diver, Roger would take Hoss’s concerns seriously. Roger had stayed back in Washington, but the unusual nature of the Deer Island job had drawn him attention from Spokane’s Journal of Business a few days earlier. “We’ve done a lot of wacky stuff,” he told the journal. “That’s what makes this business fun. The weirder and wackier it is, the better it is for us.” After getting off the phone with Hoss, Roger dialed Harald. Even though Roger was the boss, he had always felt a bit intimidated intellectually by Harald. So when Harald assured him he had worked out the kinks and “this is going to work well,” that was enough for Roger.

In fact, Tuesday didn’t go much better. Among the divers on plug-pulling duty that day was Norwesco’s Dave Riggs, a 38-year-old who had two young children back in Nevada and a touch of his native Texas in his accent. He had one of those last names that sounded like a nickname, so that’s what everyone called him.

Again, the divers complained of not getting enough air from the mixer. And, again, they had trouble starting the Humvee. This time, its battery died, so they spent more than an hour removing the battery from the Humvee they had driven out in and which was now loaded onto the trailer, and installing that battery in the Humvee that they would be driving back to the shaft.

With all the air problems, not to mention the absurd difficulty of crawling around a slippery 5-foot-wide tunnel and through 30-inch-wide pipes, all while wearing breathing equipment, the divers in two days had managed to pull the plugs from only diffuser No. 1 and No. 2. They still had 53 to go.

Out of the tunnel, several guys complained that the system had them worried for their safety. Riggs tried striking a helpful tone, asking Harald if the Norwesco shop back in Washington had an in-line analyzer. The relatively inexpensive gauge, which could be plumbed into the system, would tell the divers precisely what the oxygen level was in the breathing air after it had gone through the mixer but before it made it into the divers’ umbilicals. The in-line analyzer would be far more reliable than the attached air sampler and hand-held monitor they’d been given. “Can we get one of those hotshotted out here?” Riggs asked.

Although he never really answered Riggs’s question, Harald assured the divers that he had made the necessary adjustments. Nonetheless, the complaints intensified out of his earshot, as the drivers rode back to the Howard Johnson’s in Revere. From his motel room, Hoss talked to both his wife and his parents. Uncharacteristically, he opened up about the pit growing in his stomach. They implored him to leave the job, but he said he couldn’t abandon the other guys.

The other divers were feeling similar pangs of worry. That same night, DJ was having his uncomfortable conversation with his mother at their home in Waltham, asking for his grandfather’s Virgin Mary medal. And at five minutes to 6 the next morning, Billy called his mother, Olga, in Florida, to ask a last-minute question about homeowner’s insurance for the New Hampshire house he and Michelle were preparing to close on. He knew his mom, who worked in a law office, would have the answer. But Olga sensed an unusual heaviness in his voice. So she asked him how the job was going, expecting he would perk up and deliver one of his standard upbeat responses. He didn’t, telling her, “I’m working in this godawful hole.”

For all the drama leading up to Wednesday, there was a certain calm to the morning once the guys got into the tunnel. Hoss rode 400 feet down the shaft, sharing the basket with Riggs and DJ and his Virgin Mary-adorned hard hat. At the base, they found Billy going over pre-mission checklists with Tim Nordeen of Norwesco. Hoss always liked working with Tim, a 39-year-old Texas native with an easygoing gentleness to him behind his husky, bearded exterior.

Just after 8 a.m., Hoss hopped into the passenger’s seat of the forward-facing Humvee, which Billy was driving. Tim sat in the driver’s seat of the Humvee being towed, with Riggs riding shotgun and DJ in the back. Then they began the roughly two-hour drive through standing water out toward the end of the tunnel.

Just before the point where the ambient oxygen ran out and they would have to don their face masks, Riggs took a few swigs from his Mountain Dew. When the Humvees could go no farther, around the 9-mile mark, Hoss hopped out, and he and Riggs began loading the boat with gear. They would head out on foot as part of that day’s expedition crew, with Hoss serving as foreman. Billy was supposed to be their third man. But his back was hurting him from the plug-pulling operation the day before, so he opted to stay in the Humvee and asked DJ to go in his place.

DJ balked, calling him a wuss. Maybe so, Billy said, “But I’m your boss.” They both laughed.

“All right, I’ll go,” DJ said. “But when I bring those plugs back, you’re loading them in the Humvee.”

As the foreman, Hoss would have a direct communications wire connecting him to Tim in the Humvee. Before the three-man team left, Tim told Hoss to call with frequent updates, so he could relay them up to Harald.

Topside, there wasn’t much for Harald and Tap to do in between those updates. As the morning wore on, Tap did an on-air phone interview with a Boston TV station — commenting not about the tunnel but rather the big story of the day. A few nights earlier, JFK Jr.’s plane had crashed off Martha’s Vineyard, and that morning divers were recovering his body.

Meanwhile, in the pitch blackness of down under, Hoss set up the boat with the breathing manifold around diffuser No. 4, just before the final stretch of the tunnel choked down to the 5-foot diameter. DJ and Riggs had lumbered and crawled out to the very end, to diffusers No. 1 and No. 2, to grab the plugs that had been yanked the day before and drag them back a few hundred feet to load them in the boat. Then they went to work removing the plug from diffuser No. 3. Riggs had the toughest job. He had to pump out any water in the 30-inch-wide pipe connecting the diffuser riser to the tunnel, then shimmy into the pipe, use a special wrench to remove the steel clips holding the plug in place, and then carefully slide both the plug components and his 5-foot-8 body out of the pipe without disturbing his breathing equipment. After he was done, DJ had to go into the pipe with a video camera to document the plug removal, and then they had to load the plug onto the boat. With the plug out of diffuser No. 3, Riggs moved on to No. 4.

Just after 1 p.m., Hoss began untangling the various hoses that had started to spool around his feet. He looked up to see DJ sit down on the tunnel floor, in a strange kind of involuntary slow motion.

“Are you OK, DJ?” Hoss yelled, muffled through his face mask.

Before he could finish his sentence, Riggs went down next, falling on one knee in front of DJ.

Hoss suddenly felt lightheaded himself, in a warm and fuzzy way, as though he had just tossed back a few cocktails. He had enough presence of mind to know that warm and fuzzy was not what you want to be when you’re 9½ miles away from land, hundreds of feet below the sea. “I need to call Tim,” he shouted.

Hoss reached Tim on his communications wire and pressed him for what the oxygen level was on the breathing system — anything under 19 percent meant trouble. He said he’d check. A few seconds later, he called back. “It’s 9.8!” Tim said, frantically. “We’re going on HP air.”

Then the line went dead.

Hoss lunged toward the manifold in the boat and flicked the lever. That switched off the mixed gas flowing into their face masks from the Humvee and replaced it with air from a canister of emergency HP they’d brought with them on the boat. He looked over to see both DJ and Riggs coming to, seeming a bit disoriented, as though startled to wake up from an unexpected flash of sleep behind the wheel of a car.

Hoss was still disoriented himself. When he couldn’t get Tim on the phone, he didn’t panic. He figured he and Billy had stepped outside the Humvee to check on the liquid gas tanks. Or maybe the water that he spotted on the microphone attached to his communications wire had somehow fried the system, making it impossible for Tim to reach him.

Still, Hoss was taking no chances. He decided the expedition crew should pack up and head back to the Humvee. Then, as they were winding up all their hoses, Riggs’s face mask started to free flow, leaving him unable to slow the rush of air hissing into his system. This was bad for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which it was a surefire way to burn through their emergency air in no time. Riggs decided to kink up his hose, opening it just enough to breathe, and then closing it after every breath.

The divers then began the 1,200-foot walk back down the dark narrow tunnel to the Humvees, dragging the boat with them. Hoss was sure that he would find Billy and Tim standing beside the vehicles, shining their miner’s lamps, and giving him, Riggs, and DJ a hard time for having screwed up the communications system.

As they made their approach, Riggs whistled as loud as he could. No response. Then the Humvees came into view. Suddenly, DJ yelled out, “Man down!” and sprinted ahead. Billy was lying outside the passenger door of one of the Humvees. DJ checked for a pulse, but there wasn’t one.

Inside the same Humvee, Tim was seated, his neck turned toward the breathing-system controls behind him, his head slumped over. Hoss didn’t know what had struck down Billy and Tim, but he knew what they were doing when they died: trying to switch the main system over to the backup air and save the lives of their fellow divers 1,200 feet away.

With the emergency air supply on the boat dwindling fast, Hoss was counting on using the four canisters of backup HP air strapped to the roof of the Humvee. But because the valves were open, Hoss couldn’t be sure which system — HP or mixed gas — was responsible for the bad air that had flowed to their face masks. The backup air couldn’t be trusted, therefore it couldn’t be used.

DJ was trying to revive Billy by doing chest compressions and “purging” his face mask with blasts of air. Distraught that it wasn’t working, DJ looked up at Riggs, who was still forced to kink and unkink his hose for every breath. He saw Riggs looking at the bodies and then down the long black tunnel to the shaft. DJ thought to himself: Riggs wants to leave now. He wants to run!

That’s when it dawned on him: They were so far from civilization that they might as well have been on the moon. Bad air had killed two of the divers, and the rest of them could very well be next. And nobody was coming in to rescue them.

As comfortable as he’d gotten with Hoss and Riggs, they were still basically strangers to him. The only guy on the team he really knew was now lying lifeless in his arms. Is this what Ron Kozlowski was talking about, when he warned him about how men can turn on each other in life-or-death situations? DJ had no boogie board, no .45.

He thought to himself: Are these guys going to stick with me? If they didn’t, he knew they had no hope of making it out alive.

The TDI Advanced Nitrox course is designed to train the divers in the benefits, hazards and proper procedures for utilizing Enriched air nitrox through to one hundred (100%) percent oxygen for dives not requiring decompression To a depth of forty (40) msw, one hundred thirty (130) fsw.

The popularity of this course can further be illustrated with the recent shift in PADI’s technical diving arm DSAT to adopt the TDI style of courses which is to be released September 1st.

The course in itself gives the student many great new abilities as a diver. Of those include certification to 40m, above 40% nitrox use and the ability to dive in technical diving gear.

Yesterday Big Blue Tech completed such a course for Andy Holdaway , Panos Iosifoglo and Jean-Louis Rocheron. This course was also assited by Christos Kardana who was documenting the event with his under water camera.

The students excelled at the new gear and learning that extra buoyancy skills was introduced to help improve their confidence in the gear, these skills are typically found in the TDI Intro to Tech or GUE Foundations courses. This is essential for Panos and Andy who are continuing on to their TDI Cavern Course in a few days and later to more progressive technical diving course, they will use their new certification diving with twin tanks in the fresh water caves of Khao Sok National Park. Jean-Louis benefited from the extra skills and time to practice because he returns to work in France and might not have much time to dive again until next holiday.

Below are some pictures of the course.

When you’ve been in the technical dive business as long as TDI™ has, you think you’ve seen everything, but the feedback the agency has been receiving since the launch of its new Advanced Nitrox materials has taken even the most seasoned staff members by surprise.

“I think when we launched the new Advanced Nitrox materials in the spring, it was a low-key affair because there were several other products released around the same time,” Steve Lewis admitted. “But during the past few months, we’ve been getting a steady stream of emails and phone calls from our instructors complimenting us on the quality of the book’s content and design. But the real story is the number of students who have made the effort to tell us how much they’ve enjoyed their course and how easy the book made the learning process for them.”

Lewis, Director Marketing and Corporate Communications for TDI™, said that his collection of positive emails and phone calls is growing daily.

“We produce this textbook in large numbers to begin with – I think we’re already getting into the third print run – because our Advanced Nitrox course is one of the foundation classes for our whole technical program. And it has been a strong program for TDI™ since we started operations in ’94; however, my guess is the number of calls and emails about the new manual and instructor guide outstrips feedback on any other program about two to one… and it’s all positive!”

Lewis said the TDI Advanced Nitrox Student Manual is at the core of the new materials and was completely rewritten and redesigned featuring new photographs and illustrations throughout. He said the contents was reviewed and radically updated for the 2009 copyright version.

“Of course the basic facts are unchanged and TDI™ Advanced Nitrox still covers the full spectrum of mixes up to and including pure oxygen. But the presentation of those facts and of topics such as dive planning, gas management and foundation skills has been changed to reflect the fact that the type of diver entering the technical side of diving today is very different to the person who signed up for a TDI™ class back in the mid-nineties.”

The TDI Advanced Nitrox Student Manual is part of a full library of educational materials from the leading technical dive training agency, Technical Diving International™. For more details about this growing organization, visit the website at www.TDISDI.com To find the nearest Technical Diving International facility, click on this link: TDI International Directory

Yesterday Big Blue Tech certified 3 TDI Gas Blenders following a challenging 2 days of practical work and hands on compressor and blending use.

The students, Glen, Rich and Andy learned the following:

Theoretical:
Partial Pressure Blending
Top Up Blending
Bleed Down Top up with different banked mixed
Continuous Flow Blending
Oxygen use and hazards
Compressor design and basic operation
High pressure systems (banks, filling stations)
Rules of compression (high to low , hot and cold)
Working with PSI and BAR.

Practical:
Compressor use (Electric and Petrol powered)
Filter chemicals and their use
Compressor operation (maintenance and checks)
DIN and INT filling whips and valve use
Cylinder Visual Inspection Methods
Twin Cylinder with manifold cleaning and assembly
Partial pressure blending
Continuous flow blending
Oxygen Handling

The course started early on day one with theory and academics covering the various formulas and calculations needed to work in any nitrox facility. After a lunch break we moved into how a compressor works using both electrical and gas powered systems with ample time running each unit independently. The day was finished with home work and a introduction into nitrox filling use and visual inspection.

The final day was a round robin of events. With three students we broke the activities into several parts where one would do the exam, another servicing a cylinder and finally someone filling nitrox.

The majority of the 6 cylinders each had to fill were done with continuous flow making 23,27,32,36,38 percent mixes and finally a 60 percent mix that required partial pressure filling using pure oxygen. Each student had to perform these fills independently including turning on the compressor and oxygen.

The partial pressure part proved difficult with a inaccurate guage but the students got it within 1% which is the standard for the course.

All 3 students walked out confident they had actually learned something useful and not just another item for the CV. The students were awarded the TDI Nitrox Gas Blender certification.

Big Blue Tech and the Mv Trident will be conducting a Liveaboard to the HTMS PANGAN for a 3 day 3 night liveaboard.

The technical liveaboard will depart on July 2nd (weather permitted) and steam overnight to the wreck site. The schedule allows for 2 dives a day completing on the 5th returning to Koh Tao in the evening of the 5th.

Included:
Equipment (Regs, back plate, harness, deco regs)
Oxygen
Nitrox
Accommodation (on board)
6 Dives
Food
Drinks (water, coffee tea)

Not Included:
Personal Dive Gear (available for rent)
Helium (available at 4baht/ liter)
Drinks (soda, beer)

CCR?
The Mv Trident is equipped to accommodate CCR divers on this trip.

Pre-Requisites:
Must be a certified technical diver able to conduct decompression with oxygen for acceleration. If you’re not, contact us to get trained up before the trip!

Price: You can book online with your credit card, contact us for more info.