commercial diving

Saying No To JIM

In diving’s pre-computer age, many occupational divers compiled their own work manuals filled with essential safety information like decompression and therapeutic recompression tables, basic treatment for pressure-related illnesses, and useful trivia … including, in some instances, job offer letters.  My… Read More ›

‘Don’t Forget The Diver’

Veteran radio broadcaster, Alistair Cooke’s weekly, ‘Letter From America’, was listened to by audiences from around the world for more than fifty years, before his death on 30th March 2004, His last broadcast for 1996 focussed on the usual media… Read More ›

Pot Luck

Some fifty-years ago, we were out in the North Sea working on a production platform built alongside the drill platform, the two being connected by a narrow catwalk between the drill deck and production deck of the two platforms, at… Read More ›

Raising A Navy

At the conclusion of WWI hostilities, the German High Seas Fleet was interned at the Royal Navy’s northern base at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands of Scotland.  On learning of the proposal to give the vessels to the victorious… Read More ›

“Oxygen Pete”

Inspired by the successful 1941 attacks – carried out by Italian divers riding ‘chariots’ armed with detachable explosive warheads – on the British battleships, ‘H.M.S.Queen Elizabeth’ and ‘H.M.S.Valiant’, in Alexandria Harbour, the Royal Navy began to devote greater resources to… Read More ›