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No Problem Mate, Those Are Brazilian Groupers
By Mike JohnsonEx-Commercial Diving Consultant
It’s funny how life moves on, and things slip into the dusty corners of your mind. Life inBrazil was memorable, to say the least. It would take volumes to describe that magical place and doing it justice, that wouldn’t even include Carnival, that’s another set of volumes unto itself. A land of stark contrast to be sure. The ultra rich raise their homesand landscapes amid spiraling towering cities, stretching as massive clawed paws aroundendless beaches of all hue and description, filled with the beautiful. Tin and cardboardshanty towns, of the ultra poor, add their peppery presence to rolling hills, showing off open sewers and dirty naked babies in the shadow of Corcovado, the massive statue of Christ standing post on his mountain, overlooking this fantastic city. But, as surely as the jet landed in Miami on my trip home, the dance of life continued, with new memories andexperiences filling the now, pilling cobwebs over yesterdays. It would be some years before the image of my friend the mini-van sized grouper from Brazil returned,accompanied by the thundering of my adrenaline charged heart.The whole South American thing had been an exquisite experience. I was a young, US Navy trained diver; Second Class Deep Sea Air diving School in San Diego, First ClassMixed-Gas & Salvage Diving School in Washington DC, Back to San Diego for Saturation Diving School, the works. Before getting into the commercial diving world, itwas easy to confuse a dive station with NASA mission control. Safety was drilledconstantly, and safety seemed to mean High Tech. gadgets and oxygen-clean everything.For a while I thought that an ultrasonic cleaner and a laminar-flow bench were universalitems stocked in every diving locker. Especially, after NASA let an oxygen fire burn upa space capsule, along with a couple of astronauts. We are talking culture shock when Ilearned you did not have to use a Marsh & Marine water tight connector on thecommunications port of a diving helmet. Two bare wires secured directly to theCommunications Posts, this was, “how it’s done”… blasphemy.But the new ideas kept coming. I found myself on projects with experienced hands, newtenders, all manner of folks, and many from the world community, everybody withstories for the listening, and listen I did. This new world was not the navy, or Kansas, butI would not have been overly surprised to see a house fall from the sky.I heard other stories of big fish. One tells of a diver who tied a large steel nut, taken froma bolt, to the end of a piece of quarter inch line that his tenders had lowered from thesurface. As a big grouper hovered, staring at the diver in the water, he tossed the nut intothe mouth of the fish. The weighty steel nut dropped through the mouth and out the bottom side of the fish, through his great gill plates, creating a loop, that need only be tiedoff to itself, thereby making the fish captive. Sounds easy, but up to this point the fishhad no Idea anything unusual was afoot. This little maneuver was done at the end of theworking dive, and for good reason. The divers and bell were raised to the surface before
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stout-hearted hands, also on the surface, began to haul away on this line, now securedthrough the mouth of a very large, unsuspecting fish, swimming deep below the surfacevessel, amid guide wires, drill casing, camera frame, lots of very expensive stuff.Well, this story is not “The Old Man and the Sea” by a long shot. In fact, it only took about two minutes for that fish to trash the cameras on the camera frame and wrap severalhundred feet of line around several million dollars worth of sub-sea gear. Who wouldguess a fish new so much about knots?There were other stories about fish that were not so docile with divers in the water. Insome areas of the gulf men told of groupers attacking and being aggressive. Divers inthese areas began to carry a plastic bottle, filled with household bleach, tied to their diving harness. When squeezed into the water, among aggressive fish, it seemed to work like tear gas on an angry mob. This also worked for flushing octopus from crevices, onhunting trips, in the Puget Sound; I learned that trick from sport divers in WashingtonState.Another man told of a working dive and a perfect day, when he jumped through theinterface, from air to water, and as the flurry of bubbles and foam cleared, he focused onthe closely spaced vertical conductor pipes, within the conductor bay, of a drilling platform. The water was crystal clear and as he watched, a school of small bait fish swamfor safety, within the legs of the rig, and dispersed among the conductor pipes. A schoolof large amber jacks followed. They were much too large to swim into the forest of conductor pipes protecting the school of smaller fish. My friend watched as the entireschool of amber jack stood on their heads and swam inverted into the conductor bay to begin feeding on the smaller fish. He watched a show of nature produced for few eyesand he watched it to its conclusion. The topside diving supervisor was not very happy, but the job did eventually get done.As fate would have it, BOP stacks have a way of needing diver attention from time totime the world over and the call to work on one in the Gulf of Mexico was inevitable.This particular BOP needed to have a new AX-ring installed. Not a complicated job,using the rigs draw-works, the drilling crew picks up the upper package of the BOP toreveal a steel ring. This ring acts as a seal between the upper and lower parts of the BOPand looks a lot like a shinny steel hula-hoop (remember those). The diver has to pry outthe old ring and deposit a new one in the, now vacant, groove located on top and in thecenter of the lower BOP package, still resting on the ocean floor. How hard could this be?The time required and water depth for this work qualified for a “bell bounce”decompression profile. We had a full saturation diving system on the drilling rig, andsince “bell bounce” diving is shorter and faster than saturation diving, no problem there.Everything was S. O. P. until I geared up and dropped through the bottom bell hatch tostart work.
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A small platform and tool box were suspended a couple of feet below the diving bell,serving the functions of stowage and weighting down the bell for stability and negative bouncy. Positioned on this platform, I wrapped my legs around a post for leverage andopened the tool box. As I looked up to survey my position and plan my next move, the presence of significantly large fish became apparent, lots of fish, ranging in size fromabout 40 pounds to some beefy bodies that must have weighed in at around 500. Theywere milling about at a pace just faster than mild interest. I looked at the BOP stack for orientation as I gathered a crowbar from the tool box. We were stationed about 50 feetabove the sea floor and 8 feet above and to one side of the stack.As I surveyed, my suit began to feel like I might be inside a popcorn popper, as first one bump was felt then two, three, six…hey, these damn things are biting me. Thank Godthey have no teeth, but that hard rough mouth could deliver one heck of a pinch whenthey got a good hold. By now they were all over the place, stretched within the visiblelight given off from the bell lights and BOP camera frame, and moving even faster nowthan before. They were frenzied, my heart beat was racing along, keeping pace withthere speed, as my mind tried to formulate a plan.The AX-ring had to be changed and these fish definitely were not the docile Brazilianvariety. This moment seemed long, but it was about to get longer. My left handsuddenly flew up over my head like when you really know the answer in school and wantdesperately for the teacher to call on you. I looked up to find my hand in a fishs’ mouth,and the tight bony pinch was not fun. I jerked my hand back, only to find it still trappedand the fish still pulling. I jerked again, and this time my hand pulled free from within itsglove. The satisfied fish darted off with its rubbery prize as others came in to feed. Thiswasn’t funny anymore, fish hitting my now bare hand drew blood, the job was not done,and there was no end in sight. Another fish grabbed my hand and I did what came byinstinct, whacking the beast across his head with my crowbar. It let go, I swung atanother, and another, until I was in a frenzy bashing fish. This lasted seconds as I beganto realize the fish were no longer biting, but had backed off to allow access and watchme. They must have accepted me as a larger fish asserting territorial rights, but I was nothanging around to gloat over my presumed victory.I jumped quickly from the bell to the top of the BOP stack and used my crowbar to freethe old AX-ring. I gave the now vacant AX-ring groove a quick inspection for damageand debris, it was fine. The new ring I had brought along, when I jumped to the stack,was hanging on my arm. I put this replacement in the groove, slipped the old ring back on my arm, and stood to make the jump back to the bell. New world; now the bell was above me 5 feet, and some 8 to 10 feet distant. I needed to jump back, but with my heavy load, it would be necessary to pull myself back byclimbing the umbilical. I wore work boots on my feet, to better enable walking andworking. We seldom wore fins because very little work was done in mid-water. Thecommunications speaker in my hat had been uncommonly quiet and there was noresponse when I called for my bell tender to pull the extra slack from my umbilical, back inside the bell, and hold it there, so I could use it to climb up. This was a “bell bounce”
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