Incredible Navy Divers by Gregor Salmon

Author:Gregor Salmon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2011-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

There was an odd yet natural contradiction in clearance diving culture: their methodical systems could be undermined by arrogance. Young men were being asked to risk their lives, and they often did so with a tragic sense of invincibility. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that this would have fatal consequences.

The need to be super fit and switched on was well understood. Human beings weren’t meant to be under water for any longer than a breath-hold. The equipment allowed you to keep breathing in a hostile environment. If it failed and you couldn’t reach the surface, you would die. You were the captain of your own vessel and you could abort anytime you wanted. If you started having trouble, you just had to get the hell out of there and surface. All the divers had this drummed into them. So many facets of their education – procedures they had studied, been tested on and had made second nature – were directly or indirectly safety measures. But none of the divers ever thought their particularly hazardous job might kill them. Any reference to death was only fit to be acknowledged by way of black humour. There was a well-known typo in the divers’ manual. A symptom of oxygen poisoning, it read, was a twitching of the ‘plis’, instead of ‘lips’. ‘Twitching of the plis’ became a phrase the divers tossed around to get a laugh.

If they wore the inherent dangers of their job lightly it was because they were so highly drilled, competent and confident. It just so happened that what they did to earn a crust was occupy a frontier post. They were at the vanguard of modern diving and getting by on a shoestring. This was no high-and-mighty mission backed by blank navy cheques. No matter how many write-ups they got in Pix or the Post, the clearance divers were more faceless guinea pigs than pride-of-the-nation poster boys. They were pushing their luck in a dangerous field and, somewhere behind their collegial shtick of jokes, grilled fish, tinnies and bulletproof bravado, they knew it. A bloke could get killed doing this job. But that bloke ain’t me.

Tom Aldridge was the first. It was 1959 and he was among a group of divers staying down at the Pittwater Annex. Aldridge set off on his own to catch a few blackfish that lurked beneath the firing shed at the end of the wharf. He donned an oxygen set, grabbed a hand spear, jumped into the water and sank six metres or so. Shortly afterwards he lost consciousness. It would appear he suffered a shallow-water blackout, a response that can happen to anyone who suddenly goes from breathing air to pure oxygen and immediately enters a pressurised environment. The rapid change of both oxygen content in the blood and the pressure under which it is delivered can be too much for the brain to deal with, and it shuts down. Like fainting, the shallow-water blackout should be a short-lived and ultimately harmless malady.

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