Sealab by Ben Hellwarth

Author:Ben Hellwarth
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-09-19T21:00:00+00:00

15

THE OIL PATCH

By the mid-1960s, saturation diving, and even the futuristic notion of living in the sea, was no longer the sole province of scientific dreamers, inventors, or undersea explorers. The business of drilling oil and gas from the world’s continental shelves was growing into an industry, and saturation know-how arrived just in time for the offshore industry to take its hunt for hydrocarbons into deeper waters. It was as if George Bond’s old exploration and exploitation mantra had been adopted by an industry with the money and the motivation to push saturation diving to whatever ocean depths the market, and the human body, would bear.

By the summer of 1973, a diver like Alan “Doc” Helvey could be found working more than four hundred feet down, almost fifteen atmospheres away, at the bottom of the frigid and notoriously tempestuous North Sea. Helvey was an easygoing ex-Navy diver and medic—the nickname “Doc” had stuck with him after he left the Navy to join the growing legion of commercial divers. Helvey was attracted to commercial diving by the kind of strike-it-rich talk he had heard about working in the oil patch. There was indeed a gold-rush quality to what was happening offshore, and not just for the titans of industry. A commercial diver, especially a saturation diver, could earn in a day what a similarly skilled plumber or mechanic or factory worker would earn in a week, maybe even more, depending on the depth and duration of the dive.

Working at a depth of 440 feet would have been unthinkable only a few years before. Less than a decade had passed since Ed Link had sent Jon Lindbergh and Robert Sténuit to a similar depth for two tenuous days, and in much less hostile Bahamian waters. Helvey was not only surviving but wrangling with pipes and related fixtures on the kind of outsized underwater plumbing job familiar to commercial divers like him. Helvey and his diving partner were in an oil field called the Forties, a sprawling patch of seabed covering an area larger than the island of Manhattan that lies a hundred miles northeast of Aberdeen, Scotland. Oil was discovered in the Forties in 1970, a first for the United Kingdom sector of the North Sea. The very first North Sea oil strike had come a year before, in a field to the southeast called Ekofisk, in the Norwegian sector. These and other North Sea discoveries yielded big-money contracts for a variety of offshore businesses, including those that supplied working divers, like Helvey’s employer, Taylor Diving & Salvage. Taylor Diving had been started in the late 1950s in New Orleans by a couple of retired Navy divers. From its humble origins on the Gulf Coast, Taylor had grown into one of the largest and most influential diving enterprises in the world. The Gulf of Mexico remained a hotbed for offshore drilling, but after the North Sea discoveries, the deep frontier between Britain and Norway attracted businesses and divers, including Americans like Helvey.

Taylor

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