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of tanks on the pier that has been supplying him air
through a quarter-inch umbilical.
“Can you get the umbilical untangled?” Kazouris
asks Pearsall.
“No, negative,” he replies.
The team’s second diver proceeds over a muddy gray
bottom through murky, 5-foot-visibility water and reports,
“I’ve found a leak in the umbilical. Unfouling it now.”
“Thanks, buddy,” Pearsall responds into the mic of
his MK-20 full-face mask, prompting some wry grins
from his seven topside teammates.
Soon line handlers lift the two divers to the surface.
“Divers on surface,” Kazouris calls out.
“Divers on surface,” a topside chorus repeats. The
two divers climb up a swaying 15-foot rope-and-wood
Jacob’s ladder that’s been secured to the pier a short
distance behind the Coast Guard cutter
Stratton
.
I’m with a “fly-away team” from the U.S. Coast
Guard’s Regional Dive Locker West (RDLW), based in
San Diego, and working out of a trailer full of tanks,
weights, a compressor, safety lines and more.
Between maintenance dives underneath the 418-foot
Stratton
, they’re doing what Coast Guard personnel always
do between operations: train fiercely, in this case with
various emergency scenarios such as loss of air supply,
injury, entanglement and decompression sickness (DCS).
They’re working to qualify a couple of dive supervisors on
the new XLDS. These drills are based on their primary
missions: aids to navigation, polar operations and PWCS
(ports, waterways and coastal security).
Examples of this work include helping to rescue the
207-foot Australian fishing vessel
Antarctic Chieftain
after it got stuck in Antarctic ice last winter, securing
Manhattan’s rivers when Pope Francis visited New
York in September and helping recover debris and
bodies from a Coast Guard helicopter crash that killed
four of their fellow service members off Mobile, Ala.,
in 2012. In March 2016 they will head to the Arctic
Ocean to train with Navy divers on an ice floe off
Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, where a growing range of threats
and challenges are emerging from the declining sea ice.
As part of their polar mission training, they do a lot
of ship inspections and repairs for the fleet. Yesterday
they inspected the
Stratton
’s hull, props and bow
thruster (using a hand-held Outland video system so
the ship’s engineer could see what they saw), and they
plugged a discharge port so a leak in the engine room
could be worked on. This afternoon they’ll put another
patch over a sea chest (intake reservoir) so additional
maintenance can be carried out inside the hull.
One of the dives lasted for an hour and 55 minutes,
which is why they’re using a surface-supplied air
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• Includes all meals,
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• Free Nitrox
• Tech diving available
• Nine spacious suites