Drilling on the ocean floor

Yesterday was yet another exciting day of diving. I was torn between a deep dive and heading out to a reef a bit farther out to help with the drilling of some holes for moorings. For both, I had to get up at the same time, and when i woke up, I decided to head out to the help out with Operation: Buoy.

We got our equipment together and loaded some tanks onto a cart to take over to the front dock because this dive would not be from the standard dive boats... it would be from a much bigger boat that's usually used to bring cargo to and from the mainland - the Big Time. (All boats owned by Troy, owner of Utila Water Sports dive shop have "Time" in the title... Bottom Time, Any Time, Over Time, Island Time.)

We got all of our gear and 21 tanks loaded and hopped on board. The group consisted of the captain, some deck hands to drop equipment down to the water, Fred who is the local expert on buoys, moorings and fishing, a photographer, four Divemasters-in-Training (Brock, Laura, Chris & Itai), an instructor (Kris), and myself.

The Big Time skirted the southern part of Utila, eventually heading a bit westerly once we passed the southeastern cayes. About an hour and a half after starting, we'd reached the reef. The dive shop owner Troy joined us out there with a much smaller boat.

Fred geared up, which was interesting in and of itself - he had a pretty loaded weight belt, fins, mask, snorkel, and a tank of air that seemed to be strapped to his back with weight belts. No BCD or floatation device. This dude was old-school. He was under with Troy for about 10 or 15 minutes before he came back up. They'd found a place for the mooring. Our mission was to get the holes dug and get some cement in there to hold down some peg-like things. They'll put the moorings in later once the cement has dried.

So, we were needed to help out. They lowered down a hydraulic drill and we kinda looked at each other trying to figure out how to get into the water. We weren't on a dive boat where you can put on your gear and basically walk or roll off of the back. We were a good 2 meters above the water. So, we got everything ready, put on our fins and masks and jumped in with someone throwing our gear in after us, and we put everything on in the water. And we dived down.

We were working at about 15 feet/5 meters the whole time. Fred and Troy basically worked the drill, and Kris wanted in on the action as well, so he helped to hold down the two of them as they needed it. The rest of us twiddled our thumbs wondering what to do until we noticed that when the boat gradually moves in the water (we didn't have an anchor down), the two 100-foot hoses connected to the drill get tangled up in the coral. So I busied myself with keeping everything as tangle-free as possible as I watched the guys with the drill make 3 holes on the bottom.

The process was a pretty interesting one as well as slightly disturbing. It was disturbing for two reasons - first one being the coral that gets stepped on/grabbed/run over by the hoses during the process, thus killing it; second being the hydraulic oil that started to leak out of the drill later on in the drilling. When we came up to the surface, there was a very thin layer of oil there to coat our hair, masks, BCDs, etc. However, in the grand scheme of water pollution, the drill did very little damage.

The coral was more difficult to handle, especially because as divers, we're trained to be so cautious and respectful of the reefs. But I rationalized it by telling myself that many anchors over time would do WAY more damage that what we were doing. Which I think is very true and not just an excuse.

After bobbing up and down for an hour or so, the 4 DMTs (Divemaster-in-Training) and I got permission to poke around the reef, and we took off for a quick 10-15 minute poke-around. It was a very cool site... it's too far away for many people to dive on it, so I'm sure we were some of the few who have recently. We named it Kris' Dream (someone also suggested Kris' Wet Dream, although that might be taking it a little far) after the instructor with us, but I'm not sure if that's going to stick or not...

When we got back to the drilling area, they'd begun filling the holes with concrete. How does one use concrete under water? Well, I'm not sure what's normal, but here in Utila, Honduras, they filled PVC tubing with concrete and put in a styrofoam cork on one end. The other end you cover with your hand as you bring it down, and then you put the hand-covered end into the hole part-way. Then you take the cork out and shove another piece of piping (narrower than the concrete-filled one) and start to push the concrete out. You lose some of it in the process, but that's what happens. Stuff tubing, swim through water, shove into hole & repeat.

While the tail end of the concrete-fiilling process was going on (only 2 people are needed for it), all but Kris were back on the boat after about two hours in the water. Although we were cold in the water with our 3mm wetsuits on, once we were on board, things heated up quickly and Brock and Chris were soon giving us a show by jumping over the boat railing into the water. A quick swim took care of the heat.

After all of the equipment was loaded back into the boat, we started motoring to another part of the same reef. As a side note, getting out of the water was also a bit of an ordeal that involved taking off the equipment, tying a rope to the tank and BCD and letting someone from above hoist it up. They'd rigged up a ladder to the side of the boat to climb back up on, but it was about 10 rungs of skinny metal boards that you had to help you. Thankfully, it worked just fine.

When we got to the second site, we got in the water more quickly and all had a quick swim around. The floor was too soft, so we weren't able to do more drilling, so we swam around for about half an hour for a super chill and very slow dive.

We got back on the boat and three of us headed directly to the padded benches inside for a nap on the way back in. We got back at about 3pm and unloaded all of the gear.

It was nice to have a slightly different day of diving at a site that isn't dived very often. It's not every day you can say you assisted with a dive site mooring project.