Morehead Marine

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Scuba diving offers a unique underwater experience. For a select group of individuals, this underwater world is the place where they go to work. Commercial diving can be an exciting and rewarding career for those willing to learn the ropes and pay their dues.
Commercial diving is both challenging and unique. Generally, scuba certification is not sufficient to qualify for commercial diving jobs. Typically, one must attend a specialized program or school to become an accredited commercial diver. These programs tend to vary in length and scope. In selecting a program, it is important to keep in mind that many companies will retrain its divers to follow a company’s own protocols. As a result, it would be advantageous to chooses a school that gives hands on training in specialty areas of interest such as underwater welding or similar fields.
Due to the nature of the job, commercial diving is not for everybody. Here are a few things to consider before becoming a commercial diver. Divers perform underwater construction and salvage work either offshore or inland.
Offshore work usually involves spending months on an oil rig and may not be conducive to a family life. A benefit of offshore diving is that it can provide long term work, more experience with mixed gas diving, working with specialty submersibles, and other underwater services common to offshore commercial diving. Additionally, deep sea divers may have more opportunities for saturation diving than their inland marine construction counterparts in certain regions.
Inland diving includes working in lakes, rivers, ponds, nuclear reactor pools, other aquatic structures and commercial diving services such as underwater surveys, underwater inspection and repairs. An inland diver may experience a broad range of tasks and will need to be able to adapt to a variety of circumstances. Though inland divers are able to spend more time with their families, the nature of the work often requires a lot of travel. Inland diving will also provide the opportunity to work with many commercial diving companies.
To succeed as a commercial diver, one must possess strength, ingenuity, dexterity, the ability to work with ones hands, as well as the ability to work calmly in hazardous environments. Frequently, commercial divers must perform their tasks in low light, murky, low visibility water. As a result, divers must learn to rely on touch to navigate structures and accomplish tasks.
Due to the dangers involved with this line of work, divers can be well compensated for their time. Often, divers will receive depth pay, hazard pay, and other bonuses in addition to their hourly rates.
How to Become a Commercial Diver