0207canada.htm

UCi's Michael Cocks prepares to dive under ice in a Gorski helmet

with Seneca College in Canada

Michael Cocks travels to Canada to dive under ice with students at Seneca College, and meets up with a diving legend

The main purpose of my trip to Canada this February was to once again dive under the ice with students at Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario. However, I was also fortunate to meet and dive with the legendary Leszek Gorski.

It was then on to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sit in on the quarterly meeting of the Canadian Diver Certification Board, and while in Nova Scotia I also visited the premises of Dominion Diving. Finally I went to Prince Edward Island to meet the students training at another community college, Holland College. I continue to be impressed by the way diver training is carried out in Canada and the keen interest taken by industry in it.

Readers with long memories will remember that I first visited Seneca College four years ago and later made trips to its other two dive sites, including Wiarton on Georgian Bay where I had my first 50-metre working dive. If anything, the tasks the current crop of 37 students are required to do underwater have become harder than in previous years and now include work on a wellhead.

Dives under ice can often last as long as two hours and all tasks are timed and assessed as students have to reach a certain standard to remain on the course. Fortunately, the helmets the students are the most modern and the college now has two Gorski hats.

As I have mentioned, on this trip I was lucky enough to meet Les Gorski, who was at the college to teach the instructors how to service his helmet. I first dived in a prototype Gorski helmet at Ocean Corporation in Texas, USA, in 2001 and two years ago I used a revised model in Poland. The helmet this time was the most modern, with a polished steel finish to prevent staining. It weighs about 10 per cent less than its rivals and, with a Poseidon second stage, spare parts are relatively cheap. I found my dive a comfortable one and the helmet well balanced, but it took me a little while to get used to where the bail out is switched on, namely – as with a number of American systems – at the base of the upturned bottle. All of the students seemed to like diving in the helmet but those with small heads need a thicker hat liner, which Les will provide.

Les left Poland in 1984 and has done a considerable amount of commercial diving work; at one time he used a converted motorcycle helmet. He has invited me to dive in it and other helmets in his pool in Houston, Texas.

Students have to provide all their own diving equipment, except the helmet, but the course, which lasts almost 40 weeks, costs just C$3000 (GB£1300) for Canadian students. There is a considerable amount of class work to do and students who succeed in passing the course must be amongst the best trained in the industry. I was well looked after by those on this course, who again lent me some of their equipment, and my dives were well supervised by a new instructor, Aaron Griffin. All in all, it was an enjoyable and informative visit.

The Diver Certification Board of Canada was set up in January 2003 to take over the National Energy Board’s work of issuing commercial diver certificates and accrediting the training of commercial divers. The Board made accreditation available to overseas schools and the Divers Institute of Technology of Seattle, USA, was the first to be stringently audited. Certificates are issued to newly trained divers for two years and subsequently divers, including foreign divers working in Canada, have to renew their certificate every five years; 460 certificates were issued in 2006.

David Parkes, formerly with the Canadian Coast Guard, has been in charge of the Board from the start. The Board’s meeting I was allowed to sit in on referred to the recent agreement on mutual recognition of Offshore Air Diving Supervisor certificates with IMCA and the intention to introduce a certificate scheme for ROV technicians. The Board adopts a business-like approach to the needs of commercial divers and is much smaller than the HSE Diving Industry committee on which I sit.

I believe there is considerable merit in the diver certification regime adopted both in Canada and Australia, though it does cost the divers some money. The Board intends to mount the first Annual Canadian Underwater Conference, probably in Toronto, in 2008.

At the meeting I met John Scott, the business development director of Dominion Diving, Canada’s largest diving, ROV and marine service company. I was later shown Dominion’s extensive premises and the wide range of equipment and ships the company uses. Dominion provides the wet bell for the students of Holland College. John reminded me that he had had the pleasure of watching me dive in Rosyth docks in Scotland almost 15 years previously.

Finally it was on the plane with Dave Geddes of Seneca for the short flight to Prince Edward Island, where we met Steve White of Holland College.

The community college’s diving programme was set up five years ago and was the first to be audited by the Diver Certification Board of Canada (by two Canadian ex-clearance divers). The college’s students dive to 30 feet (nine metres) off a nearby wharf and do their deep diving in the Bedford Basin in Halifax, using the facilities of Dominion Diving. On our visit two students were doing a complicated welding task in a very large tank, under the watchful of eye of Eldon Murphy, another highly experienced commercial diver. I have suggested I should be invited back to see the students doing their deep diver training in May.

I feel anyone can gain from visiting training schools around the world and I believe it a great pity that the HSE does not allow its inspectors to do so. Standards at the schools vary enormously and some, whose students obtain HSE approval and IMCA recognition, do not reach the high standards I have observed in Canada.