Underwater Wakulla- March 27, 2014
LP Hose Diving By GREGG STANTON
Tuesday, March 25, 2014 at 9:22 am (Updated: March 25, 10:07 am)
My first introduction to hose diving was in 1967. I was just a college kid in Hawaii back then, diving for the Cooperative Fisheries Unit at
the University of Hawaii. The boss suggested we attach an air compressor used in an automobile repair facility to the floor of our small
boat, change the oil to a breathable mineral compound, attach a long hose and be sure the exhaust was downwind from the intake.
This monstrosity shook the boat mercilessly and made a lot of noise. But at 90 feet underwater, we
neither heard nor felt the surface commotion. When it ran out of fuel, we made a free ascent back
to the surface, just like we did with scuba anyway.
Back then, we had no pressure gauge and an unreliable “J” valve reserve. For all the trouble
keeping this compressor happy caused us, it was preferable to hauling steel 65 cubic foot
cylinders every dive day back to the fill station or dive store to get them refilled.
Divers using Brownie Third
Lung unit
It was about this time Joe Sinks was building the Brownie Third Lung in South Florida. He took a
small lawn mower engine and drove a paint compressor using an automotive fan belt. It could be
mounted on the deck of the boat or eventually, in an inner tube, to float behind the diver. He only planned to use it to 30 or so feet, so
the compressor was small, quiet and portable.
But hose diving has a long tradition dating back several centuries, to the bell diving of the 1700s, where pumps had a poor reputation.
Haley sent weighted barrels full of air down to replenish his diving bell’s atmosphere during salvage operations. Early pumps were
hand driven, evolving into rotary hand wheels and then on to steam driven wheels, allowing people to spend more time tending the line
going over the side. Air driven helmets on the shoulders of Greek sponge fishing divers come to mind, as seen in Tarpon Springs.
The modern surface supplied hose diver is a far cry from those precarious days. Today, the gas is delivered from large low pressure
compressors or high pressure cylinders down an umbilical complete with hot water to heat a cold person, communications, pressure
(depth) indicators and, of course the gas hose.
More use breathing gases other than air. And they dive deeper than their predecessors!
My next encounter with the hose was in the Scientist in the Sea Program mid 1974 where the U.S. Navy took a sorry lot of us graduate
students off a Panama City pier to teach us about their diving lifestyle. Most Navy divers are hard hat divers, fed by a surface supplied
hose. We became proficient with the Kerby Morgan band mask and the Supper Lite helmet, which I later used under 10 feet of ice in
Antarctica, thus surpassing available bottom times available to our scuba compatriots. By then I was teaching hose diving to all my
budding diving scientists at FSU in a class called Applications of Diving to Research.
So no surprise then, when asked to daily haul scuba tanks several miles in the rocky vertical jungles of Palau, I chose to carry in a 50
pound compressor Joe Sinks modified to dive to 100 feet, and after that a pint of fuel a day to operate it. These units became the most
popular diving technology in our million dollar dive locker at FSU.
Lobster fisherman in the Florida Keys and clammers off the coast of Wakulla and Franklin counties routinely use them for harvest and
seeding. Today, I encourage parents with young wide eyed children looking to begin their underwater adventure, to consider what I did
with mine: a small low pressure compressor that keeps them on a hose, shallow, tended and with little chance of running out of air.
We are again, going back to the future.