So, as promised, here’s more about this gutsy lady:
Her name is Adeline Coyac (Addie), and I’ll let her tell you about what drives her in her own words:
“I started diving when I was 15 years old. At first, I didn’t get to dive very much since I lived in the middle of New York State. Then I moved to the Pacific Northwest, where I spent as much time as possible diving in cold water.
I love being in the water. I have a Zen feeling when I can hear myself breathing, and I love looking for tiny critters. I’ve also always loved the ocean. When I was little, my parents took me to the Mediterranean Sea and we visited the Cousteau Museum in Monte Carlo. After that, I begged to go back every year.
At 26, I went to a commercial dive school – the kind of place where people get trained to work around oil platforms and on ships underwater, all very industrial. I had been warned that it would be hard… but it was much more difficult than I imagined. The intimidation and the crassness I had to face were difficult to deal with, but there were also some really good guys in the class with me. Of the 18 students, only 11 graduated, and only 4 or 5 of us are still in the industry.
Not long after graduating from the commercial dive school, I signed a contract to go to Antarctica as a contract commercial diver for the US Antarctic Program (USAP). This was when I first tried to subscribe to a free commercial diving magazine — you have to be ‘in the industry’ to receive it. To validate people’s credentials, their website asked for a short description of your diving job. So I wrote about my commercial certificate, the Antarctic job and contract work in the oil industry I was applying for at the time.
I got an e-mail back calling me a bullshit artist.
You can imagine how offended I was. In response, I wrote a very elaborate reply that was a bit long-winded but spanned my whole diving career and the things I had accomplished. I am happy to say that, after this, I got an apology, the website featured me as ‘chick diver in Antarctica’, and I have since received the magazine.
I had to realize quickly that not many people were going to take me seriously unless I carried my ‘credentials’ around with me.
Antarctica is extreme diving – the water is freezing; most of the time you don’t have access to the surface and it can be strenuous considering that you have to wear 40 pounds of weight to make you negatively buoyant due to all the clothes you wear to keep warm.
One of my jobs at McMurdo Station the last two seasons was as a commercial diver, assisting with any underwater ‘working’ dives, for example involving work on the station’s sewage outfall system (not very glamorous…). I also assisted a few of the science groups with their underwater science.
In the pictures, I am getting ready to dive under the ‘Oden’, a 108 m icebreaker owned by the Swedes. It is subcontracted by the NSF to come down to McMurdo Station once a year to break a channel into the ice, so the cargo and fuel resupply vessels can come into the Bay. The Oden has a few instruments that take readings below the water surface, through windows on the bottom of the ship. We were asked to check these windows for any cracks, since they are right in the icebreaking zone of the vessel, and it turned out that two of the three windows were compromised.
While I was under the vessel, I also did a quick inspection of her propellers and rudders. It was very cool, and also a little scary. The visibility was great and light penetrated through the ice, but it would have been a little different if we had been experiencing an algal bloom — in that case, visibility would have probably been low.
Other than Antarctic diving; the most exciting project I have been involved in was working with a scientist out of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He studied cold water tidal bores and I was able to saturate in NOAA’s Aquarius Habitat off Key Largo, Florida. We lived in 64 feet of water for 10 days and dove every day, for an average of 8 hours a day. I love coral reef ecology and getting to experience it in this fashion was fantastic."
If you want to go diving under the ice: first, you have to drill a hole…
…like so.
Then you get in and enjoy…
…that is, if ‘Friendly the seal’ lets you in to play, of course.
Wow, amazing post Steffi! And great photos too. Thanks for sharing Addie’s story.
Truly fantastic, Steffi! Thanks so much for this post. I have been checking out the NSF missions to Antarctica since you started blogging and have found everything about them to be absolutely fascinating. Looking forward to your next post!
Addie is one amazing – and brave – person!
A third thanks – that was a fascinating entry. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be underwater for eight hours a day! Doesn’t one sort of macerate in the wetsuit?
The curious seal is a hoot.
What happens with compromised windows? Do they have to dry dock to replace them?
Just amazing…
What an excellent post and amazing story, Steffi! I knew there were commercial divers for oil platform work, but it never occurred to me that such skills would be required for Antarctic research programs and to inspect icebreakers. I guess I just assumed that no one would be able to dive at all under such conditions. Some of the descriptions put me in mind of China Miéille’s steampunk novel, The Scar (there’s an oil platform and a floating community that figure heavily in the plot).
The seal is adorable! Squeeee!
Here’s another vote for the seal. However, I am now feeling freezing cold even thinking about doing that for a living.
Love the photo-journal aspect of the post – great stuff.
Thanks guys, and my thanks to Addie!
Heather: yes, when those windows are cracked, the ship needs to be dry-docked to replace it.
Behind the windows are all kinds of sonars, for example to measure properties of the water column (Teri Chereskin mentioned one use of measurements taken with an ADCP – Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler – in this post).
Replacing the windows is not trivial: you need the right material for the replacement window (it’s a custom job), so the window material doesn’t attentuate the beam of your instrument or scatters it or whatever, and you need the right epoxy to fix it all in place, etc…
Richard: I hear it’s much better these days to dive in cold water, since your face isn’t exposed anymore – I talked to someone once who dove at Explorers Cove in the 80s, and she said “Oh, it’s really not that bad, just the first moment when you get under water you feel like you’re hit in the face with a sledge hammer”…
good job, must be cold down there
So brave and tough- she’s amazing! The cold’s bad enough, but sometimes not having an easy ‘out’ (access to the surface) on top of that? Really cool post Steffi (definitely a good follow up to the teaser post!)