Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly UpdatesHave dive gear, will travel.
It's the best way to describe the transient life of a commercial diver.
That's part of the appeal for Rene Jackson, a first-time entrepreneur and founder of R. Jackson Developments Inc.
"You travel and you chase work when you're a diver," said Jackson, who started his Sault Ste. Marie company in 2007. "You have to be mobile to keep it steady."
Intermittent and seasonal work is common. But once the ice on rivers and lakes clear and municipalities put out tenders for their capital project budgets, he expects activity to start picking up.
His company is a fully certified surface supplied mobile dive system specializing in marine inspection and construction projects.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
It's hard and dangerous work, working mostly alone underwater, battling river currents using slow controlled movements, or frogging around the penstocks and tunnels of a generation staton, but it's a line work of that clearly gets Jackson excited.
"People think we swim around. There's no swimming. You're sweating, working with jack hammers busting apart rock and putting in rebar. Everything you do on surface, you basically do have to do in the water, like regular construction."
The 31-year-old Jackson worked in a local scuba shop and as a welder around town before graduating from Seneca College's underwater skills program in 1999. He later enrolled at the Canadian Working Divers Institute at Buckhorn in the Kawarthas. The intensive program trains commercial divers in the skills of rigging, hoisting, cutting, welding, explosives, salvage and doing pipeline work in the oil fields.
He got a real world taste of that while working for Northern Underwater Systems in Edmonton, a huge marine services provider doing oil patch project work for Syncrude and Albian Sands.
"Those complexes draw massive amounts of cooling water, plus they have effluent caustic tanks. We did a lot of dry contamination entry with a lot of pump house work. Basically anything that was in the water."
For six years, jobs took him across Western Canada and up into the High Arctic working on port facilities for De Beers' Polaris Mine Project.
"Those jobs are unbelievable. Five-star camps, way up in the north and helicoptering in and out."
After returning to the Sault for a friend's wedding, he met his girlfriend, decided to settle down and began thinking about his own a business.
Despite being without gear, colleagues and friends within the tight-knit commercial diving community gave him a hand, some referrals and sub-contracted him for jobs.
Commercial diving is a highly-regulated business, requiring big dollars. The minimum for a dive system is $80,000, not to mention insurance for a new entrepreneur.
The Sault Ste. Marie Community Development Corp. gave him a $6,000 start-up loan to rent equipment for a project and Northern Ontario Heritage Fund kicked in a $25,000 grant to help build his system from scratch.
He bought a compressor, umbilicals, breathing air system components, safety gear, harnesses and a dive trailer to tow behind his pick-up.
"Having my own equipment is a saving grace for me."
As extremely specialized gear, the rental fees were killing him.
"That compressor makes more on-site than I do every day."
Still on his check list are a wireless dive radio and two dive helmets worth US $6,500 apiece.
Being at the hub of the Great Lakes, Jackson said there should be no shortage of marine, hydro-electric and municipal pump plant work. His coverage area is anywhere within an eight-hour drive. He also has a rolodex of divers he can call on for an extra hand.
Lately he's travelled to Sturgeon Falls to do concrete work on West Nipissing Power Generation's dam and, more recently, performed a video inspection for a Sudbury engineering firm for a new stop log structure at the Ramsey Lake Dam.
This spring, he's moving from the Sault, just east to St. Joseph's Island where he's setting up a shop on the water. When diving work tails off in the winter, he falls back on his fabrication skills where he's, working on two patents related to the recreational power sports and sailing industry.
Eventually he wants to offer a fully mobile diving service that can take emergency calls.
Always thinking of new ideas, Jackson is putting together a business plan to provide a marine fire suppression unit with a landing craft and high pressure pumps for the Bruce Mines-Thessalon area.
By IAN ROSS
Northern Ontario Business
E-mail: r_jacksondiving@hotmail.com
FEED