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by Christopher Brian Lee (Author)
This book is a fast reading autobiographical account of my early years as I pursued a career in commercial diving. Beginning in 1976 in Marblehead, MA and leaving for California in late 1978 to attend commercial diving school after a chance encounter with a high school classmate at the Landing Bar and Grill. Patrick Mulroy introduced me to the promise of adventure and fortunes from commercial diving . He was leaving the next day for Portland, Oregon and expected to make a fortune working for Atlantic Divers. After our visit and a few beers, the allure of adventure and promise of fortunes were too hard to resist. Three weeks later I was in Wilmington, California and beginning Class D-102 .at Commercial Diving Center. For the next five years =/- after graduating top in my class, I worked offshore building oil platforms for Chevron and Sun Oil in the Santa Barbara Channel. The NASA Space Shuttle was at its earliest stages with infrastructure underway. One of the projects was rebuilding the NAVY SEABEE Base in Port Hueneme to handle the support ships and barges that were envisioned to support the Military Space Shuttle planned to operate out of Edwards AFB.. I had been dispatched to join the construction team and worked through to completion. There were many projects in California that served me well as training and experience in the commercial diving field . As things slowed in late 1983 into 1984 we made a strategic move to the Boston area where we had family and friends and looked for a fresh start. There were plans for a third harbor tunnel in Boston at some point and could become a future opportunity. In the meantime, after receiving a call from an old tennis adversary things changed rapidly as we teamed up to form a commercial diving company specializing in maintaining large commercial ships. The only issue was neither of us knew anything about them. Being pre-internet there were no easy ways to investigate the industry to get a toe hold. It is here where amazing luck and good fortune would drive us forward with Aquafacs. A most unlikely start up that would lead to years of traveling the world and becoming experts in the field of ship husbandry. At the time, the shipping community was the most conservative and highly secretive industry out there and there was no love for commercial divers that had a long reputation of inability to solve the problems of the ship operators and charging wildly with no results. That would be only one of many hurdles we'd have to overcome on our climb to fame and fortune. These were truly interesting times. .
