Every serious offshore expedition has a number it calls when the situation is beyond the crew’s capability to resolve independently. Not the emergency services number, which is the number for the situation that has already become critical. The number you call before the critical: the specific person or organisation with the specific expertise and the specific reach to solve the specific problem that the voyage has encountered in a place where the conventional solution infrastructure does not exist. This number, for the Naora circumnavigation, belongs to Hans and to Antwerp Underwater Solutions.
The relationship between Naora and Antwerp Underwater Solutions began as a friendship of twenty-five years and has become something more structured and more significant: a formal commercial partnership that places one of Europe’s leading offshore diving companies in the position of technical underwater support partner for a five-year sailing circumnavigation.
The friendship made the partnership possible. The partnership makes the voyage safer and more resilient than any equivalent expedition without it. Both things are true simultaneously, and neither diminishes the other.
What Antwerp Underwater Solutions Is
Antwerp Underwater Solutions is an offshore diving company built across twenty-five years of professional underwater work in some of Europe’s most demanding operational environments: the North Sea platform infrastructure, the Baltic pipeline systems, the harbour and port structures of the major European maritime hubs, the industrial and civil engineering projects that require the specific technical capability of the professional diver operating in conditions that the recreational diving world does not prepare you for.
The company has grown beyond its Antwerp origins to the network of European operations and partnerships that the offshore professional diving market requires and that Hans has built across the same twenty-five years that the friendship with Sven has been developing in parallel.
The specific capabilities of The Underwater Solutions Group that the Naora partnership draws on are not the capabilities of the diving school or the recreational dive centre. They are the capabilities of the offshore professional organisation: the ability to mobilise a qualified dive team to a specific location on a specific timeline, including timelines that the conventional working day does not observe.
The ability to diagnose and assess underwater technical problems in the specific operational context of a working vessel rather than in the controlled environment of a facility. The network of professional contacts in the major port regions of the Naora route that means the mobilisation of local expertise does not require starting the search from zero when the need arises.
The Red Phone
The red phone is the metaphor that describes the partnership most accurately: the direct line to the person who can solve the problem that no other available resource can solve, available at any hour, operational regardless of the time zone difference between the Naora vessel’s current position and Antwerp, functioning whether the vessel is in the Mediterranean or the Pacific or the Red Sea or anywhere on the 45,000-mile route between the Bodrum departure and the Bodrum return.
When Sven calls that number, the call is answered. Not eventually, not during business hours, not subject to the availability of the specific person who manages this type of enquiry: answered, because the twenty-five years of the friendship and the formal structure of the commercial partnership have produced the specific arrangement in which the Naora voyage’s operational needs are the priority that the number represents and that Hans has committed to treating as such for the duration of the circumnavigation.
The situations that require the red phone are not the dramatic emergencies that the offshore safety planning addresses at the primary level: the life raft, the EPIRB, the coast guard. They are the operational situations that fall between the dramatic emergency and the manageable inconvenience: the propeller entanglement in the kelp forests off the Chilean coast that the crew diver can assess but not clear alone.
The underwater hull damage from the debris strike in the Indonesian channel passage that needs a professional structural assessment before the vessel continues to the next port. The running gear problem in the Red Sea that needs an underwater inspection at two in the morning because the departure window for the offshore site passage opens at four and the captain needs to know whether the vessel is fit to sail through it.
A Team Underway, Even at Night
The offshore professional diving world operates without the schedule that the commercial diving industry presents to its civilian clients. The platform that loses a critical underwater system component does not wait for Monday morning. The pipeline that has a suspected leak does not wait for the inspection company’s earliest available appointment. The offshore infrastructure that requires underwater intervention requires it when it requires it, and the companies that serve it have built their operational model around this reality rather than around the convenience of the nine-to-five working day.
Antwerp Underwater Solutions built its reputation in exactly this operational environment, and the capability it developed there is the capability it brings to the Naora partnership. A dive team mobilised and underway at any hour. The specific people with the specific expertise for the specific problem, not the nearest available diver with a general qualification.
The logistics managed between the vessel’s position and the intervention point, in the coordination with local port authorities and local dive operators that the company’s European network makes possible and that the first-time caller cannot navigate alone in a port they have never been in before at eleven at night with a problem that needs to be resolved before the morning passage.
What Hans Says About It
Hans describes the partnership with a simplicity that reflects the twenty-five years of friendship that preceded it: if Sven’s boat needs underwater help anywhere on the route, Sven calls me and I make sure it gets there. The commercial structure formalises this. The friendship made it possible to formalise it in a way that both parties trust completely. The voyage is going to go to places where the equivalent support does not exist through any other channel. This is the channel.
For the Naora Circle members who board the Eighty2 at various points along the five-year route, the Antwerp Underwater Solutions partnership is invisible in the way that the best safety infrastructure is always invisible: present as the capability that means the situation that would otherwise become a crisis is resolved before the members know it needed resolving. The red phone that is answered when it rings. The dive team that is underway before the captain has finished explaining what the problem is. The partnership that keeps the voyage moving even when the sea produces the situations that the sea, given five years and 45,000 miles, inevitably will.
