Sven and I have spent our professional lives in the same ocean. Not always the same stretch of it: my work has taken me to the North Sea platforms and the Baltic pipelines and the harbour infrastructure of ports across Europe and the Middle East, while Sven’s work has taken him from the Belgian coast through the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and onward to the offshore world that the Naora route will now navigate in its full extent.
But the ocean, as a physical medium and as a professional context and as the specific environment that shapes the people who spend their working lives in it, is the same ocean. The specific quality that the sea produces in the people who work in it with genuine respect for what it is: that is the quality that connects us across the difference between the surface and the depths.
I want to describe that quality because I think it is misunderstood by people who have not experienced the offshore professional life from either direction, and because it is the quality that underlies the friendship, the support partnership, and the specific trust that twenty-five years of shared respect for the same environment has built between the offshore diver and the offshore sailor who found each other in Antwerp a quarter of a century ago, in a dive club called “Safe Diving“
What the Offshore Environment Produces
The offshore environment, whether above or below the surface, produces a specific quality in the people who work in it seriously and over time: the quality of someone who has been in situations where the consequences of poor judgment or inadequate preparation are immediate and physical rather than abstract and financial. The offshore platform diver who makes an error in a confined space at twenty metres with limited visibility and adverse current is not facing a reputational risk or a financial penalty.
The offshore sailor who makes an error in passage planning in the Bay of Biscay in a developing storm is not facing a customer complaint or a project delay. The errors in these environments have the specific quality of errors in environments that do not offer the second chance that most professional errors allow.
This shared understanding of the stakes of the work produces, in the people who share it, a specific quality of mutual respect that is different from the professional respect of two people who are good at what they do. It is the respect of two people who understand what the other’s work requires in the specific sense of understanding what the failure of that work would mean.
Sven respects what offshore diving requires because he is a diver of 2,800 dives who has been in the water in conditions that require the specific quality of preparation and judgment that the offshore diver must have. I respect what offshore sailing requires because I have been aboard boats in conditions that make the quality of the captain’s judgment immediately and physically apparent. The respect is mutual and specific and it is the respect of people who understand each other’s work from the inside rather than from a description of it.
The Same Water, Different Directions
The specific conversation that Sven and I have been having across twenty-five years is the conversation between the surface and the depth of the same ocean: the offshore sailor who knows the behaviour of the water from above it and the offshore diver who knows the behaviour of the water from below it, and the specific insights that each perspective provides about the other. Sven has told me things about the surface behaviour of the sea that have informed how I think about what the surface is doing when I am below it. I have told him things about what the underwater world looks like from within it that have informed how he thinks about what is below the surface of the passages he is navigating.
This exchange is not primarily professional knowledge transfer. It is the specific pleasure of two people who have devoted their professional lives to the same environment from different angles and who find in the exchange the specific completeness that neither angle alone provides. The sailor sees the sea from above and knows it thoroughly from that perspective.
The diver sees it from below and knows it thoroughly from that perspective. Between the two perspectives is a more complete understanding of the ocean than either achieves alone, and the friendship that has maintained the exchange across twenty-five years has produced, in both of us, a relationship with the sea that the single perspective would not have built.
The Naora voyage carries this understanding in the specific form of the self-sufficient diving capability that the 300-bar compressor and Sven’s CMAS qualification provide. The offshore diver who has been at the dock across twenty-five years of this friendship will be present, through the Antwerp Underwater Solutions support partnership, for the five years of the circumnavigation.
The surface and the depth of the same ocean, in continuous contact across the full arc of the voyage that the twenty-five years of the friendship prepared. This is the specific pleasure of a collaboration that grew from a friendship that grew from a shared devotion to the same place from different directions. The ocean that produced the friendship will be the context for its most specific expression.
