Diving Opportunities for Fun and Profit
by Jim Meuninck
Preface
Treasure, untold riches, heart stopping adventure, beautiful people, scientific breakthroughs, and world recognition are a few excuses to go diving, and I suppose most people are easily satisfied with these mundane preoccupations. Not me. Not when I can muck in the mud for beer cans, slip a disk salvaging sunken logs, or suck down five tanks of air scrubbing the hull of a boat. Why just the other day, I read where some entrepreneur found 400 million dollars worth of Spanish gold on some wreck. By the time I finished the article, I was so bored that I called Randy Kitchel and told him I would take the job spearing carp outta' his pond for a buck a beast. Now don't get me wrong, I haven't got a monopoly on all the good things to do while diving. Mel Romeo's the best I know for sitting neck deep in the St. Joe River off the ninth hole, ballyhooing duffers so they top golf balls into the swirling, snarling current. Mel gets a real bang out of cracking his head on boulders and old cars, while blindly fingering through silt for a Spaulding that's got a one inch gash down the side.
Another buddy, Artie dipper, loves pushing his nose through Mississippi bottom silt looking for freshwater mussels. He sells the mollusks to the Louisiana Shell Company. As the story goes, they punch the bivalves into little pieces and send them to Japan. I hear tell the Japanese use the shell parts for pearl seed. Silly idea. I know it won't work. I've already tried it. Must have punched a thousand shells into pea sized bits then planted them in Eagle Lake. Well, three years have come and gone and not one a single seed has grown into a pearl.
Anyway, you don't have to be as smart as me to find odd jobs diving. Another fella' I read about, seems he was some kind of executive; suit, tie, the whole bit, well, he gave it all up. Bought a boat, some dive gear, and started sucking mussels off Louisiana oil rigs with an air lift. Story goes, while his buddy scrapes mussels loose with a shovel, he positions the lift hose close enough to vacuum away the tasty little buggers and blow them up onto the boat. After an hour or so of scraping and lifting, the divers go topside, sorts the bivalves into bags and sell them to restaurants. Says he can make $300 dollars a day. If so, that puts him in the same class with treasure hunters. I don't think I could stand all the excitement, if you know what I mean.
I'd guess Mike sinkhole had about the best idea I ever heard. Seems he took a job with some big name dive company and began demonstrating how easy it is to take apart their regulator underwater. Well, Sink, that's what we call him, grabbed opportunity by the old J valve, quit his full time day job, and opened a dive shop near Pennecamp, you know, the big underwater park in Florida. Says he's got a good location, near a humongous brain coral, in about twenty feet of water. he does VIP's, changes regulator hoses, and performs minor maintenance on site--while you wait. At first business was slow. So he put up a sign: Underwater Repairs Cheap...I've never lost a diver, be my first customer! The sign must have turned things around. Why just the other day I read in the paper Sink's got this brand new liability suit...Knowing Sink it's probably foreign-made. He always was a sharp dresser.
It's funny how one odd job leads to another. Take, for example, Dank Marl, he started out making pin money salvaging anchors and fishing rods along a quarter-mile cooling tunnel that blasted waste water from a nuclear plant. His glow-in-the-dark rods and reels were big sellers for gung ho night fishermen. Then he started renting himself out as a surface tender for night dives. They say you can see him a mile away on an overcast night. Dank also rents geiger counters for reckless types who wander too far from his boat.
If you know how to read, you can find lots of diving opportunities in magazines. My girlfriend, Carlitta Karpfen, always reads me the latest articles at Jack Cutter's barber shop. Jack's got magazines about everything. Just the other day Carlitta was jabbering away from some cooking book about sturgeon eggs. Said lots of people eat them. Stiff shirts call it caviar and will spend a thousand dollars a pound for the stuff (must be treasure hunters). That much money makes me nervous, so I called Skeeter Sparrow who lives up on the Sacramento River. I knew he had seen a few white sturgeon while salvaging propellers at a Yacht basin outside the city (don't worry if your boat is docked there, Skeeter's a fulltime sturgeon raiser now). Anyway, Skeeter's not afraid of big money, so he bought himself an aquarium, caught three baby sturgeons, and is doing real good. He says it takes about 15 years for the fish to reach maturity. Skeeter's already bought a hundred or so of those little bitty jars you put the eggs in.
Of course not all odd jobs work out the way they are supposed to. Like, I have this business card I pass out to construction companies that says, Have Snorkel, Will Scoop . Well a few weeks back, I got a call from Tinker's bridge repair. Tom Tinker, the boss, told me they lost a ten foot section of sewer pipe in the river off the Ironweed bridge...That dive was the worst luck I ever had. I thought I had found the pipe, but it was too heavy for me to lift alone, so I paid Mary Fillups, Vip Ratz and Mel Romeo three bucks a piece to help me get the monstrous thing to the surface. Turned out the pipe was an old Spanish cannon: rusted, the tube all filled with muck, why it wouldn't even shoot. I still got it, sitting in my yard, looking uglier everyday. I've tried to give it away. Called all my friends. Nobody wants the dang thing. But my biggest mistake was telling them how I found it. Now every diver in Stinkhole County is looking for that missing sewer pipe.
Anyway, that's just a few ways to make ends meet underwater, without getting pulled down with treasure hunters and other beautiful people. But what's the use. I'm sure you missed the point. Like those American divers that found an old galleon off the coast of France. It had about a half billion dollars of gold ingots in the hold. Now you explain that to me. I mean why go halfway around the world to a place where you can't even buy a decent hamburger and most folks have never heard of chicken nugget. No sir, there's no excuse for that kind of reckless behavior, but there's no stopping it either...Take that phone call I just got, it was Skeeter. Seems the wanderlust grabbed hold of him too...Said he just took an odd job with the CIA. Says he's leaving tonight by helicopter to mine a harbor in Nicaragua. Har! Har! Har! More mining. Knowing Skeeter he'll probably find coal instead of gold.
Yessir, Skeeter and the gang have provided me with twenty five years of diving fun. Over those years I thought I had seen it all. But writing this book opened my eyes: There's more to diving than exotic destinations and elbow rubbing with beautiful people. Your diving skills can pay off in practical ways too. So if your motivation is both Fun and Profit get my book Diving Opportunities for Fun and Profit.