Roman Frischknecht (suited and ready for action)
From Oris Life as a professional diver can take you all over the world – and to many different and unusual jobs. Oris caught up with our professional diving partner, Roman Frischknecht, 200km off the north east coast of Scotland in the North Sea to find out what a typical day looks like for a professional diver.
Roman Frischknecht: At the moment I'm working on a disconnection job here in the North Sea with several other divers. We are disconnecting the gas and oil lines that come from the wells on the seabed into a storage tanker. Although we are a long way out to sea today the weather is lovely and sunny and the water is very calm. I don’t have much time before I have to suit up and get into the water.
This morning I got up at around 5.30 am to make sure I had time to eat and get my equipment organised for today’s dive. We will be working at around -32 metres today. I can spend 70 minutes underwater at that depth breathing nitrox gas. Then I come back to the surface and one of my colleagues goes down to continue the job I started. Then we’ll take the work in turns until the end of our shift at around 6pm.
We can’t stay in the water for too long because of the depth. The sea is really cold here – only around 10 degrees but we have warm water pumped into our suits constantly to keep us warm. We’ll spend the evening relaxing; catching up with emails and watching films. We aim to finish the job in another three weeks and we’ve already been here for 3 weeks.
The ProDiver is useful for almost everything out here because of the dive timer and the chronograph. I use it at work to time how long I’ve been in the water and to see how long I can continue to work before I need to think about coming back up. I also use it in the gym here and yesterday I helped the cook to time the perfect boiled egg!
Roman's current home in the North Sea.
Roman has often worked on oil rigs and container ships in the North Sea.
The diving system takes Roman and his colleagues to the depth they will work at.
Roman at work underwater.
Recovering in the decompression chamber after a shift in the water.
Roman with Oris Product Development Manager, Ralf Hilbich, during the testing of the ProDiver at Oris HQ in Hölstein.
Roman launches the new Oris ProDiver Chronograph at Baselworld 2009.
Oris ProDiver
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