An Cosantóir

8| by Lt Cdr Patricia Butler O ver the past 12 months S/Lt Shane Mulcahy became the first Naval Service officer to undergo the Mine Clearance Diver course with the Royal Canadian Navy at their Fleet Diving Unit Pacific. Not only that but he also received the Best Student award on the course. There were nine students (seven leading hands and two junior officers) on the course, all with previous naval diving qualifications. Each Canadian student had to pass a gruelling two-week selection course during which they faced huge physical and mental stress and sleep deprivation. The failure rate at that stage is over 70%. The 12-month course is hugely demanding both physically and mentally, with PT twice daily (not including diving) and exams every week. The year is broken down into a number of diving and non-diving phases at different military bases around Canada. The first phase included all aspects of SCUBA diving, the physics and physiology of diving, dive medicine and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. This phase lasted until mid-October and was similar in many ways to the Naval Service Diving Course run annually at the Naval Base. The next phase, shallow water rebreather training, was the most physically challenging. Using the Canadian Clearance Diving Apparatus (CCDA) mixed-gas rebreather, S/Lt Mulcahy and his class conducted underwater swims lasting up to three hours in depths ranging from 2m to 42m. Students had to have An Cosantóir October 2013 www.dfmagazine.ie their equipment prepared by 0630 each morning, and conducted night dives twice a week, many of which would continue past midnight. This phase also included an introduction to explosives and conventional munitions disposal on land. In January the students transferred to Canada's largest military training facility in Gagetown, New Brunswick, for more explosives training. This included improvised explosive device disposal (IEDD) and taught the students how to use a number of tools and techniques to make-safe a suspicious or home-made explosive devices. The training took place mostly outdoors where the average air temperature was -36 degrees Celsius. The phase finished with a five-week mine warfare course in Quebec, which covered the theories and techniques used in mine warfare. The following phase brought the students back to Vancouver Island for deep diving, using the Canadian Underwater Mine Apparatus (CUMA) rebreather. Using helium mixed with oxygen, the students dived to 81m and practised the techniques used for approaching a live mine underwater. They learned various methods for making-safe different types of mines, including deploying from a helicopter to approach a mine floating at the surface. As summer approached the students moved onto surface supplied diving. This involved breathing mixed gas fed through a hose from the surface down to the diver at depths of up to 100m. This was a very technical phase and required a lot of teamwork and trust between fellow divers. During this training the students conducted underwater welding and cutting, practiced the use of hydraulic tools, and ended with a salvage project, recovering a sunken 40-foot fishing vessel.

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