I joined the Mary Rose project in 1981 as a volunteer diver and that year we dived through until December carefully excavating the contents of the Mary Rose. I came back in 1982, from late April to mid-June, for the final push to empty the hull of all the remaining artefacts which just left the most important artefact of all, the remains of the hull. Most of the internal structure had been dismantled and removed in 1981, apart from the huge deck beams which remained in situ.
Early 1982 I did a commercial diving course to allow me to me work as a diver in the North Sea, but it also meant that I could join the salvage team when a vacancy became available in June.
In the salvage team we not only dived but carried out all the diving related tasks on deck like taking turns as the standby / rescue diver, running or supervising the dives, operating the decompression chamber on deck as we did our decompression in the chamber rather than in the water.
We dived using surface supplied diving equipment wearing a helmet supplied with air from the surface via an umbilical which also included a cable for hard wire communications back to the diving supervisor plus a method of monitoring our depth. We wore dry suits which kept us warm underwater. No lights but they would not have been much good when we were tunnelling under the hull of the Mary Rose.
