Bored with your job? Need a new challenge? Why not consider sewage diving.
We can be under several metres of sewage for up to four hours.
The first metre or two of sewage can be quite dense. We've had it that thick that the guys have dropped spanners and they haven't fallen.
It's black and silent. It's just pure black, you can't see anything. It can be very claustrophobic and it takes careful planning before you go ahead.
You can walk through the sewage but not really swim. We've had times when there were big islands we've had to remove when pumps have broken down. We've had to go in with big suction heads and suck 500 foot of solid poo out — lovely days!
It doesn't smell bad at all for the diver; he's normally on processed air. The hardest job is the people who have to wash them down and clean them up afterwards.
When I lived in Singapore I learned to Scuba Dive. Visibility in Singapore waters is very poor, and there is no coral because of all the dredging for land being developed in the sea to house petrochemical complexes and land to build on. That said, there is great diving in all the countries around Singapore.
My favourite was on Mactan Island in the Philippines, where I stayed at the dive resort and had a dive in the morning before going to work and a dive in the evening before dinner. Very beautiful and considerably more fun than diving in human waste.
