Down line & Deco Station
The shipwreck diving platform is a combination of two elements: the down line system and the free floating deco station.
It requires four people to easily deploy these two apparatus.
Surface Support, Safety & Expedition Divers will all help deploy these tools.
Down Line + Hook
To setup the down line system, the first thing you need to do is hook the wreck.
To hook the wreck we use a large anchor/hook made from a car axle with 3 prongs of rebar welded to it on 200-350′ of rope.
Once we hook the wreck, we remove as much slack from the line as possible and tie a knot to clip on the floats.
Any extra rope is bunched up and placed in a rope bag which is also attached to the knot
Finally someone attaches the two large floats (buoys).
We back the boat off and make sure the wreck is actually hooked (lesson learned the hard way).
Once you’re sure you’ve hooked the wreck, you start to assemble the floating deco station on board and prepare to hook your floats.
Floating Deco Station
One person prepares the carabiner and weight on the long rope side of the deco station while someone hooks the floats.
Once the floats are pulled up, you hook the carabiner under the rope bag (or else it won’t slide down to 120′ where we want it to be).
Now you have two teams working in unison on the two sides of the deco station to mount the cross beams that make up the 10′ increments for 20 -50′.
Every 10 foot of deco station rope has a ring tied into it; the rings are color coded to match on each side.
The team working the long line of the deco station calls out a color as they clip a cross beam to that ring.
Often the first cross piece beam (at 50′) also has a bag of goodies included with it (e.g. water, headphones, etc.) and an additional Oxygen bottle + reg (charged and off)
The short line team repeats the color as they clip the other end of the cross beam to that color coded ring.
50′ red – red
40′ blue – blue
30′ yellow – yellow
20′ green – green
The final step is for each team to attach the orange float balls to the top of the line (before they let it go into the water).
