Jeremy Mathews
"I am a commercial diver working with Kasandi Dive and Maintenance at Port Lincoln. Kasandi carries out all the maintenance work on Southern Australian Seafood’s onshore and offshore abalone farms at Boston Point. …. About 30% of the time is diving, the rest of the time is spent on maintenance.
I really don’t see the diving side of it as a chore. When I can get up in the morning and go to work I go for a swim basically. It’s a lot more enjoyable for me, than people sitting at a desk slogging away at figures. I can just get up, go to work and enjoy my day."
Jeremy went to high school in Eudunda and during work experience with the Grange dive shop he gained his recreational diving certificate and enjoyed it so much he began thinking about how I could do it for a job.
"My parents and I went up to the Riverland to stay with a couple for a weekend and I mentioned that I had just done my recreational ticket. …. They told me that their son was a diver in Port Lincoln and suggested I might be able to get over there and have a few dives with him. So I chased it up, gave him a ring and yeah, it all went from there."
Half way through Year 11 Jeremy managed to get work experience with Kasandi in Port Lincoln.
"My boss said, ‘I can offer you a job next year but it will not be full time diving, it will be working on my maintenance crew and diving when we have diving available.’ …. I decided to leave school and start a traineeship."
Jeremy spoke to the TAFE in Port Lincoln and arranged to do a traineeship with Kasandi.
"My employer and I went to the TAFE here in Port Lincoln and had a talk to them about arranging a traineeship. They didn’t have any courses at the time involving any diving, so we got an existing course, which is a Certificate Three in Aquaculture, and modified it to suit my needs. We incorporated the diving course as well as all the diving I do from the abalone farm. And basically 30% of my course is diving and 70% is on shore."
To dive commercially Jeremy needed to complete an 8-week commercial diving course run as part of the Australian Diver Accreditation Scheme. Kasandi contributed towards the course fees and Jeremy borrowed the rest of the fees from his parents.
"The 8-week course was full time work, we started at 7 in the morning and some nights I would not get back to my accommodation until 10.30 and it was anywhere between 5 and 7 days a week as well. There was no opportunity to do any part time work to get any extra income during the course."
To assist Jeremy gain his diving qualifications the Eudunda District Country Education Foundation awarded him a Community Scholarship that helped cover the cost of his accommodation and meals whilst he was completing the course.
"I believe it’s highly important that rural communities have some form of country education foundation. A lot of students don’t realise the opportunities and the range of jobs that are available. Probably a lot of them don’t look because it’s rather expensive to shift out of town, live away from home. …. But to get a job like I have there is a lot of money that you have to put up front, and a lot of people just leaving school don’t have the money in the bank to do it. The Country Education Foundation is highly important. It gives people a chance to do what they want to do.
It is possible to get a full time diving job in Port Lincoln, …. but those sort of jobs are repetitive diving. …. Where I am there is a huge amount of variety and the diving is interesting too, there is always something different. Today I was actually diving underneath a big ship. …. It’s an offshore abalone ship, they grow the abalone on the ship and they have intake screens in the hull of the ship. I had to go under there and hold a plate on it while they created suction from the inside so the plate stuck on so they could fix the pump. We go all over South Australia collecting brood stock. The idea behind that is to find warm water abalone [to breed from] because what kills an abalone is a temperature spike, they like to sit around 16 to 18 degrees and they do not like a varying temperature. …. That’s an interesting job.
We have a quarantine station where we bring all the wild abalone from the brood stock collection and I had to put an intake screen onto that. I had to hang onto rocks while the swell was running back and forth, (he laughs) …. like a limpit!"
Jeremy is only 17 and sees himself continuing in this line of work for the foreseeable future. At the end of his traineeship he can see himself managing a dive team and you do not see that many 17 year olds doing that.
"I guess I’ve been rather lucky, as the Australian Diver Accreditation Scheme, or ADAS, gave me an exemption to do my commercial dive ticket. The age limit is 18 at the moment and I had only just turned 16 when I did it, so it’s given me a huge head start and it’s going to get me a lot of experience rather quickly. My boss has said to me quite a few times that at the end of my two year traineeship he’d like me to run a dive team and I’d love to give it a go!"
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