N like NARGUILE

Definition

Hose of varying length supplying breathing gases to a working diver and connected at the other end to the surface, as desired and depending on the means, to a reserve of compressed gas, a manually operated pump or an air compressor plus or less enriched with burnt oil. 

Synonymes

Hookah | Hookah | Shisha | Calumet | Water pipe. Although in these latter cases, the synonyms have nothing to do with the diving that concerns us but rather with emphysema, lung cancer and other gurgling ecstasies ...

Starter

Historically, hookah was therefore the name that divers gave to the tube that connected them to the surface and that provided them with the air they needed to breathe underwater. At least as long as the pump attendants continued to pump with regularity, precisely. Naturally forbidden pump stroke. 

Diver connected to the turret by a hookah. National School of Divers.

Long after the days of divers heavy foot, this concept was generalized and used by other generations of men under the sea, notably by professional divers (yes, they kept the name) who only carry low capacity bottles on their backs as a backup, just allowing them to regain their turret under pressure, being connected to it by a life cable also called umbilical and which often also brings, in addition to respiratory gases, heating, hot water, telephone and all the modern comfort. The same applies to fishermen “of the South Seas”, of pearls and other sponges, in Indonesia inx PhilippinesWithin United Arab Emirates, riding a Polynesia, mainly for reasons of economy: a mask generally full, DIY fins and the famous pipe bringing in continuous flow to the diver the air of a sluggish compressor backfiring on the canoe.

Likewise on theAmazon, told me the late Stéphane who was part of our team and who was a gold digger in Brazil, diving to more than 20 meters in the mud of the river, without visibility, groping the sucker in the current, connected to the barge like dozens of other divers through a fragile pipe. The art was not to get the umbilical stuck in a wrecked tree, a rock and to avoid having the pipe cut by a jealous or ill-tempered colleague. “Every month there were some who did not come back”…

Main course

Back-up back-up bottle used in case of hookah failure.

We had to go there too, to the narghile ... In the eighties, our forays into the waters of the earth became more and more distant and deep, causing in the inlet basin decompression stops which were counted in hours. It was necessary to act. I had made an appointment with Jean-Claude Lepechon who developed the decompression tables for divers in the DORIS, a large offshore diving company at the time, established on the banks of the Seine. It was he who taught me how to drastically reduce the duration of the stops by breathing pure oxygen at 3 m, 6 m and beyond ...

Subject to having a “pure oxygen hookah”. We had therefore obtained a steel bottle of twenty liters of medical oxygen equipped with its regulator with its two pressure gauges in Mickey's ear, connected to 20 meters of reinforced hose to resist pressure and kinks, at the end of which we had climbed a second stage of regulator Comex duly degreased. So now our stages were spent in the hospitable flavor of pure oxygen and the carefree attitude of youth ...

The tongue hanging out

I do not remember who drew my attention to the absolute necessity of placing a non-return valve between the second stage and the end of the submerged pipe. Indeed, in the event of untimely unclamping or rupture of the pipe on the surface, the depression would have been sufficient to tear our tongue out and what follows, all going up in the pipe. We knew accidents of this type, in the days of the divers. The famous “blow of the suction cup” which reduced the diver to a pinkish mush in his helmet, his feet at the height of his neck, but that is another story…

Much later a hookahMuch more orthodox, plugged into a bottle that remained on the surface was used to explore a gallery in the catacombs of Paris. Ducts so narrow that even the size of the scuba tanks became an issue. It is indeed in narrow passages that the narghile technique takes on its full meaning. And this reminds me of an anecdote when I started out when we were part of a Parisian club, within what must be called a team of madmen. With a glowing record corresponding to the risk-taking. Thirsty for “first” one of us had attacked the rYport drowned network in the chalk of Normandy. At the bottom of the catchment well, the submerged natural gallery, lined with sharp black flint kidneys and resembling an “upturned hedgehog skin” was so small that it barely allowed the passage of a diver's body without bottles. These were towed by a rope behind the fins, feeding the diver through a hookah winding along the body. As for the Ariadne's thread reel, too big, it had been abandoned, replaced by a small submarine rifle aimed at black. The arrow unchecked, it was enough to follow this precursor thread to gain a few centimeters on the unknown. 

It was this same intrepid diver who attacked the terminus of the source of the Orbiquet in Calvados where we had my brother and I explored and topographed 400 meters of flooded gallery. This terminal area became narrow and crumbling so that in order to move forward, it was necessary to knock down the crumbly chalk walls using a long pole. This courageous attempt must have been abandoned shortly afterwards when the advanced diver realized that he was causing entire sections of the gallery to collapse behind him, digging his own grave so to speak ... It is in this area that was discovered following the network, explored today over more than 1200 m beyond a tenth siphon by Pierre-Eric Deseigne.

Dessert

Modern diver with his heavy helmet and hookah.

The first recorded use of the hookah concept dates back to the year 1820 following the invention in England by the brothers Charles and John Deane a diving suit, not to go underwater but to resist fire smoke. An idea that was taken up in 1827 by the English engineer of German origin Augustus Siebe and transformed the following year into a “heavy foot” diving suit, with the success we know.

The diving suits that equipped the pioneer divers who took part in the underwater excavations of the HMS Royal george, the largest warship in the world at the time of its launch in 1756 and which sank during a routine maneuver while at anchor at Portsmouth le August 29, 1782, causing the death of more than 800 people on board ...

See you soon for a new definition of Scuba Bécédaire. The irreverent lexicon of diving, but not only. Because sometimes ...

Francis Le Guen

Café

An already old video of a surface compressor powered hookah diving system. Demonstration by the inimitable Patrice Vogel, owner of the legendary and late Marseille store “To the old diver".