Subsea excavating has its unique challenges. Ask Tim Ferris, president of Defiant Marine in Golden Valley, NC. “When you are working subsea, the ocean constantly moves. Rivers move silt all of the time,” says Ferris. “If you have a wreck or any kind of project on subsea, a river bed, lake bed, or ocean bed, most of the time you have to excavate them. The simplest, lightest-duty method is a high-horsepower, high-pressure, high-flow pump with an equalized working head at the diver’s end. You may think water is a more dense force than air, but in using high-flow, high-pressure water, you have to give 50% of the flow back to balance to zero; otherwise, you’d be flying all over like you’re hanging on to a jet nozzle.”
Defiant Marine crews have jetted down 30–40 feet to expose an old sunken vessel and excavated 50–60 feet deep to locate oil and gas pipelines in the sea. A recent job entailed opening an abandoned gold mine from the early 1800s using a John Deere dozer, a skid-steer with a grapple bucket, an auger attachment, and a tooth excavating bucket. While most jobs require heavy equipment, “the versatility of a good track hoe—with a good operator—is amazing,” says Ferris. Ferris may buy equipment for certain jobs and sell it afterward but prefers renting as needed to save on shipping costs to job sites. He keeps a John Deere 333G skid-steer with a forestry package and a John Deere 750 crawler dozer.
Large time gaps between the unpredictable diving and salvage jobs have required Ferris to augment marine work with consulting, project management, construction, and emergency/environmental disaster response, deploying where needed. Ferris has no challenges finding contract employees with multiple skills in rigging, welding, operating, diving, and fabricating, and treats them well to retain them. Ferris says he named his company “Defiant” because “it takes a measure of being defiant when working in 30-foot swells in 60-knot winds 100 miles offshore.” The company’s work has been featured on History and National Geographic television programs. Ferris also is president of Defiant Whiskey, a separate company he formed when seeking something to do between jobs and called up contractors to help him build what would become the Blue Ridge Distillery.
What He Does Day to Day
“My biggest responsibility is absorbing a lot of the day’s different emotions and stresses so they never make it onto the guys’ plates, leaving them mostly unencumbered to focus on their tasks,” says Ferris.
What Led Him to This Line of Work
Ferris grew up in a trade-focused family—carpentry, plumbing, electrical, welding, and mechanics—and enjoying doing all of them, but had difficulty picking one. Commercial diving piqued his interest. He combined it with the other disciplines to create his dream job. “The emotional range you go through gearing up for a dive, getting in the water, accomplishing the task, getting out of the water, and feeling that sense of survived intensity was too much to walk away from,” he says.
What He Likes Best About His Work
“There is zero room for complacency,” says Ferris of his work. “You are only as good as your last success. My work causes me to go through a validation process of engaging in a project so much bigger than myself. My first reaction is, ‘Have I only gotten lucky to this point? Have I really been good enough to do it?’ I find a place to engage, start to read the data, and get my mind around it. Then I bring the team to a point where they can engage based on their skill set. Before you know it, the machine is humming. To be part of that is fantastic.”
His Greatest Challenge
“My greatest personal challenge is not just knowing I need to operate in faith but exercising it and relying on that when it matters the most,” he says. “There is a difference between identifying a risk and worrying. I’ve gotten better at identifying the risks and having the faith that we have the tools, knowledge, and competency to successfully work through that identified risk.”
