Blake Riddle & Dylan Harrell: Commercial Diving in Nuclear Plants & Offshore Rigs

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 456 — Blake Riddle & Dylan Harrell — commercial diving in nuclear power plants, offshore oil rigs, and dynamic positioning vessels.

Cold Open: A Great White at the Nuclear Plant

Blake Riddle: There was a tiger shark that used to come around a job site in Hawaii — the locals had a name for her because she showed up so often. Right before we jumped in, my buddy told me not to worry about her, she was fine, just carry on with your business. So I hopped in and kept my focus. You can't start thinking about what could happen, because that becomes your own worst enemy. Especially diving in black water — you close your eyes and you don't think about what's in the dark, because the second you do, that's when paranoia sets in, your heart rate jumps, and things can go bad fast. I had a similar experience on a dive just off the coast of California, where we were working for the Edison nuclear power plant near Camp Pendleton. We were core-drilling into the concrete structure that sits over the pipelines that cool the reactors, and all that noise drew in a ton of sea life — sheepshead, calico bass, halibut, lobster everywhere. Then all of a sudden a great white, maybe thirteen to fifteen feet, showed up at the job site. Divers can talk to each other underwater through our umbilicals, so I radioed my dive partner and asked what he wanted to do. He said don't worry about it, just keep working — and honestly, as a diver, you're safer in the water around sharks than you are swimming or surfing on the surface. Don't let that keep you out of the ocean. You're more likely to get struck by lightning than attacked by a shark.

Blake Riddle: My name is Blake Riddle.

Dylan Harrell: I'm Dylan Harrell, and this is the Tom Rowland podcast.

Introducing Breakdown the Dive

Tom Rowland: Today's podcast is a little different. We're going to visit some guys in Southern California who have a podcast called Breakdown the Dive. These guys work in the ocean lifestyle — they're underwater commercial divers, and honestly, it's an eye-opener hearing everything that goes into being a commercial diver. They're committed to helping people learn what the job actually involves, and to helping people who are interested in that path figure out how to make it a reality. It's very similar to a lot of what we talk about on this show. I've been listening to a bunch of their episodes and these guys are awesome — Blake Riddle and Dylan Harrell from Breakdown the Dive are coming up next. Blake, Dylan, what's up, man? How are you guys doing?

Dylan Harrell: Good, man. How are you?

Blake Riddle: Doing great.

Tom Rowland: Doing awesome. Where are you guys right now?

Blake Riddle: We're currently in Costa Mesa, California, just outside Newport.

Dylan Harrell: Beautiful Southern California.

Tom Rowland: Right on — you've got your surfboards, your dive helmet, looks awesome. How close are you to the beach?

Blake Riddle: Walking, about fifteen minutes. Driving, about five.

Tom Rowland: How's the surf these days?

Blake Riddle: The report says four to six, but I think it's lying to us a little.

Dylan Harrell: Yeah, they're fooling us.

Tom Rowland: Sometimes you just gotta go check it yourself.

Blake Riddle: Yeah, you can't always trust the report — you just gotta suit up and get out there.

The Center Point of Breakdown the Dive

Tom Rowland: So, man, you guys are in a different world. We share a love for the outdoors, and you've got a commercial fishing background and all this other stuff, but your podcast is super cool — Breakdown the Dive is designed for people who are interested or intrigued by working underwater. That's your gig, right?

Dylan Harrell: Yeah, it has a center point around commercial diving, and we revolve that around an ocean lifestyle — captains within the maritime industry, people who want to get involved with the ocean. We absolutely love it, and once the saltwater gets in your bloodstream, you can't get away from it.

How Blake Got Into Commercial Diving

Blake Riddle: About seven years ago I was working in the restaurant industry, and the people around me were pretty unhappy with their jobs. I didn't want to take that same road, so I started looking into ocean-based work. I came across a video of a hard-hat diver in the Gulf of Mexico working on a jacket — the structure that holds up offshore oil rigs. While he was working, a green sea turtle came up behind him and nipped him on the shoulder, and instead of freaking out, he turned around and started petting it. I was about twenty years old watching this, and I couldn't take my eyes off it — this guy was working at two hundred feet getting paid to pet a sea turtle. I lost it. I started researching what it would take, found a dive school in Jacksonville, Florida, quit my job about a month and a half later, and went straight there. I completed the six-month training program, then headed back to the West Coast and got into ship husbandry.

Tom Rowland: Wait — ship husbandry? That's a term I'm not familiar with. I know animal husbandry.

Blake Riddle: Ship husbandry is just the repair, maintenance, and upkeep of any vessel — at sea or in port. It can even apply to ships within the Great Lakes. My company had two branches on the West Coast — a construction department and a ship husbandry department — which let me acquire skill sets that guys at single-focus companies couldn't. I fell in love with the whole industry: putting on the helmet, getting in the water, always a new challenge. I also saw a need for people who wanted to get into it but didn't know how, and I wanted to build a different mindset than the typical "I'm up here, you're down here" attitude in the industry. Dylan doesn't want to be that guy either. So we started this whole thing with the mindset of helping people who are involved in the ocean — whether fishing, surfing, or diving — progress in their passion. Commercial diving is at the center of it. That's where I started Hangin' Lead apparel, which eventually transitioned into Breakdown the Dive, and that's when I brought Dylan on board as a cohost and partner.

Tom Rowland: That's a cool story — it's similar to mine in a way. I like helping people get involved. We talk a lot on this podcast about how someone becomes a fishing or hunting guide, because when I started as a fishing guide, working as one as a real career seemed impossible — not even impossible, just something that didn't seem to exist. If you don't know anyone who does something like that, it's not even a consideration. You're just opening people's minds to the fact that people are out there doing this for a living, making good money doing it, and that they could do it too.

Dylan's Path: Retail, Welding, and Alaskan Longlining

Dylan Harrell: I was working in retail at a younger age — at Home Depot for about a year and a half — and quickly decided that wasn't my passion. I went to welding school and became a welder for companies out in the Central Valley of California, fabricating gates for canals and waterways. Then, being an adrenaline junkie, I cut ties and headed to Alaska to try commercial fishing. I was there for about five years on a longliner, rotating between three vessels in the fleet. As soon as I stepped foot in Alaska I knew — being out on the water, forty-foot seas, adapting and overcoming — it was amazing.

Tom Rowland: Forty-foot seas, that's insane. What were you catching on the longline?

Dylan Harrell: Mostly lingcod — maybe ninety percent — with some pollock when the quota allowed it. We fished around three hundred to five hundred feet in water that was roughly eight hundred to a thousand feet deep. It's actually one of the most eco-friendly types of fishing — in five years I never once saw a shark or a dolphin caught. Every now and then a crab would come up on the line and we'd throw it back.

Tom Rowland: On the other coast they're catching tons of sharks longlining, but that's probably a function of depth, bait, and time of year. So what's the hardest part of that life? I came close to trying Alaska fishing myself.

Dylan Harrell: You should still do it, man. I've seen swells up to about fifty feet out there during hurricane season — the captain decides whether to keep going or heave to for a day or two until it settles back down to thirty, thirty-five feet.

Blake Riddle: We've talked about him bringing me along if he goes back. I'm all in — I already got my backpack ready.

Tom Rowland: There's always a lure to that life — people go up, make a lot of money, and come back completely worked. I've seen guys come back having lost thirty pounds, eating everything in sight. What's that day-to-day actually like?

Dylan Harrell: You're doing eighteen to twenty hour days depending on the fishing and how the crew is cooperating. Guys will quit mid-trip sometimes — they go to their bunk and that's it, they don't get paid and still have to cover room and board. Teamwork is everything in commercial fishing; one guy off the team means everyone else works four hours longer in an already-eighteen-hour shift. On deck, you set sixty miles of line in the water, which takes about six hours, then immediately haul back — finding the end of the line can take ten minutes or an hour, and pulling in all that line takes twelve to twenty-four hours. It's a nonstop process split across two deck crews, and when you're setting gear, it requires all hands on deck.

From Fishing Boats to Underwater Work

Dylan Harrell: Coming into 2018, Alaska started dropping quotas and the native corporations were buying up a lot of what was left, so our company couldn't buy much quota. We had to dock a few boats and rotate guys in and out, and a lot of us weren't working as much. I was thinking about a different industry because I'd worked my body so hard.

Blake Riddle: So you chose commercial diving — the next hardest thing you could find.

Dylan Harrell: Pretty much. We were bringing a boat into dry dock and I saw guys in hard hats jump in the water to set the keel blocks so the boat could come out. I asked my captain what those guys were, and he said, "those are the divers." I thought that was badass, looked into it, and a few months later went to the same school in Jacksonville that Blake had gone to, about three years after him. I'd wanted to work in Florida but it didn't pan out, so I came back to the West Coast and got on with the company Blake was already at — that's how we met. We worked underwater together for a couple of years, balls to the wall, hard work. Eventually he got in touch with me about the podcast and we linked up, and here we are.

What Commercial Divers Actually Do

Tom Rowland: So are you guys mostly fixing stuff, or building stuff underwater?

Blake Riddle: It varies — every job is different. Sometimes you're building piers and driving pile, and you need a diver down there to inspect when the pile hits a dead stop, to find out if it hit a rock, or to do inspection work ahead of time so they know what the seabed ecosystem looks like. Some jobs are physically brutal, and some jobs are just, hey, go take a photo of some damage and come back up, and you get paid for eight hours for a five-minute task. It has its ups and downs, same as the scheduling — work comes in waves.

Tom Rowland: Underwater welding is a big part of it, right?

Blake Riddle: It can be, but honestly it's probably less than ten percent of a commercial diver's job. There's really no such thing as an "underwater welder" as a job title — you're a commercial diver who can perform underwater welding, because most jobs aren't just welding all day. It's a lot of cleaning, inspections, and mechanical work. That's why I fell in love with this industry — you become a jack of all trades. You learn to run boats, work on diesel engines, hydraulic systems, electrical systems. There's so much you can pull from to build a well-rounded diver who could eventually move into a job completely outside diving but still tied to the industry.

Tom Rowland: Do you guys have captain's licenses to move those boats if needed? You build that up over a career, right?

Blake Riddle: Exactly. I'm currently a fifty-ton captain, and I'm in the process of acquiring my hundred-ton license with a towing endorsement. It requires some book work and mathematical equations for towing loads based on vessel size, but it's not as long as you'd think — you can knock it out in three or four weeks. I got my fifty-ton off of hours accrued on the boats I was driving, but now that I'm working on hundred-ton vessels I have to retake the test to upgrade, and I happen to be right in my license renewal window, so I want to get that done before it lapses.

Ocean Conservation and Charter Work

Dylan Harrell: Ocean conservation is a big thing for us — keeping the oceans clean. Right now we also run charter boats for yachts. The other day we were out on a charter and spotted a big trash bag floating out in the ocean, so we went and picked it up — inside was a backpack, glasses, a purse, a bunch of trash, and ten dollars. Mother nature paid us.

Tom Rowland: I've got a friend who checks everything he finds floating out there hoping to find a box of cash someday. Nothing yet, but there's always tomorrow. So — what about the merchant marine? When my son was looking at colleges, we stopped by a merchant marine academy booth and I had no idea that path even existed — a degree, real skills, and a solid job right out of college working on a ship.

Blake Riddle: If you're talking about people working aboard container ships and tankers, I've worked alongside a lot of those guys. Matson is one of the largest shipping companies in the country — you've probably seen their containers on the backs of trucks. They recently built the largest U.S. container ship, the Daniel K. Inouye, named after the senator from Hawaii. When we do dive work on their ships we have to board, talk to the chief engineers and captains, and go through lockout-tagout safety procedures. Those crews run LA to San Francisco to Hawaii and back, and they're always in a good mood — a couple of days off in Hawaii to surf and barbecue with friends and family before heading back. It is dangerous work depending on your position on those ships, but the hardest part of anything in maritime is being away from home. It's known for taking a toll on relationships, so if you can handle that, great — but I've seen a lot of people struggle with it.

Favorite Parts of the Job: Habitat Work and Thruster Changeouts

Tom Rowland: With everything you're learning — all these skills, licenses, and travel — what's the one part of this lifestyle you like the most?

Dylan Harrell: That's a good question. As soon as you touch the water, listen to your breath, and collect yourself with your thoughts, that's a cool feeling right off the bat — being alone underwater in places no one has ever touched. As far as the actual work goes, I love technical jobs. If I can go do a thruster changeout every day, get inside a dewatered tunnel, get some wrenches, and swap out blades, that's exciting to me.

Blake Riddle: A bow thruster tunnel on a large ship can be about ten feet in diameter and fifteen to twenty feet wide. We go in, weld screw dogs — steel brackets with bolts — around a three-eighths-inch steel plate to seal the tunnel doors with neoprene, leaving about a three-foot gap at the bottom for an air pocket and an access point. Then we dewater the tunnel and go inside without our dive gear — just a wet suit or dry suit — working inside what's basically a habitat, with surface-supplied air keeping the space breathable the whole time. My very first experience with a habitat job was in Cozumel, Mexico, working on a shaft seal exchange with about a hundred feet of visibility, compared to the three-to-five-foot visibility I was used to on those thousand-foot ships. Being able to actually see the scale of what we were working on — a propeller about thirty-five feet in diameter with blades ten to twelve feet long — made me feel about an inch tall. The habitat material itself is a very high-density, cut- and heat-resistant fabric — practically military grade — because if it punctures while it's full of air, the water rushing in hits you like a semi truck.

Tom Rowland: How long before a new guy is actually leading that kind of job?

Blake Riddle: For me it took about two and a half years; for Dylan, a little less.

Dylan Harrell: About six to eight months of doing that kind of work before I felt comfortable.

Blake Riddle: It comes down to the team you're working with — our company has offices globally and repairs ships all across the world, so guys get spread thin, and whoever's available has to make the job happen. Dylan stepped up on one of those jobs and got it done successfully.

Leadership in Commercial Diving

Dylan Harrell: Leadership is a big part of commercial diving, and honestly it's lacking in the industry. We talked about this on one of our own episodes — a new guy comes on board, people get intimidated if he does well, and instead of encouraging him they put him down. Leadership is a big reason we do this podcast.

Blake Riddle: Leadership can be performed by anybody — you don't have to be the project manager or supervisor. You can be the tender, the workhorse, straight out of dive school, and still have a leadership mentality. It's a skill set like anything else, and if you practice it for the right reasons — not for money or a title — people will eventually take notice.

Tom Rowland: That's interesting, because some of what you're describing sounds a lot like Extreme Ownership — the idea that anyone can be a leader, up and down the chain. You can lead people above you just as much as they lead people below them.

Blake Riddle: I'm a big reader on that subject — Simon Sinek, Leif Babin, and Jocko Willink, who wrote Extreme Ownership. If this industry had that mentality, we'd be unstoppable — the kind of teams you could build would be as efficient as SEAL teams.

Tom Rowland: Getting thrown into a new group of people you've never worked with, where your life is literally in their hands, that's got to be a tricky thing to navigate quickly.

Blake Riddle: Exactly — that's how it is traveling overseas. I've worked with guys in Japan who barely spoke English, and I don't speak Japanese, so we had to communicate almost through sign language, and it worked. That's one of the most awesome things about this job — traveling to other countries, working alongside people in the same industry, all there to accomplish one goal. Through teamwork and good leadership you get to watch a ship that needed repair sail off carrying products to people all over the world. That was the most rewarding thing — I can't stress that enough.

Tom Rowland: That's such a bigger purpose than just fixing a ship — there could be medical supplies on that boat that save lives on one end of the spectrum, and on the other end, a kid who really wants their Amazon package. Either way, you're part of something that matters. What you're describing makes it even more attractive as a career than I expected, especially since there's no such thing as "just" an underwater welder — you're acquiring skills, licenses, and travel opportunities the whole time.

Freelancing and the Unpredictable Diving Schedule

Dylan Harrell: Right now Blake and I are freelancing rather than with a single company. You put your name in with several dive companies and get a call a day or two before a job — you say yes, grab your gear, show up, work, and get paid. I like it because it gives me a lot more free time. Coming from a lifestyle with no fixed schedule, commercial diving means saying yes and no to a lot of things, including personal time. There's no Monday-through-Friday, eight-to-five — it's a twelve-hour shift Monday, an eight-hour shift Tuesday, a day off Wednesday, a sixteen-hour shift Thursday, maybe nothing Friday, then a 4 a.m. hull clean Saturday and another one Sunday. It's an unpredictable schedule.

Blake Riddle: And that's just for ship husbandry. Get into oil and gas and it's similar, but you're gone for much longer stretches — you get the call to be at the dock at 0600, the ship heads offshore to the rigs, and you're out there two to three months before coming home with a big check, similar to offshore fishing.

Tom Rowland: I see those rigs when we fish in Louisiana — they're like their own cities out there, with helicopters running crew changes constantly.

Life on a Dynamic Positioning Vessel

Blake Riddle: One of my favorite experiences was going offshore — I lived on a dynamic positioning vessel called the Danny Adkins for about a month and a half.

Tom Rowland: We fished right next to one of those boats in the Gulf, and our guide told us it just sits there floating in place. Explain how that actually works.

Blake Riddle: Those vessels drill the wellhead, then leave so a production rig can be built directly over it. It's all run by computer systems with a set of thrusters — some have one on every corner, others two per corner plus one on port and one on starboard — mounted on two pontoons supporting typically six columns. The thrusters are set to GPS coordinates by computer, and if the vessel starts to drift, they fire automatically to push it back into position while the drill is actively working, sometimes eight hundred to a thousand feet down. Those drill strings are surprisingly flexible — they can bend and twist like a snake — so the ship isn't rigidly fixed in place; if it moved too far, the pipe would snap. I was out on one of these jobs removing thrusters that needed refurbishing, and as we pulled them one by one, the ship started losing its ability to steer itself. For the last two, we had two massive tugboats play tug-of-war with the ship to hold it in position while we dove down to about a hundred and fifteen feet, working out of roughly a hundred-eighty-five to two hundred feet of water, to make the swap from the thruster to the crane. It was incredibly exciting. Getting transferred from a crew boat to that ship is one of the most exciting things I've ever done — better than any roller coaster. You stand in a man-basket with four or five other guys, wrap your arms around the cables, and the crane operator lifts you two hundred fifty-plus feet into the air, straight over the ocean, and sets you down on the helicopter deck.

Tom Rowland: Does that happen no matter what the weather's doing?

Blake Riddle: They plan around it — crew boats track the storms in the area and there are safety protocols, but it's still a different ride whether it's slick calm or blowing twenty knots.

Dylan Harrell: In Alaska, at fifty-foot seas, they just call it all stop.

Wildlife: Sharks, Swordfish, and Sawfish

Tom Rowland: Let me ask what everybody wants to know — what about wildlife, specifically sharks?

Dylan Harrell: I've personally never seen much out in Florida besides the occasional small bull shark.

Blake Riddle: I've had the luxury of seeing two — a tiger shark in Hawaii and a great white right here off the coast of California. The tiger shark in Hawaii actually had a name from the locals, since she commonly came into the harbor — we'll call her Betty for the story. Right before jumping in, my buddy told me not to worry about her, and I focused up and got in the water. You can't let your mind create a story about what could happen, especially diving in black water — closing your eyes and not thinking about what's down there, because that's when paranoia and hyperventilation take over and things go bad. That same mindset applied on the dive off Camp Pendleton at the Edison nuclear plant, core-drilling into the concrete intake structure and drawing in sheepshead, calico bass, halibut, and lobster, when a thirteen-to-fifteen-foot great white showed up at the job site. I radioed my dive partner over our umbilical comms, and he told me to stay calm and keep working — as a diver, you're safer around sharks in the water than you are swimming or surfing on the surface. Don't let that keep you out of the ocean; you're more likely to get struck by lightning than attacked by a shark.

Dylan Harrell: It's the sea lions that'll actually get you more than anything else.

Tom Rowland: They're like dogs — they'll just bite you, and there are so many of them. Sharks are one thing, but swordfish are a serious animal too. We had a diver on our show get attacked by one in Louisiana — he's spearfished in the Keys his whole life and is very experienced, but he got into the no-go zone between the fish and the boat while it was being pulled in. The swordfish's eye shifted toward him, and in an instant its bill drove into his underwater camera housing — high-impact plastic — and snapped off inside it. None of us could get the broken bill out afterward; it was buried like the sword of Excalibur. That's the last time we dove with a swordfish on the line. Sawfish are just as dangerous — most of the ones we encounter in the Florida Keys turn up while tarpon fishing, when a sixteen-foot fish turns out to be mostly bill and tail. The teeth on that bill get long as they mature, and reaching down for one is a mistake — it's like handling a live chainsaw once it starts thrashing.

Blake Riddle: I'd imagine encountering one as a diver, it would probably just go about its business like a ray would, unless you tried to handle it.

Dive Depths, Decompression, and Saturation Diving

Tom Rowland: What counts as a deep working dive for you guys versus a routine or shallow one, and how does your bottom time compare to recreational scuba?

Dylan Harrell: On surface-supplied air, without changing your gas mixture, I'd call two hundred fifty feet — or even a hundred feet — a deep dive.

Blake Riddle: Honestly it's based on whether you're still diving air, because the moment you switch to mixed gas, that's considered deep diving, and you're into the realm of Sur-D-O2 — surface decompression, where you get put inside a chamber for a controlled decompression. For most of the work Dylan and I do, it's all on air; the deepest dive I've ever done on air was a hundred eighty-five feet, where you get nitrogen narcosis — basically the effects of being drunk — and still have to function and perform the job. At that depth you're bound by U.S. Navy dive tables, so your bottom time is very limited, sometimes only four or five minutes of actual work, which is why crews rotate divers so often — that's where the big money comes in, since you're paid for the whole day including the chamber time afterward. An average working dive for us is around thirty-five feet, where the Navy tables allow up to two hundred thirty-two minutes before you have to surface. Anything above twenty feet is considered unlimited bottom time, so we've spent hours and hours at twenty feet — the longest I've ever stayed underwater without surfacing, inside a habitat, was fourteen hours straight.

Dylan Harrell: My first job as a runner on a seal job in San Diego was about twelve hours, just running tools back and forth to the divers in the habitat.

Tom Rowland: What happens if you have to go to the bathroom during something like that?

Dylan Harrell: If you're in a dry suit you can actually get little pee valves installed now.

Blake Riddle: Inside the habitat it's a lot easier since you've got your gear off. But some of our dive hoses run about six hundred feet, and at that distance from the boat you have to make a call — swim all the way back and climb the ladder, or handle your business right there in the water without even telling topside what's going on. So you learn to lay off the coffee and skip the heavy meals before a long dive like that.

Movies About Commercial Diving

Tom Rowland: You guys got an awesome lifestyle and a cool podcast — what's the apparel company called again?

Dylan Harrell: Hangin' Lead — it's got a great logo, the hat and the fishing rods, like the mark five helmet from Men of Honor.

Tom Rowland: That's a great scene — the part where he has to walk a hundred steps in that gear after losing his leg in a diving accident.

Blake Riddle: There's also a movie called Pioneer, based on a true story about American divers working with Norwegians to dive to depths beyond their normal limits, because the Americans had the breathing gas mixture figured out and the Norwegians needed it to install the first oil pipeline out of the North Sea in water around a thousand feet deep. They performed habitat work directly on the ocean floor.

Tom Rowland: How did they even get down to a thousand feet?

Blake Riddle: That's saturation diving — a whole other topic, very technical. Your body has to acclimate to the pressure at that depth, so divers actually live inside pressurized chambers onboard the ship, like hamster tunnels, pressurized to match the working depth of the job. They travel down in a diving bell lowered through the moon pool in the center of the ship until the pressure equalizes, open the door, and get to work — basically taking the bus to the job and the bus back home.

Dylan Harrell: It's literally being an aquanaut.

Tom Rowland: Is that healthy long-term?

Blake Riddle: When it's done correctly, yes — there are obvious physical stresses from working hard at those depths, but the key is working smart, not hard, because overexertion increases your risk of decompression sickness, the bends.

Dylan Harrell: After the job, they'll live in that pressurized chamber for about a month of decompression before coming back to normal pressure.

Blake Riddle: They're making good money for it too — somewhere around a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a day, plus hazard pay. But like I said, you have to be okay with being away from home that long. The movie Last Breath, which Dylan mentioned, is also a great true story — both it and Pioneer are based on real events, and Last Breath is a little nerve-wracking for anyone getting into this industry because the job does carry real danger. If you don't understand that going in, it's not for you. But if you've got that drive to push your limits and you work smart, slow, and smooth — because slow is smooth and smooth is fast — you can handle it. At those depths, it's life or death.

Final Thoughts and Where to Find Breakdown the Dive

Tom Rowland: I learned so much talking to you guys — we've got to do this again. What an interesting way to make a living.

Blake Riddle: We'd love to have you on our show too.

Tom Rowland: Let's do it — we can talk sawfish and swordfish and make people look over their shoulder.

Dylan Harrell: I've got to tell you, Tom, it's a dream of mine to have my own fishing charter business.

Tom Rowland: Do it, man — you're in a great place for it, with yellowtail already starting to move up from Mexico and mahi right behind them. We'll talk about the road to becoming a charter guide when I come on your show.

Blake Riddle: And Hangin' Lead will sponsor the whole thing.

Tom Rowland: Love it. Alright, tell everybody where they can find your podcast and buy your shirts.

Dylan Harrell: Head to hanginleadapparel.com for our apparel — we're running a sale right now and some new merch designs are coming soon.

Blake Riddle: Follow us on Instagram at hangin_lead, and the podcast is Breakdown the Dive, all one word, on Instagram. We're on every platform — Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio — and also on Waypoint TV alongside Tom Rowland.

Tom Rowland: Love that plug.

Dylan Harrell: If anyone's interested in the industry, feel free to message us on Instagram — we're happy to talk with you about it.

Blake Riddle: Dylan and I both came from backgrounds with zero ocean experience — I came from restaurants, he came from retail — and you can make it too. It doesn't matter what your background is; what matters is how bad you want it. It's not about the size of the dog, it's about the size of the fight in the dog. Surround yourself with the right people — I surrounded myself with a group of ex-military guys who'd been through hell in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they pushed me past what I thought I was capable of in dive school. Anyone with questions about diving, captaining, surfing, fishing, or anything ocean-related, we're here for you.

Dylan Harrell: And always know your why — always know why you're doing it.

Tom Rowland: That's an important message, especially with so many people questioning what they're doing with their careers right now. Between the three of us, we all landed in careers that were pretty unlikely on paper — it's not about experience or connections, it's about wanting it badly enough and being willing to work harder than everybody else. The person making that jump just has trouble seeing it from the other side, and sometimes people need someone like you guys to tell them it's possible.

Blake Riddle: And the harder the obstacle, the better the reward.

Tom Rowland: I believe that fully. You guys are cool dudes — I'd love to come out to California and hang out. One of my favorite spots is Encinitas.

Blake Riddle: We're about an hour north of there.

Dylan Harrell: Come out and go fishing — Blake's building his boat in the driveway, I've got my little sport-fishing boat, we can all go do some offshore fishing.

Tom Rowland: As long as you keep me out of that dive suit.

Blake Riddle: No promises. We're also linking up with Seven C Spearfishing, out of Long Island, who we just recorded with — trying to get him out here too.

Tom Rowland: Right on — I'll let you know when I'm out there. This was awesome, man, I enjoyed every bit of it. Let me know when you want me on your show. Otherwise, everybody go check out their podcast — lots of cool, eye-opening stories. Thanks, guys, I really appreciate it.

Dylan Harrell: We will. Talk to you soon.

Blake Riddle: Thank you. Talk to you later, man.