Jose Santos Vindeola II: Commercial Diving Instructor with Four Decades of Gulf Coast Experience
Jose Santos Vindeola II doesn’t tell war stories in the classroom—he teaches the calculus that kept him alive through 41 years of commercial diving. As a commercial diving instructor at The Ocean Corporation in Houston, he brings students into an industry where a misread decompression table or a botched hot tap can end careers, or worse. His teaching philosophy? “Realistic as it can get.” That realism is earned from supervising saturation dives in the Gulf of Mexico, project managing $100M offshore campaigns for Chevron and Shell, and executing one of the region’s most technically demanding pipeline connections under conditions that gave him “no sleep for weeks.”
The moment that still defines Jose’s approach to risk management came during a Kinder Morgan hot tap project that should have been routine. Instead, he inherited what he calls “a soup sandwich”—a 26-inch drill boring into a 36-inch live pipeline pressurized at 1,400 psi, with multiple anticipated failure points and a client budget already strained. Most project managers would have walked. Jose mapped every contingency, triple-checked the math, and brought the job in at three times the bid price while returning $300,000 to the client. It remains one of the largest pipeline hot taps executed in the Gulf of Mexico, and it taught him a lesson he now drills into students: in this industry, the business case and the safety case are the same calculation.
From Navy Rescue Swimmer to Gulf Coast Diving Supervisor
Jose’s path to becoming an offshore diving instructor began in the U.S. Navy, where he trained as a Sonar Operator, qualified as a Navy 2nd class diver candidate, and earned his Search and Rescue Swimmer certification. After his honorable discharge in 1985, he enrolled at the Divers Institute of Technology and launched his commercial diving career at Martech in 1984. He started as a tender—the entry-level position handling lines and equipment topside—and worked his way through air diving, gas diving, and saturation diving before earning his supervisor credentials, all on barges in the Gulf.
The progression from tender to supervisor typically takes a decade. Jose compressed it through what he now recognizes as obsessive pattern recognition: watching how experienced divers sequenced tasks, how supervisors anticipated problems, and how project managers translated operational reality into bidding documents. By the time he moved to Global Divers in 1990, he was handling deep air and saturation work on major construction and inspection projects. At Acadiana Divers and Salvage Corp from 1992 to 1997, he developed his underwater inspection expertise and learned to work in the zero-visibility environments of inland rivers—skills he would later leverage to teach students how to function when you can’t see your own hands.
Project Management for the Industry’s Major Players
Jose’s twelve-year tenure at Cal Dive International from 1997 to 2009 marked his transition from saturation diving instructor to project manager and operations executive. He initially served as a superintendent across inland, offshore, and deepwater operations before moving into estimating and project management. Eventually, he assisted the operations manager in tracking profit and loss across a 14-vessel fleet, building budgets, and managing third-party assets for projects spanning from routine platform maintenance to complex IMCA-standard subsea installations.
He project managed for Apache, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Nexen, W&T Offshore, and Walter Oil and Gas, along with drilling contractors including Transocean, Ensco, Hercules, and Noble. The work ranged from pipeline installations and reroutes to platform abandonments, drill rig thruster changeouts, and hyperbaric dry weld repairs in saturation. One assignment that still stands out involved joining an elite burning team tasked with platform decommissioning in the Gulf—specifically, dropping inside the jacket legs of platforms to execute below-mudline burns and cuts that would allow the structure’s removal. It was technically demanding, occasionally terrifying, and exactly the kind of high-consequence work that separates credentialed divers from professionals who stay employed.
After Cal Dive, Jose spent more than a decade in business development roles at Neptune Marine Services, Triton Diving Services, Global Diving and Salvage, Javeler Marine Services, and Leviathan Offshore. He represented companies across the United States, Mexico, and South America, introducing new technologies like Neptune’s NEPSYS dry welding system to Gulf Coast producers, forecasting revenues, and managing client accounts. He also mentored project managers and contributed to operational planning—roles that gave him insight into how diving companies win contracts, manage risk, and build reputations that survive decades in an unforgiving industry.
Teaching the Business of Diving, Not Just the Dive
Jose joined The Ocean Corporation in 2025 with a specific mission: to show students that commercial diving offers a viable 30-year career, not just a few adrenaline-fueled years underwater. Too many divers, he argues, focus exclusively on bottom time and miss the business literacy that determines who advances to supervisor, project manager, and eventually consultant or business development roles. His classroom emphasizes decompression table mastery, dive station setup, and the operational math of being what the industry calls a “shot caller”—the person responsible for writing procedures, managing dive teams, and signing off on projects where lives and millions of dollars are at stake.
One of Jose’s most effective teaching tools is his ability to render life-like 3D drawings that help students visualize underwater structures, rigging configurations, and the spatial relationships that are nearly impossible to grasp from two-dimensional diagrams. For students who’ve never worked offshore, these drawings translate abstract concepts—platform jacket legs, pipeline tie-ins, subsea wellheads—into tangible mental models. He also tutors students one-on-one when concepts don’t land the first time. Recently, he spent several hours working through decompression tables with a student who couldn’t make the calculations stick. When the student finally grasped the relationship between depth, time, and nitrogen loading, Jose saw what he calls “the light come on”—the moment when rote memorization becomes operational understanding.
His teaching philosophy centers on a simple standard: “My goal is that when students leave, I would trust them to be my tender.” That’s not metaphorical. In saturation diving, your tender manages your umbilical, monitors your gas supply, and responds to emergencies when you’re locked in a chamber 300 feet below the surface. Trusting someone with your life isn’t hyperbole—it’s the job requirement. Jose measures his teaching success by whether his graduates understand that every procedure, every checklist, and every safety briefing exists because someone died when it didn’t.
Preparing Students for an Evolving Industry
Jose sees the commercial diving and offshore subsea industries shifting toward greater individual accountability. Producers are increasingly outsourcing qualification management to third-party systems like OQSG, VERIFORCE, SEMS, and ISNetworld, which means divers will soon be responsible for maintaining their own records: physicals, helmet inspections, skill refreshers, training certifications. Students who graduate without understanding how to navigate these credentialing platforms will struggle to stay employed, regardless of their technical diving skills.
To address this, Jose is working to integrate more physical conditioning into The Ocean Corporation’s curriculum. Offshore diving is punishing work—long hours in cold water, repetitive tasks in bulky equipment, and the constant physical strain of operating tools underwater. Students who arrive fit and leave fitter have better job prospects and longer careers. Beyond fitness, he emphasizes the interpersonal skills that don’t appear in dive manuals: how to mentor newer divers, how to communicate bad news to project managers, and how to build the professional networks that sustain careers when the offshore work slows down.
Outside the classroom, Jose’s interests span cooking, music, art, sculpture, astronomy, medicine, and mechanics—a range of disciplines that inform his teaching more than students might expect. Timing in diving, he points out, has rhythm like music. Mental perspective under stress borrows from visual art. Health and nutrition matter when you’re working 12-hour shifts on a barge. He uses these analogies to help students see that diving isn’t a isolated technical skill—it’s a profession that demands broad competence and the ability to synthesize information under pressure.
Jose’s four decades in the industry—from Navy rescue swimmer to saturation supervisor to project manager to instructor—give him a perspective that most offshore diving instructors simply don’t have. He’s managed the projects that students will one day work on. He’s bid the jobs, tracked the costs, and written the procedures. And he’s made the mistakes that teach you what the manuals leave out. For students at The Ocean Corporation, that translates into a classroom where “realistic as it can get” isn’t marketing—it’s the standard.