Offshore Marine Services Ltd
Martin Woodward has been in the commercial diving and marine services business since 1968. During this time he has worked extensively on different projects worldwide. Martin has been a professional diver since 1968, and is still actively diving in the UK and other locations around the world. Martin’s diving career includes 'deep saturation' diving in the North Sea, oilfields in the Persian Gulf, projects in Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong, Philippines, Brazil, Cuba, Caribbean, USA and many other locations worldwide. It has covered all aspects of commercial diving, including multiple shipwreck and salvage projects. He operates a diving vessel based in the Isle of Wight, (and until recently another vessel in the Far East), involved mainly in historic shipwreck projects and underwater archaeology. Project planning and marine consultancy are also strong elements of the business in recent years, both for Offshore Marine and other entities and groups.
He has also been involved in many interesting and unusual projects such as searching for Glenn Miller's aircraft, Goering's Gold, Sir Francis Drake's coffin off Panama, the Lost City of Atlantis and the famous U.S. hijacker D.B Cooper. His great love. however, has always been finding shipwrecks, history and artefacts from under the oceans.
He has also been involved in many interesting and unusual projects such as searching for Glenn Miller's aircraft, Goering's Gold, Sir Francis Drake's coffin off Panama, the Lost City of Atlantis and the famous U.S. hijacker D.B Cooper. His great love. however, has always been finding shipwrecks, history and artefacts from under the oceans.
Martin originally set up his own diving company in 1973 after a few years working for local diving companies such as Mobell Marine and Marex. He named the company ‘Offshore Diving Services’ and despite still working and sub-contracting to other diving companies at that time, he also took on independent diving, civil engineering and salvage work. After many years the name change to Offshore Marine Services Ltd came about in 1991 after forming a limited company to expand and encompass additional marine services work. Martin owned and used various vessels during the period 1972 to 1991, including large ex-fishing vessels and fast craft, but 1991 saw Offshore Marine taking a big step forward in designing a new specialised diving/survey catamaran vessel, which was then built in a Cowes shipyard. 'Discovery' proved to be a superb vessel in all ways, being the ultimate diving vessel equipped with state of the art sonar and magnetometer equipment and a ‘stay at sea’ capability. It served well over 25 years until 2017, when it was sold to Holland for wind farm and marine services contracts. Due to scaling down on commercial work and concentrating more on shipwreck and survey work, Martin then purchased a smaller Botnia Targa 31(33) and equipped it with the latest survey equipment such as Helix 12 Mega 1.3 MHZ sidescan and bottom profiling sonar/plotter, Cmax sidescan sonar, magnetometers, ROVs and other sophisticated search equipment. Martin still continues with and enjoys shipwreck diving, survey work and finding new wrecks. With this specialised search and survey equipment aboard, the boat can also be available for outside search projects on request. Portability of our modern search equipment also makes it possible to mobilise anywhere worldwide travelling with normal commercial aircraft luggage.
One of Martin’s specialities is finding small targets underwater that are difficult to locate. This has included some of the following tasks, all completed successfully.
* Locating and recovering a lost Royal Navy sonar sensor off the Isle of Wight
- Locating and recovering a valuable piece of equipment lost by the Royal Netherlands Navy
- Locating and recovering a lost Seaspy magnetometer sensor 25 miles south of the IOW
- Locating a lost water level recording sensor from a wind farm project south of Poole for Fugro
- Several tasks involving lost tanker anchors and chains, and boom equipment.
- Many other tasks involving specialised search equipment for small targets.
Other overseas diving work included munitions search and clearance contracts in Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan and Hongkong, cable installations and recovery, and much more.
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