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July 11, 2006

Diver down | How one Maine teacher spends his summer vacation

By Joseph Thompson

For nine months out of the year, McLean is a biology and marine biology teacher at Deering High School in Portland. But when the school year ends, "I'm raring to dive," he says.

From mid-May until mid-October, McLean runs his own commercial diving business, Portland-based Underwater Services. The majority of that work involves McLean spending two to three afternoons each week hanging upside down, three feet below the water, cleaning the unpainted hulls of racing boats in Falmouth. "My students like to tease and say I'm scraping barnacles," says McLean.

Not coincidentally, McLean's career as a commercial diver began eight years ago, during his first year as a student teacher. He had graduated from the University of Vermont with a bachelor's degree in wildlife biology and had enrolled in the University of Southern Maine's Extended Teacher Education Program. Although he was working as an environmental consultant at the time, the job wasn't giving him the hours he needed, so he looked to supplement his income with his diving and sailing experience.

Initially, he offered a host of marine services, but soon found that non-diving work, such as delivering yachts along the coast, was too time consuming. So he began focusing on diving services such as cleaning hulls and setting mooring chains, for which he charges a flat fee of roughly $50 per job plus one dollar a minute for time spent underwater. "Within two hours you can be talking 600 bucks pretty quickly. This is what affords me the opportunity to be a teacher," he says. "Anyone who teaches knows that during the first five to 10 years you're on a pay scale that is pathetic."

On average, McLean brings in about $15,000 during the summer, working two days a week and racking up about 200 dives. "It could be more but I don't advertise," he says. "I've never advertised — I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't want to spend every single day in the summer working."

McLean's summer job also translates into a unique classroom opportunity when school resumes in the fall. Typically, when he emerges from water after cleaning organisms such as diatomic slimes and bryozoans from yacht hulls, he often finds lumpfish stuck to his tanks. "It's a marine biology teacher's dream," says McLean. "You get to see all these things and come out of the water with them attached to you."

But aside from bringing in creatures to examine, the two jobs have little in common, McLean says. And by September, the drive to dive he felt in June has been replaced by a new urge. "You go from a job where you're with kids all day long, talking and making a million decisions to a job where there's very little social contact. By the time the summer ends I'm raring to get back to the classroom and spend time with people," he says. "I get sick of the diving. It's miserable work, which is why it generates the money it does."

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