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"If you were just an underwater welder, you'd starve to death," says underwater welder Jerry Clouser. But that's not to say there's no work for underwater welders.

"One year, an oil company might say we need to do a lot of repair work, so that year you may get a lot of work. The next year, they might be doing a lot of inspection," explains Clouser.

You've likely heard the saying: "jack of all trades and master of none." If you want to be an underwater welder, you have to be ready to be a jack of all trades and master of all. "In order to survive and be successful, you have to be able to do a lot of things," Clouser warns.

Clouser can do it all: welding, pipeline inspection and ultrasound testing. He's also a commercial dive instructor. Plus he's an active diver and welder.

"Every summer, I go off and work in the industry," he says. Sometimes he's a diver. More frequently these days, he's a project manager overseeing a number of divers.

Underwater welding is vastly different from typical welding, says instructor Jonathan Bennett. For one thing, the equipment used is different, he says, and often quite expensive. And it's one of the few professions where the mode of transportation -- the diving -- is perhaps the most important skill.

"You have to have above-average diving skills. That's something you can't get overnight."

Colleen Kelvin is well on her way to being a jack of all trades. "It's hard, but most of all I like it," she says.

Kelvin was trained at the Diver's Institute in Seattle. "I'd done scuba diving and construction work, and I heard about the school," she explains. So far, Kelvin hasn't done much welding or diving. "Mostly I do a lot of tending, run chambers, hand jetting, cover pipe or uncover it and set flanges."

Kelvin is one of the few female commercial divers working in the Gulf of Mexico. "Most people I run across, I'm the first one they've ever seen dive," she says. There are more women commercial divers working inland, and Kelvin expects it will become more common in the Gulf. "I wish there were more. People look at me like I'm an alien."

The biggest problem Kelvin has had is visibility underwater. "Sometimes we just feel around," she admits. On clear days, she's seen a stingray and a shark. "They don't bother you," she says. "The neatest thing about the job is the environment underwater."

Clouser says one of his most memorable projects was off the East Coast. He was part of a crew salvaging an Irving freighter, which sank with 3,000 tons of crude oil in it. It was memorable because the operation was shut down by court order.

"Some politician didn't think we should raise it," he remembers. The fear was the potential for environmental disaster, but Clouser says they needn't have worried. The oil wasn't going anywhere.

"The water was [32 F]. Do you know what happens to oil when it's that cold? It gets thick. Really thick! Their idea was to heat it up and pump the oil to the surface. Do you know what happens when you heat up oil? They'd have had oil everywhere!"

In the end, the government allowed the vessel to be raised. But by then, Clouser was back instructing classes. "These people weren't stupid, but they weren't divers."

So how did Clouser get into this field? "Lloyd Bridges," he chuckles. The actor starred in a television series called Sea Hunt while Clouser was growing up.

"I used to watch that and say, 'I've got to be a diver,'" he remembers.

Obviously, commercial diving is quite different from recreational scuba diving. For one thing, divers are attached to the surface with a hose. "They still have a scuba tank on their back and a spare [mini tank], but that's just for emergencies," Clouser explains.

An emergency might be losing air at 100 feet, which would be fatal if you're weighted down so you can stand and work on the bottom. "I think we're all aware of the dangers," says Kelvin. She says the spare tanks aren't the only precautions. "We have a standby diver always ready for something to happen."

Kelvin says what sounds like glamour and excitement can become routine. "Some days it's just work," she admits. She tells would-be commercial divers that it's not a career for everyone. "You have to understand it's construction and not just scuba."