In this paper two explicit force control schemes for underwater vehicle-manipulator systems are presented. The schemes take into account several factors such as uncertainty in the model knowledge, presence of hydrodynamic effects, kinematic redundancy of the system, and poor performance of vehicle's actuation system. The possible occurrence of loss of contact due to vehicle's movement during the task is also considered, and the adoption of an adaptive motion control scheme is investigated to take advantage of dynamic compensation. The proposed control schemes have extensively been tested in numerical simulation runs; the results obtained in a case study are reported to illustrate their performance.