by James Jones
For example, on the first day of real work-diving they took out two of the four free cannon and in doing so spent slightly under half an hour on the bottom, decompressing for fifteen minutes. The second day they took out the other two with only slightly more bottom-time. The next cannon, the first of the eight coral-attached ones, required three entire days making multiple dives, two dives a day for a total of one hour and twenty-five minutes total bottom-time per day, plus 96 minutes decompression time per day. This meant roughly three hours a day in the water, half of it decompressing. It seemed to Grant they spent most of their time hanging on the anchor line staring at each other and breathing.
It was not an easy dive program to plan, once it was established that eight of the cannon were grown to coral, and it had to be planned exactly. Hauling out his grubby, well-thumbed NAVSHIPS 250-538 U.S. Navy Diving Manual, Bonham calculated that exactly 50 minutes bottom-time (which included the descent) would require exactly 47.7 minutes decompression time: 15 minutes at 20 feet, 31 minutes at 10 feet, plus 1.7 minutes ascent time to first stop. Sixty minutes bottom-time at 120 feet, however, would require 70.5 minutes total decompression time, a considerable difference. He decided 50 minutes would be the maximum they could stay down.
There was still a problem with air however. The U.S. Divers large-size tank, with a capacity of 72 cubic feet, was about the largest commercial tank around and the one Bonham preferred to use. One of these would give 20 minutes of air at 4 atmospheres, or 130 feet. Two, rigged together in what the manufacturers liked to call their “TWIN 72”, would give 40 minutes. Bonham had a number of both rigs. But the Twin 72 wouldn’t by any possible stretch give him 50 minutes bottom-time at 120 feet and still allow for adequate decompression, and if they used it, and made shorter dives of twenty or twenty-five minutes, they would more than cut in half their working time on the bottom; they might be months getting their cannon up.
There were only two answers to this problem. One was to hang an extra tank for each of them on the anchorline at twenty feet to decompress on, where they would have to take out their own mouthpiece when its tank ran out and turn on and insert the new one. The other way was to use triple-tank rigs, and Bonham didn’t have any triple-tank rigs. They were normally too heavy and cumbersome. But he could make some up in the shop, and after deciding this would be an easier method for Grant than changing mouthpieces at twenty feet, he made up four of them the morning of the second diving day, after spending the afternoon of the first day making his calculations, while both times Grant hung around watching and learning. “You probly won’t hardly be able to stand up in the boat with this on,” Bonham grinned; “but once you’re underwater you’ll never notice it.”
Still this did not solve everything. There still remained the second or “multiple” dive problem. To get the maximum amount of working time on the bottom to finish the job in two or even three weeks, they would have to dive more than once a day. And this presented all sorts of other problems. Breathing compressed air under pressure as a diver did caused him to absorb nitrogen into his bloodstream and tissues to equalize his body’s normal nitrogen pressure. The deeper the dive and the pressure, and the longer the dive, the more nitrogen he absorbed. That was the reason for decompression: that excess nitrogen had to be got rid of by exhaling it slowly or it would form bubbles in his tissues and bloodstream at surface pressure. But when the diver surfaced safely after decompression, it did not mean the nitrogen in his blood and tissues had returned to normal for sea level, as it was before the dive. Twelve hours was required for that, and for him to slowly exhale all the excess nitrogen he had absorbed on the dive. And if he entered the water for another dive before that twelve-hour period passed he would still be carrying with him a certain percentage of the nitrogen he had absorbed on the first dive, making his second-dive decompression correspondingly greater. The Navy had worked out a descending scale for this twelve-hour period, and checking the NAVSHIPS Manual Repetitive Dive Charts, Bonham calculated that after a 50-minute dive at 120 feet they would be in NAVSHIPS Manual Group “N,” that after 4 hours 4 minutes on the surface they would have descended to NAVSHIPS Manual Group “E,” that Group “E” making a second or “multiple” dive to 120 feet must consider itself to have already spent 15 minutes on the bottom before beginning the dive. In other words, they could spend only 35 minutes on the bottom during the second dive if they wanted to come up in the same decompression time of 47.7 minutes as the first dive—always provided they had remained on the surface 4 hours 4 minutes between dives and descended from Manual Group “N” to Manual Group “E.” Had they dived immediately after coming up while still in Group “N,” they would have to consider that they had already spent 46 of their 50 minutes on the bottom already. And, if they stayed two or three minutes over that second-dive 35-minute limit, they would be forced to come up in the next greater decompression time, that for 60 minutes bottom-time of 70.5 minutes—which, of course, especially if they had seriously exerted themselves working below, would seriously stretch their air, and perhaps even force them to come up too soon.
“And there aint no recompression chamber on this boat for us, either,” Bonham grinned. “As far as that goes, there ain’t even one on this island. The nearest one—old buddy—is Key West,” he grinned, “and there isn’t anything worse for a man who comes up with the bends than to be put in an airplane and flown somewhere, at an even lower pressure than sea level.”
Bonham went over his calculations four or five times that first afternoon. Any slightest miscalculation in them could cause one or both to get decompression sickness, or “the bends,” with effects running all the way from a slight headache, to permanent crippling, to total paralysis, to death. Grant felt a slight chill run over the back of his shoulders as he stood looking down over Bonham’s shoulder.
“I want you to know exactly what you’re getting into,” Bonham said soberly. “This kind of stuff is always dangerous, now that we got to work on those cannon to dig them loose. This is real pro-specialist, trained-frogman stuff. And there’s no real guarantee that even if every precaution’s taken, somebody won’t get a case of the bends, largely due to the big variations in individual tolerances. I just want you to know before you go.”
“Okay. I still want to go,” Grant heard himself say. “I just hate to quit, now that we’ve gotten started.”
“That’s the way I feel,” Bonham said. “The main thing is to just not ever overexert yourself down there, or get nervous and try to come up too fast. If you’ll just follow me, and do everything I tell you to do, and do everything I do when we’re down there, there’s no reason to worry.
“I’ve worked this deep before, and I know what my tolerances are. But I’ll not be using them as any kind of criterion for you. We’ll go much lighter. Just remember that the danger is always once removed from the present. It’s what happens after you come up that hurts you.”
Once again the chill passed across Grant’s shoulders as he nodded.
In the actual practice, of course, both men would be wearing D.C.P. Automatic Decompression Meters, one of which Bonham had already sold to Grant who had never yet needed it, though he had worn it a few times on deep dives just to see how it worked. Bonham’s own, which when he first found the wreck he had sent in to Miami to be checked, was a battered old one, but when they dived with them and checked them both showed almost identically the same markings. Because it worked on an ascending curve of decompression as its indicator needle descended, rather than on the ten-foot and five-foot step stages of the Navy charts, it provided an additional slight safety factor; and it came equipped with a “Memory Zone” at the bottom of its scale to allow for the twelve-hour Surface Interval period.
All this business was something he had hoped to avoid, Bonham told him with a wry grin. If all the cannon had been loose like the four, they could have breezed through this like a snap, but now they were going to have to work. With crowbars. Chipping the damned things loose. If they wan
ted to get the job done in any two or three weeks.
It all sorted itself out into a system quite quickly. Grant would set his alarm for seven, allow himself only one cup of coffee for his breakfast because he was diving, which he made in the Cottage for himself while Lucky still slept, and then meet Bonham on the dock at eight. In the bright sun on the slower moving winch boat they usually got to the site around nine. Suiting up, dressing out (Bonham too wore a wet suit shirt now, and Grant wore shirt, pants and hood), checking gear all took about twenty minutes to half an hour. Bonham believed in doing everything slowly and never rushing whenever it had anything to do with diving. Especially deep diving. And he never stopped preaching it. Then the First Dive, from 9:20 to 11:00—to 10:58, to be exact, if the First Dive began exactly at 9:20. But Bonham never stayed the exact full 50 minutes down below. 48.5, 49 was usually the limit, a slight added safety factor, then he would be tapping Grant on the arm to rise for the long decompression. Usually they were back in the boat by 11:00 or 11:05, and then the long wait began.
Bonham never timed the “Surface Interval Time,” as the NAVSHIPS Manual called it, to the exact 4 hours 4 minutes the Manual recommended, always allowing five or ten minutes over, so it was usually 3:20 or 3:25 before they were back in the water and heading down the long line of the anchorline for the Second Dive. By 4:43 or 4:48 they were back, and it was time to haul in the winch line and the anchor line and head in. By 5:40 or 5:45 they were at the dock, and by 5:50 or 6 o’clock Grant was back at the Cottage just in time to dress for cocktails up at the great house.
It was impossible to understand how Bonham had ever thought he could hide the raising of these cannon from the authorities and spirit them away to sell black market in Mexico or the States. Perhaps if he had had the schooner, and had equipped it with as big a winch, but certainly not by using the port winch boat and the harbor dock facilities. Every night when they came in there was always a crowd waiting on the dock to see how they’d made out, and the operation itself had become one of the main subjects of gossip in the little town, with Evelyn and her rich social friends asking Grant all about it. On the second day when they came in with the second two free cannon, the harbor Government man and the local chief customs officer were both already waiting on them. The cannon as they brought them in were kept in a harbor warehouse building the customs man loaned to Bonham, and since they didn’t need Ali, Bonham had him in there all day working at cleaning them with acid. It was soon established that they were French by the historian who came up from Kingston, probably from the late eighteenth-century fleet of de Grasse when he was maneuvering against the English in the Caribbean around the time of Yorktown, but nobody could find in the archives any mention of any ship French or otherwise which had sunk or been sunk anywhere near this position. All the local papers from the nearby towns wrote it up, and the Gleaner sent a photographer and reporter up from Kingston to take pictures and do a story. And of course they all made a big thing of Ron Grant, the famous American playwright, who was Bonham’s partner and fellow diver in the project. Bonham of course gloated over the publicity. Bonham was even in favor of getting in touch with Time and Life, and over Grant’s feebly expressed protest telephoned both offices in Kingston, but neither wanted to do anything with it.
The work itself was not so terribly hard, and indeed Bonham insisted that it not be made so. In this kind of deep multiple diving, nothing was more dangerous or could bring on the bends quicker than overexertion deep underwater. He kept insisting and warning Grant every day about this, until Grant who was already scared became every day more scared.
In spite of that, the actual work down below was almost boring. In addition to the large and small crowbars he also had brought along short-handled sledge hammers and cold chisels. These were good for working close against the cannon’s cascabels or trunnions, but they took much longer, and mainly they worked with the large crowbars, beating them with the sledges and hacking away, then trying to prise. More than anything it made Grant think of how he had once helped his father break up part of their old concrete driveway. The difference here was that when you tried to prise, without any gravity to give you leverage, you often moved yourself more than the dead coral. It was often ludicrous.
Perhaps the worst thing was the sand. They dismounted and carefully cleaned their four regulators every night on the way in because of the sand. On some of the attached cannon the sand was very shallow but on others it was deeper and on these it gave a lot of trouble. Even kicking with your flippers while on the bottom could raise a cloud of it. Every movement had to be delicate and very slow. Sometimes when too great a cloud of it got raised they had to wait a few minutes for it to settle to see anything at all. It settled very slowly. Usually, after the first few minutes of the First Dive, there was always a cloud of sand to work in. About the only way to move the deeper sand was to carefully scoop it away with both hands, piling it up a few inches from the cannon. Whenever this was done it was necessary to go away to another one for twenty minutes and come back, or else wait till the next dive. It could be infuriating, a great cloud of it could suddenly raise at any moment for no apparent reason.
But the thing that disturbed Grant the most was the long wait between the two dives. In the water, and on the bottom, he was calm and collected, though alert and somewhat nervous. But once back in the boat after the longer morning dive, with nothing to do except wait four hours, his nervousness and imagination afflicted him with all sorts of horrible propositions. And it got so, as the days passed, that he came to dread that 4-hour 4-minute wait much more than the diving itself. At least on the dives themselves he had something to do which occupied his mind. The truth was, once he was in the water he was no longer afraid; it was just all the rest of the time. And on the boat, during the long midday wait, there was nothing, nothing except to lay around and try to read.
Part of the trouble was that raising the anchor and winch line and the relowering and replacing of them properly, was such a job and required so much time that it precluded them from moving the boat during the wait. Otherwise they could have gone in to shore in the four hours. Or they could even have gone fishing. Out farther, in the deep water, they could see sport-fishing boats trolling for marlin and kingfish about two-thirds of the time. Unfortunately, they were attached to their cannon like an old-fashioned criminal attached to a ball by a chain. They would come up from the last long minutes of decompression of the first dive, get out of their gear in the water and climb aboard, and it would begin. They each ate one small ham sandwich and drank one bottle of beer immediately, and that was all, since they wanted their stomachs to be empty by the time they went back down. So they were hungry most of that time, too. But Bonham was very strict about this. A man who overexerted and vomited into his mouthpiece 120 feet down was in serious trouble, especially if he needed decompression. In addition, there were always some little dribbles of seawater getting inside your mouth and mouthpiece down there, a certain percentage of which you could not avoid swallowing, so that Grant’s stomach, anyway, was always sour from salt water.
After the first day of “multiple” dives, when he realized what it was going to be like, Grant had brought with him a good number of the new books Evelyn de Blystein had had sent down to her from home and none of which had he had much chance to look at during the past three months. But he found it hard, and increasingly harder, to concentrate on them. His mind would continually snatch him away from some book with a thought of some little mistake he had made that might have been serious if, say, he had panicked; or, of some thing that might just have happened, though it hadn’t, and hadn’t even been near. Every little headache, every little ache or pain, every little bit of gas in his gut (of which there was a lot because of the salt water he swallowed) would send him into heart-shivering spasms of panic terror, of physically debilitating fear that he had gotten the dreaded “bends.” How did he know? He had never had them. How did he know what they felt like coming on? Slowly, as the day
s passed one by one, he watched the level of his stock of courage descend almost imperceptibly, as the level of water in a bottle with a tiny hole in its bottom will descend imperceptibly, invisibly, until finally the bottle is empty.
None of any of this seemed to be the effect created upon Bonham, however. The placid big man with the stormcloud eyes seemed to be more at ease and more restful than Grant had ever seen him. He did not once, to Grant’s knowledge, crack the cover of a book—or even a magazine—the whole time they were out there. Not even when Grant offered them to him. He slept a good bit. And the rest of the time he just sat. He tried fishing a few times, with a handline, and caught nothing, as they both (who knew the terrain below them like the palms of their hands) knew he would not. But the rest of the time he just sat, while Grant read, or pretended to read. Sat, and looked off at the misty green, jungly mounds and hills rising to form the Jamaican skyline in the steamy heat and which must not have changed much since the first eyes of white men in Columbus’s crews first saw them, or at the brightly colored hotels along the beach beside the airport fading off into the harbor whose interior was invisible from here. What in the name of God did he think about? Or did he think at all? He seemed totally contented.