by Bob Morris
As Teddy stands and begins backing his way toward the transom, Boggy pops out of the water. A couple of strokes and he’s at the boat. He climbs aboard, barely winded.
“Is nice down there,” Boggy says.
“How deep do you figure you went?” asks Teddy.
“To the bottom.”
Teddy seems skeptical.
“Oh, really now?” he says.
“Yes, there is a big coral ridge and it is shaped like …” Boggy traces it in the air.
“Sock ’Em Dog, all right,” says Teddy. “That’s one impressive display of free diving, I must say.”
Boggy shrugs off the compliment. He turns to me and says: “You will like, Zachary, there are many fish and the water it is very clear.”
“Can’t wait,” I say. “But I’ll need to get geared up first.”
Only then does Teddy seem to realize that I’m lagging way behind him.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he says. “I was operating purely on instinct, just thinking about myself. Help yourself to whatever gear you want. If you don’t mind, I’ll be waiting for you down below.”
He steps backward off the stern, surfaces briefly to let all the air out of his BCV, and then he’s gone.
It’s another ten minutes before I find gear that will fit me. Boggy sips at a bottle of water, watching me while I put everything on.
“What troubles you, Zachary?”
“Just not accustomed to diving like this, that’s all. I’m used to everyone going down together. You know, never lose sight of your buddy and all that.”
“Teddy, he started diving long ago, before there were so many rules.” “Yeah, he’s an old mossback. I guess it’s just his way,” I say. “It’ll be all right.”
I step to the transom, slip the mask over my face, stick the regulator in my mouth. Then I take a giant stride and hit the water.
21
In diving parlance, I am what is called a “slow descent.” Some people zip right to the bottom. But for me, the first 45 feet are hellish.
Maybe I should have tried Teddy’s ice treatment, but I was in too big of a hurry to catch up with him. I swallow and gulp, pinch my nose and blow, trying to equalize the pressure against my eardrums. It’s painful, but after I get over the hump, everything’s good.
It takes me a couple of minutes to level off at about sixty feet. I check my air—just under 3,000 psi. Meaning, I didn’t consume that much on the way down.
The visibility is good, 150 feet or so. Schools of reef fish swim all about—blue tangs and parrot fish, wrasses and snapper.
But there’s no sign of Teddy Schwartz.
While I can’t make out anything even vaguely resembling a Labrador’s head, I spot the seamount and start swimming for it. It would be impossible to miss, actually, thrusting upward from the murky depths to within twenty feet or so of the surface, like some crazy underwater skyscraper. Pity any ship that collided with it.
I fin along, getting into the scuba groove. Breathe in, breathe out. Relax, relax. It’s like yoga and flying all at once, the closest I’ll ever come to being an astronaut at zero gravity.
The relaxing part is important. The more relaxed you are, the less air you use, the longer you can stay down. And I’d like to stretch out this dive as long as I possibly can. Partly because it’s plenty beautiful down here and I want to see everything there is to see. But partly, too, because I want to look good in front of Teddy Schwartz.
Scuba diving isn’t supposed to be a competitive sport. Still, there are all sorts of ways that divers take measure of each other.
For some, it’s the gear—who has the most technologically advanced dive computer, the newest state-of-the-art fins. For others it’s a dickson-the-table, depth thing. You did 140 feet at that blue hole off Andros? Well, at Cozumel, we shot the tubes at Maracaibo Reef down to 152.
Just a lot of swagger and macho bullshit. Because the real yardstick is air consumption. The slower you are to drain your tank, then the greater your cred as a diver. It means you move through the water with efficiency, are at ease with your surroundings. The coolest divers don’t suck much air.
The equation is stacked against big guys like me who just naturally need more air to keep us going. Then again, I’ve been diving with hundred-pounders who were in constant motion, flapping their arms and legs and getting all excited. Their tanks were empty before they knew it.
Experience levels the playing field. The more you dive, the more comfortable you feel pretending to be a fish. Bottom line—when your tank hits 500 psi and you have to go sit on the boat while everyone else enjoys another ten minutes of bottom time, then that definitely places you on a lower rung of the scuba hierarchy.
Breathe in, breathe out. Relax, relax …
As I near the seamount, I pick out scatterings of ship’s timber on the sandy bottom, most of it encrusted with coral and anemones. Part of the Victory, I assume. I hang in the water and turn slowly, looking in all directions. Still no sign of Teddy Schwartz.
I can no longer see the hull of Miss Peg, but I’ve got a pretty good idea of her general vicinity perpendicular to the seamount.
I check my air—2,500 psi. I’ve barely dented the tank. Yep, Zack, you’re one cool diver guy.
I start swimming to my left, the shortest route for getting to the other side of the seamount. I figure that’s where Teddy must be. I keep close to the coral wall, stopping occasionally to peek under a crevice or to watch tiny fish—redlip blennies, I think they are—poke their heads out of hidey-holes.
As I move around the far side of the seamount, the bottom begins to drop off and I can make out another scattering of timber on the seafloor, maybe 120 feet below.
I’m not familiar with the story of the Victory, don’t know how many aboard her perished. I can only imagine the sheer and utter horror of chugging along on a ship in the night—the night, it’s always the night—and then comes the sudden tumult, the awful noise, the impossibility of escape.
I pause a moment, pay tribute to those souls now resting in the deep.
Just ahead of me there’s an overhang in the seamount. I move past it, peer underneath at the lip of a shallow cavern. And there, flat against the sand, lies what’s left of Victory’s paddle wheel—a half-circle skeleton, spokes radiating from a rusted iron hub.
The water is murkier here, as if there has been a recent commotion. I see movement near the remains of the paddle wheel—a figure swimming toward me. It’s Teddy.
When he’s just a few feet away, I give him the OK sign, meaning: Everything’s fine with me. How about you? He returns the OK.
I swim past him, heading toward the paddle wheel. The rubble around it looks ripe for exploration.
But there’s a tug on my fin. Teddy stops me. He signals for me to follow him around the seamount.
We angle upward, past purple gorgonians and bucket sponges. Nothing quite nearly as interesting as the wreck of the Victory, but Teddy’s the tour guide. I’m just tagging along.
Suddenly, Teddy stops. He rolls over, looking up at the surface. I look up, too, glimpsing the silvery trail of a boat, a big one, as it churns past the far side of the seamount.
Teddy turns to me. He makes a hatchet-chop signal: Back to Miss Peg.
Then he’s off, finning like a madman. It’s everything I can do to keep up with him.
We make a slow ascent on our way back until we come to Miss Peg’s anchor line. At about 30 feet, I grab hold of the line to make my safety stop. I only need a few minutes to decompress since I didn’t have much bottom time.
I check my air gauge—2,000 psi. Hell, I was just barely getting started. Wonder what made Teddy want to head back?
That’s when I realize that he hasn’t stopped. He’s heading straight for the surface. These crusty, old divers. They just don’t play by the rules. The bends be damned …
I look up the length of the anchor line. I see the hull of Miss Peg with its blue antifouling paint.
I see s
omething else, too.
The other boat, its red hull sitting right alongside Miss Peg.
22
By the time I surface, Teddy has already stripped off his gear and is talking to a tall, bearded man who stands on the other boat.
The other boat’s engine is running. I can’t hear over it, but I can tell that “talking” does not fully describe what Teddy is doing. He’s in the other guy’s face. At least, as much as he can be in the other guy’s face considering the two of them are on separate boats with the gunwales between them. Which is probably a good thing. Because it looks as if Teddy is ready to leap out and grab the tall, bearded man by the throat.
The other vessel is what we in Florida call a “go-fast” boat—sleek, powered to the hilt, and the favored craft of drug smugglers. The U.S. Coast Guard uses the same kind of boat to chase the bad guys, only the coast guard calls it a DPB, a deployable pursuit boat.
Whatever the name, it flat-out hauls ass. This one looks like a fortyeight-footer. There’s a second man on it, sitting at the wheel. He’s young, in his twenties, olive skinned with black wraparound sunglasses.
It’s not until I climb aboard Miss Peg that I notice the official seal of Bermuda emblazoned on the side of the other boat, white and green with a red lion in the middle.
And I hear Teddy shouting: “This is harassment, you son of a bitch, and I’m tired of it!”
Boggy takes hold of my tank and helps me slip out of my vest.
“What’s going on?” I ask him.
“Government man,” says Boggy. “He wants to search Teddy’s boat.”
The other boat rides high in the water so it gives the tall, bearded man the advantage of looking down on Teddy. He stands with his arms folded across his chest, wire-rimmed glasses low on his nose. He looks like a professor, patient and unruffled as Teddy hurls invective after invective at him.
When Teddy finally stops, the bearded man puts up a hand, trying to calm him down.
“Sir Teddy, please,” he says, “I apologize for any trouble that this might cause you. It is not my intent to harass, merely to carry out the law. And the law gives me full authority to board any vessel that I suspect may be in violation of the Salvage Act.”
“I told you, goddammit, I’m not in violation of anything!”
“Then you shouldn’t have a problem with me carrying out this inspection.”
“It’s an insult. I intend to file a formal complaint with the minister’s office.”
“That is your right,” says the bearded man. “Still, I will ask one more time for permission to come aboard. And if you do not comply, then I will impound this vessel.”
Teddy fumes, but he stops arguing. He steps away from the gunwale.
The bearded man grabs a line from his boat and ties it off on Miss Peg’s stern cleat. The young guy behind the wheel shuts down the engine and fastens a line from the bow. Both of them wear navy blue shorts, light blue shirts, and navy blue caps that bear the seal of Bermuda.
The bearded man hops aboard Miss Peg.
“Again, Sir Teddy, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Just hurry up with it,” says Teddy.
It only takes a few minutes for the bearded man to search all the compartments, deckside first, then in the cabin. When he’s done, he walks up to me.
“You were diving as well?” he asks.
“I was.”
“Then I need to take a look at your vest.”
“And I need to know who you are.”
The bearded man looks briefly startled, but he recovers with a smile.
“Oh, my apologies,” he says, sticking out a hand. “Dr. Michael Frazer, with the Ministry of Environment. I’m curator of wrecks.”
“Curse of the wrecks is more like it,” says Teddy. “A goddamn plague on us all.”
Frazer ignores him, shaking his head as if to say he’s grown accustomed to being cussed and it doesn’t really bother him.
“Curator of wrecks?” I say. “Interesting title.”
Frazer shrugs.
“And an interesting job to go with it,” he says. “But you know that old Scottish curse.”
“May you live in interesting times?”
“That’s it.” Frazer smiles. “And well applied to what I do.”
He points to my BCV.
“May I?”
“Knock yourself out.”
He goes through all the pockets.
“Thank you,” he says when he’s done.
He steps toward the bench where Teddy’s vest sits.
“May I, Sir Teddy?”
“What is this, some bloody child’s game? Mother, may I?” Teddy says it with a sneer. “Just finish up with it, will you?”
Frazer goes through Teddy’s vest, finds nothing. Sitting next to it on the bench is Teddy’s dive bag.
“That your dive bag?” asks Frazer.
“You saw me climb out of the water with it, didn’t you? And you saw me put it down. Yes, it’s my dive bag.”
“Then I’d like to have a look in it, too.”
“You’ve arse-ended everything else on my boat,” says Teddy. “Might as well stick your hands in there, too.”
Frazer picks up the dive bag. He unzips it, removes the ice pick and the Ping-Pong paddle. He casts a suspicious look at Teddy.
“What?” says Teddy. “There a law saying I can’t carry the tools of my trade?”
“You know the law, Sir Teddy. No disturbance of an archaeological site without proper permit.”
“Only disturbance here is you.”
Frazer lets it roll. He turns the dive bag inside out. There’s nothing else in it. He puts it back on the bench.
“Satisfied?” says Teddy.
“Yes, thank you,” says Frazer. “We’ll be on our way.”
“Damn right you will,” says Teddy.
Frazer hops aboard his boat and casts off the lines. The young man takes the wheel and fires the engine.
The boat moves slowly away. When it’s at a distance where its wake won’t rock us, the boat throttles up with a loud va-room and hits its planing speed.
Teddy watches the boat until it becomes just a speck on the water.
“Let’s haul anchor,” he says. “We’re heading in.”
23
By the time we return to shore and load into his car for the drive back to Cutfoot Estate, Teddy Schwartz seems to have shaken his sour mood.
I ride shotgun. Boggy takes the backseat. And as we bump along, the conversation soon turns to Michael Frazer’s surprise inspection of Miss Peg.
“Ah, the bastard’s just doing his job, I suppose,” says Teddy. “Still, I don’t see why the government has to interfere with tradition.”
“The salvaging tradition, you mean?”
“That exactly,” says Teddy. “Generations of Bermudians have been going out in these waters to find what they can find. There’s hardly an old-time family here on the Rock doesn’t have a little trinket of some sort that was plucked from the sea.”
“It’s like having your own personal treasure chest out there, huh?”
“Ha!” snorts Teddy. “That’s what the world would like to believe, anyway. That we treasure salvors just went out for a nice swim and came back rich men.”
“Didn’t work like that, huh?”
“No, the way it worked, you invested lots of time, lots of money, risked your life, and often for naught,” says Teddy.
“You’ve done pretty well by it though.”
“Ah, technology lent me a hand. I was lucky enough to be a young man with his eye on salvaging when scuba first came along. Doesn’t mean I was any brighter than the rest.”
“Come on,” I say. “Something tells me that even if scuba hadn’t come along you would have still found a way to do what you were obviously meant to do.”
Teddy smiles.
“Yeah, you’re right about that,” he says. “Five years old, I was going out in a rowboat with a bucket, the botto
m cut out and a piece of glass stuck in it so I could see what lay down there. By the time I was twelve I’d rigged up this little gasoline motor to pump air down a garden hose. Didn’t occur to me that I needed to figure a way to filter out the carbon monoxide when I did it. Almost killed myself the first time I tried it, had to work out the kinks. I was seventeen when I first strapped on a scuba tank. Seldom been far from one since.”
“And the rest, as they say, is history.”
“Yeah, I had a good run at it. But that was in the so-called good ol’ days, before the new salvage law took effect.”
“Changed things, did it?”
“In a big and everlasting way. The Historic Wrecks Act, they called it. Said all shipwrecks within three hundred miles of shore are historical sites that belong to the nation of Bermuda. Created a fancy-ass position, curator of the wrecks—that would be our man Frazer—and said anyone who discovers a site of potential salvage must register for a permit with his office. Some joke that is.”
“How’s that?”
“Care to guess how many people have registered for permits since the new laws went into effect?”
“Don’t have clue.”
Teddy holds up a hand, touches index finger to thumb.
“Exactly zero,” he says. “Nary a one.”
“The permits cost a lot of money?”
“No, man, they’re free. Don’t cost a damn thing.”
“So, I don’t get it. People have just stopped salvaging?”
Teddy cuts me a look.
“What kind of fool ya be? Of course they haven’t stopped. Salvaging goes on like it always did. Only these days when folks go out there to look for something they just don’t find it. You know what I mean?”
“They salvage on the sly.”
Teddy nods.
“Who’s to blame them? The law says the government retains ownership to anything they find.”
“And doesn’t have to pay them for it?”
“Oh, the law provides for just compensation,” says Teddy. “But it’s the government that gets to decide the compensation. And believe me, it’s nowhere near just. That’s why, people who salvage nowadays, when they find something of value, they sell it on the black market to some rich collector who secrets it away for his enjoyment and his alone. The public doesn’t hear about it. And worse, the public doesn’t get to share in the history of what was found. All the Historic Wrecks Act did was make sure people would never get a chance to see historic marine finds again.”