Now there was a corpse on the bottom of a very dangerous wreck. Someone had to go get him. That was Nagle’s job; ordinarily, he or one of his assistants—his mates—would make the recovery dive. But they had just completed their own dives and could not return to the water until their bodies had off-gassed built-up nitrogen, a process that would take hours.
Chatterton volunteered. A diver unfamiliar with the bottom could easily get lost and never find his way back to the Seeker, so Nagle asked if Chatterton knew the mangled topography of the wreck. “Not really, but I’ll go anyway,” Chatterton said. That answer spoke to Nagle.
Chatterton reached the bottom of the Texas Tower and began his reconnaissance. Soon enough, he found the diver—“Doesn’t look too bad for a dead guy,” Chatterton thought. He tied the man’s tanks to a two-hundred-pound lift bag and inflated the bag with air until the body began its ascent to the surface. For good measure, he tied a spool of line from the corpse to the shipwreck; that way, if anything went wrong, there would still be a trail to the body.
Something went wrong. During ascent, the rapidly decreasing water pressure caused the air in the diver’s dry suit to expand, turning him into a deceased version of the Michelin Man. As the body surfaced, a giant wave collapsed the lift bag, and the man sank back to the bottom. With nightfall approaching, it would be unsafe for anyone to dive again.
Chatterton volunteered to retrieve the body in the morning. That really spoke to Nagle. The Seeker stayed overnight; everyone ate Doritos for breakfast. Chatterton found the body again. This time, the poor guy didn’t look so good. His eyelids had been eaten away and his teeth showed; he’d become what divers call a “creature feature.” Nagle reeled in the body when it surfaced. “You did a good job,” he told Chatterton. “You are a good diver.” After that, Nagle and Chatterton were friends.
Before long, Chatterton was crewing on the Seeker. In 1987, he made his first trip to the Doria. He swam around but did nothing more. The wreck was so dangerous, so terrifying, that he vowed never to return. On the same trip, Nagle recovered a two-hundred-pound wooden sign that read KEEP CLEAR OF PROPELLERS, the most beautiful sign Chatterton had ever seen. He shook Nagle’s hand, thanked him for the opportunity, and said, “Bill, I’ve made my trip to the mountaintop. Once is enough.” Nagle, however, knew better.
Chatterton couldn’t forget the wreck. In contemplating the Doria’s tilted grandness, he could glimpse shadows of the secrets great shipwrecks offer those who see with their minds. He returned. The Doria’s hugeness overwhelmed him; a diver could spend a decade of twenty-five-minute dives on this wreck and never see it all. Again he returned, and marveled at the feeling of being inside places that didn’t used to be places, of becoming present in this vast repository of tiny things that had meant something to people. Soon, the Doria ran through his bloodstream full-time. Raking leaves or watching a Giants football game or walking the grocery’s dairy aisle, Chatterton stitched together his experiences on the Doria, and gradually his eyes adjusted, until the quilt of his separate experiences aboard that shipwreck formed a single picture in his mind. “This is why I dive,” he told Nagle. “This is what I want diving to be.”
Soon Chatterton was going places and finding things on the Doria no one had before, not even Nagle and his cohorts in the glory days. His reputation wafted across the bows of dive boats along the eastern seaboard. And he continued to absorb Nagle. He marveled at Nagle’s instinct to see the big picture, to envision a ship as it had been in its proudest moment, to study deck plans and captain’s logs, to put himself into the mind of the ship’s navigator, to construct a dive plan that envisioned the whole ship when only a tiny portion of it was currently knowable. He was astounded to bring up meaningless rusty artifacts from hidden corners on the Doria only to have Nagle examine them and divine exactly where he’d been.
Most of all, he and Nagle shared a philosophy. To them, diving was about exploration, about aiming for the everywhere of the unknown. There were a lot of impossible places to go when the world was as big as Chatterton and Nagle saw it, but for God’s sake you had to try. You were required to try. What were you doing alive, these men thought, if you didn’t go and try?
The day after Skeets revealed his secret, Nagle asked Chatterton to meet him at the Seeker. The men walked upstairs to the boat’s wheelhouse, where Nagle locked the door and related Skeets’s story to his friend. What could be at the bottom of that site? The men dealt out the possibilities like solitaire cards. Could it be a warship or a war-era merchant vessel? Almost impossible—military records indicated little action in the area during either world war. Could it be the Corvallis, a ship reputedly sunk by Hollywood for a 1930s disaster flick? Faintly possible: it was thought that the filmmakers had bothered to note only the most general location for their shoot, an area that included Skeets’s fishing site but also several hundred other square miles of ocean. How about a subway car? Also vaguely possible—New Jersey sunk them purposely to promote marine life, but those locations had been reliably recorded.
Less romantic scenarios seemed more probable. It might be a pile of rocks. It might be a worthless pipe barge. Most likely it was an old garbage barge; in years past, municipalities had stuffed geriatric schooners with trash, cut their masts, and sunk them at no place in particular. Nagle and Chatterton had been to plenty of those.
But maybe, just maybe, it was something big.
Nagle proposed a plan. He and Chatterton would organize a trip to the site. Each would recruit six top divers, guys who could survive a 200-foot plunge into the unknown. It would not be an easy journey—six hours each way in the chill September air. Each diver would pay one hundred dollars to cover fuel and expenses. There would be no promises. Other diving captains offered hush-hush trips to “virgin” sites, but these were always scams; you’d get down there and find a recent diver’s orange crowbar on some junky fishing boat, and the captain would actually look you in the eye and say, “Gee, fellas, I had no idea.” Not Nagle and Chatterton. They would pitch their trip the way they felt it: It’s probably nothing, men, but we have to try.
The trip was booked for Labor Day 1991. Nagle and Chatterton called every good diver they knew. Nearly all of them refused the invitation. Even some of the greats, guys who were supposed to be excited by maybes, turned down the trip. “I’d rather spend my money on a sure thing instead of some wacky pie in the sky” was the standard regret. One diver, Brian Skerry, told Chatterton, “You know what, man? I was born too late. All the really cool wrecks have been found. The age of exploration for shipwrecks is over.” That’s how it was in 1991. Guys wanted guarantees. Nagle and Chatterton kept calling.
Finally, their lists exhausted, they found their twelfth diver. Chatterton was incensed. “Nobody wants to find anything new! What the hell’s going on, Bill?” Nagle, normally bombastic in the face of caution, looked down at the red X’s on his list of divers and said to Chatterton, almost in whisper, “These guys don’t have the heart for wreck diving, John. These guys just don’t get it.”
Just after midnight on September 2, 1991, while the rest of Brielle slept, Nagle, Chatterton, and the twelve divers who had signed up for the exploratory trip stuffed the Seeker with tanks, masks, regulators, knives, flashlights, and bundles of other gear. They faced a six-hour ride to Skeets’s numbers. Some grabbed a bunk and went to sleep. Others hung around the changing table, catching up on one another’s lives and laughing about the folly of paying to chase a pile of rocks. At one A.M., Nagle checked the sign-in sheet against the passengers on board. “Get all gear secured,” he called to those still awake, then walked up the stairs and into the wheelhouse. Chatterton gave the signal to switch from shore power to generator. The lights in the boat’s salon flickered, then gave way to powerful quartzes that bathed the back deck in white. One of the divers pulled the power leads and water feed from the dock and disconnected the shore-based phone line. Nagle lit the twin diesel engines, which danced to protest—cough-grumble-POP-chum .
. . cough-grumble-POP-POP-POP-rrmmm—the disruption of their slumber.
Chatterton pulled in lines. “Bow line off! Stern line hold . . . hold . . . hold . . . okay!” he called to Nagle, then slung the heavy ropes onto the dock. Now the Seeker was ready. Nagle switched his wheelhouse lights to dim red, checked his VHF radio, single sideband radio, Loran-C, and radar, and engaged the engines one at a time, the choice method for coaxing a lady from her dock. A few minutes later, the Seeker was past the railroad drawbridge and nose up into the Atlantic. Most likely these men were chasing a garbage barge. Most likely the age of shipwreck exploration had passed. But as the Brielle dock faded behind them, Chatterton and Nagle saw possibilities on the horizon, and for that moment the world was perfect and right.
CHAPTER TWO
ZERO VIZ
DEEP-SHIPWRECK DIVING is among the world’s most dangerous sports. Few other endeavors exist in which nature, biology, equipment, instinct, and object conspire—without warning and from all directions—to so completely attack a man’s mind and disassemble his spirit. Many dead divers have been found inside shipwrecks with more than enough air remaining to have made it to the surface. It is not that they chose to die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live.
The sport bears only passing resemblance to its cousin, the resort-area, single-tank scuba familiar to the general public. Safety statistics are difficult to divine. Deep-wreck divers make up a minuscule percentage of the world’s twenty million or so certified scuba divers. Their accidents barely blip on the excellent safety record of a sport in which nearly all the participants stay in shallow tropical waters, depend on partners for safety, and desire little more than lovely scenery. In the United States, of the ten million certified scuba divers, it is likely that only a few hundred dive deep for shipwrecks. To those few, it is not a matter of if they will taste death, only of whether they’ll swallow. If a deep-wreck diver stays in the sport long enough, he will likely either come close to dying, watch another diver die, or die himself. There are times in this sport when it is difficult to say which of the three outcomes is worst.
Deep-shipwreck diving is unusual in another respect. Because it confronts man’s most primordial instincts—to breathe; to see; to flee from danger—the layperson need not strap on the equipment in order to appreciate the peril. He need only contemplate the sport’s dangers. They are his dangers, too, and in learning about them he will begin to comprehend the deep-wreck diver and feel his stories. He will understand why capable men give up underwater. He will know why most people in the world would never consider chasing a fisherman’s numbers sixty miles out and 200 feet down into the middle of nowhere.
A deep-shipwreck diver breathing air confronts two primary dangers. First, at depths greater than about 66 feet, his judgment and motor skills can become impaired, a condition known as nitrogen narcosis. As he descends farther, the effects of narcosis become more pronounced. Beyond 100 feet, where some of the best shipwrecks lie, he can be significantly handicapped, yet he must perform feats and make decisions upon which his life depends.
Second, should something go wrong, he cannot simply swim to the surface. A diver who has spent time in deep water must ascend gradually, stopping at predetermined intervals to allow his body to readjust to decreasing pressures. He must do this even if he believes himself to be suffocating or choking or dying. Panicked divers who bolt for “sunshine and seagulls” risk a case of decompression sickness, or the “bends.” Severe bends can permanently handicap, paralyze, or kill a person. Divers who have witnessed the writhing, screaming agony of a bad bends hit swear that they would rather suffocate and drown on the bottom than surface after a long, deep dive without decompressing.
Nearly all the myriad other dangers lying in wait for the deep-wreck diver involve narcosis or decompression sickness. Both narcosis and decompression sickness are conditions born of pressure. At sea level, atmospheric pressure is roughly equal to the pressure inside the human body. Throwing Frisbees on the beach or riding a bus, we are said to be at one atmosphere of pressure, or 14.7 pounds per square inch. Life feels normal at one atmosphere. The air we breathe at sea level, which is composed of 21 percent oxygen and 79 percent nitrogen, also enters our lungs at a pressure of one atmosphere. The oxygen nourishes our blood and tissue. The nitrogen is inert and doesn’t do much of anything.
Things change in water. Every 33 feet below the surface, the pressure increases by one atmosphere. A scuba diver chasing seahorses at 33 feet, therefore, is said to be at two atmospheres, or twice the pressure he experienced at the surface. He barely feels it. But something is going on in the air he breathes from his tanks. While that air is still made up of oxygen and nitrogen molecules in that 21:79 ratio, there are now twice as many of each of those molecules in every lungful of air he breathes. At three atmospheres, there are three times as many oxygen and nitrogen molecules in his lungful of air, and so on.
As the diver breathes underwater, the extra nitrogen molecules being taken into his lungs don’t just sit around as they do in a person on land. Instead, they dissolve into the bloodstream and travel into his tissues—his flesh, joints, brain, spine, everywhere. The longer and deeper a diver stays underwater, the more nitrogen accumulates in those tissues.
At a depth of around three atmospheres, or 66 feet, that accumulated nitrogen begins to have a narcotizing effect on most divers. That is nitrogen narcosis. Some compare the effects of narcosis to alcohol intoxication, others to the twilight of a waking anesthetic, still others to the fog of ether or laughing gas. Symptoms are relatively mild at shallower depths—judgment skews, motor skills dull, manual dexterity suffers, peripheral vision narrows, emotions heighten. As a diver descends farther, the effects intensify. At 130 feet, or about five atmospheres, most divers will be impaired. Some become all thumbs and struggle to complete simple tasks, such as tying a knot; others turn “dumb with the depth” and must talk themselves into believing what they already know. As a diver descends even deeper, say to 170 or 180 feet, he might start to hallucinate, until lobsters begin beckoning him by name or offering him unsound advice. Sometimes divers realize that they are “narced” by the sounds they hear. Many experience the “jungle drums,” the deafening sound of one’s pulse in one’s own ears; or they might simply hear a hum, like a buzzing alarm clock lost under a pillow. Below 200 feet, narcosis can supercharge the normal processing of fear, joy, sorrow, excitement, and disappointment. Tiny problems—a missing knife, a bit of silt—can be perceived as unfolding catastrophes and snowball into panic. Serious problems—a depleting air tank or the loss of the anchor line—can appear as niggling annoyances. In an environment as unforgiving as a deep shipwreck, the short-circuiting of judgment, emotion, and motor skills complicates everything.
The nitrogen in the diver’s breathing gas poses another problem. It accumulates in his tissues with both depth and time. This is generally not a problem on shallow dives of short duration. On deeper, longer dives, during the ascent the accumulated nitrogen is released from his tissues back into his bloodstream. The rate at which this happens determines whether a diver will suffer from the bends, or even if he’ll die.
If the diver ascends slowly, atmospheric pressure decreases gradually and the accumulated nitrogen passes out of his body tissues in the form of microscopic bubbles. The same effect can be observed by slowly opening a soda bottle; if you gradually reduce the pressure inside the bottle, the bubbles stay small. The size of the bubbles is key. Only when nitrogen bubbles are microscopically small inside a diver can they travel efficiently through his bloodstream and back to his lungs, where they can be discharged through normal respiration. This is what a diver wants.
When a diver ascends quickly, however, the surrounding atmospheric pressure drops rapidly. That causes the accumulated nitrogen in his tissues to form massive quantities of large bubbles, just as when you rapidly unscrew the soda bottle’s cap. Large nitrogen bubbles are the mortal enemy of the deep diver. When large bubble
s form outside the bloodstream, they can press on tissues, blocking circulation. If this happens in the joints or near the nerves, the result will be agonizing pain that might last weeks or even a lifetime. If it happens in the spinal cord or the brain, the blockage can cause paralysis or a fatal stroke. If too many large bubbles make their way back to the lungs, the lungs will shut down, a condition called the “chokes,” which can stop a diver’s breathing. If too many large bubbles find their way into the arterial system, the diver can suffer a pulmonary barotrauma, or gas embolism, a condition that can cause a stroke, blindness, unconsciousness, or death.
To guarantee that he ascends slowly, keeping the nitrogen bubbles microscopically small, the deep diver deliberately pauses at predetermined depths to allow these bubbles to work their way out of his system. These pauses are known as “decompression stops” and have been optimally calculated by scientists. A diver breathing air who spends twenty-five minutes at a depth of 200 feet might spend an hour working his way back to the surface, stopping first at a depth of 40 feet and waiting for five minutes, then ascending slowly and stopping again for ten minutes at 30 feet, fourteen minutes at 20 feet, and for twenty-five minutes at 10 feet. The amount of time he spends decompressing is a function of depth and time—longer dives and deeper depths mean more decompression. That is one reason why shipwreck divers don’t spend hours working underwater; the decompression time for a two-hour dive might be as long as nine hours.
Narcosis and decompression sickness are the patriarchs on the family tree of deep-wreck diving dangers. A diver does not dare board a charter boat bound for a deep wreck unless he honors these perils.
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