Navigation and visibility issues make for a full mental plate. But the diver must contend with another danger inside a wreck, this one perhaps nastier than any other. In the violence of the ship’s sinking, her ceilings and walls and floors likely vomited their guts. Once-civilized spaces are now spaghettied with electric cables, wires, bent metal rods, bedsprings, couch springs, sharpened pieces of broken equipment, chair legs, tablecloths, conduit pipes, and other now-threatening items that once conducted the ship’s unseen business. All of it dangles nakedly in the diver’s space. All of it stands ready to snag his hose or manifold or any of dozens of other bulky parts that make up the life-support components of his gear. Once tangled, the diver becomes a marionette. If he struggles, he can mummy himself in the stuff. In bad visibility, it is nearly impossible to avoid these nests; there is not an experienced wreck diver who has not become entangled—often.
A diver lost or tangled inside a shipwreck has come face-to-face with his maker. Corpses have been recovered inside wrecks—eyes and mouths agape in terror, the poor diver still lost, still blinded, still snagged, still pinned. Yet a curious truth pertains to these perils: rarely does the problem itself kill the diver. Rather, the diver’s response to the problem—his panic—likely determines whether he lives or dies.
Here is what happens to a panicked diver in trouble inside a shipwreck:
His heart and respiratory rates jump. At 200 feet, when every lungful of air requires seven times the volume as that on the surface, a panicked diver can breathe down his tanks so quickly that the needles on his gauges begin to drop into the red before his eyes. That sight further quickens his heart and breath, which in turn further reduces the time he has to solve his problems. Heavier respiration also means heavier narcosis. Narcosis amplifies panic. A vicious cycle has begun.
He responds to panic as evolution designed him to, immediately and forcefully. But in a shipwreck, where every danger is first cousin to every other, a diver’s desperation makes an open house of his bad situation. A lost diver who panics, for example, will thrash about in search of an exit. That movement will billow silt and foul the visibility, so that now he cannot see. Blinded, he searches more desperately for a way out; in that struggle, he might become entangled or collapse a heavy object dangling overhead. He breathes harder. He sees his gauges dropping further.
The diver might call for help. Sound travels well underwater, but it is directionless, so even if someone hears his cries it is doubtful they could trace them. When a man is trapped alone in a shipwreck, his brain starts to think in declaratives, not ideas. I’m gonna die! Get out! Get out! The diver tries harder. The needles dip. It is dark. It is likely the end.
In 1988, a skilled Connecticut diver named Joe Drozd signed up for an Andrea Doria trip aboard the Seeker. It would be his first journey to the great wreck, a dream come true. To ensure a safe dive, he added a third air tank—a small emergency, or “pony,” bottle—to his normal set of doubles. “Just in case,” he reasoned. Drozd and two partners penetrated the wreck through Gimbel’s Hole, a foreboding rectangle opened into the ship’s first-class section in 1981 by Peter Gimbel, heir to the Gimbel’s department store fortune. The opening is black against the dark green ocean and drops 90 feet straight down, a sight that chills the blood of even the most experienced divers.
Shortly after entering the wreck, at a depth of about 200 feet, one of the valve-regulator assemblies on Drozd’s back became tangled in a ninety-foot yellow polypropylene line left as a landmark by another diver. Under perfect conditions, a diver would ask his partners to untangle him. At 200 feet, narcosis humming, conditions are never perfect. Drozd reached for his knife; he would simply cut himself free. But instead of using his right hand, as was his custom, he grabbed the knife with his left hand, likely because the entanglement was behind him on that side. The awkward reach to cut the tangled line put pressure against the exhaust valve on his dry suit, a result he likely never expected. As Drozd cut at the snagged line, the air in his suit began to vent, making him negatively buoyant. He began to sink. Depth brings harder narcosis. His narcosis began to pound.
Dropping, Drozd hurtled toward his mental meniscus. Every time he reached to cut the tangled line, he vented more air from his suit and got heavier. His narcosis built, the kind that blocks good ideas, such as changing knife hands. His breathing quickened. His narcosis gained. In the growing urgency of his situation, Drozd breathed dry the first of his two double tanks before switching, mistakenly, to his pony bottle instead of his second full-sized tank.
A few minutes later, Drozd freed himself from the tangled line. At around this time, his two partners realized he was in trouble and swam toward him to help. With narcosis raging, his dry suit constricting tighter, his body sinking farther, he breathed dry what he believed to be his second primary tank.
His two partners reached him. One grabbed Drozd and tried to swim him up and out of the Doria, but Drozd was leaden from losing the air in his dry suit. The divers would have to do something to keep Drozd from sinking farther. One filled his own suit with extra air, increasing his buoyancy so that he might grab Drozd and more easily ascend with him out of the wreck. But by now, starved for breath and believing both his primary tanks to be empty, Drozd spiraled into full terror. He flailed against his helpers until the diver who had grabbed him lost his grip. That diver, now overly buoyant and without the heavy Drozd as counterbalance, rocketed out of the wreck and toward the surface of the ocean, unable in the violence of the ascent to vent his suit, which expanded, making him more buoyant with every foot he ascended into shallower, lower-pressure waters. Soon, that diver was at 100 feet and still shooting to sunshine. If he broke the surface without decompressing, he would either suffer serious central nervous system damage or die. He could do nothing to vent his suit in this explosive ascent. The anchor line was nowhere in sight. He kept rising.
Back down at the Doria, Drozd spat his regulator from his mouth, a physiological reaction in blind panic. Icy salt water choked his lungs. His gag reflexes fired. His tunnel vision narrowed to blackness. His remaining partner offered Drozd his backup regulator, but Drozd, knife still in hand, slashed wildly at the man, his mind spraying in a million directions, his narcosis pummeling. And then Drozd turned and swam down the wreck, a full tank of air on his back, no regulator in his mouth, still slashing, still cutting the ocean to shreds, and he kept swimming until he disappeared into the blackness of the wreck, and he never came out.
His second partner, also ravaged by narcosis and the terribleness of the moment, was now in danger of panicking himself. He believed both Drozd and his other partner to be dead. He checked his gauges and confirmed what he feared most: he was over his time limit and should have already started his own decompression. He began his ascent believing himself the only one of the three to survive the event.
In fact, the first diver had caught a miracle. At about 60 feet, he finally managed to vent the gas from his suit and slow his ascent. At the same time, he glimpsed the anchor line, a stripe in the ocean from God, and swam over and clutched it as if it were life itself. He survived without injury. The other diver completed his decompression and also survived, terrified but unscathed. Drozd died with a full tank of air on his back.
Not all divers succumb to panic as Drozd did. A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature.
To arrive at such a state, the diver must know the creases and folds of dread, so that when it leaps on him inside a wreck he is dealing with an old friend. The process can take years. It often requires study, discussion, practice, mentoring, contemplation, and ha
rd experience. At work, he nods when the boss reveals the latest sales figures, but he is thinking, “Whatever else is wrong inside a shipwreck, if you are breathing you are okay.” Paying bills or setting the VCR at home, he tells himself, “If you find trouble inside a wreck, slow down. Fall back. Talk yourself through it.” As he gains more experience, he will meditate upon what every great diver advises him: “Fix the first problem fully and calmly before you even think about the second problem.”
An ordinary diver will sometimes rush to extricate himself from trouble so that no other diver will witness his predicament. A disciplined diver is willing to risk such embarrassment in exchange for his life. The disciplined diver also is less susceptible to greed. He knows that divers busy grabbing are no longer focused on navigation and survival. He remembers, even under narcosis, that perhaps three-quarters of all divers who have perished on the Andrea Doria died with a bag full of prizes. He knows that it is narcosis talking when, after recovering six dishes, he sees a seventh and thinks, “I can’t live with myself if someone else gets that dish.” He pays attention when a charter captain like Danny Crowell passes around a bucketful of broken dishes and bent silverware and tells his customers, “I want you people to see this stuff. This is what a guy died for. We found it in his bag. Look real hard. Touch it. Are these pieces of shit worth your life?”
Once a diver has exited the shipwreck, he begins the journey back to the dive boat. If all has gone well, he feels exhilarated and triumphant; if he is heavily narced, he might be downright giddy. He cannot relax now. The trip to the surface is rife with its own perils, each of them capable of striking down even the best man.
Once the diver finds the anchor line, he begins his ascent. He cannot, however, simply float balloon-style up the line. If he should lose his focus during such an ascent—perhaps from seeing a shark or by daydreaming—he would find himself rising past the critical stops required for proper decompression. A good diver instead seeks a neutral buoyancy for his ascent up the anchor line. In that near-weightless state, he can propel himself upward with the gentlest pull or kick, but will never find himself free-floating past the crucial stops should he become distracted. As he ascends, he will gradually vent air from his suit and wings to retain his neutrality and prevent any sudden ascent.
Presuming that the water is calm, the ascending, decompressing diver will find himself with an hour or more of idle time at his various deco stops. At around 60 feet, the depth of his first hang, the sun likely will have reappeared and the ocean will have warmed around him. The water might be clear or murky, vacant or thick with jellyfish and other small animals. Most often it will look blue-green. In this weightless transition through worlds, free from narcosis and the storm of dangers at depth, the diver may finally allow himself to become a sightseer on his own adventure.
At the surface and now near the dive boat’s bow, the diver swims alongside or under the boat to reach a metal ladder unfolded into the water at the stern. He need only climb aboard to end his dive. In calm seas, the process is routine. In rough seas, a steel ladder becomes a wild animal.
In 2000, a diver named George Place, freshly surfaced from exploring an offshore wreck, reached for the ladder on the dive boat Eagle’s Nest. Seas raged and fog charcoaled the horizon. In the boat’s upward heave, a rung from the ladder uppercut Place’s jaw. Stunned and nearly unconscious, he lost his grip. He was cast into the current, disoriented and drifting behind the boat. Dive boats trail a “tag line” from their sterns—attached to a buoy—so that a drifting diver might grab hold and pull himself back. Place couldn’t manage to reach the line. A diver who gets behind the tag line runs a serious risk of going lost. Place got behind the line in a hurry.
A witness on board ran to alert the captain, Howard Klein. But by the time Klein reached the back of the boat, Place was out of sight; he just wasn’t there anymore. The captain could not simply cut the anchor line and give chase with the Eagle’s Nest; he still had other divers decompressing on that line. Instead, he grabbed a two-way radio, rushed into his small Zodiac chase boat, and set out to search for the lost diver. Within seconds, in the increasing violence of the seas, Klein disappeared from view, too. A minute later he radioed to Eagle’s Nest that the outboard motor on his Zodiac had failed. He was also adrift and, in the pitching waves, could see the dive boat only when the ocean’s waves crested. By that time, Place’s wife, who was a mate aboard Eagle’s Nest, issued a mayday by radio. She reached only a single fishing boat, but it was an hour away. That boat promised to try to raise a closer vessel. After that, no one could do anything but pray that Place was still conscious in the big Atlantic.
After thirty minutes, Klein coaxed the Zodiac’s motor back to life. But he had drifted too far by that time to have any hope of finding Place. He found his way back to the dive boat. A short time later, a radio call came in to Eagle’s Nest. A closer fishing boat had sighted Place—five miles from the dive boat and alive. He had been adrift for more than two hours. Klein, who now had all his divers back on his boat, retrieved Place, sobbing but healthy. After that, divers aboard the Eagle’s Nest came to believe in miracles.
Place had been ten seconds from completing a ninety-minute dive and had ended up cheek-to-cheek with death. It was another example of the truth that defines the sport of deep-wreck diving and shapes the lives of those who love it.
On a deep-wreck dive, no one is ever truly safe until he is back on the deck of the dive boat.
CHAPTER THREE
A SHAPE OF POWER
THE SEEKER had twenty minutes behind her when the last embers of Jersey Shore nightlife snuffed out under the gray-black horizon. The boat’s external running lights, configured white on the mast, red on the port side, green on the starboard to indicate a “motor vessel under way,” now stood as the only evidence of fourteen men who had decided to take a chance.
Nagle and Chatterton set the autopilot in the wheelhouse. It would be six hours until the Seeker hit the numbers. In the salon below, the paying customers worked themselves out of their clothes and onto the wooden, infirmary-style bunks that lined the outer edges of the compartment. Most had no trouble securing their lucky spot. Each man spread blankets or sleeping bags across his bunk; a passenger did not dare lay naked skin against the gymnasium-issue blue pads that passed for mattresses on the Seeker. There are romantic smells at sea, but a cushion kippered by years of sweaty, salt-watered divers is not among them.
On this night, while Nagle and Chatterton worked in the wheelhouse, the remaining divers slept in the salon. They were:
— Dick Shoe, forty-nine, Palmyra, New Jersey; administrator, Princeton University plasma physics lab
— Kip Cochran, forty-one, Trenton, New Jersey; policeman
— Steve Feldman, forty-four, Manhattan; stagehand, CBS
— Paul Skibinski, thirty-seven, Piscataway, New Jersey; excavating contractor
— Ron Ostrowski, age unknown, background unknown
— Doug Roberts, twenty-nine, Monmouth Beach, New Jersey; owner, cosmetics business
— Lloyd Garrick, thirty-five, Yardley, Pennsylvania; research chemist
— Kevin Brennan, thirty, Bradley Beach, New Jersey; commercial diver
— John Hildemann, twenty-seven, Cranford, New Jersey; owner of excavation company
— John Yurga, twenty-seven, Garfield, New Jersey; dive-shop manager
— Mark McMahon, thirty-five, Florham Park, New Jersey; commercial diver
— Steve Lombardo, forty-one, Staten Island, New York; physician
Some of these men had arrived in pairs and planned to dive together: Shoe with Cochran, Feldman with Skibinski, Ostrowski with Roberts, McMahon with Yurga. The others preferred to dive solo, many for safety reasons—a partner can’t panic and kill you, they reasoned, if he’s not your partner. Most knew one another from previous deep-wreck trips, or at least by reputation. All had searched for “mystery numbers” before. Collectively, they had discovered several garbage barges and
rock piles for these efforts.
The Atlantic was kind to the Seeker through the evening. Around sunrise, loran readouts showed the boat just a half mile from the target site. Nagle cut the autopilot, throttled back the twin diesels, and swiveled to face the bottom finder. In the salon, divers began to awaken, the new quiet of calmed engines an alarm clock to eager men.
Nagle nudged the boat closer to the numbers. A shape appeared on the bottom finder’s electronic display.
“There’s something on the numbers,” Nagle called to Chatterton.
“Yeah, I see it,” Chatterton replied. “It looks like a ship on its side.”
“Christ, John, it also looks like it’s deeper than two hundred feet. I’m going to make a couple passes over it to get a better look.”
Nagle cut the Seeker’s wheel hard to port, throwing her stern starboard and pulling the boat around for a second pass, then a third and a fourth—“mowing the lawn,” as they call it. All the while, he watched the mass at the ocean bottom morph in and out of the bottom finder’s screen. On some passes, the instrument showed the object at 230 feet; on one it read 260 feet. Brennan, Yurga, and Hildemann climbed the ladder and entered the wheelhouse.
“What do we got, Bill?” Yurga asked.
“This is deeper than I was expecting,” Nagle told them. “And whatever it is, it’s lying low—there’s not a lot of relief. I think it might be a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot dive.”
There were no experienced 230-foot divers in 1991. Even those brave enough to test the Andrea Doria almost never went to her bottom, at 250 feet; most stayed near that wreck’s high point, around 180 feet, with the very best divers testing 230 feet perhaps once or twice a year. But Nagle kept saying that the mass on his bottom finder looked to be at 230 feet. Worse, it seemed to rise only about 30 feet off the sand.
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