Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team

by Daniel Lenihan

  As insurance against bends, we had a ton of oxygen available, literally. Before leaving Santa Fe, I called Kent Hiner, the Holmes and Narver manager, and told him I wanted a dozen large bottles of industrial oxygen shipped from Kwaj. He thought that was an odd request for a diving operation that used compressed air for underwater life support but relented when I explained its role in preventing bends. Kent, knowing well the risk of being penny-wise in remote operations, ordered twenty-four bottles to make sure I hadn’t underestimated. I also instituted a policy that all divers would stay off compressed air for a twenty-four-hour period after every three days of operation. This was no game; a miscalculation meant someone might never walk again.

  The other risks at Bikini included unexploded live bombs and torpedoes, a heavy shark population on the outside reef, and some nagging doubts about radiation. The hard data we collected during our project had to dispel even the ghosts of that issue. If not, they would haunt attempts at using the ships as the focus of a tourist-based economy in a resettled Bikini.

  Slam! The peculiar little pontoon barge, with the big six-by truck on it, crunched into the beach sand. With a great straining of gears, the six-wheel-drive train tried to gain traction, but failed. A D9 Cat on the beach was chained to the truck’s towing eye, and soon a load of our equipment made its way ponderously to the field station. The same bulldozers were used to launch our dive boats through the surf.

  Finally, after a series of coordination meetings, we were doing it: diving at Bikini. Heading out to the site in a fast Boston Whaler piloted by a Bikinian, we looked incongruously overdressed in our Park Service coveralls. We wore the coveralls for protection: On the surface, they shielded us from the withering, melanomic rays of the sun that burned through lotions and flimsy T-shirts; on the seabed they provided a thick skin to take the edge off our contact with jagged metal and the stinging sea creatures that covered the wrecks.

  The photographers and television types working with us hated these dark green uniforms. They complained we looked like “underwater janitors,” and worse, they “suck up all the damn light,” making filming us a real chore. We commiserated with them on these problems as we zipped up our coveralls. Jean Lajuan, our assigned boat operator, traded banter regarding our pale complexions and the gobs of sunscreen with which we painted our faces and ears, the only exposed parts of our anatomies.

  Jean was in his twenties, another sharp contrast to we Santa Feans, all in our forties at the time, except for Jerry Livingston, who was fifty-six. We were an unusually old bunch to be doing this kind of diving so Jean missed few chances to prod us about our feebleness, pending impotence, and imminent departure from this life. We, in turn, assured him that being older and wiser had only increased our competence and sexual prowess, etc., etc. This sort of banter seems to be a required ritual among males that crosses all cultural boundaries.

  Soon, with the boat stopped and no cooling breeze, the heat caught up to us. The joking was put aside while we went through the process of getting from the wave-tossed boat into the water. It was a race against time—once we’d committed to the heavy tanks, buoyancy gear, and weight belts, the coolest and safest place to be is over the side. Overheating is nothing to take lightly before a deep dive, nor is dehydration, which we deterred by drinking deeply from the Styrofoam cups of ice water Jean passed to us frequently.

  Demeanors changed quickly and Jean listened intently to my last-minute instructions about deploying the oxygen hoses as we prepared to do a back roll into the lagoon. My eyes burned inside my face mask as perspiration poured over them. I gave a last look at my dive partners arranged around the edge of the whaler, poised to flip backward on the signal to begin the dive. “Everybody happy?” I received four sardonic “Yo’s” in return. “Vamanos,” and we were over the side, as water closed over our heads and we entered a cool, blue world. From this point all of our actions became disciplined, focused, intense. As with cave diving, the teamwork is so much of what appeals to me about diving as a member of SCRU. Communication is the key to success in a world where speech is impossible without elaborate electronic accessories.

  A good team of divers develops a body language that overcomes communication handicaps. They nurture a sixth sense about their partners that allows them to detect a problem before it grows into an incident. Larry Murphy turned quickly and came to me when I had a minor problem with my gear after entering the water. It was remarkable only because no conscious signal passed between us, just some inadvertent, slightly erratic movement on my part. We turned back to our descent and to the sharing of a mind-boggling experience.

  The Saratoga loomed beneath like the ruins of a steel city—a fortress with five-inch-diameter guns and many smaller ones bristling along the perimeter of its flight deck which was dotted with thousands of fittings that once held teak decking in place. The decking is gone now, having provided a nourishing meal for millions of marine worms, ugly little swimming intestines that eat wood. The metal on Saratoga was also being eaten by a different, slower process called corrosion.

  As we passed the command bridge, or “island,” which stood on the starboard side of this aircraft carrier, the visual impact of the site was electrifying. This had been the nerve center of the great warship. The huge elevator for passing planes up to the flight deck had collapsed; a black square hole with rounded edges outlined where it had been. We moved past that access to the ship’s bowels in favor of a blast damage hole further aft. At least three of us did—I motioned for the illustrators, Jerry Livingston and Larry Nordby, to break off and head to a vantage point for drawing as we passed the dark square hole. The resemblance of our descending team to a formation of planes was not lost on the ABC camera team that joined us from their own boat to film this first dive. The producer and cameraman, Lee McEachern and George Lang, respectively, were known to us from 1982 when they first covered our underwater work at Point Reyes and Alcatraz for the San Francisco ABC affiliate.

  Bubbles from our mouthpieces rose in long, ever-expanding, reverse cascades as we swept along the deck a short way and spiraled gently into the hole. We were intent on penetrating as far back into the hangar deck as we could get. Jim Delgado’s search in the National Archives indicated live ordnance was placed throughout the hangar at certain frame numbers. We meant to find if it was still there and intact. This would tell us something about the A-bomb’s effect, and more importantly for our park assessment, what sorts of hazards might greet recreational divers who would inevitably be drawn to make exploratory penetrations into this eerily beckoning portion of the ship.

  The ABC crew followed, intent on documenting our progress as the site revealed its secrets. Their presence was welcome because they carried huge movie lights that helped illuminate the hangar. We swam the forward part of the hangar through the elevator shaft, noting intact Hell-Divers, a type of naval dive bomber, and racks of 500- and 250-pound bombs.

  The largely intact vintage warplanes, wings folded for stowage below decks, would have a great appeal to the diving community. Jim said his work in the archives led him to believe that some bombs were dummies, with plaster having been substituted for the primary explosive charge. Supposedly, the architects of Operation Crossroads were concerned that exploding conventional ordnance on the battle-ready ships might mask the effects of the A-bombs, so they filled some of the test ordnance with inert material instead of real explosives.

  The problem was inconsistency in the application of this logic. It is next to impossible to tell if a given bomb is filled with plaster or high explosive without breaking it open. We were concerned the attrition factor for the “breakers” might be unacceptably high, especially because the fuse and initiating charge of even the inert bombs were powerful enough to kill a diver.

  As we pushed farther aft in the hangar, there was no “plasterfilled” designation on the archival documents, so we had to assume the rack of rockets in our light beams were live, fused, and armed. We moved gingerly by the weapons, which loo
k stark and lethal in their cradles. We would discuss our finds with Navy explosive ordnance disposal experts later—we had no desire to field-test the latest theories on the stability of immersed World War II ordnance.

  Then the sun seemed to shine around me as the ABC megalights caught up. Their appearance made me particularly happy I was “running a reel.” As in cave diving, the strand of nylon line ensured some physical link to the hole through which we entered. As we passed more rockets and torpedoes along the walls of the hangar, it became clear we were coming to some sort of termination point. A chaotic array of pipes and nondescript material on the floor, and a bulkhead in front of us barred further progress. A glance behind me vindicated my decision to run the line. The tiny patch of blue that would have pointed our way out was totally obscured by silt raised from the swift fin kicks of the camera team holding the heavy lights.

  The feeling of being in a large space was eliminated as the silt rose in reddish brown clouds. Our perceptual world compressed into a few feet of thick brown water that the most powerful lights couldn’t penetrate. No up, no down, just confusion, save one piece of clear white sanity, that straight unmoving nylon line, pointing to light and air. The Saratoga is a cultural cave of ceiling and walls. Steel passageways formed by man are so different, yet so very much the same as natural ones; both as unforgiving as they are intriguing.

  We made our way out along the far wall of the hangar as I slowly wound line back onto the reel; the rest of the group kept ahead or beside me. We were soon out of the hangar and heading up the island to our decompression stop under the dive boat.

  Our time on the bottom at 130 feet in the hangar was considerable, so we required almost a half hour of staged decompression using hoses suspended from the bobbing Boston Whalers on the surface. During stops at twenty and ten feet we nursed contentedly from the hoses, listening to the reassuring rush of oxygen moving thickly, at half again its surface density, through the rubber umbilicals.

  Hanging from a rope bouncing up and down with the swells is not my idea of fun, but it has its purpose in the scheme of things. The glazed expressions of my compadres yo-yoing around me made me ponder the market for a text on Zen and the art of contemplation on decompression lines.

  “Bikini base, Bikini base, all divers are up,” Jean Lajuan confided to a hand radio and received a quick acknowledgment. On the way back to the field station, with the whaler slapping the waves smartly, our spirits still soared from the dive. There are few things in life that can clear the cobwebs from the brain and put things in perspective so well as an exploration dive. Perhaps it is because you put aside anything not immediately relevant to the tasks at hand: finding, learning, surviving. We already had learned the answer to the first question posed by the Departments of Energy and the Interior: Are the sites visually and historically compelling? Hell, if there was nothing else but the Saratoga at Bikini, it would rate as a world-class dive destination.

  Later that day we made a shallower dive on Saratoga, concentrating on the bridge, command center, and admiral’s cabin. Instead of cameras and slates, we carried a modern version of a Geiger counter in a Plexiglas housing. Kitty Agegian, a researcher and diver for the Department of Energy, showed us how to monitor the device as we checked enclosed areas deep in the ship. We also carried plastic bags and sponges. These were for gathering samples of silt from the overheads and decks at random points. These sediment samples would be sent to Lawrence Livermore labs to be analyzed for alpha emitters and other signs of radiation residues. The point of all this was to verify empirically what analogous studies on land and inference told us should be the case—that the ships were safe. Trust, then verify.

  A deep dive Larry Murphy and I conducted the next day to check for radionucleides on the Saratoga was educational in a different sense. It suggested an explanation for a puzzling incident that had occurred almost ten years earlier. As I carried the radiation meter and several plastic bags full of silt back toward the surface, from a 180-foot dive to the mud-line, Larry and I were approached by a gray reef shark. This individual was probably less than five feet in length, certainly not grist for an awesome shark tale of the Jaws—dum-dum-dum-dum—Roy Scheider-save-the-town ilk.

  Encumbered with bags of silt and instruments and wishing to return to the decompression stop without delay, I was in no mood to be distracted. I ignored the animal even though he was circling us closer than usual for these grays at Bikini. He didn’t seem agitated or aggressive, just curious.

  Larry, coming up behind me with a camera, had a few shots held in reserve, as was his habit for situations just like this. “Whap,” the strobe startled me as much as it did the shark. But what happened afterward really captured my attention. The strobe hooked to Larry’s camera started that whining, high-pitched sound they make when recycling for another shot. The shark went looney—this half-pint went into a classic aggressive display!

  Murphy thought it was amusing and immediately burned off two more shots. If I wasn’t so encumbered, I would have done him violence. There is no such thing as a small shark when it’s in the water near you, teeth flashing, back arched, and pectorals down. But when I knew I should be totally engrossed in the moment, I felt something drawing my thoughts to the past. My memory took me back almost a decade to this shark’s great-grandfather off that reef on Pohnpei in 1981. The one that became so inexplicably aggressive and chased me from the water. It occurred to me that when I was taking those pictures of the crown of thorns starfish and this shark’s ancestor began harassing me, there was something else in the water with me—the granddaddy of Larry’s strobe. I watched Larry fire off one more picture as we made our way to the decompression stop—from the fish’s reaction, I was certain.

  We determined from immediate feedback instruments, such as the detector, that most of our assumptions about the lack of radiation danger on the Saratoga were correct. The meter would react sometimes, pegging out the needle, but in those instances the settings were so low that it probably would have acted similarly if carried out of my home into direct sunlight. The background radiation at Bikini was, in fact, significantly less than commonly found in Denver or Santa Fe or anyplace in the Rocky Mountains for that matter. Analyses of sediment in the bags would eventually yield similar negative results.

  Meanwhile, Nordby and Livingston’s work was progressing on a map of the great aircraft carrier. They shared my conviction that just by itself the Saratoga comprised a world-class recreational dive site.

  Although I knew that in our limited time we could develop a really comprehensive map of only the most dramatic site, the Saratoga, and perhaps devote several dives to the Nagato, we were loathe to leave without some level of documentation of the other wrecks. It was this necessity that mothered the invention of a new technique that worked so well for us at Bikini. We later employed it in many other projects requiring high returns from limited bottom time. We called it the “Blitz.”

  The first place we tried it was the site of the submarine Pilotfish, one of the vessels in the Bikini test array that would be a draw for many people on its own but was cast in a supporting role due to the proximity of the superstar wrecks Saratoga and Nagato. All we knew about the sub was that it was nearby, Balao Class (about three-hundred-feet long), and reported to be sitting upright by the Navy MDSU divers who had buoyed it for our convenience.

  After a lengthy huddle discussing how we could milk all the data possible from one dive, we were ready to try our plan next morning. All five members of SCRU strapped a small strobe light to their left shoulder. We descended simultaneously, planning to be back at the decompression stop under the boat in less than thirty minutes. As the submarine started to take form below us in the eighty-foot-plus visibility, I took the lead while the others broke into pairs behind me. I leveled us out at 155 feet deep and started making a slow pass down the centerline of the submarine. The other four spread apart, until they were forty to fifty feet from each other, keeping me and the centerline of the sub betwe
en them.

  I flipped over and swam backward. To my right Murphy was slowly following, strobe light flashing at regular intervals. On my left, Jim Delgado, most familiar with the archival information on the vessels, proceeded at the same pace as Murphy. He was shooting video with a small 8-mm camera from which we had fixed a wire attached to a microphone in the oral-nasal area of his full face mask. This allowed Jim to make verbal observations directly onto the videotape—much quicker and more accurate than trying to reconstruct what he had seen. Trailing twenty feet behind both of them were the illustrators, Livingston on the right, Nordby on the left.

  My job was to set the pace, control the depth, watch the time, and query through hand signals those I thought might need to check their air. The only concentration-breaking requirement they had was to keep my flashing armband in the corner of their eyes for reference. If I were to bang on my tank with my knife blade, it meant all-stop, something was wrong, or somebody in trouble.

  It was a dreamy twenty minutes on the bottom for me. I swam slowly backward with my gauge console held just under my chin. I kept my depth precisely at 155 feet as I passed over the hull of the sub resting in 175 feet of water. On both sides of the vessel, I monitored the trailing four divers, their strobes making them easy to track. I could tell from a glance behind that the Pilotfish was coming up to reach me. The sub’s sail, or con, rose close to my height off the bottom, and I was soon brushing by soft corals adhering to the top of the periscope tubes. A cloud of tiny fish hovered around the twin 20-mm Oerlikon machine guns, barrels canted upward at a crazy angle.