There is a world of difference, of course, between casual scuba diving in the clear blue waters of the Caribbean, and the skill and expertise required to descend beyond the dark depths of 100 or 130 feet. Beginners swim not far below the surface but deep enough to get the feeling of weightlessness and the pleasure of gliding along with a variety of harmless fish, taking in the wonders of underwater life, coral, reefs, brilliant colors, knowing that if anything goes wrong they are within an easy swim to the water’s surface and precious fresh air. That’s pure recreational diving. But to dive deeper than 130 feet, particularly for the pleasure of exploring sunken ships, a diver risks serious injury from oxygen toxicity, nitrogen narcosis, the bends, and even death. Gimbel’s exploits, however, made deep scuba diving more and more popular.
The 1980s also happened to mark a whole new world of so-called “extreme sports,” which afforded amateurs the added lure of extreme physical danger. One could try mountain climbing, rock climbing, auto racing, parachute jumping, or deep-sea scuba diving. Any one of these sports would test the extreme limit of one’s skill, physical strength and mental discipline—and at the risk of death. Of course, the further you ventured, the greater the gratification of knowing that you were going where very few, or perhaps no one, had gone before. Sir Edmund Hillary was the first to climb Mount Everest in 1953 “because it was there.” (He stayed there for only fifteen minutes.) For the same reason, scuba divers from many parts of the world have practiced, prepared, and equipped themselves at considerable expense and effort for the personal challenge of exploring the most intriguing of all accessible shipwrecks.
In the 1980s, after Gimbel, only professional or serious sports divers who had close to ten years of experience ventured down to the Doria. They wore small tanks of compressed air, giving them no more than fifteen to thirty minutes total bottom time under deep water to find their way in and, more importantly, out of the Doria. They were pioneers, learning a new skill. But those early divers were treated to a rare view of a marvelous ocean liner, which appeared immense and awesome, longer than two football fields, a sunken city, her name still visible on the bow and on the stern, her brass fixtures still gleaming, her portholes still intact, her teak decks almost like new. The ship, however, was covered with sea growth and bright anemones that made it look like a floral garden. Lost trawler fishing nets blanketed parts of the ship with steel cables or hemp fishing lines.
Inside the ship the large public rooms were in violent disarray. With the ship lying on her side, the floor and ceiling became her walls; everything was at an angle. Swimming inside the ship was difficult and dangerous. Lighter pieces of furniture had floated to the ceiling; curtains floated sideways in the sea-water. The walls and ceilings in many areas had collapsed, exposing and loosening tangles of electrical cables. There was a surreal, spooky feeling in the water-filled interior of the ship, especially as fish and debris drifted casually by and dangling wires and exposed electric cables threatened to snag divers. But there were souvenirs all around, there for the taking. All about was dead silence, except for the hiss of air and bubbles being expelled by the diver himself. Some divers described it as the closest thing to a haunted house where real people once had lived and died. Others thought of it as a time capsule of a bygone age of trans-Atlantic luxury liners.
In those early days of deep wreck diving there were few minor mishaps, like cases of the bends, but no deaths. Those pioneer divers were experienced and knew full well not to exceed their time limits, or their own physical limits. They knew that deep underwater pressure increased the amount of nitrogen absorbed in the blood, and that made one euphoric, like being a little drunk and carefree. It affected one’s judgment. Some compared the effect to the taking of so-called laughing gas at the dentist. The divers knew not to do anything at all foolhardy when swimming down to the Doria, its upper hull some 190 feet below the surface of the sea. It took these divers years to learn how to function rationally at such deep depths, taking into consideration that the deeper and longer one swam underwater, the greater the build-up of nitrogen in the blood stream.
From about 150 feet down, the diver starts getting more and more reaction from the nitrogen. The pressure is six to eight times the normal air pressure at the surface of the ocean, and that pressure forces nitrogen to dissolve in the blood and tissues. When you come up, the gas in your body can form little bubbles that can settle in your joints, your spine or your blood, and this can cripple or kill you. Prevention is fairly simple. You come up slowly, stopping a minute or two at various depths, and then complete the compression at 20 feet and then at 10 feet below the surface. For a fifteen to thirty minutes bottom time, a diver would have to spend sixty to ninety minutes coming back to the surface, decompressing. That would allow the body to flush out the excess nitrogen and bring the pressure in the body back to normal. The length of time you decompress and the depths at which you do it depend upon how deep you’ve dove and for how long. It is, in short, an exacting sport.
For those who practiced or indulged themselves in deep sea wreck diving, there was a special feeling of awe, of being alive and aware in a strange element, of living the moment to its fullest, of being akin to all the great explorers of the past. The early divers of the 1980s became a small, close society of men who knew and dove with one another, and they played a significant role in the early days of deep-water explorations. There was Gary Gentile, who put together a team with Bill Nagle aboard the Seeker that recovered the auxiliary bell of the Doria in 1985—a remarkable achievement at the time. He called the ship’s bell “the ultimate artifact from the ultimate wreck.” John Moyer, who crewed with Gentile on that venture, capped ten years of diving in 1993 by retrieving three Guido Garbano art frescos, weighing seven hundred pounds, from the wall of the ship’s Winter Garden Room. Others in this group of “old-timers” exploring the Doria included Bart Malone, Steve Gatto, Mike Boring, John Chatteron, Jon Hulbert, and David Bright, who is reputed to have the largest collection of artifacts of them all from the Doria, including two lifeboats, one surviving deck chair, Doria-inscribed life rings and life preservers, and thousands of china dinnerware, lamps, jewelry, portholes, glass windows, and just about one of each of everything brought back to the surface from the Doria. Knowledgeable and with degrees in physiology, biology, and German, Bright worked full time for Pfizer, Inc., and spent his spare time diving, exploring, and studying sunken wrecks, including the Civil War’s Monitor off the coast of North Carolina, the Titanic, and some 113 dives to the Doria, and lecturing on what he had learned.
In 1988, when he was thirty-one, Bright decided to try exploring the Tourist Section of the Doria simply because a survivor, Liliana Donner Hughes, had asked him to bring her something to remember from that section, if possible. It occurred to him that the Tourist Class dining room had been unexplored; almost all divers entered the ship through Gimbel’s Hole and concentrated on the First Class forward section of the ship. With about thirty previous dives to the Doria under his belt, Bright teamed up with Ed Suarez, thirty-six, who worked for the IRS in Washington but loved to dive anywhere there was water. Ed was a jovial, swashbuckling character who told great diving stories, and an expert diver and instructor whose eccentricity was to “bring the store” down with him to any shipwreck. He would bring down so much redundant equipment for safety’s sake it would seem like he had a whole dive store with him.
Here is David Bright’s account of their dive:
Log: July 5, 1988
Dive Boat: Seeker; Captain Bill Nagle
Weather: Sunny, warm, 85 degrees
Hook: Promenade, slightly distal to Gimbel’s Hole.
Dive Partner: Ed Suarez
Bottom time: 23 minutes; Total Dive time: 99 minutes
Temp on bottom: 45 degrees
Visibility: 20 feet (dark); Max Depth: 217 ft.
We decided to try to find the Tourist Class dining room on this dive. We had to swim from Gimbel’s Hole to the stern of the ship. There was a sl
ight current, so we decided to swim through the Promenade to the end, come out of the Promenade and follow a ship railing to the stern bridge wing. The wing has a huge trawler net attached to it, so we decided to avoid that area and dropped down into the stern area.… We came across a room that we felt was the dining room but could not access it. We looked through the windows and saw what we felt were dining room tables of many different shapes.… We tried to find a way into this room, but there was a solid metal bar that prevented us from getting in. We saw a Tourist Class saucer dirough one of the windows that was taunting us to find a way in, but we couldn’t. Since we still had a long swim ahead of us (with the current), we decided to end our dive.
David and Ed, feeling very pleased to be the first ones to locate the Tourist Class dining room, decided not to share their find with anyone else. They agreed to meet and to carefully plan their next dive to the Doria. When they boarded the Seeker at Montauk two weeks later, they learned that a diver, Joe Drozd, had died the previous week diving to the Doria. Perturbed by the death and disturbed that five inexperienced deep divers were aboard for the trip, David joined with the mates of the Seeker in determining the lack of diving experience of these five men and then managed to scare them so much that three of the newcomers loaded their gear back into their cars and drove home. The other two dove just once to touch the hull of the Doria and they decided they had had enough. David and Ed persuaded Bill Nagle and his crew to tie up to the stern section of the Doria rather than at Gimbel’s Hole, and they went down the line with a concealed hacksaw.
Log: July 17, 1988
Dive Boat: Seeker; Captain: Bill Nagle
Weather: Sunny, warm 85 degrees
Hook: Stern area near Bridge wing
Dive Partner: Ed Suarez
Bottom time: 25 minutes; Total Dive time: 115 minutes
Temp on bottom: 45 degrees
Visibility: 15 feet (dark); Max Depth: 205 feet
We found the dining room site very easily.… We proceeded to pull out the hacksaw and started cutting through the far right side of the bar. We took turns doing the cutting as we didn’t want to get too narc-ed (nitrogen narcosis). We made a slight dent into the steel and realized that it was going to take us a bit of time to do the cutting. Ended the dive and decided that we needed a better plan.
Their better plan was to split up so that each one would spend the entire time sawing through the steel bar. They each made three dives and by the end of the trip they had cut only an inch and half into the steel bar.
Their despair and the fact that they did not come up with the usual artifacts did not go unnoticed. Davids friend, John Chatterton, who was serving as the secondary captain and dive mate on the Seeker, asked why he was so quiet. David told him he and Ed were working on a project and did not want to talk about it to anyone. Chatterton inquired no further, as per diving etiquette. But when he returned from his final dive of the trip, he approached David. “Now I know what you guys are doing!” He said he had come across the nicked bar and offered to help cut through the bar with a cutting torch he used as a commercial diver. David welcomed him to the project. They planned to get into the dining room at the start of the diving season next year. But a few weeks later, Chatterton telephoned him, “David are you ready to go now?” Without hesitation, David agreed and the two divers planned a full excursion down to the Doria with eight seasoned Doria divers in mid-August, rather than wait a year. That was taking a great risk on the chancy weather beyond the usual diving season.
A tremendous amount of preparation went into that late season dive. The operations portion of this expedition was lead by John Chatterton because of his experience as a commercial diver. They planned to cut through the bar using an underwater blow torch and magnesium rods; for working underwater they needed to bring with them huge cylinders of oxygen, many electrical batteries, hundreds of feet of hoses, electrical cable, and duct tape. The eight-man team worked through the night preparing everything on the night trip out to the Doria. They were lucky. The morning dawned in pure summer splendor, cloudless and calm. They split the work as planned in three teams of two divers each, taking turns going down and working to cut their way into the Tourist Class dining room. Below, conditions were unusually perfect; visibility was sixty-five feet, the current was nil and amber rays of sunlight actually reached the wreck. “It was the best visibility that I have ever seen on the Doria,” David recalled. “It was like diving the deeper waters of Florida, and I will always remember that day because everything had to be perfect, and it was.” As was appropriate, David and Ed were the first team to enter the Tourist Class dining room.
Log: August 17, 1988
Dive Boat: Seeker; Captain Bill Nagle
Weather: Sunny, warm, 80 degrees
Hook: Stern area under Bridge wing
Dive Partner: Ed Suarez
Bottom time: 25 minutes; Total dive time: 135 minutes
Temp on bottom: 47 degrees
Visibility: 65+ feet (light); Max Depth: 220 ft.
We came down the anchor line and I entered the dining room first, followed by Ed. All the tables were sticking out of the left side of the ship and were of various sizes and shapes. We decided to go forward through the dining room staying at the mid-ship level. As I came across the bulkhead at the end of the forward portion of the dining room, I observed a corridor that led to the pantry, but there were fallen cables blocking the entrance to the pantry. As we tried to explore the corridor, Ed’s regulator got caught in the cables and I had to come in and clear his regulator of the cables. Going slowly through the corridor, we saw several pieces of porcelain china, silverware and silver service trays. At the end of the corridor were many cables that looked very spooky, so we decided to turn around and go out of the corridor and back into the dining room. Just before the end of the corridor, I decided to lift up and went into the pantry.
As I looked around, there was nothing but wall-to-wall porcelain china. I shrieked with joy. I reached down and grabbed Ed to come up and see where I was. I could see his eyes getting bigger and bigger as we started to dig into our “prize.” We were so excited that we stirred up the silt and we had limited visibility. We continued to bag our porcelain dishes without vision but by feel. At the zenith of our euphoria, I realized that it was time to go.… Because of our earlier dives and extended current dive, we had a long decompression.
At the end of the first day, the team had recovered forty-eight pieces of fine porcelain china. They were all extremely tired but excited to dive the whole next day retrieving china. But it was not to be. The next morning the weather changed dramatically. The sea was rough with high waves and a wicked wind. The men decided wisely to pull the hook, unshackle the Seeker from the Doria and to leave the area as quickly as possible. Going back to Montauk, the Seeker took a good beating from the weather. The stern of the dive boat took on a heavy amount of water, and a few men were dumped out of their bunks when waves hit the sixty-five-foot boat broadside. The running joke that night was that other divers would be diving the sunken Seeker just to get their hands on the porcelain they had taken from the Doria. The men agreed to divide “the loot” evenly among themselves, and they vowed not to say anything to anyone about the project so that they could complete the excavation of the china early in the next diving season in 1989.
But, of course, the secret did not last long. The men heard rumors that the Wahoo, a rival dive boat, was planning to go out to the Doria earlier in 1989 than it had ever done before. The assumption was that the Wahoo divers were going to jump the claim to all that china. So the original dive team and other invited experienced divers sailed early on the Seeker, mid-June, and they reaped the spoils. David and Ed retrieved more than seventy-five pieces of choice china, and before they left, to protect their find, John Chatterton bolted a grate over their access hole leading into the dining room and attached a slate which said: “Closed for Inventory.” When the divers from the Wahoo got to the site a week later they were extremely
angry. But the Seeker men felt they were entitled to first dibs. Later that summer, they unbolted the grate and allowed free access to the area. But that act started a rivalry that went on for years between the Wahoo and Seeker, the two principal dive boats for the Doria. David Bright collected so much china from the Tourist Class dining room that he found it easy to give one or two souvenirs to each of the many Doria survivors he had met over the years. He also began exhibiting notable Doria artifacts to various maritime museums, principally the one on Nantucket Island.1
What really opened deep sea diving to the amateur scuba diver was the introduction in the late 1980s of a new mixture of compressed gas developed by the U. S. Navy to be used underwater called Tri-Mix, which added helium to the mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. Tri-Mix made deeper diving more safe and accessible. It largely did away with the dangerous euphoria of nitrogen narcosis; it doubled the “bottom” time a diver could spend on a wreck to thirty or forty minutes; it thereby increased the margin of time to get out of dangerous situations. At the same time, there were vast improvements in all diving equipment, and more and more recreational divers across the country, and, in fact, around the world, took up deep scuba diving. A wide variety of diving clubs sprang up in almost every state, catering to all kinds of divers, including shore, boat, kayak, wreck, and cave divers as well as photographers and videographers. The National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI), organized in 1953, with headquarters in Tampa, Florida, now trains and certifies diving instructors in more than five thousand diving clubs, who in turn train and certify sports divers at different levels of competence. On a worldwide basis, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) also trains and certifies diving instructors through its 106,000 professional members, who issue more than 500,000 certifications each year signifying the standards for training, experience, and equipment for each danger level of scuba diving.
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