Collision Course

by Moscow, Alvin;

  Tri-Mix brought about a transformation in deep diving similar to the evolution of flying a plane by the seat of one’s pants to flying with instruments. Deep scuba diving became known as “technical diving.” One could study mathematical tables for the proper proportions of breathing gases (oxygen, nitrogen, helium) at different levels of dives, and then one could dive deeper and deeper until qualified to reach down to the Andrea Doria. It leveled the playing field to some extent, requiring less actual experience to dive the Doria than the old timers had. Because diving certification took less time, it opened the way for many more men, and some women, who wanted to make that ultimate dive. Anyone who could pay the fare and had open-water certification could go. Boat charters became readily available. As a consequence, because so many of them lacked real cold water, deep and wreck diving experience, it increased the likelihood of serious injury and death.

  Through the 1980s, there were perhaps twenty or thirty serious divers who made it down to the Doria. With Tri-Mix available in the late 1980s, the number of individual divers increased significantly, most probably to more than two hundred, though no one really kept a reliable count. Of course, most of these divers made many more than one or two dive trips each season and from one to four, five, or even six dives per trip. Whatever the number, a lucrative cottage industry developed on the north shore of Long Island, in which professional divers ran competing dive boats to take the recreational divers out to the Doria’s grave. Dive boat captains could make their whole year’s profit just by sailing to the Doria every week from late June to early August. The two leading “research” vessels were the Wahoo, captained by Steve Bielenda, a native of Brooklyn in his sixties, who had himself made more than one hundred dives into the Doria, and its arch rival, Seeker, captained by Dan Crowell, a salty sea dog in his forties, who took over from Bill Nagle and ran the most popular dive boat in the area. The Seeker was the more comfortable boat with air conditioning, television, videos, and an atmosphere of joie de vivre. It became the favorite of diving clubs that would charter the whole boat for its own members a year or more in advance. The Seeker carried a captain and a crew of two or three and usually from seven to ten paying divers per trip.

  Extreme sports are almost always inconvenient and expensive, unlike tennis, golf, or bowling. To qualify as a “certified technical diver” someone would need to pass diving tests and written examinations with about one hundred dives observed and certified by a certified instructor. The three to five compressed gas tanks, plus the breathing regulators, the dry suits, the ropes, the knife, the dive computers, the depth and tank pressure gauges, the buoyancy compensator, the underwater lights, perhaps a camera or video camcorder—all this could easily run $10,000 or more for the best and latest equipment. Then there’s the cost of the trip to New York for an out-of-towner or a two- to four-hour drive to Montauk at the northern tip of Long Island. The 107-mile boat ride to the site of the wreck takes ten to twelve hours, depending on the weather, usually leaving late Friday night, returning late Sunday night or early Monday morning. Trip cost? About $1,000.

  The sense of adventure began after leaving shore, bouncing on the open sea with fellow divers, sharing stories, advice, and a feeling of something new and exciting to come. Captain Crowell on the Seeker and Captain Beleinda on the Wahoo might try to check each diver’s credentials, experience and know-how, but in practical terms that was nearly impossible. They would say frankly, “Just because you’re certified does not mean you’re qualified.” Divers signed waivers that they were diving at their own personal risk, absolving the dive boat, its crew, and their own instructors from liability. Divers were taught they had to depend upon themselves in diving; they could not expect another diver, even a diving partner, to risk his or her life to save their own. But despite efforts, there has been no way to guarantee safety.

  For most divers, to touch the hull of the mammoth ship at a depth of 190 feet or perhaps to venture to the opening of Gimbel’s Hole and look inside is a notable dive in itself. To swim into the ship and to explore its decks, its large public rooms and return perhaps with a memento of the dive—a cup, a saucer, a lamp—that raises your dive to a whole new level of pride and bragging rights. There is never enough advice and knowledge you can absorb to achieve complete safety. The number one rule is that the most important thing you can bring back from the Doria is yourself. To do that you must train yourself to never, never panic. You have to plan your dive and dive your plan. Know your limits. Only after you have studied the ship’s deck plans can you venture farther and farther into the wreck on each successful dive. You have to know where you are, where you are going, and how you are going to swim out—all within the limits of how much compressed gas you are carrying with you. If you get lost, you can run out of gas. If you get tangled in some loose cable or trapped underneath falling debris, you can run out of gas. If the silt on the bottom of the floor of a particular room is stirred up, visibility can be cut to zero. If you cannot see where you are, do not panic; just stay still until the current clears the water around you. If one regulator does not work … If you are suddenly low on gas supply … If.… There are so many ifs and buts and so many scenarios of dangerous situations and how to escape from them that each dive to the Doria becomes a new and extreme adventure.

  Divers all know that the underwater conditions at the site far from shore are just as dangerous as the snow and thin air up on Mount Everest. Strong, bone-chilling currents can carry divers out to sea; water temperatures at 190 feet and below hover around 40 to 45 degrees. The ship itself is cluttered with old, snagged fishing nets that can easily trap a diver. Inside, a maze of corridors, twisted electrical cables, sharp bits of jagged steel, floating objects, and years of accumulated silt on the floor below you, limited cloudy visibility—all combine to tax the skills and threaten the life of a swimmer far beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Adventurers going out to the Doria know that divers before them, some of them more experienced than they, have lost their lives exploring this ultimate shipwreck. The reasons are varied: One diver can not extricate himself from wires wrapped around his ankle; another is trapped beneath a table; another succumbs to a heart attack; another seems to fall asleep or slip into a coma; several somehow miscalculate the time, or become lost and run out of air, or have a piece of equipment fail; others panic for some reason and fail to decompress while swimming to the surface. The latest count is thirteen deaths. Experienced wreck divers insist that almost all these deaths could have been prevented and are due at least in part to human error and inexperience.

  The most recent tragedy was that of Bill Schmoldt, fifty-four years of age, a man in perfect health who ran marathons, an avid and experienced diver, a college professor of computer sciences, and a licensed sea captain, who lectured widely on wreck explorations and marine archaeology. In August 2002, while serving as a crew member of the John Jack, a very new and advanced dive boat, Schmoldt suffered some mishap underwater and shot up to the surface without decompressing. He suffered an apparent embolism. In excruciating pain, he was airlifted by helicopter within an hour to a hospital decompression facility on land, where doctors tried but failed to revive him. Of the thirteen2 confirmed deaths, five of them occurred within a thirteen-month period in 1998 and 1999, all divers from the Seeker, all of different causes. Word spread fast and that put a dent in the number of sports divers attempting that ultimate dive to the Doria.

  By the end of the 1990s, something brand-new and much better in essential equipment became available to deep wreck divers, which promised to open up whole new vistas of opportunities. That was the Closed Circuit Rebreather. It was a complicated, expensive piece of dive equipment, but once a diver learned how to use it, he or she loved it. CCR tanks acted like an extra pair of lungs, taking the exhalation of the diver, scrubbing it clean of carbon dioxide and expelling it, and then allowing the diver to rebreathe a clean mixture of compressed oxygen, nitrogen, and helium. It was a breathing machine, less cumbersome, ligh
ter, and safer. It weighed less than half of the scuba tanks used before; it allowed the diver to stay underwater much longer than before, even up to three hours, if the diver could stand the bone-chilling cold. With CRR tanks, divers had a greater sense of safety and far less danger of running out of air. If one got tangled, or caught, or lost his or her way, there was now more time to be rescued. Within the first few years, CCR equipment became more and more prevalent. Most of the divers venturing into the Doria had switched to CCR tanks by the end of 2003.

  By that time, with almost fifty years on the ocean floor, the Doria had deteriorated seriously. The entire superstructure down to the Promenade Deck had broken off the ship and lay in a heap of wreckage alongside it on the ocean floor. The pressure of the depth had gradually compressed the entire hull. Gimbel–s Hole, once the size of a garage door, had been reduced to a slit no more than a foot wide. Most door openings had become impenetrable. The teak Promenade Deck had buckled and folded in upon itself. A huge crack in the steel hull threatened to break the bow off and another deep crack along the stern appeared equally ominous. With its structural integrity gone, only the corpse of the luxury liner was left, a seven-hundred-foot hull that looked like a sliced half of a mammoth watermelon.

  The wreck now offered a different experience to divers. With its upper decks gone, the rest of the ship was wide open along its entire length. Divers could enter anywhere and venture deep within the ship and exit at will. The continuing search for artifacts changed from a search-and-find to a “digging wreck.” Divers now went down with sawed-off rakes and gingerly dug in deep silt for small treasures. The days of coming up with a bag full of goodies were long gone. However, divers still believed that the Doria, whipped by strong currents, will continue to give up thousands of artifacts over the next fifty years.

  On the Seeker’s voyage to the Doria in July 2002, when the forty-sixth-anniversary wreath was cast upon the ocean, Christina Young, one of the very best of the very few female deep scuba divers to reach the Doria, dove from the Seeker, wearing a Rebreather, and swam far into the interior of the ship. Christina, a regular among the serious Doria divers, earned her living as a manager in a high-tech industry, played at downhill ski racing, horseback riding, flying, and stuck to her first love: wreck diving. With more than ten years’ experience, a thousand dives along the East Coast in the past twelve years and sixty-plus dives to the Doria, she had become an expert deep-sea photographer.

  Here is her account of that dive:

  We were tied into a piece on top of the wreck near the second set of Lifeboat davits. The area is just aft of the Winter Garden and forward of Gimbel’s Hole. We lost the first day of our three-day trip due to bad weather. Left Montauk around midnight, Monday morning. Not very many people got much sleep due to the strain of trying to stay in their bunks in heavy seas, but the forecast was that the weather would lay down. It did lay down, but most people were too exhausted to go diving the next morning.

  On Monday afternoon, I did a dive. Reports back from the couple of people who dived in the morning was that the visibility was just between five and ten feet. So I decided not to take the camera. I dropped down to find a big shell of a wreck with different levels of debris fields where the various decks once were. The Promenade Deck was completely missing, just exposed teak planking was all that was left. I dropped down a level to a debris field that was once the Boat Deck superstructure. Nothing was recognizable here as a “ship.” I dropped down another level to what was once the Lido Deck superstructure. I saw an intact sink lying on its side amid the mazes of hull plates and beams. I continued dropping down until I was in another debris field around the 235-foot level when something caught my eye. It turned out to be a nice silver bowl lying amongst the conglomeration of rusted steel. After retrieving it, I continued to search around the area and into little cubbyholes that no longer resembled the doorways they once were. The hallways and rooms they once opened up to were crushed, no longer penetrable.

  On the way back up, once I got to the Boat Deck level, I saw a hole that was big enough to enter, almost underneath the overhanging hull. I went inside a few feet and saw something remarkable. There was an old boat anchor (fluted) about four feet long. How did it get in here? The only thing I could imagine was that this must have been an anchor for one of the lifeboats.

  My bottom time was just about spent. I swam up to the top of the hull and back to the tie-in point. I’m glad that I didn’t bring my camera. The previous divers were correct: the visibility on top of the wreck was only about ten feet, and down in the lower debris fields about five.

  On the decompression hang, at one point I felt like I was inside a lava lamp. Brownish-black blobs started slowly coming up and around a couple other divers and myself. At first I didn’t recognize what they were, but then after touching one (mistake!) I realized that these where blobs of bunker oil from the Doria’s fuel tanks. Later, back on the boat, I had to go and wash off with some dish soap.

  I had hoped that the next morning would bring better visibility and I would shoot some video then. However, it was not to be. Petey Wohlieben came back from his traditional 6:30 AM dive and had his ass kicked by the unrelenting current that went all the way from the surface down to the wreck. There is no Promenade Deck (or really any other deck) to hide inside any more, and when the current rips, divers are completely exposed in most directions.… We waited until almost 10 AM to see if the current would die, but when it didn’t a vote was taken to leave the wreck and head back to Montauk.

  The silver bowl I found has the classic crown and “Italia” engraved in it, and appears to be a very nice sugar bowl. It will shine up beautifully. I do think that although the wreck no longer looks very much like a grand ship it once was, new places for exploration are being opened up.

  And, so the SS Andrea Doria lives on.

  1 Ed Suarez died in a cave-diving accident in West Virginia in July 1994. He was 43.

  2 John Barnett, July 1, 1981; Frank Kennedy, July 15, 1984; John Omsby, July 31, 1985; Joe Drozd, July 13, 1988; Matthew Lawrence, July 1, 1992; Mike Scofield, July 15, 1992; Robert Santuli, July 12, 1993; Craig Sicola, June 24, 1998; Richard Roost, July 8, 1998; Vince Napoliello, August 4, 1998; Christopher Murley, July 21, 1999; Charlie McGurr, July 28, 1999; Bill Schmoldt, August 4, 2002.

  Image Gallery

  A formal photograph taken in the Mediterranean of the Andrea Doria when she was new in 1953.

  A portrait of the yacht-like Stockholm, built in 1948, as she looked with her enlarged superstructure of 1953.

  The spacious wheelhouse of the Andrea Doria contained two engine telegraphs, two radar sets, and two helms. The metal wheel automatic pilot was switched off when fog was encountered.

  The Doria’s chartroom behind the wheelhouse. The radar plotting device was in the top drawer.

  Captain Nordenson of the Stockholm in a contemplative mood.

  Third Mate Carstens-Johansen in a typical ingenuous pose, explaining something after the collision. INSERT: Peder Larsen, the helmsman whose attention wandered.

  A portrait of Captain Calamai at the time of the Doria’s maiden voyage.

  The three officers who were on the bridge of the Doria. Captain Calamai seated, Third Officer Giannini on his right, and Second Officer Franchini on his left.

  The de luxe bedroom occupied by Ferdinand Thieriot, business manager of the San Francisco Chronicle, and his wife, Frances.

  A typical first-class cabin, not unlike that occupied by the Cianfarras, the Petersons, and the Dilworths.

  A view of the Doria’s First-Class Lounge.

  The Promenade Deck with its glass escape doors.

  The Stockholm Engine Room where one man, standing at the desk in the center when the telegraphs range FULL SPEED ASTERN, had to open two air valves and reverse both engine wheels seen here.

  Profile diagram of the Andrea Doria, 697 feet long: note there are no portholes on C-Deck at the waterline. The Engine Rooms and fuel tanks are beneath t
he waterline.

  Profile diagram of the Stockholm, 525 feet long: The sea was held back by the watertight bulkhead midway between holds No. 1 and No. 2.

  The third mate of the Stockholm used the radar set barely seen here on the extreme right and the telephone on the aft wall in the foreground.

  A close-up of the radar set, which had been checked for accuracy the day before the collision, and the plotting board to the right.

  The next morning less than an hour before the Andrea Doria sank, her captain boarded the Coast Guard tug Hornbeam.

  The final hours of the Andrea Doria is dramatically recorded in this and the following ten pictures taken by news photographers aboard a Coast Guard plane and by Harry Trask, twenty-eight-year-old photographer for the Boston Traveler, in a private plane. Trask arrived just nine minutes before the end. As his plane swooped seventy-five feet over the sinking ship, he fought off airsickness to snap the pictures which won him the Pulitzer Prize for the year’s best news photography.

  The starboard side: note the ladders and ropes over the side and the jammed position of the davits for Lifeboat No. 3.

  The portside: note the eight lifeboats still in place, the Promenade Deck doors open, and the flow of water still being pumped out of the abandoned ship.

  The starboard side dips under …

  … going down by the bow …

  … the bow gone … half under …

  … the portside lifeboats rigidly in place …

  Harry Trask saw and recorded the end …