The Helldivers' Rodeo: A Deadly, X-Treme, Scuba-Diving, Spearfishing, Adventure Amid the Off Shore Oil Platforms in the Murky Waters of the Gulf of Mexico

by Humberto Fontova

  Gerry missed it. No brain shot. "That thing took off and I went with him. That huge thing was lunging around with me in tow, just missing the beams. I was ducking them just in time, or just glancing off them, ripping my jumpsuit, but not much of my skin."

  Finally the fish slowed down a bit and Gerry saw he might have a chance to grab it by the gills-not the gills actually. When a diver grabs a fish "by the gills" he means the ridge that runs just under the actual gills, joining the mouth to the chest. Makes a handy place to get a chokehold, and to try and muscle the fish along. But not necessarily a 450 pounder, and especially not if you grab wrong.

  "Down in that murk, with all the commotion, I stuck my hand in too far." Gerry blurts. "I actually stuck it inside the gills, way inside, past the feathery red stuff, into the hard bony stuff. Then-clump!-he snapped them shut. I pulled and-nothing. Couldn't budge it. Whoa-boy, I thought."

  And well he should. He was alone. His dive buddies were all on board.

  Val himself had just finished boarding a huge jewfish of his own. He'd gotten a kill shot but at a price. He'd approached the huge fish unseen near the bottom murk and marveled at its size. With a monster like this he definitely wanted a kill shot. His scars from the previous week were barely healing. No kill shot that week, and the jewfish had taken him on a merry, bumpy ride around the rig. His dive buddies were still calling him "Pinball."

  No more of that, Val thought when he saw this one-which looked even bigger. So he approached and aimed carefully, by poking his gun straight out in front of him, pointing at that threesquare-inch zone right above the eyes that Jacques Cousteau had shown him as the kill zone. Piercing to the brain was the only way to disable these buffalo-sized fish.

  In the process of aiming, the butt of the spear gun was positioned inches in front of Val's mouth. And Val, a welder and machinist, was expert at customizing his guns for maximum power. These are souped-up guns-low riders, magnums. The six-foot shaft on Val's gun was straining at six extra-thick bands of surgical tubing. We're talking some serious penetrating power here-thus, some serious recoil.

  The lumbering fish finally turned to face him, offering the perfect head shot, and Val crunched the trigger. Whack!-the gun smacked into his mouth, smashing his lips and teeth against his regulator mouthpiece like a trip-hammer. He was blinded for a second, stunned, dizzy. Recovering his wits he was happy to see the jewfish turning on it's side, "stoned," as they say. "Coldcocked." Thank goodness for that.

  But a strange sensation enveloped his mouth, a steely taste, and he felt things floating around in there. Now something green was staining the water in front of his mask. He sat there in his semi-daze, thrilled with his kill but stunned. Finally he felt around with his tongue and realized he'd knocked out four teeth with the gun recoil. Oh well. At least the jewfish was done for. Time to get the 250-pounder up.

  Gerry saw none of it. And Val couldn't see Jerry pounding on his jewfish with the spear gun while trying to pull his other arm out of the thing's gills as it barreled around the Gulf bottom. "And there was no pulling my arm out." Gerry says. " I had gloves on and everything, and a long-sleeve shirt. But he had me good. I couldn't move my arm in or out. And now he decides to take off again! So there I go right with him. Like I'm hopping a freight train, ya know, hanging on the little ladder as it chugs off. That's what I felt like. But hell, with a train I could just let go. Not here."

  So Gerry's bumbling around through the murk going wherever the beast wanted to go. "And remember," he says, "I was low on air to begin with. Well, at least he couldn't take me any lower than a hundred and seventy feet, I'm thinking."

  Some consolation. "If all I'd done was shoot him, hell, I'd a let go of the gun by now. My air was going. But I kept yanking, ripping my damn hand and arm up but what the hell else could I do?"

  What indeed, Gerry. "The jewfish was bucking around every which way, just jerking me around. I felt like a bull rider. Ever see how they get thrown off the bull but their hand's still caught in the rope? And the bull's bucking and running around dragging and bucking and stompin' the poor sap?

  "Well, that was me. I'm gettin' jerked around just like that. Except I'm almost two hundred feet under the Gulf in the bottom murk and can barely breathe. The air was gettin' hard to suck out. Something was gonna have to give soon. I had trapper friends who told me of coons and mink actually gnawing their legs off to get out of a trap. I was wondering about that. But I couldn't even grab my knife."

  Gerry finally hit upon a solution. If he couldn't pull his arm out. Perhaps he could push it out, using his other arm. This meant, of course, inserting his free arm through the fish's mouth-a mouth that, half open, could have swallowed him.

  "Hell, I had to do something." He says. "Well, no sooner I stick my arm in his mouth than-chomp!-he snaps it shut, right around my elbow. Yeah boy. Great idea, I'm thinking.

  "Now I got one hand in his gills up past my elbow, and the other in this mouth to the elbow! Now what? And off he goes again on another little romp with me flapping around like the bull rider while hugging his head!"

  You hear from old timers that jewfish play out fairly easy. They give bursts of energy, spurts, lunges, then relax, unlike the sustained rocketing frenzy of an amberjack or tuna. "He finally seemed to be playing out." Gerry says. "So I said this is it, I've gotta try to take this sucker up with me. So I just kinda pointed his head up-I had the strength and leverage of both arms to do it with, remember-then I just started swimming up. And damn if he didn't come right along. He was spent. No more struggle.

  "Up I go with him barely moving, my ears popping from the decreasing pressure, the air getting a little easier to suck out as I ascend. I felt a helluva lot better-but I ain't outta the woods yet. I hit the surface near the boat and start yelling. The guys see me. Their eyes are poppin', man. The size of the fish for one thing, but also their faces are saying like ... what the hell?

  "A couple of the guys jumped in immediately and helped pry my arms outta the fish with their knives. The fish had lost strength, bloated, and relaxed it's grip. Finally I'm out. My arms are free-all scratched up-but free. Hell, when Val came over and smiled, I saw he had it worse. I like to die laughing when I heard how he got his jewfish-not that my story was too bad."

  Point is, Gerry had earned his spurs in the sport of rig-diving many times over. This rodeo, over thirty years later, found him and a boatload of Sea Tigers aboard a ninety-foot shrimp trawler at deep rigs in the Timbalier blocks, out from Morgan city where the first rigs went up in 1947. But those were in 50 to 60-foot depths. These had gone up much later and stood in 300-foot depths. The deeper the water, the deeper the danger.

  This past summer, dive instructor Chuck Buckley nailed a big grouper near the 200 ft. mark. He had been at depths far greater than what most would consider safe, though only fair-to-middling by Hell divers' standards.

  His dive mate Randy Evans saw him spear the fish about fifty feet below him. "It looked like he had the fish under control," Randy told me. "So I stayed at one hundred and fifty feet, watching him ascend. He came past and we exchanged the OK signal. He looked fine. The fish was calm. I stayed down looking around for a few minutes, saw nothing real big, so I started up. I'm about halfway up when I hear the outboard crank up. Hum? Nov that's kinda weird, I thought. We'd left a buddy on the boat fishing. Why would he be leaving us? So I hurry through my decomp stop and get to the surface. The boat's going off and there's no sign of Chuck ... now this is really strange, I'm thinking.

  "But I'm not really worried. The fish seemed to be under control and Chuck had looked fine. He'd shot much bigger fish. He was a dive instructor for heaven's sake. Well, finally the boat turns around and heads back to the rig. That's nice, I thought. Must have dropped something over the side and the current took it. No sweat. But I only see one person in the boat. When he's about thirty feet away he sees me bobbing around, hauls back on the throttle and screams: CHUCK'S DEAD!

  "What a stupid joke, I'm thinking. What a t
asteless joke. It didn't sink in. It couldn't sink in. This couldn't be real. That stuff only happens to those lunatics who go down to two hundred and fifty feet ten times a day during the Rodeos. We came out here to have fun and relax. I picked up Chuck at his house this morning. We were excited. The day's beautiful-calm, no murk, not much current. He's my friend. I know his family ... It can't be! ... what kinda bullshit is Dave trying to lay on me? And why?! Then he got closer and I saw his face and I knew it was true.

  "His look said everything that needed to be said, without another word. He said he saw Chuck surface outside the rig screaming 'Come help me! Oh God, come help me!' So he unhooked the boat, cranked up the motor ... when he got over there Chuck was face down. He pulled him in the boat and he wasn't breathing. He gave frantic CPR, everything. But he was dead."

  The Coast Guard ruled an AGE (arterial gas embolism) as cause of death. Chuck also had barnacles embedded in his skull. "We figure the fish must have got his second wind closer to the surface-where the danger of an embolism is greatest", says his friend Randy. "Maybe he banged him around the beams, using up his air or knocking his regulator out of his mouth. But his tank still showed air. He never ran out. Like I said, Chuck was a good, careful diver ... what happened? We'll never know for sure."

  Dr. Charles Burchrell of the University of Southern Mississippi-himself a rig diver-has looked into several rig-diving accidents. He explained to me that an embolism is much more likely when you're struggling with something. "Think about it," he said while pretending to lift something off the floor. "When you're lifting something, or pulling on something, you have a tendency to hold ... your ... breath-right? Well we all know from Diving 101 that's a no-no-a BIG no-no. But when you're in a fight with a two-hundred-pound fish instinct takes over, right?"

  I got the picture. Oddly, Chuck still had the riding rig around his wrist, and the fish was still on, and lively. Sometimes they win. A riding rig is a rope off the spear gun cable that attaches to your wrist, rather than to the spear gun. This way you can shoot and let go of the gun, which is attached by a cord to your belt. Then you grab the rope with both hands and go for a ride. Or you can simply loop the rope around a beam and tie the fish off. Let him fight the rig rather than you. With a riding rig, if things get hairy-say he's dragging you down past 250 feet, your air's low, whatever-you can simply let go, losing fish, shaft, and cablebut not the gun. Some rig-divers swear by riding rigs. Others prefer the shaft and cable attached to the spear gun the conventional way. They say it's easier to just let go of everything that way.

  "We'll never know for sure"-the epitaph for Chuck Buckley's diving death, as for half of rig-diving fatalities. Jack Schiro was twenty-seven years old and had been diving for five years when he went down about six miles from here this past June. "He looked fine when I last saw him," says his divemate and uncle, Bob Larche. "He was cocking his gun and gave me the OK signal. I was on my way up. He was down around eighty feet, heading down. The water was beautiful, blue, without any murk, calm, not much current. We'd dove under much worse conditions, believe me.

  "Well, I climb aboard and we wait half an hour for Jack to surface. That's about how long a tank's gonna last on our dives. Then we knew something was wrong. We suited up, went back down to one hundred and fifty feet, but found nothing. So we came up, got on the radio, called the Coast Guard."

  Helldiver Stan Smith was diving nearby and heard the distress call. "We heard 'em on the radio. They were panicking, you can imagine. So we get coordinates and head over. Turned out we were only a couple miles away. I went down and at around one hundred and eighty feet saw a school of huge black grouper. I mean big ones. Right then I knew what had happened to Jack. Black grouper bore straight down when you hit 'em. If you don't get a kill shot, they give a burst of power and there's no stopping 'em at first. You just have to ride 'em out. Problem is if you're too close to the bottom, or too deep with too little air, or maybe wrapped in the cable, or narked, or whatever. When I got down there I saw that the murk started about fifty feet from the bottom. I started into it, but it was hopeless. I knew this rig. I'd dove it before. The bottom's full of discarded cable, scrap, pipes and other stuff from the platform. It would be real easy to get banged up and tangled up down there, especially attached to a black grouper-a big one. They head right into that stuff."

  The Coast Guard gave up the search two days later. Jack had a wife and three kids. You hear a lot of sanctimonious types badmouthing those "crazy macho-type divers" like Stan, who risk their lives to "get their name on the board" or "pose with some fish." Stan's an insurance agent in his early thirties, been rig-diving since his late teens. The record books show Stan's name behind the top three sharks, each nudging five-hundred pounds. Each took him on "a helluva ride," in his own words, often through the murk. Somehow he evaded their teeth. But they were shot at shallower rigs and the ride was usually outside the rig. Stan went down into the murk at 200 feet that day, not "to kill a fish," not "to get his name on the board," but to try and rescue a diver he didn't even know. Crazy indeed. They were calling the Coast Guard, not him. He didn't have to show up.

  Gerry's son, thirty-two, another Sea Tiger, was suiting up alongside his Dad and chuckled when he heard the "Pops" line. Darren "Gumby" Bourgeois owns Aquatic Technologies, a dive shop in suburban New Orleans. On his office wall hangs a gold plaque from JBL, the nation's biggest spear gun manufacturer. The award heralds the most spear guns sold in one year. A little dive shop right here in New Orleans sells more spear guns than any other dive shop in the U.S.

  The Sea Tigers, like other dive clubs, often charter big (sixty to ninety feet) shrimp or crew boats and spend several days rig hopping. "Shoot, we might dive ten, fifteen rigs in one day," says Gerry.

  Gerry, son Darren, and those guest divers who graciously assured "Pops" they'd watch out for him walked to the side of the big trawler and hopped in. This was a Rodeo, so they were going for big fish or nothing. And that meant going deep. "The water was beautiful," says Darren. "You could see across the whole rig and down forever." It's easy to descend in those conditions; also easy to lose track of your depth.

  But "Gumbo" was distracted midway down. "That sucker came straight at me!" he chuckles. "He was about an eight-foot sand tiger, nothing huge. But he caught me off guard. I'd seen my share of them, knew they got ornery at times. But we had great visibility that day-probably one hundred feet. So he wasn't mistaking me for a fish."

  But something about Darren interested him. " I don't think that he'd completely made up his mind that I wasn't lunch, either." He says. "I mean, he was coming straight at me ... okay, he'll turn away any second now, I'm thinking-Okay ... Okay ... Any time now! Okay ... come on now! I'm a diver! A human! LOOK!

  "WHACK! I raised my gun and smacked his nose. He swerved off. That's better, I thought ... but I'm still watching him-then he turns around. And comes back!-Oh shit! I thought. Never seen them do this before. Usually one whack on the nose does the trick out here. So now he's coming straight at me again.

  "POP! And I poked him with the tip-he swerves off again. Great, I thought. So I start swimming off, a nice snapper was under me. I was going after him. I look behind me-and here he comes again! So I turn around to face him. Now he's coming a little faster ... closer ... closer-JAB! I really poke him in the nose with the gun-I mean hard, felt the point sinking in-Now he jerked away and darted off-for good. That's better, I thought."

  Darren looked around to make sure the shark had no buddies around and continued the descent. "Dad was always down below me. He knew where he had to go to find the big fish in this area. He was after amberjack. And they were descending steadily in front of us, down into the dark depths. He was following."

  Indeed he was. "At one hundred and eighty feet I look around," says Gerry. "And there's my chaperones, the guys who were gonna watch out for "Pops," twenty feet above me, waving. They're heading back up, waving at me, like, come on! Ya crazy or something? So I waved back."

  "Pops"
was going after the big ones, his specialty. "I could see some big amberjack below me. Looked plenty big enough to put me on the board. So I cocked another band and just drifted on down."

  Darren had also drifted past the erstwhile chaperones but not as far as his dad. Actually he was starting to worry, while looking at his depth gauge that read 200 feet. And still his father was descending.

  "I knew good and well what he was going after," says Darren. "This was a Rodeo. You always push it a little during a Rodeo. And I knew that even after thirty years of this stuff, Dad had lost none of his passion for the sport, or for shooting the biggest of anything around. And I could tell those amber jack were big. I just wished Dad had looked at his depth gauge."

  But "Pops" was focused on the fish. Remember youur cat at the bird feeder. Remember that leopard closing on the gazelle on Animal Planet. Same instinct here.

  Darren finned towards the middle of the rig, where some barracuda hovered near the center beams. But, nah. None were trophy size. So he continued down, towards the edge of the rig now, where the big AJs circled. What a contrast to the lazy 'cuda who weave slowly around the structure. None of that for amberjack. They're hyper, always on the move. Piscine candidates for Ritalin.

  Darren looked again and now his depth gauge said 230 feet. And his sixty-one-year-old father is was below him, still descending. "He's pushing it." I thought. "The old man's gettin too old for this daredevil stuff. He's bound to be narked out of his head by now ... is he acting crazy?"

  Darren himself was succumbing to Martini's Law at that depth. "I was getting giddy, all right. But I knew if I was worried about Dad, I couldn't be too narked. That nitrogen narcosis is like drinking. You can't say: at such and such a depth you'll get narked. Any more than you can say, two drinks or so many ounces of alcohol get a person drunk. It depends on the person. Depends on a lot of other factors. Same with nitrogen narcosis. If not, we'd all been drowned a long time ago, me and every rig diver I know. Believe me."