Sealab

by Ben Hellwarth

  A pair of barges, two boxy vessels with decks the size of basketball courts that had previously been used for test-launching Polaris missiles, comprised the support ship and mission control for Sealab II. In a bit of cost-conscious recycling, they were being modified and joined in such a way that they formed a U-shaped staging platform. A decompression chamber was installed in what had been a missile bay. The clutter of equipment, struts, beams, cables, crane, tarps, and color-coded tanks of compressed gas scattered around the deck made it all look like a floating construction site. Many of the crew on deck wore protective hardhats. A flag with the Sealab insignia fluttered in the breeze. The support ship was dubbed the SS Berkone, a moniker Mazzone coined one day by fusing his own name with that of Joe Berkich, a top civilian technician from the Naval Ordnance Test Station with whom Mazzone worked closely to set up the barges.

  By August the Berkone was moored almost a mile offshore from La Jolla, over an area known as Scripps Submarine Canyon that the nearby institution’s oceanographers had mapped as thoroughly as any comparable swath of ocean floor in the world. Below a rim two hundred feet deep a canyon plunged to depths of more than six hundred feet. Finding a suitable site had proved to be a challenge, even with the assistance of a Navy ship that scoured the sea floor with underwater cameras to assess a number of possible locations. On one exploratory dive to get a firsthand look at a possible site, a scuba failure left Walt Mazzone lying unconscious on the ocean floor, more than two hundred feet down. In that moment, the whole program might as well have been lying down there, too. Mazzone’s alert buddy diver, an aquanaut-to-be named Bill Bunton, came to his rescue, but in the confusion Bunton had to abandon his bazooka-sized camera.

  Once Bunton and Mazzone made it back to the surface, Bob Barth and Scott Carpenter went down to retrieve the camera, a valuable piece of equipment that Bunton, a former Army paratrooper turned civilian specialist in underwater photography, would need while living in Sealab II. Carpenter spotted it and swam at top speed for the bottom, leaving a great trail of bubbles in his wake. Barth tried to slow him down, knowing the dangers of breathing hard when in the realm of the narcotic haze, but couldn’t stop Carpenter before he got to the camera. As the two paused for a decompression stop, holding on to the line they followed between the surface and the bottom, a dizzying array of synaptic bells and whistles went off in Carpenter’s head. Disoriented, he hung upside down on the line like a drunken trapeze artist, eager for his disconcerting first bout with nitrogen narcosis to pass.

  The fact that such near disasters could arise on these brief and largely conventional scuba dives put the risks lying ahead for Sealab II in sobering perspective. The job of a Sealab II aquanaut wasn’t for everybody. Each of those who volunteered had his own reasons for embracing the risks of undersea living. Berry Cannon, for example, one of the dozen civilian aquanauts, had joined the Navy after high school. During four years of service he became a mineman second class and developed a keen interest in electronics. He earned a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Florida, back in his home state, and was working as a civilian electronics specialist at the Mine Defense Lab in Panama City when Sealab I was pieced together on Alligator Bayou. When word got around about Sealab II, Cannon made sure to volunteer, and was among the several hundred others in the running for a spot.

  Cannon was a young father, thirty years old, lean and muscular, with dark hair and chiseled features reminiscent of a Roman statue. He had always admired the independence and self-reliance of the Old West, read a lot of Zane Grey, and liked to imagine himself as a Western pioneer. He and the other aquanauts shared a genuine sense that their sea floor sojourn could be the start of something historic, a pioneering exodus into the sea that mirrored the moon shot. It was an extraordinary opportunity that ordinary guys like Cannon didn’t want to pass up, despite the risks.

  On August 26, 1965, Sealab II touched down on the sea floor, following a scare from helium leaks, a tangled umbilical, and a few other technical difficulties. The lab had to be held just below the surface for a day, but once the problems were fixed the lowering went relatively smoothly. The Berkone had been fitted with a counterweight and an innovative system of pulleys and winches for easing the two-hundred-ton habitat to the bottom. Sealab II, which weighed about seven times as much as Sealab I, also had an improved ballasting system. Instead of relying on old train axles, the team could control the lab’s buoyancy by taking in and releasing water from built-in tanks, much as a submarine operates. That system, along with the counterweight, made it possible to lower the lab within a couple of hours—and with considerably less drama than had been the case with Sealab I. No yo-yoing, no major flooding.

  A sizable press corps witnessed the event, which pleased Captain Bond. It was a welcome contrast to the scant attention in Bermuda, and might bode well for coverage over the forty-five days to come. Two dozen photographers snapped away as the first team of ten aquanauts posed for pictures, and later that afternoon they donned wet suits and scuba, moving about awkwardly on the Berkone as they prepared to swim down to the lab in pairs. Captain Bond and numerous crew members crowded onto a lower deck at the waterline to see the divers off. Someone handed Scott Carpenter a cigarette and he took a last puff. Carpenter, who was forty, and Wilbur Eaton were first to drop into the water. Eaton, who was like Bob Barth’s alter ego, was a thirty-nine-year-old gunner’s mate and an experienced diver who had been a support diver during Sealab I.

  The lab had landed about fifty yards to the southeast of Scripps Canyon, atop a silt-blanketed bluff that would have afforded a spectacular view if not for the opaque saltwater setting. Carpenter entered first, and Eaton followed him up the stepladder and through the four-foot liquid looking glass in the floor at one end of the lab. No one was singing “O Sole Mio” but Carpenter and Eaton exchanged a few words and found themselves struck by fits of laughter. For some reason the pitch of their Chipmunk voices sounded more preposterous than usual. Maybe it was a release of pent-up tensions. The project had been run on a tight schedule. For seven months they were focused on preparations and training. Now, just a few days behind schedule, they had suddenly arrived. The plan was to have Carpenter lead the first two teams, for fifteen days each, so he could spend thirty consecutive days living and working on the ocean floor. Cousteau’s Starfish House oceanauts had lived for as long a stretch in the Red Sea, but that was a much less hostile environment, with balmy, crystalline water, and they were just two atmospheres down, not seven.

  Carpenter and Eaton were followed by Berry Cannon and Cyril Tuckfield. Tuck, a chief engineman, and Cannon, the electronics specialist, had a few preparatory tasks to do around the lab before entering it—adjusting some valves, hooking up the freshwater lines, and checking out the Personnel Transfer Capsule. The PTC was a pressurized elevator similar to the Submersible Decompression Chamber used for Sealab I, but specially fabricated for Sealab II and large enough to hold the ten aquanauts in each team. This new capsule, painted international orange and shaped like an oil drum the size of an elevator, was lowered by the Berkone crane to the sea floor. It stood upright atop a four-legged steel base and was placed ten yards or so from Sealab II’s entry hatch. The first aquanauts had swum down to the habitat but the little capsule would take them back to the surface and be attached, under pressure, to the decompression chamber installed in the former missile bay on the Berkone.

  Cannon and Tuck were working in the water for perhaps twenty minutes before they swam into the shark cage, the protective fencing around the entry hatch similar to the setup on Sealab I. A lot of small fish had already congregated, attracted to this alien fixture that landed in their midst. Cannon and Tuck climbed the short ladder, then pulled themselves up through the liquid looking glass. Cannon immediately sensed the warmth of the lab’s interior and heard the Chipmunk chatter. Out of one porthole he could see the light he just turned on inside the PTC. The light reassured him, like a beacon in thick fog. If Sealab II became uninhabit
able for any reason, the PTC would be a safe haven.

  Once inside the lab Cannon and Tuck doffed their Mark VI gear and peeled off their wet suits. The suits’ porous latex material became noticeably thinner and fit more snugly, like a second skin, under more than a hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. Cannon, like Wilbur Eaton, looked like a lab rat. They were both sporting electrodes on their scalps, with wires that ran down their necks, over their shoulders, and onto their chests. For the first four days the electrodes and wires would detect any irregularities in brain and heart function.

  Dive gear was stowed around the entry hatch, in a kind of foyer. From the entry, Cannon took his first walk to the bunks at the opposite end of the lab, about twenty paces along a path of rough carpet running straight up the middle of the lab. As on Sealab I, these living quarters, with a galley and workspace, had the austere comforts of a camper. But the entire lab was on a slant. It had come to rest on a canyon slope and Cannon was among the first to experience the gentle uphill grade en route to the bunks. The lab also listed to the port side. The tilt increased slightly during the first hour, which made Cannon a little nervous. No one wanted Sealab sliding toward the edge of Scripps Canyon. To prevent any further slippage, an anchor with a six-inch-thick line was dropped from the Berkone onto a ridge about two hundred feet from Sealab. From there the aquanauts would have to mule-haul the line across the sea floor and tie it to the lab.

  Within the next few hours the rest of the first team arrived in pairs, including the team doctor, twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant Commander Robert Sonnenburg, a burly six-foot-four and 240 pounds. His beefy hands had been the catalyst for some crass commentary when the aspiring aquanauts gathered in Panama City for physicals, including a routine prostate exam—a “digital rectal examination,” which the guys just called “the finger wave.” Lester Anderson had used the exam to perpetrate a characteristically outrageous prank. Anderson flummoxed Dr. Sonnenburg—and greatly entertained the divers in the adjoining waiting room—with an exaggerated, operatic wail during the beefy finger wave. He followed up by giving the earnest young medical officer a big kiss—right on the mouth—then threw in a crude, mock proposition. After that encounter, Dr. Sonnenburg may have been relieved when Anderson was bumped from the program.

  Sonnenburg was the only other aquanaut besides Scott Carpenter scheduled to live a full month on the bottom, but instead of duplicating Carpenter’s consecutive days, Sonnenburg would leave with Team 1 and come back for the final fifteen days with Team 3 to shed light on the possible effects of going in and out of prolonged saturation under real working conditions.

  Dr. Sonnenburg swam down with Billie Coffman, who had witnessed the EDU fire with Anderson. Coffman was a torpedoman who had earned the Bronze Star during the Korean War for his efforts to rescue fellow sailors aboard their stricken destroyer. Like Cannon and Eaton, he was sporting electrodes. Carpenter, Eaton, Cannon, Tuck, Dr. Sonnenburg, and Coffman still awaited four more aquanauts, including Tom Clarke, a lanky and bespectacled Scripps graduate student in marine biology who liked to keep goldfish in the claw-foot bathtub of his La Jolla apartment. At twenty-five, Clarke was the youngest of the aquanauts—their average age was thirty-six—and one of the few who wasn’t married with children. On Team 1 alone were the fathers of eight boys and fourteen girls. Clarke swam down with Jay Skidmore, a thirty-seven-year-old Navy photographer who was involved with the record deep dive of the bathyscaphe Trieste. Even before all ten were in, the full spectrum of aquanaut personalities and their varying degrees of experience was plain to see.

  Sealab II made an ideal setting for a study of “groups under stress,” so from an office onshore at Scripps, psychologists planned to observe the captive aquanauts over the closed-circuit television system. Each team member had to fill out extensive daily questionnaires, such as a “mood checklist.” The living conditions alone were enough to get on a person’s nerves—a crowded tank, stuffy and humid, suffused with the sweaty stench of a locker room in which everyone sounded like Chipmunks. Many of the aquanauts had known each other only a short time. The smokers couldn’t smoke, of course—not enough oxygen in the pressurized atmosphere to sustain fire—and outside was a very hostile environment.

  Captain Mazzone’s wartime submarine patrols had taught him to appreciate the value of decent food to a captive crew’s morale and he took a personal interest in creating the Sealab menu. Some foods could not be prepared inside the artificial atmosphere—frying was verboten, as was cooking meat, for fear of spewing potentially dangerous hydrocarbons and other elements. The lab was loaded with more than two thousand cans, many containing heat-and-eat meals of the sort for which Chef Boyardee was well known—spaghetti and meatballs, franks and beans, ravioli, beef stew. All of these the aquanauts could safely heat on their electric stovetop. They had also stocked peanuts, pickles, raisins, crackers, assorted condiments, and four varieties of freeze-dried omelets—cheese, ham, mushroom, and Western.

  For the first team life inside Sealab II was initially like a dormitory on move-in day, with lots of unpacking and housekeeping to be done in a space not much bigger than a city bus. The lab’s tilt didn’t make things any easier. Pots and dishes had a tendency to slide. Someone came up with a suitable nickname for their sea floor accommodations: the Tiltin’ Hilton.

  Lying in the narrow bunk that first night, electrodes protruding from his scalp, Cannon listened as Scott Carpenter struggled to make himself understood for a radio hookup with his pal Gordon Cooper, who was then whizzing around the globe, a hundred miles up, aboard Gemini 5 with astronaut Pete Conrad. Carpenter sat next to the Sealab II console in his bathrobe, wearing headphones with a jutting microphone, like the one sportscasters wear, patiently if futilely repeating himself. This “sea-to-sky” voice link had struck someone as a fruitful way to siphon some of the enthusiasm for outer space to inner space. Unfortunately, the NASA radio operators seemed unable to comprehend Carpenter’s otherworldly helium speech. Captain Bond, the erstwhile philologist, stepped in via telephone from the Berkone to help and the call was patched through about eleven-thirty that night, Pacific time, as Gemini 5 made its 117th orbit. Carpenter might have kidded his fellow spaceman and delighted reporters with a favorite diver maxim of the day: “The ocean’s bottom is more interesting than the moon’s behind.” Or he could give Gordo a little ribbing about being just one atmosphere up while he and his Sealab crew were more than seven atmospheres down. But Carpenter wasn’t that sort of a josher and he and Cooper were barely able to greet each other before the historic communications link fizzled.

  The newspapers devoted scant attention to the sea-to-sky stunt but were filled with stories about Gemini 5 seeking to break the Soviet Union’s duration record by orbiting the earth for eight days. Still, there was ample time for Sealab II’s pioneering quest, including its own unprecedented duration, to make the papers. A month earlier Captain Bond had appeared on an NBC current events program called Survey ’65, but the timing was not ideal. His interview aired on a Saturday night in mid-August, shortly before Sealab II was towed from Long Beach to La Jolla—and just as the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles exploded in riots. Thirty-four people would soon be dead, more than a thousand injured, hundreds arrested, and dozens of buildings burned and destroyed. A couple of weeks later, as the aquanauts entered Sealab, those on board the Berkone could practically hear the ecstatic shrieking from across the water as the Beatles put on one of their final American shows of the year in San Diego—another reminder that in the mid-1960s Sealab had ample competition for attention.

  The aquanauts on Team 1 followed the splash-down phase of the Gemini space mission on a little television that had been sealed inside a pressure-proof housing. Captain Bond liked the idea that his aquanauts felt a kinship with the spaceship. He was also relieved that they were safely on the bottom at last, completing their move-in tasks. When they asked that some music be piped in, Papa Topside gladly obliged. He also pulled out his harmonica. It soothe
d his nerves to play. He serenaded the men below over the intercom and relished the wild howls that came back in response. It had been eight years since Bond first began to lobby for a grand undersea quest. His thoughts, as recorded in a daily logbook, reflected his dreamy jubilation: “What a life in the deep! Commercial TV, unlimited fish-watching, FM music, gourmet-grade food, and hundreds of willing servants! Beats space exploration any day.” The first full working day on the bottom, August 29, was a Sunday. Bond knew his aquanauts were busy but called for a halt in the action below to draw some inspiration from above. Over the intercom, in his soothing pulpit brogue, Bond recited the Sealab prayer he wrote for Sealab I. “Almighty God, who declared through Holy Scripture that mankind would one day acquire dominion over the seas, and the creatures therein, grant that this day fulfillment of Thy word is at hand…”

  11

  LESSONS IN SURVIVAL

  A key to the aquanauts’ survival, apart from their own wits, was the efficacy of their equipment, from the hulking Tiltin’ Hilton itself on down to the delicate needles in their depth gauges. When they went swimming outside the habitat, nothing was more important than the breathing gear on their backs. For much of their work in the water, the aquanauts would rely on the Mark VI. Despite its peculiarities and the diver’s need to maintain a sixth sense for subtle signs of malfunction, the gas-recycling rig was still the best of its kind for dives out of a habitat at seven atmospheres.