Sealab

by Ben Hellwarth

  In addition to the Mark VI, the aquanauts could use standard scuba and would try out a new prototype, called the Arawak—named for a seafaring group of South American and Caribbean Indians. The Arawak was umbilical-fed, drawing breathing gas from the artificial atmosphere like the noisy “hookah” used on Sealab I. But the Arawak was designed to conserve gas, like the Mark VI, and would return the diver’s exhalations to the lab through a secondary umbilical. The dual Arawak umbilical—about a hundred feet long and as thick as a pair of garden hoses—was attached to breathing bags worn as a vest in a manner similar to the Mark VI. As with any umbilical-fed rig, the Arawak offered an indefinite gas supply, but also limited range. It was useful for work right around the outside of the habitat, but the growing web of lines and cables could complicate its use, as Tuck and Dr. Sonnenburg found out. Their Arawak umbilicals got so tangled up that it took Berry Cannon and Billie Coffman a half-hour to free them. The visibility was poor that day, as it often was, and it was almost six o’clock in the evening, so the minimal sunlight was beginning its fade to black.

  Scott Carpenter gave the Arawak a try early on and what happened was enough to make him wish he were back in orbit. He was out with Billie Coffman, working on something at the opposite end of the cylindrical habitat, twenty yards or so from the entry hatch, his umbilical trailing behind him. It was dark and cold, but otherwise everything seemed to be all right—until Carpenter had difficulty inhaling. He sucked harder on the mouthpiece but the blockage just got worse, until it was like sucking on a rock. The inability to breathe is an immediate, terrifying threat to survival, especially when you don’t know what is going on. Carpenter swam for the shark cage and the entry hatch inside. It seemed a world away. At moments like this, somewhere in the diver’s adrenaline-drenched mind, lurks the possibility that his trailing umbilical could get caught on something, yanking him to a sudden halt like a dog on a leash. Then what?

  The aquanauts still had no voice communication in the water, just hand signals. So no one inside the lab nor anyone topside was aware of Carpenter’s plight any more than they had known when Tiger Manning was swimming for his life. They only realized there was trouble when Carpenter burst through the liquid looking glass. He pulled out his mouthpiece and speaking… between… gas-gobbling… gasps, he said that Coffman might be having the same problem. Someone had to get in the water and go after him. No sooner had Carpenter spit out the words than Coffman appeared next to him in the open hatch. Coffman had seen his team leader take off in a hurry and he followed, guessing that something was wrong.

  If Carpenter hadn’t made it back, the national press would undoubtedly have noticed. (“Scott Carpenter, the second American astronaut to orbit the earth, became the nation’s first aquanaut to die on the ocean floor…”) That would not have been good for the program, but Carpenter lived and his close call went unreported, like so much else about Sealab. A bad kink in Carpenter’s umbilical was to blame, a simple but potentially deadly malfunction. After straightening out their hoses, Carpenter and Coffman disappeared down the hatch once more into the dark, cold water to get on with their work.

  The inability to talk while in the water remained an obvious threat to survival, so Berry Cannon and Wilbur Eaton, Barth’s good friend and alter ego, prepared to try out an Aquasonic, the space age name of a promising prototype for diver voice communication. If it worked, the aquanauts wouldn’t have to be incommunicado in emergencies and diver-to-diver dialogue would be especially helpful on complex jobs. Now, when hand signals didn’t suffice, the aquanauts had to stop what they were doing and swim back into Sealab so they could pull out their mouthpieces and talk things over, in their helium falsettos. Even old-style hardhat divers had had telephone systems in their bulbous helmets for half a century, since about 1915. But such systems were more easily devised for the dry interior of a helmet than for a mouthpiece and face mask.

  The Aquasonic looked like something a fighter pilot might wear, a type of mask fitted around the mouth that was supposed to allow for both breathing and talking underwater. Cannon, whose expertise included underwater communications, hooked up the Aquasonic system with a Mark VI and Wilbur Eaton took it out for a test dive. Back in the habitat Cannon received Eaton’s signal but his helium speech was incomprehensible. Worse, the mask leaked badly. Cannon’s verdict: Old-fashioned hand signals would have to do. A piece of equipment as significant as the Aquasonic that wasn’t thoroughly tested and safe to use was another indication that the Man-in-the-Sea program, despite a surge in funding and enthusiasm, was still in its infancy. As Scott Carpenter summed it up, they were “working with mail-order equipment in marginal conditions.”

  Besides the special projects the aquanauts had to do more regular kinds of jobs—routine wouldn’t be the right word—but jobs to keep their undersea house in order. Tending to the “pots” was one. These were airtight containers the size of trash cans that ran like dumbwaiters on cables, often several times a day, to ferry supplies and materials between the Berkone and a spot just outside the shark cage. Arriving pots had to be met, hauled through the water, and lifted up through the hatch into the lab, and pots such as those filled with aquanaut blood samples had to be sent back. Open baskets were set up on a dumbwaiter system similar to the one for the pots to carry Mark VI and scuba rigs to the surface for gas refilling. The lab was not yet equipped for the aquanauts to refill their gear themselves.

  When a number of larger pieces of equipment were lowered from the surface, the first order of business was often just to find them in the obsidian gloom. Then they had to be moved into position, and moving anything around on the ocean floor could be exhausting with water being about eight hundred times as dense as air. Try walking waist-deep in a swimming pool or just clapping your hands underwater and—even without the burden of the cold and the bulk of diving gear—you will experience the added effort needed for even the simplest moves a diver makes. But depth and the greater pressure that comes with it do nothing to create additional resistance to movement. As Pascal’s law explains, pressure applied to a fluid is transmitted equally in all directions, so there is no net effect.

  The Berkone crew had to be careful not to drop anything on the lab and could only be so precise about where auxiliary equipment might land after drifting and dangling on a cable through two hundred feet of seawater. A few items did get lost on the way down, even fairly large ones like the “way station”—a hollow steel box about the size of a phone booth sandwiched by a smaller pair of adjoining boxes for ballast. Two or three way stations were to be set up as emergency safe havens along frequently traveled routes, but one tumbled into Scripps Canyon early on and disappeared. Several “psychomotor” machines were lowered and put into place outside the habitat, including one resembling a pinball machine. These devices comprised a kind of underwater arcade for testing and recording the aquanauts’ strength and dexterity.

  Another piece of equipment lowered from the surface was a weather station that looked something like a teepee frame. It was part of a Scripps project conceived to demonstrate the kind of scientific research that might be done more usefully from an undersea base than from the surface. The weather station hit bottom just twenty-five feet or so from the shark cage, on the port side. No one inside Sealab could see that far through the portholes—too dark and murky—but Carpenter and Eaton eventually found the contraption shrouded in the muck. They kicked up dirty clouds of the silt that blanketed the bottom as they dragged the weather station to a sandy slope near the rim of the submarine canyon, about fifty yards away, which the Scripps scientists had decided was a better data-gathering site than in the sheltered valley around the Tiltin’ Hilton.

  Cannon was carrying a fifteen-pound instrument out to the weather station for hookup one day and soon realized that he was too heavy to swim. He had to walk the distance, working against both gravity and water density each step of the way. Being encased in a full-body, tight-fitting wet suit added another layer of resistance. Cannon wa
s huffing and puffing by the time he reached the station. In situations like this it could be hard for an aquanaut to tell whether his heavy breathing was due to the physical exertion or whether he might actually be experiencing a telltale sign of trouble with the Mark VI—Is my exhaust valve burping properly? Am I feeling dangerously light-headed? Am I about to pass out, like Tiger did? Will anyone even notice if I collapse out here in the liquid void? Cannon would survive this taxing trek to the weather station, but anytime any aquanaut’s fate was in question, so, too, was the fate of the program. Things might go relatively smoothly for hours, even days at a time, with the entire team surviving, if not always thriving. Headaches, fatigue, ear infections, and a few other ailments dogged the aquanauts.

  Within a few days of Cannon’s arrival on the bottom, he and Jay Skidmore, the Navy photographer on Team 1, donned the Arawak and swam over to the PTC so Cannon could hook up a battery charger. They climbed into the short trunk and up through the liquid looking glass into the dry capsule. They immediately sensed that something was fishy—literally. Anchovies! Schools of the little silver fish apparently had become enraptured by the glow emanating from the open hatch, and hundreds of them, now lifeless and putrefying, had swum over the circular rim of the hatch and met with a dry fate. Cannon swam back to Sealab to report that their safe haven and elevator to the surface stank—and not just a little. The effect was nauseating. It was intolerable for minutes, much less hours. There was no immediate crisis, but if Sealab II were to lose pressure, or spring a leak, or if the atmosphere turned toxic—the very problem that forced Lindbergh and Sténuit to evacuate during their first hours in Link’s SPID—the ten aquanauts would have nowhere to go for shelter. It took Cannon, Tuck, and Dr. Sonnenburg a day to rid the PTC of the decaying fish and purge its putrid atmosphere. Despite their efforts, the capsule had to be raised to the Berkone for a more complete flushing and ventilating. A makeshift screen was installed to prevent further anchovy invasions, and this additional work meant the aquanauts would have to go for another night without their backup safe haven.

  As it turned out, anchovies were not their only problem. The shark cage surrounding the Sealab II hatch was meant to give the aquanauts a quick getaway from large predators. And while encounters with a fearsome creature like the great white shark would be rare in these waters, the shark cage did nothing to keep out smaller fish. One species was gathering in ever larger numbers, not just inside the cage and near the entry hatch but all around Sealab. They were Scorpaena guttata, also known as sculpin or scorpion fish. They’re brownish and speckled, with a stout body that can grow to be about the size of a football. Unaggressive and slow-moving, they often wriggled into the silt-blanketed bottom. But along the backs of scorpion fish is a spiky dorsal fin. They look like little dragons, and their caudal fins are similarly spiked. When they sense danger, they respond like porcupines, sticking up their protective spikes. Those spikes, sheathed with tiny venom sacs, are sharp enough and strong enough to skewer human flesh, even through a wet suit. The sting can cause excruciating pain, but not death, not usually, although multiple stings could be serious enough to require hospitalization. Soon the spiky creatures were everywhere, about one every square yard or so. It was like a minefield of scorpion fish, which made the hostile environment even more hostile than anticipated.

  The lighting outside the white habitat created a dusky scene in chiaroscuro. The oasis of light usually dissolved into darkness within twenty yards or so, long before the aquanauts arrived at job sites like the weather station. Some found it unnerving to lose sight of Sealab, enveloped in murk with no points of reference and only the sound of their own breathing as reassurance. Many aquanauts made a practice of carrying tethers with them to avoid getting lost or thrown off course by currents. Mazzone noted that the added sense of isolation from living with limited visibility might be another area ripe for physiological research. There was still much to learn.

  As a practical matter, almost everything seemed to take longer than expected, a source of frustration for those on the bottom, but also just another fact of underwater work. Donning a snug-fitting wet suit and strapping on breathing gear could take an hour (greasing themselves with liquid soap helped speed the process of squeezing into wet suits). Once in the water, every movement unfolded in belabored slow motion. Fatigue set in more quickly, and along with the biting cold and limited visibility a job could get complicated. Things floated away. Lines got tangled. Manual dexterity was further diminished for those who wore wet suit gloves to fend off the cold. All the while they were dodging the ubiquitous scorpion fish and keeping a sixth sense trained on the functioning of their diving rigs, especially the Mark VI. Berry Cannon found that the floodlights around the outside of Sealab, for example, frequently burned out and could take an hour to replace. Other maintenance and repair issues, both the expected and the unexpected, added to an already full agenda of useful work.

  More than a week into the experiment, neither the scorpion fish minefield or the anchovy invasion or even Carpenter’s Arawak scare had made the daily papers. A few stunts managed to produce a smattering of innocuous notices, though, as when Captains Bond and Mazzone put on scuba rigs and made their way down into Sealab to witness Billie Coffman’s reenlistment ceremony, led by Scott Carpenter. “This will certainly be a first in naval annals,” Bond mused. Usually, as with Sealab I, no one other than the aquanauts was allowed inside the habitat, but Bond had made an exception for his brief ceremonial visit. Reenlistment aside, the visit might have made good advertising for the advantages of a saturation dive over a conventional bounce dive. For their brief thirteen minutes on the bottom, Bond and Mazzone had to spend more than an hour decompressing.

  A few days later Dr. Sonnenburg’s wife came aboard the Berkone with a devil’s food cake topped with ten homemade aquanaut figurines. The three-layer cake had crumbled, but was put in one of the airtight transfer pots and sent down to Sealab for her husband’s twenty-eighth birthday, on September 6. The couple exchanged pleasantries over the intercom and from the command van Captain Bond led the singing of “Happy Birthday.” This cheerful episode, too, produced some bemused notices in the papers.

  Bond’s prospects for better coverage brightened when he was asked to sit for an interview with a reporter from The New York Times. The Times didn’t send its esteemed military affairs writer Hanson Baldwin, whom Ed Link and his friends had sought out, and as far as Bond could tell, the reporter who came to interview him on the Berkone had never even heard of Sealab I. When the article appeared the next day, it was two dozen paragraphs consigned to page thirty. In it, the reporter wrote that the aquanauts “were suffering considerable hardships.” He noted the “inadequacy” of the wet suits, the “paralyzing coldness,” the “painful ear infections,” and the “invasion of stinging scorpion fish.” This was all true. But the Times made no mention of saturation diving, or how this newfound ability to live on the seabed was breaking century-old diving barriers—despite the unavoidable hardships that came with the hostile territory. Papa Topside was always sensitive about what the skeptical Washington bosses might think, and the story did cause some unwelcome consternation back east. Like Ed Link, who had fired off a letter to the Times, Bond tried to lodge an official protest but mainly he blew off steam by blue-penciling the offending article and adding a few earthy comments of his own. He posted the marked-up clipping on the Berkone’s event blackboard for the edification of other visiting news reporters.

  A few days after the Times story appeared, the first team was getting ready to wrap up its fifteen-day boot camp on the bottom. Commander Carpenter had just returned from a final, midday inspection of the PTC. As Carpenter came up through the liquid looking glass, dragging the Arawak umbilical behind him, someone dropped a wet suit glove into the open hatch. Carpenter instinctively stuck his bare hand in the water to grab the glove before it sank. Then came the pain. Instead of grabbing the glove he grazed his right index finger on a sculpin’s spiky fin. The p
ain soon spread from finger to hand and arm. It was an excruciating, debilitating ache, like having your hand slammed in a car door. Carpenter got out of the water, undressed, and went to lie down on his bunk. His nose and sinuses filled with fluid, forcing him to breathe through his mouth.

  Bond sent down an assortment of drugs for Dr. Sonnenburg to administer. Bond also had Carpenter soak his hand in ice water, but that seemed only to exacerbate the pain. Woozy from the drugs, Carpenter slept for a few hours. Sonnenburg went back and forth on the intercom with Bond, who was prepared to dive down himself and help if necessary. Cannon, Tuck, Coffman, Eaton, and the rest of Team 1 postponed their pressurized PTC ride back to the Berkone, where thirty-plus hours in the decompression chamber awaited them. Carpenter was supposed to stay down another fifteen days and lead the second team, but if his condition didn’t improve soon he would have to catch the PTC back to the surface with the others. A motorbike spill had kept him off Sealab I, and now a venomous fish threatened to cut short his record thirty-day stay on Sealab II.

  It’s safe to say that Sculpaena guttata had never made such headlines. The papers seemed to find it irresistible to point out that a former astronaut, who orbited the earth three times without a scratch, had fallen prey to… a fish! Not a dreaded great white shark, but a spiky little menace no bigger than a football. Carpenter was not even the first aquanaut to have been stung. About a week into the experiment, a scorpion fish punctured Billie Coffman’s wet suit and zapped him on the leg. That incident never made the papers. As far as Sealab’s place in the popular psyche went, hardly a word was printed to mark a genuine milestone of the sort often heralded in headlines, as with the recent Gemini 5 flight: A few days before Carpenter’s sting, on September 7, Sealab II passed the ten-day duration mark set by Sealab I.

  Within a few hours the doctors were satisfied that Carpenter’s condition had stabilized enough to leave him on the bottom. The rest of the first team swam over to the PTC and rode it back to the surface that afternoon. Three members of Team 2, including Bob Barth, came down to begin the transition. While Commander Carpenter was still laid up, Captain Bond appointed Barth as the team leader’s acting deputy.