Sealab

by Ben Hellwarth

  In the ensuing decade, Meeks garnered considerable experience as a working diver, including a stint in Alaska waters so numbingly cold they gave him nightmares for years. He later got transferred to the Navy’s Ship Repair Facility in Yokosuka to do salvage and repair work, mostly using hardhat gear. When Bond was looking for Navy divers with salvage experience, he put in a call to Meeks, who had just arrived for duty in Bermuda. Meeks really hadn’t heard much about Sealab—might have read a blurb in the Navy Times—but when Bond brought it up, sure, he was interested. Ten days later Meeks was on his way back to the States, ready to accept Bond’s tempting offer to join Sealab’s third team.

  Given their backgrounds, Sheats and Meeks were logical choices to be first to try out a novel technique called “foam in salvage,” or FIS, one of several high-priority tests. The procedure was straightforward enough: Pump the jet carcass full of a frothing goo designed to force water out. The goo then morphs into a buoyant and spongy foam. Once there was enough foam the plane would float to the surface. That was the idea, anyway. This method had been tried before, but only in water no more than thirty feet deep. Laboratory tests indicated that the foam would work at greater depths and in colder water, but Team 3 would put it to a realistic test on the aircraft hulk. If successful, the foam could be used to raise other large objects—missiles, submarines, even a space capsule.

  The day of the debut foam-in-salvage test Sheats and Meeks went through the tedious ritual of donning their skintight wet suits. They also took the necessary steps to prepare the Mark VI—checking regulator assembly, checking valves and hoses, gas flow rate, and always making sure the canister was topped off with dry, sandy granules of the carbon-dioxide-absorbing compound called Baralyme. A high-pressure line enabled the Team 3 aquanauts to refill the gas tanks on their diving rigs themselves rather than sending them to the Berkone in dumbwaiter baskets, which gave the divers an added measure of autonomy.

  Sheats and Meeks swam a hundred feet over to the sunken aircraft and got the FIS gun, which looked like a cross between a rifle and a spray-painting gun. Dangled down from the Berkone it was attached to a pair of hoses carrying the frothing goo, a mixture of Freon and other chemicals. Meeks picked up the goo gun to take the first shots while Sheats assisted. As usual they had no voice communication, only hand signals. The procedure was to shoot the goo into a series of holes around the fuselage. Each one was supposed to take between two and eighteen minutes to fill. They started at the tail, then worked their way to the holes in the side. As Meeks fired away, some of the foam escaped through cracks in the fuselage, creating near whiteout conditions and coating the aquanauts with the sticky goo. They were perhaps twenty minutes into the project when Meeks noticed he was having trouble staying in place. He was becoming overly buoyant. As the silent alarms went off in his head, Meeks quickly recognized that foam was clogging the exhaust valve on the shoulder of his breathing bag and causing it to balloon around his neck. The blockage could also disrupt the proper gas flow, another threat to his survival. Meeks and Sheats signaled to each other, dropped the goo gun, and made a brisk swim through the darkness toward the shark cage.

  Back in the lab Sheats let it be known that the FIS gun was unfortunately not compatible with the Mark VI. Like the unready Aquasonic, this was another by-product of the trial-and-error approach to Man-in-the-Sea that Mazzone had talked about at the recent press conference. The escaped foam had also coated watches and depth gauges, making them impossible to read, another unforeseen difficulty. As for the incompatibility of the Mark VI rig and the errant foam, the aquanauts would switch to standard scuba rigs for the rest of the testing. The gas supply would last about half as long, even with two large tanks, but there would be no breathing bags to clog and overinflate.

  Once the aquanauts got the jet hulk to rise and hover about twenty feet off the bottom, they watched to see how well the foam maintained its buoyancy. After a few hours, the jet settled back on the bottom. The next day an aquanaut team shot up the jet with more foam. It rose and sank again. There was either a problem with the foam, or the aquanauts may not have injected enough, or both. Still, Sheats found the work gratifying, and believed it was an important step forward for the program. The aquanauts had better luck with several fifty-five-gallon oil drums that also got the foam treatment. They rose like balloons on strings and showed no signs of sinking.

  In another test Sheats and Meeks blasted studs into steel as thick as a ship’s hull with a stud driver. Each time the aquanaut fired it, he had to keep his head out of the line of sight to avoid a painful shock loading on his eardrums, but Meeks preferred it to the messy foam. They successfully patched a mock section of a submarine hull and dragged a cumbersome prototype rubber pontoon to the repaired hull, kicking up silty clouds as they shuffled through the scorpion fish minefield. Once they wrestled the pontoon into position they inflated it to raise the mock sub section to the surface.

  Sheats and the third team were down less than a week when a telephone call was put through from Jacques Cousteau’s Conshelf Three, then on its tenth day on the bottom of the Mediterranean. The French oceanauts spoke some English, and one of the Sealab aquanauts, Scripps graduate student Rick Grigg, tried out his French. The result was mostly helium-spiked bilingual confusion that produced little more than comic relief. Bond blithely summed up the exchange this way: The oceanauts and aquanauts were doing well; the oceanauts congratulated the aquanauts; the aquanauts congratulated the oceanauts; the water in the Pacific was dark and cold; the water in the Mediterranean was dark and cold; no one understood each other very well.

  The dark and the cold were constants, but the Sealab II aquanauts contended with many variables as well. Both Meeks and Grigg were stung by scorpion fish. The Mark VI continued to present technical difficulties, including unnerving occurrences of rig roulette. Sheats worried that they were going to lose someone to the rig’s inconsistent breathing times. The whole team got a scare when gauge readings showed elevated carbon monoxide levels inside Sealab II. The CO may have been responsible for some of the aquanauts’ headaches. Captain Bond sent down Hopcalite, a chemical used to oxidize carbon monoxide aboard nuclear submarines, which the aquanauts mixed into the lab’s atmosphere-scrubbing system to eradicate the colorless, odorless, silent killer that had mysteriously crept into their midst.

  The Team 3 aquanauts were doing most of their own cooking, although one of the wives was allowed to send down a cake decorated with the Sealab insignia for Sheats’s fiftieth birthday. To supplement the canned fare, Sheats soon had his team eating sashimi, slicing up cod or octopi or whatever else they caught around the habitat, even scorpion fish. The old master diver speared perch and rockfish and sent some up to Captain Mazzone and the night crew.

  As part of a Scripps research project, grad student Grigg had been netting hordes of plankton from the water, like dust from the wind. Sheats decided to serve some in a soup. They were not to everyone’s taste, but Meeks found the little critters pleasantly nutty. The next morning Sheats had a bowl of raw plankton for breakfast. Not bad with cereal. Plankton could make a nutritious food on the deep frontier, he thought—perfect for future sea dwellers. Captain Bond was delighted with his friend’s show of self-sufficiency. A true aquanaut ought to have a woodsman’s knack for living off his environment, Bond reckoned, and who better than Bob Sheats to show the way? In that same spirit, the Team 3 aquanauts did some impromptu training of a curious sea lion that regularly popped up in the entry hatch. Compact, agile, and cooperative, the precocious little pinniped, which they called Sam, rivaled Tuffy the porpoise in its ability to respond to the porpoise’s buzzer. Sam’s performance indicated that his kind might do well as couriers for future undersea missions, especially since a sea lion could bring deliveries right to Sealab’s doorstep.

  All the Team 3 aquanauts, starting with Sheats, made more excursion dives, this time over the canyon rim and down to three hundred feet, adding another atmosphere to the maximum depth attained by Car
penter and the second team—another first for Sealab II, as proud Papa Topside would point out, and another step downward. At that depth they were also just an atmosphere shy of Conshelf Three’s depth in the Mediterranean, though that seemed to be coincidence more than a product of conscious competition.

  While the first two teams had each managed to rack up totals of around one hundred hours diving outside the lab, the Team 3 aquanauts, with their heavier work schedule and the benefit of the foundation laid by the previous teams, would spend almost 150 hours in the water. On one especially productive day, the Team 3 aquanauts amassed almost eight hundred minutes in the water—more than thirteen hours of dive time. Captain Bond got to thinking about a recent plane crash off Long Island, and how much more efficient the recovery operations might have been using a Sealab approach instead of conventional surface dives.

  Sheats and the third team spent their final hours essentially breaking camp—packing up, disconnecting cables, dismantling equipment. Bond gave his okay to keep their television circuit on through the last full day of their run so they could catch the third game of the World Series between the Dodgers and the Twins. Los Angeles, the favorite, had lost the first two games. Shortly after nine o’clock the next morning, Sunday, October 10, the day after the Dodgers won that third game, Captain Bond preached a bittersweet farewell of a sermon, inspired by The Road to Bithynia—one of his favorite religious novels. Following Bond’s customary recitation of the Sealab prayer, Bob Sheats led the aquanauts on the final swim to the PTC. They took their places on the benches around the inside of the cramped capsule and put on their football helmets. They had a smooth, uneventful ride to the surface and by eleven o’clock the PTC was successfully mated to its chamber hatch. All they had to do now was wait out their decompression time of approximately thirty hours. Team 1 was finished in thirty-one hours, but Team 2 had taken thirty-five. Where decompression was concerned, patience was always a virtue, and this was a small price to pay for two weeks at two hundred feet.

  Sheats had found his time in Sealab beautiful, adventurous, rewarding. But he was also frank enough to admit that fifteen days on the bottom had been enough, even for him, a master diver who had endured thirty-nine months as a prisoner of war. Toward the end of his stay in Sealab, Sheats felt as though he had to force himself into the chilling water. The others seemed ready, even eager, to get back to the surface, too. Some of Sheats’s fellow aquanauts had disappointed him in their performance, but others had performed superlatively. He planned to rate them all in his report.

  For the first twenty-four hours as the atmospheric gases were reconstituted and the chamber pressure systematically dropped, from seven to two atmospheres, Sheats passed the time reading and played some chess with Rick Grigg. They all listened to the Dodgers even up the series. Shortly after eleven the next morning, Sheats began to notice a telltale pain in his right knee. He did not want to be the one to ruin Dr. Bond’s perfect batting average for Sealab decompressions, but he knew what the pain might mean. A couple of hours later, when they were just twenty-three feet and a few hours from being released from the chamber, Sheats’s nagging knee ache had spread to his right hip, along the sciatic nerve. It was the same sensation he had the year before, back home in Washington state, when he got bent while helping a stricken civilian diver in a chamber. Before that, he had been hit just twice in twenty-seven years of diving. It was a reminder that no matter how experienced the diver or how precise the decompression schedule, the bends were always a threat.

  Sheats grudgingly reported his condition to Bond at one o’clock that afternoon. Bond locked into the chamber to verify his friend’s diagnosis, but knew Sheats was probably right. Indeed Sheats had the bends, but his case appeared to be the less serious variety—just a pain in the leg, not bubbles in the central nervous system that could do serious damage. Bond decided to have the nine others move into the chamber’s outer lock, a smaller section where they could finish off their six remaining hours of decompression before stepping out to breathe the cool, salty Pacific air. Sheats would stay behind in the main chamber, where the pressure would be raised to about three atmospheres to quash the bubbles fizzing in his leg. A hospital corpsman locked in, trading places with Bond to monitor Sheats’s condition. He would sit for the next twelve hours with Sheats, watching for any symptoms that might have to be treated with a hyperbaric roller-coaster ride, like the hair-raising one Bond once took with ailing Charlie Aquadro back in Pearl Harbor.

  While Sheats waited out his extended decompression, the other Team 3 aquanauts finished theirs in the outer lock. They soon went ashore for the final press conference, taking their places onstage while the aquanauts from the first and second teams assembled alongside reporters and guests in the Scripps auditorium. The tenor of this last conference was not much different from the previous one, although there was some added pomp as the Navy aquanauts received the Navy Unit Commendation. Captain Melson announced that it was “among the proudest ribbons that can be given by the secretary of the navy to military personnel.” The rear admiral in charge of the Office of Naval Research touted the oceans as “the next frontier.” Captain Bond offered fond introductions of his aquanauts, and each of the Team 3 members said a few words, mostly accentuating the positive—“The deep dive we made is something we’ll never forget,” as Bill Meeks said. No one dwelt much on close calls or chronic threats, like the need to play rig roulette with the finicky Mark VI.

  In Bob Sheats’s absence, Captain Bond recounted a heartfelt story about a sage piece of diving advice he once got from Sheats—a psychological tip about breath holding and maintaining one’s composure in underwater emergencies. Bond believed that advice once saved his life. Bond now returned the favor. His prescription for treating Sheats’s case of bends worked. By the time of the press conference the old master diver was safely out of the decompression chamber, but was held on the Berkone another day for observation.

  The two-hour press conference was not packed with a NASA-style horde, although The New York Times dispatched a reporter to the conference and in the next day’s paper heralded the Navy experiment as a success. Sealab II was indeed a success, and so was Cousteau’s Conshelf Three, though it went unmentioned at the final Sealab press conference, despite the recent habitat-to-habitat phone call and the simultaneity of the experiments. The French sphere surfaced the following day, having remained on the sea floor for an extra week—three weeks in all—to make up for some unexpected troubles, including stormy weather and helium leaks. Cousteau would later describe his Conshelf Three venture in another big article for National Geographic, and in a TV special shot by his son Philippe and narrated by Orson Welles.

  Sealab II, like Conshelf, had its share of troubles, but they paled in comparison to the overriding success of the mission. Never had so many people lived and worked for so long at such depth. Lived. That was the key. Captain Bond pointed out that the Sealab II aquanauts had logged a grand total of three and a half man-years living on the bottom, and when a reporter asked Bond to comment on the program’s achievements, he didn’t hesitate. The greatest achievement, he said, was sending twenty-eight men down and getting twenty-eight back. No one had been lost to the hostile environment, to spiny fish, finicky rigs, mail-order prototypes, poisonous gases, explosive decompression, or any other looming threats. With the mission of aquanaut survival accomplished, the Man-in-the-Sea program itself could hope to survive.

  Summing up, Bond sounded homey and proud. He proclaimed that the deep excursion dives, especially those made by the third team to three hundred feet, were a major breakthrough in saturation diving technique. Papa Topside also predicted that within a few years there would be aquanauts living at six hundred feet and commuting from there down to job sites at seventeen hundred feet—a bold prediction, to be sure, though perhaps not as eye-popping as the coming of Homo aquaticus. Bond then gave what amounted to a spontaneous mini-sermon on the Man-in-the-Sea program, and how far it had come despite an uncertain st
art. He told of the program’s genesis in a “sub-rosa fashion” eight years before, in the dark corners of a laboratory. Work was done on weekends, sometimes without official sanction, and in the face of cries from officials high up in Navy bureaus that this quest to live in the sea was “Buck Rogers–ish,” “madness,” and had no “social significance.” It was deemed a waste of his time and the Navy’s time, Bond said. “We have seen a program grow, and we have seen it grow into a healthy child.” Now, flush with triumph, they could nurture a deepening quest to live and work in the sea, one that might grow healthy enough to rival the moon shot, as George Bond always believed it should.

  13

  THE DAMN HATCH

  Within a few months of the successful conclusion of Sealab II, the Navy transformed its Deep Submergence Systems Project into a higher-prestige, stand-alone organization. With that hierarchical change, Sealab and Man-in-the-Sea were elevated from their experimental, R&D status to full-fledged Navy programs. That meant Sealab’s budding methods and equipment—decompression schedules, diving rigs, personnel transfer capsules, possibly even Tuffy the porpoise and an amiable sea lion named Gimpy—were all to be refined and certified for practical, “operational” use. A half-century earlier the Navy had embraced hardhat diving, followed by helium-oxygen diving and scuba. Now saturation diving was to become operational—a fully developed addition to the undersea toolbox. Saturation diving could be developed for a variety of underwater Navy operations—oceanography, search, salvage, construction, and the rare but potentially urgent need for submarine rescue.