Sealab

by Ben Hellwarth

  It looked like George Bond’s dream of an undersea future was coming true. Sealab II was shipped back to the Hunters Point shipyard in San Francisco, where it had been built, to be expanded and remodeled into the roomier, more sophisticated Sealab III, a habitat designed for a depth of at least four hundred feet. Also at the shipyard, the Elk River, originally built during World War II for amphibious landings, was being remade into a state-of-the-art support ship and mission control. It would be outfitted with the latest saturation diving systems, including two decompression chambers, two Personnel Transfer Capsules, and a sturdy gantry crane designed to move the PTCs less precariously—no more need for football helmets—and to lower and raise them through a protected opening in the hull, called a moon pool, amidships.

  Some $10 million, about five times as much as was spent for Sealab II, was being pumped into Sealab III. Close to sixty aquanauts and support divers, both military and civilian, were being selected to train for a two-month stay on the sea floor near the northeastern shoreline of Southern California’s San Clemente Island, a craggy twenty-mile-long slice of dusty chaparral run by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. The island served as a testing range for submarine-launched missiles, among other things, and would give Sealab III an additional base of operation close to the Elk River, which would be moored a little less than two miles from San Clemente. To the northeast, the Long Beach shipyard was a half-hour away by plane; directly to the east it was about the same distance to San Diego and neighboring La Jolla, the site of Sealab II. About twenty-five miles to the north, halfway between Sealab III’s planned location and Long Beach, was Catalina Island, where six years earlier Hannes Keller got tangled up in his Swiss and American flags, his partner perished, and a support diver vanished.

  Along with Sealab III’s operational stature and fresh infusion of money came a burgeoning bureaucracy and an influx of new people, most notably Commander Jackson M. Tomsky, the line officer chosen to lead this new organization. Captain Melson and the Office of Naval Research oversaw R&D, and they were now out of the picture. Jack Tomsky had enlisted thirty years back, at age nineteen, in his hometown of San Francisco and was trained as a hardhat diver. He worked on submarine rescue and salvage ships for a decade before he became an officer and a ship commander. Tomsky was a mustang, an enlisted man who attains the rank of an officer, and had recently commanded a submarine rescue vessel. Just prior to joining DSSP he was an officer-in-charge of the deep-sea diving school. Tomsky was tall and imposing, with dark hair swept back, hawklike, over a broad head. His hard-nosed manner and booming quarterdeck voice earned him the nickname “Black Jack.”

  When the prospect of running the Sealab program came his way, Tomsky had to do some talking to persuade those in charge of the Deep Submergence Systems Project that he was the right man for the job. Some in DSSP understood that George Bond had been the de facto leader of the previous two Sealab experiments, even though Bond was a medical officer and not a line officer, an issue that had caused some headaches for Captain Melson. With the entire program moving from experimental curiosity to operational capability, DSSP heads were looking for a proper commanding officer to infuse Man-in-the-Sea with “authority, responsibility, and accountability,” as John Craven, who was then director of DSSP, liked to put it. Tomsky, if chosen, would serve as Sealab III’s on-scene commander, a role that fit with his background, but he would also have to assume a bureaucratic role that was new to him, that of project manager of DSSP’s Ocean Engineering Branch, run from DSSP headquarters near Washington, D.C. Tomsky would be responsible for running several major projects related to submarine rescue and salvage operations in addition to Sealab III.

  Tomsky impressed Craven and convinced him that he could wear both organizational hats. By 1966, Tomsky had the job and would oversee the design and testing of new diving systems, the outfitting of the Elk River, and the construction of Sealab III, while also managing his branch’s other projects. The rise of a commander known as Black Jack over Papa Topside was itself indicative of how Sealab was maturing from its anomalously familial beginning, with George Bond as benevolent patriarch. Tomsky and Bond got along well enough. Bond was an easy man to like, and in the new management structure he was less involved with day-to-day operations. Bond retained his favored title of principal investigator and was to preside over Sealab III personnel health and safety, and conduct a continuing program of biomedical research. But like a peripatetic professor emeritus, Bond also had ample time to travel, lecture, and spread his gospel of undersea living, which was fine with Tomsky.

  Within the expanded DSSP and Sealab ranks there were now a number of medical officers besides Bond, including one of Tomsky’s key lieutenants, Bob Bornmann, the Navy doctor who worked with Ed Link and his cylinder on that first saturation dive in the south of France. Bornmann was one of many new faces among the doctors, corpsmen, master divers, engineers, civilians, scientists, and Seabees, members of the naval construction forces. Many of the aquanauts, too, were new to the expanded program. Just ten of fifty-four aquanauts and surface support divers had previous Sealab experience, among them Bob Barth, Berry Cannon, Barth’s pal Wilbur Eaton, Cyril Tuckfield, and Wally Jenkins. Lester Anderson did not return. Bob Sheats, the seasoned master diver and key participant in Sealab I and II, had concerns about the new DSSP management structure, how he would fit in and what authority he would have to ensure that the operation adhered to his strict standards for safety. Sheats ultimately decided not to participate, despite Bond’s encouragement that he do so. Bond’s old friend seemed to lack faith in Sealab III.

  Two British divers, two Canadians, and one Australian were on the aquanaut roster. All were volunteers from navies that used similar equipment and cooperated in diving training. Philippe Cousteau, the famous diver’s dashing twenty-eight-year-old younger son and collaborator who shot the footage for a TV special about Conshelf Three, was now signed up to turn his camera on Sealab III. The arrangement greatly pleased Captain Bond, who had some ideas of his own for opening scenes that featured him and Jacques Cousteau seated by a rock fireplace in a guest house on San Clemente Island, smoking their pipes and pondering the potential of undersea living.

  Scott Carpenter might have been preparing for another stint as an aquanaut, but X-rays revealed lesions in his femur, a sign of bone necrosis. Carpenter was asymptomatic, but Bond and other doctors were worried that his condition might worsen with another long stay under pressure. So Commander Carpenter became Tomsky’s deputy. The number three man was Captain Mazzone. Everyone understood that there would be no Sealab III without Walt Mazzone. Tomsky, like many others, had no personal experience with saturation diving prior to taking his post at DSSP. Mazzone was named the diving operations officer and would oversee much of the diving activity, including decompression cycles and atmospheric monitoring. He was also put in charge of what was called the Deep Submergence Systems Project Technical Office, an all-purpose West Coast hub for aquanaut training and equipment testing that was set up at the naval station at Point Loma in San Diego, close to the planned Sealab III site at San Clemente Island.

  Although the bigger budget for Sealab helped, the project was not being lavished with NASA-caliber funding, which might not have mattered except that there never seemed to be enough money to pay for adequate personnel or to buy the time needed to polish the rough edges and avoid the kinds of mistakes that cause delays. The project was originally scheduled to get under way by 1967, within a couple of years of Sealab II, but a variety of design problems and equipment failures, some related to the ever-challenging containment of helium, caused postponements that pushed the project back a year. A flood-out of a PTC during an unmanned test in late 1968 was typical of the setbacks the program experienced and it contributed to yet another delay. A further challenge came from a decision made, with little explanation, to extend Sealab III’s initial target depth of 430 feet to six hundred feet, a substantial increase of five atmospheres and fully three times the depth of the t
wo previous Sealabs. In addition, excursion dives were to be made to 750 feet, possibly even deeper.

  Just about everyone, aquanauts and the Elk River crew alike, were growing weary of delays. It had begun to look like man would land on the moon, leaving footsteps in the ashen dust of the Sea of Tranquillity, before he was ever able to make his mark with Sealab III deep in the cold primordial soup of inner space. A new target date for getting Sealab III on the bottom was set for mid-February 1969, and all indications were that this deadline, unlike the earlier ones, would be met. Some worried about having to cut corners in the final push to get the operation started, but the February deadline also proved to be a morale booster for those tired of delays. It was for Bob Barth, and the rest of his team felt the same way. Barth was to lead the first of five teams scheduled to occupy the habitat for twelve days each, giving mankind an unprecedented sixty-day presence on the continental shelf, by far the longest, deepest stay ever attempted and a giant leap toward George Bond’s undersea future.

  In the early evening of February 15, a rain-swept Saturday, a barge crane lowered the three-hundred-ton habitat to its place on the bottom, 610 feet below the surface. The process took three hours but was largely uneventful, a credit to the experience gleaned from previous trials and errors. Sealab III was painted a traffic-light yellow, with the name U.S. NAVY SEALAB on either side and on each end of the tank. Two symmetrical sections, each twelve feet square and almost eight feet high, were added to the underbelly at each end of the cylindrical habitat, creating an arch-shaped, two-story structure nearly forty feet tall. One of the new sections would serve as a marine observation room; the other was the diving station with an entry hatch. The station was the foyer where the aquanauts would have ample space for donning and doffing wet suits and diving gear. On the outside, in between the two new additions that formed the base of this golden arch, a block of ballast tanks was suspended as part of a novel anchoring system. The idea was to lower the tanks all the way to the bottom while the lab maintained just enough buoyancy to float a few feet above. Regardless of any unevenness on the ocean floor, the lab could be made level, so no more Tiltin’ Hilton.

  Not long after the successful lowering, the topside commanders could tell they had a problem. The lab was leaking badly. Its helium-rich artificial atmosphere was bubbling out at an alarming rate. More and more gas had to be pumped in to compensate for the leaks and maintain the lab’s internal pressure—a finger-in-the-dike fix to prevent a disastrous flood. By the next morning the leaks had become steadily worse. The lab’s high-pressure atmosphere was now escaping so briskly that within a day the gas tanks would be depleted on board the Elk River. If the gas ran out, the lab would surely flood.

  One possible solution was to raise the habitat, fix the leaks while it was back on the surface, and then start over. But after all the delays of the past few years, and with Sealab III already on the bottom, the commanders decided it was best to hurry up and get Barth and his team down there to deal with the problem in situ. Captain Bond, in his more strictly defined role as chief medical adviser, approved an expedited compression schedule—four hours instead of fifteen—to take the divers from the benign ambient pressure of slightly less than fifteen pounds per square inch at sea level to the full pressure they would experience at six hundred feet, a formidable 280 pounds per square inch. This rapid pressurization, in a chamber on board the Elk River, could bring on some additional soreness, but that initial discomfort should subside as the aquanauts adapted to their depth.

  At six hundred feet, the habitat was well beyond the reach of conventional bounce divers from the surface, so a mini-sub called Deep Star, with Scott Carpenter on its three-man crew, took a dive down to the habitat to try to pinpoint the source of the leaks. No one on board could see much except the chaotic streams of bubbles rising from the habitat as if it were a dissolving Alka-Seltzer tablet. The worst leaking appeared to be around the electrical stuffing tubes, where power, communication, and other lines passed through the midsection of the lab’s steel hull.

  On February 16, shortly after five in the afternoon, the Elk River gantry crane plucked a white Personnel Transfer Capsule from its perch atop the hatch of a decompression chamber, where the capsule sat like a golf ball in a tee. The decompression chamber with the aquanauts was below the main deck, alongside a second, matching chamber in a cramped control room. The PTC, a steel pod seven feet in diameter and ringed by ten scubalike tanks, looked like a sci-fi transport for space aliens. With the twelve-ton pod in its grip, the crane rolled aft along the deck of the Elk River, then stopped over the moon pool amidships to begin the lowering to six hundred feet.

  Inside the pod were Bob Barth, now thirty-eight years old, who had been promoted to warrant officer, and Berry Cannon, the able thirty-three-year-old civilian electronics engineer from the first Sealab II team. They were the ones chosen to get inside the habitat first, and find and fix the leaks. Once inside, they would be joined by the two others riding with them in the PTC, Richard “Blackie” Blackburn and John Reaves. Blackburn was new to Sealab, but not to Navy diving. Blackie was a twenty-nine-year-old aviation ordnance man first class. He had spent six years in explosive ordnance disposal, EOD, the inherently dangerous and delicate business of diving to locate and disarm mines and bombs. John Reaves, a last-minute replacement for this first PTC ride to the lab, was a decade older, a Navy photographer, and a former Sealab II aquanaut. He had been a principal trainer of Tuffy the porpoise, who was scheduled to get another try during this deeper venture.

  The lowering took almost an hour, and long before the PTC reached its destination, about twenty feet from the bottom, the foursome inside had been chilled to the bone. Their capsule was acting as much like a refrigerator as an elevator. Its electric heater was out of order, which might have been bearable, especially to a band of divers accustomed to inhospitable conditions. But a deflector was also missing on the carbon dioxide scrubber and it blew what felt like an unrelenting arctic wind. Helium further sapped everyone’s body heat, and the divers’ standard neoprene wet suits, compressed and thinned under pressure, provided little warmth. They all felt cold to the core. Barth was sure he had never been so cold.

  Upon arrival he and Cannon took a few minutes to don their breathing gear, called the Mark IX, the prototype specifically designed for making deep dives from the PTC. It was a gas-recycling rig similar to the finicky Mark VI, except that its breathing gas was delivered through a hose connected to the tanks around the outside of the PTC. Umbilical-fed gear, despite the drawbacks of dragging around the equivalent of a garden hose, was essential at depths of six hundred feet, where the pressure approached twenty atmospheres. Scuba tanks, even large ones, would be depleted in a matter of minutes at such depth.

  Like the Mark VI, the Mark IX had a pair of breathing bags worn like a vest. A compact fiberglass backpack contained a built-in canister, about the size of a thick phonebook, which had to be filled with fresh Baralyme, the sandy granules that scrubbed carbon dioxide from the exhaled breathing gases that the rig captured and recycled. Because it had no tanks, the Mark IX was compact and also lightweight—less than fifty pounds. By comparison, the bulky prototype rig that had been designed for use from the Sealab III habitat weighed a hundred pounds more.

  Barth and Cannon dropped fins-first through the hatch in the floor of the PTC and through the short trunk. They landed on the “cage,” a box made of steel mesh containing a winch motor and anchor that could be used to secure the PTC to the bottom. The cage hung a few feet underneath the PTC, like the basket under a hot air balloon, so that its top doubled as a stoop. The water was cold, in the mid-forties Fahrenheit. With their umbilicals trailing behind them, Barth and Cannon swam over to the lab. Along its sixty-foot length were various valves, clamps, and vents to check and adjust as part of the “unbuttoning” procedures for parking the lab on the seabed. One of Barth’s jobs was to “blow the skirt,” which meant releasing overpressure from inside the lab to create a lit
tle air pocket, like a porch, just below the hatch in the dive station, one of the two new sections added to the lab’s underbelly.

  Standing a couple of steps up a ladder, Barth turned a valve to blow the skirt, then yanked a few levers to unlock the spring-loaded hatch, a heavy steel square of about four feet. With a good shove the hatch should pop open, but it wouldn’t budge. Barth banged haplessly on the hatch, succeeding only in bruising his hands. At that point he and Cannon had been in the water about twelve minutes, each working as quickly as they could through their separate unbuttoning checklists. It seemed to Barth that his buddy should have rejoined him at the hatch by now. Concerned, Barth left the hatch and swam around the habitat looking for him. All the while, Barth’s breathing rig was giving him trouble. He found himself huffing and puffing hard and something didn’t feel right. The water was dark, though much clearer than they had expected. Cannon was nowhere to be seen, and Barth was beginning to feel uneasy about being alone on the ocean floor, unable to open the hatch, unable to communicate with anyone, unable to swim for the surface, wondering where the hell his buddy went. And why such difficulty breathing? He swam for the PTC and felt as though he might black out before he reached it.

  Unbeknownst to Barth, Berry Cannon had experienced a similar shortness of breath a few minutes earlier and was already back at the PTC, where he had popped up through the hatch in the floor of the PTC with a dazed look on his lean face. He was breathing like a runner who just sprinted the last mile of a marathon. Blackburn and Reaves hauled him up through the liquid looking glass and into the cramped capsule.