So on a fall day in 1977, the Cognac Six and their tender were sealed into a spartan chamber barely the size of a school bus. Laboratory tests had shown that a slow compression seemed to be the best way to avoid HPNS, so over the course of a full day, the pressure edged up toward 450 pounds per square inch. Because gases become more concentrated under pressure, the oxygen content at a thousand feet had to be held close to a paltry one percent to approximate the normal percentage at sea level. Determining and maintaining safe oxygen levels had been an early challenge for Bond, Mazzone, and Workman during Genesis. Too much oxygen was of course toxic, and at a thousand feet, with so little oxygen in the mix, there was even less wiggle room than at lesser depths. Most of the rest of the artificial atmosphere pumped in consisted of helium.
When Helvey’s turn to dive came he made the hour-long descent to the bottom in a diving bell with his partner, Ronald Schwary, an old friend. Schwary was one of the Gulf Coast frontier divers who had found ways to get his offshore training on the job. The two divers were already wearing their hot-water suits. Pretty much all that remained to be done before leaving the bell was to pull on their helmets, a popular design with a snug-fitting neoprene hood affixed to a face mask that looked borrowed from a motorcycle helmet. Helvey dropped through the open hatch in the floor first, falling through liquid space as if he’d taken a slow-motion leap from a rooftop.
He landed on the bottom and to his surprise sank to his knees in fine silt. He had never experienced such a thick sedimentary blanket. Then there was the darkness—not just darkness, but a total absence of light, except for the gauzy glow from the bell overhead and his own handheld light. The sound of his own breathing was more resonant because of the snug fit of his helmet. With each exhalation Helvey produced a burst of bubbles—this rig did no gas recycling—but breathing gas was pumped directly to his headgear through an umbilical. Scuba tanks were not an option at such depth and pressure, where each breath sucks far more gas out of the tank than at lesser depths. At thirty atmospheres, even a large tank would be rapidly depleted. This is why Helvey hoped that he would not be needing his “bailout bottle,” a small tank that could be switched on in an emergency. At this depth it wouldn’t last more than a few breaths—barely enough to swim for the bell. Direct surfacing was obviously out of the question.
Each Cognac diver, upon leaving the bell, would have his Neil Armstrong moment, even if their first steps on the bottom weren’t televised. Now it was Helvey’s turn, and he kicked up a particulate fog as he shuffled along the seabed. The current was just strong enough to blow the silt clouds away, but fortunately not strong enough to thwart his progress. When the fog lifted, the visibility was spectacular, when there was enough light to see. When Helvey shone his light into the void, the water seemed to twinkle like a starry night sky. That twinkling turned out to be reflections from schools of silvery ribbon fish. They were twice as big as any Helvey had ever seen—up to ten feet long. Spooky-looking angler fish, that toothy, jut-jawed species resembling a swimming skull, also appeared from out of the dark. Most astonishing was the sheer size of the grouper, a great frowning football of a creature that looks pretty much the way a child would draw a fish. The grouper were huge, like Volkswagen Beetles with fins, and could swallow fish that were about as big as Helvey.
When Helvey took a first pneumofathometer reading, the depth gauge said he was standing 1,030 feet below the surface—five feet deeper than anticipated. The slightly greater depth wasn’t terribly significant, although Helvey was tickled to find out that he was even deeper than he thought he would be. For the moment, Doc Helvey was the deepest man in the world. More than thirty atmospheres! It was a breathtaking depth, with seawater applying some 440 pounds per square inch of pressure. Not only that, but Helvey and the rest of the Cognac Six—Schwary, Alan Andersen, Mike Cooke, Fred Miller, and John Propeck—were going to be spending more time working at greater depth and pressure than Homo sapiens had ever spent before. And they would have much more to do than plant flags or collect rocks. Survival, too, could be counted as a major achievement—putting six men down and getting six back, to paraphrase Captain Bond’s sober remark about Sealab II’s greatest success. But for these divers survival alone would not suffice. For one thing, if their work didn’t prove to be useful enough, market forces would drive them out of business.
Helvey and the others spent their first shifts going through what amounted to an industrial dress rehearsal on the seabed. A barge had been sunk that was filled with mock-ups of the various tasks to be performed on the jacket. All the tools and procedures had been previously tested, in chambers and on shore, but this final run-through gave the divers an opportunity to make certain that everything worked the way it was supposed to. Burning at a thousand feet had never been done before, for example, but they confirmed that the technical hurdles had been overcome. Helvey was not the only diver who initially experienced some nerve-racking bouts of dyspnea, still a mysterious symptom of HPNS, but the divers learned to pace themselves in a way that eliminated their shortness of breath and the disconcerting sensation of lacking oxygen even when lab tests showed that they had all that they needed.
Following the seabed rehearsals came the lowering of Cognac’s massive square base, a three-acre forest of crisscrossing steel beams, the thickest ones vertical, like the trunks of old-growth redwood trees nearly twenty stories tall. Once the base was lowered to the bottom, the divers filled critical roles as ringmasters, and one of their first jobs was to guide two dozen steel piles, one by one, into individual “sleeves,” a vertical length of pipe affixed at intervals around the base. The piles themselves were six hundred feet long, seven feet in diameter, and weighed thousands of pounds. Each one had to be carefully dangled from the surface and slid into its designated sleeve. A pile driver, which the divers helped swing into position, hammered the pile into place, nailing the base to the sea floor. The divers had also learned how and where to hook up the steel lines through which grout would be pumped into the sleeves to cement the piles into place and solidify the base. Throughout the mission the divers were going to be shadowed by a new remote-controlled device that everyone called a “flying eyeball.” These unmanned orbs, operated from the surface, were about the size of a big beach ball, functioned as mobile klieg lights, and were equipped with cameras so that topside supervisors could watch subsea operations for themselves rather than rely exclusively on garbled Chipmunk narrations.
In preparation for the insertion of a pile into its sleeve, one of the early jobs, Doc Helvey first had to unbolt a lid from the top of the sleeve, a heavy disk like a manhole cover that was seven feet in diameter. The lids were in place to act as parachutes, slowing the base’s descent by preventing water from passing freely through the sleeves. Once the base was safely on the bottom—Helvey took a walk around the steel forest to verify its positioning—the lids had to come off. The nuts and bolts holding them in place were about a half-foot wide, and heavy. The divers used hydraulic wrenches to wrestle each one loose, and when the bolts were out, the divers orchestrated the lid’s removal by crane. Because the divers were then working at the top of a sleeve, they were at a depth of only nine hundred feet or so—only! Upon arrival at a lid, Helvey often found the VW-sized grouper lingering at his workstation. When he shooed them away, they would seem to vanish into the darkness. But when he shone his light around, Helvey found them parked nearby, sometimes right overhead. When Helvey peered out of the diving bell one day, he could see his bell partner, Ronald Schwary, tiptoeing along a horizontal beam. The grouper tagging along looked as if they had found their pied piper.
During their off-hours, within the austere confines of their chamber, the Cognac divers played cards, read, ate, slept. Sleep came especially easily after an eight-hour shift on the bottom. The distinction between days and nights faded, as was often the case for saturation divers who made commutes around the clock, from their chambers to the sunless depths and back. The Cognac Six would live this way for th
irty-one days. The second chamber, right next to theirs on the sprawling barge, housed the second six, who would be ready to take the next month-long shift. The two teams would then trade off once more, racking up a total of more than 120 days in saturation.
If it had suited the needs of the multimillion-dollar project, there’s little doubt that saturation divers could have spent their days and nights on the sea floor in some kind of industrial version of Sealab. As it was, each team had to wait out a ten-day decompression to return to the surface, sealed inside their spartan chamber. In a way that was the hardest part, or at least a reminder that saturation diving was a poor career choice for claustrophobes. Doc Helvey happily spent much of his decompression playing pinochle with his chamber mates. By the time the chamber door could finally swing open, he’d won $147—at a penny a point. No ticker-tape parade was in store, although considering the magnitude of the dive, of the thousand-foot Cognac mission, a parade might have been in order, or at least some triumphant headlines. But for the Cognac Six, the refreshing embrace of a Gulf breeze would have to suffice.
After the jacket’s base was set, the middle and top sections were lowered into place beginning in the spring of 1978. The base had required the deepest work, but the process of attaching the three-hundred-foot-tall middle section to the base called for dives to about eight hundred feet. To put the sections together the divers coordinated the lining up and fastening of jumbo-sized pegs protruding from the bottom of the midsection as they were lowered into matching holes in the top of the base. A Shell Oil spokesman likened the joining of the Cognac sections to docking two spacecraft—an image fresh in the public’s mind from the historic Apollo-Soyuz test in 1975.
Once the midsection was lowered onto the base, and after the top section was lowered into place on the midsection, the divers did more plumbing and grouting to secure the structure, in addition to hooking up electrical and hydraulic connections. Working for hours at a thousand feet, or even eight hundred or five hundred feet as sections were added—well, barriers had surely been broken in the two decades since Hannes Keller struggled to do nothing more than plant flags a thousand feet down.
Of course Cognac was never just about achieving milestones in deep-sea diving or in marine construction, although when finished in 1978, ahead of schedule, it was the world’s tallest offshore platform. But like many other offshore platforms that boasted impressive feats of engineering and diving, Cognac was strictly business. It was there to produce the lifeblood of the industrial world, and to turn a profit. Drilling soon began on the first of more than sixty planned wells that would feed into the structure, adding to the more than 2,700 offshore wells drilled that year. Another twenty-seven hundred wells were drilled in 1979. Before the 1970s were over, almost a quarter of the world’s oil and gas would come from offshore oil fields, and within a few years the offshore contribution to fossil fuel supplies would approach one-third.
As long as saturation divers continued to serve the offshore industry’s needs, divers like Doc Helvey might expect to be summoned to ever greater depths. Yet the unmanned, robotic flying eyeballs used in setting Cognac were a sign of an impending change in divers’ roles. Such devices evolved into more sophisticated remotely operated vehicles, called ROVs, that were designed to work with divers, and also to replace them, much as robots had begun to replace workers on auto assembly lines. The savings on underwater jobs would be even greater, since ROVs required neither meals nor costly breathing gases. Nor did ROVs have to spend idle days decompressing in artificial atmospheres. Furthermore, an ROV had the same kind of practical advantage as a probe launched into outer space: It could go to depths far beyond the reach of a diver, to oil fields the industry was hoping to explore more than four thousand feet below the surface.
Tapping deeper fields heightened industry interest in ROVs—Taylor added an ROV test tank to its facility in the mid-1980s—but the rise of ROVs also contributed to a decline in demand for saturation diving, as did the global slump in oil prices that hit in the early 1980s, not long after Cognac’s completion. At that point the entire offshore industry was experiencing the business equivalent of the bends, and the resulting pain was acute among providers of diving services. The market picked up a bit toward the end of the decade, but by then many divers, including saturation divers, had gone looking for other frontiers. Companies large and small were either going out of business or merging. Taylor Diving & Salvage, which had been such a prominent force throughout the boom times of the 1960s and 1970s, was sold off and disbanded as the decade of the 1980s unfolded. Ocean Systems, which Ed Link helped bring into being, was ultimately swallowed by Oceaneering International, one of the big companies to survive the downturn and thrive, in no small part because of its ROV business.
Despite the painful reversals of fortune, the offshore industry’s embrace of saturation diving had done a lot to break depth barriers. Cognac had put a very tall exclamation point on the thousand-foot mark, and companies like Comex, another that weathered the downturn, had not given up on solving the mysteries of High-Pressure Nervous Syndrome or on figuring out how to send divers to depths well beyond a thousand feet. The U.S. Navy, too, carried on the deep-diving revolution, even if the demise of the Sealab program made it appear otherwise. George Bond, Jacques Cousteau, and Ed Link had clearly started something, but their own quests were coming to an end.
16
THE RIVALS PRESS ON
As the private sector began to put saturation diving to use in the mid-1960s, the public sector seemed to be on the verge of doing the same, but with an eye toward science and exploration rather than industry. In 1967, during the period between Sealabs II and III, President Johnson appointed a blue-ribbon commission to consider a range of oceanographic issues and chart a more deliberate course for the nation’s undersea activities. Two years later, the commission’s fifteen members produced a three-hundred-page report called “Our Nation and the Sea; a Plan for National Action,” but often referred to as the Stratton report, after the commission’s chairman, Dr. Julius Stratton, a physicist, electrical engineer, and former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among the report’s key recommendations was the establishment of an independent civilian agency, like NASA, that would also report directly to the president. That brought hope to those who believed that if the United States was going to put the kind of concerted effort, and money, into manned undersea research and exploration that NASA was pouring into human space flight, it needed such an agency—a “wet NASA,” some liked to call it.
In addition, the Stratton report made a case for some major undersea initiatives, including one that sounded remarkably similar to a certain “Proposal for Underwater Research.” It recommended that over the next decade half a billion dollars be used to establish laboratories on the continental shelf. “This project is based on the premise that, if man is to conquer the sea, he must go into the sea,” the report said. “The Navy Sealab and French Conshelf projects have been impressive demonstrations of the ability of man to go into the sea for short periods of time. The next step is to make it possible for man to stay with a degree of permanence and to provide him with facilities for research and development at continental shelf depths.”
What a difference a decade had made for the undersea gospel according to George Bond. The report envisioned both fixed and portable labs, and set an ambitious depth goal of two thousand feet for free-swimming divers. If divers could reach that depth, they would have access to both the continental shelf and the next topographic level down, the continental slope, which together comprise a vast frontier known for a richness of resources. To achieve that goal, the commission members recommended that additional millions be spent on research, bolstering private sector efforts to break depth barriers and speed up the downward progress.
In late 1970, the year after the sudden demise of Sealab III and the first oil strike in the North Sea, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was formed from a smorgasbord
of government agencies and departments with ocean-related interests. The acronym NOAA, pronounced Noah, was fitting since the new agency’s responsibilities would be about as diverse as the animals on the Ark, covering issues from the deep sea to the far reaches of the atmosphere. After Richard Nixon’s victory in the presidential election of 1968, NOAA wound up under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce in the new administration, to the chagrin of those who favored the fresh outlook and clout that being an independent agency like NASA could have brought. Still, it was at least a start.
In the meantime, the friendly rivals pressed on in their individual ways. While none of them was immune to the need for funding, they were essentially unfettered by specific industrial or military demands. After Conshelf Three, Jacques Cousteau was dreaming up plans for what seemed to be the next logical step in the quest to live in the sea: a mobile habitat. Conshelf Three had achieved a greater measure of autonomy from the surface, but in terms of mobility, its occupants could only lower their spheroid habitat to the bottom and raise it to the surface. The habitat still had to be transported to a desired location at sea, and once on the bottom, it couldn’t go anywhere for the duration of its stay. For in situ scientific research, or perhaps for a salvage job or archaeological excavations, stationary habitats like Conshelf or Sealab could suffice—or perhaps even the copycat habitats that were popping up around the world, many of them projects of poorly funded diving enthusiasts. A couple of scrappy, tanklike habitats initiated in the mid-1960s by diving clubs in Czechoslovakia, of all places, were fairly typical. The Soviet Union produced quite a few modest designs, but these and some better-equipped prototypes, including a few American-made habitats like Tektite, were rarely capable of functioning at depths of more than a few atmospheres. Many of them made Sealab I, even with its train axle ballast, look like a wonder of space age engineering.
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