Cousteau wanted to try to improve on the concept of stationary habitats by building an undersea base that was more like a mobile home, one that divers could swim out of and reenter, an idea that had been around at least since Jules Verne’s fantastical Nautilus. Cousteau, an inveterate fund-raiser who was never averse to being first, succeeded in selling the French government’s oceanographic agency and the French Petroleum Institute on his plan to build a mobile habitat he would call Argyronète, named for a type of diving spider. Argyronète might someday be the underwater equivalent of Cousteau’s Calypso, and a real-life Nautilus submarine equipped with a built-in mini-habitat. Saturation divers would be able to live in that sealed-off, pressurized compartment, much as commercial divers spent their off-hours in chambers. The divers could then swim out of Argyronète down to at least a thousand feet. But Argyronète was running way over budget and its prime sponsors backed out. Cousteau had been able to move quickly to start building his version of Captain Nemo’s vessel, but by the early 1970s its hull sat unfinished in a storage hangar on the waterfront near Marseille.
Ed Link, too, had been thinking along the lines of habitat mobility—his inflatable dwelling had been portable, after all, if not entirely mobile—and the energetic inventor promptly produced a first prototype in the mid-1960s, called Deep Diver, which may even have been an inspiration for Argyronète. Link’s approach was decidedly more modest than what Cousteau had in mind, more like a diver taxi than a fully equipped mobile home, and Link could be reasonably sure to finish what he started. Deep Diver was a mini-submarine, like the stout little research sub Alvin, launched in 1964 and improved in ensuing years, or Star I, the pint-sized rescue sub that visited Sealab I. Mini-subs, also known as submersibles, typically had to be launched from a mother ship. They could move about freely, under their own power, for a number of hours before they had to return to their waiting mothers. But submersibles might achieve even greater feats if saturation divers could come and go from them. This they could do from a small lockout compartment built in to a section of the twenty-two-foot-long Deep Diver hull. Link designed the compartment to handle depths down to 1,250 feet—forward-looking indeed, since dives to only half that depth pushed the safe and practical limits of the day.
In 1967, the same year President Johnson set up the Stratton commission and a couple of years after the Deep Diver debut, two divers locked out of Link’s mini-sub at seven hundred feet in the same Bahamian waters where the portable inflatable dwelling had its trial. The dive lasted just fifteen minutes, long enough for the divers to collect some flora and fauna before sitting out thirty hours of decompression. Even a more conventional dive to seven hundred feet would have been remarkable for the time, and here was a very deep dive, albeit a brief one, that was made from a submersible.
Deep Diver was used for some contract work by Ocean Systems, the commercial diving company Link helped form, but the craft wasn’t catching on with industry the way underwater welding habitats had. Structural problems with the Deep Diver hull ultimately put the submersible out of commission, but by then Ed Link had plans for an improved vessel he would call the Johnson-Sea-Link, in honor of his partnership with his friend and fellow marine enthusiast J. Seward Johnson, the septuagenarian scion of the Band-Aid maker Johnson & Johnson. Johnson had founded the Harbor Branch Foundation in 1970 and Link suggested that it set up its headquarters for oceanographic and engineering research at Fort Pierce, Florida, where Link had bought land to establish his own coastal base, called Link Port.
The Johnson-Sea-Link, often called Sea-Link for short, was very different looking from Deep Diver but similar in size, and once again, equipped with a lockout compartment for two divers. At a length of just twenty-three feet, one-quarter the size of Cousteau’s still unfinished Argyronète hull, the Sea-Link looked less like a baby submarine than a helicopter without rotors. Rather than encase his vessel in a sleek hull, Link decided to leave its parts accessible for repair and so outdated components could be readily replaced and the entire craft improved over time.
The Sea-Link’s forward section was like a two-seater cockpit, with room enough for a pilot and observer. They sat side by side in a transparent acrylic sphere nearly six feet around. The metallic tail section behind the sphere housed the battery-powered motors and the two-diver lockout chamber. Sea-Link could reach depths of three thousand feet and was designed to release divers down to fifteen hundred. Link was, once again, aiming well into the future and he had created this craft for under half a million dollars—a bargain compared to the several million dollars Cousteau poured into Argyronète. Sea-Link, launched in 1971 and commissioned to the Smithsonian, was made available to marine researchers from universities and scientific institutions. Over the next two years the unusual-looking submersible was used for dozens of successful undersea projects. Then came the dive that would forever disturb Ed Link’s peace of mind. It began on Father’s Day, 1973.
Link and his wife, Marion, were on board their research boat, the ninety-one-foot Sea Diver, which was equipped as the Sea-Link’s mother ship. Link added a crane to lift the submersible on and off of the deck for transport. Shortly before ten that morning, fifteen miles out at sea from Key West, they learned that the Sea-Link was stuck 360 feet below. Operating a kind of mechanical skewer from the cockpit, the Sea-Link pilot was trying to recover a small fish trap from a man-made reef formed by a pair of scuttled Navy ships. In its maneuvers Link’s submersible got hooked on a cable.
At the controls was thirty-year-old Archibald “Jock” Menzies, an experienced diver who had piloted the Sea-Link on about a hundred previous outings. Seated next to him in the cockpit was Robert Meek, a pressure physiologist who was twenty-seven and on board as a scientific observer. Two others were sealed in the diver lockout chamber at the rear of the craft. One was Albert “Smoky” Stover, the fifty-one-year-old veteran submersible pilot who had visited the site of Sealab I to test the Star I mini-sub. The other was the Link’s younger son, Clayton Link, who was thirty-one and had joined his parents on many an expedition, including the first saturation dives at Villefranche. He served in the Navy as a diving officer aboard a submarine rescue ship, did a commercial stint with Ocean Systems, and had lately become the Smithsonian’s director of diving.
When Ed Link heard his craft was stuck he quickly got on the radio to summon a Navy submarine rescue ship, the USS Tringa, which was docked at the Key West base. Another Navy rescue team and a couple of commercial vessels got the Mayday call about Sea-Link and they, too, were on the way. With walkie-talkie in hand, his craggy face glistening with sweat under the visor of his cap, Ed Link orchestrated the rescue from the deck of Sea Diver. The sea was calm. Ed Link was calm. Navy rescuers were on the way. Link and his Sea Diver crew calculated that the atmosphere in the diver lockout compartment ought to last two and a half days, about sixty-one hours. The cockpit’s air supply wouldn’t last as long, but should be good for forty-two hours. Link was confident that his son and the three others would soon be returned safely to the surface.
As the minutes dragged into hours, it would become agonizingly clear that the breathing-gas supply would last only about half as long as they initially thought. Murphy’s Law seemed to be governing virtually every aspect of the rescue. The Tringa was delayed getting to the site and it was almost eleven o’clock that night before two Navy hardhat divers, wearing bulbous Mark V helmets and cumbersome old-style dive suits of canvas and rubber, were ready to descend to the Sea-Link. Floodlights illuminated patches of dark seawater. The divers made it to three hundred feet, still a couple of atmospheres shy of the ensnared submersible, but they couldn’t get through the wreckage of the scuttled ships. They had to turn back.
Pilot Menzies and physiologist Meek had no choice but to wait for help. There was no way to open the hatch on their acrylic sphere underwater. Stover and Clayton Link twice considered locking out of their compartment, first before the Tringa arrived and again several hours later. They hadn’t planned to di
ve outside the submersible during this brief, routine trip and wore only shorts and T-shirts. Still, they could either try to free their sub while making some breath-holding swims, or they could escape to the surface by doing a blow and go, like Bond and Cyril Tuckfield years before, when they made their record submarine escape in these same waters, from almost the same depth. But Stover and Link were already feeling chilled in their aluminum compartment and didn’t want to risk further complications by swimming into very cold water, a strong current, and the tangle of debris. Help was on the way, after all. Ed Link, his topside crew, and the trapped divers all agreed that it would be best to hold out for rescuers.
As the divers waited, the temperature in their compartment continued to drop into the mid-forties Fahrenheit, the temperature of the surrounding water. Pilot Menzies and Meek were better insulated from the chill by the four-inch-thick sphere, but both compartments were running short of breathable air. Over the radio, Menzies kept telling rescuers he didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. The two men in the Sea-Link cockpit and the two in the diving compartment were also battling faulty carbon dioxide scrubbers and a hazardous rise in CO2. Each duo had to come up with some creative jury-rigging to stave off suffocation, like the imperiled crew of Apollo 13 three years before. Pilot Menzies took off his shirt, filled it like a sack with Baralyme, the sandy carbon dioxide absorbent, and held it in front of a fan to bring down the CO2 level. The falling temperatures further compromised the scrubbers so Stover and Link increased the pressure in their lockout compartment. That warmed their compartment and themselves, and also improved their scrubber’s efficiency.
About one-thirty in the morning, a Monday, another dive from the Tringa had to be aborted. Five hours later, a brisk current thwarted a dive by a rescue team flown in from San Diego. Several hours after that, another dive had to be called off. Around noon, another submersible, the little two-man Perry Cubmarine, arrived on a Navy ship and was sent down but couldn’t do anything to free the Sea-Link. A commercial salvage ship, the A.B. Wood II, came with a remotely operated vehicle similar to Taylor Diving’s flying eyeball. With the aide of the ROV’s camera, a grappling hook was hitched on to one of the Sea-Link’s propeller shrouds. Just before five in the afternoon, more than thirty hours after the ordeal began, the ship’s crane lifted the entire nine-ton submersible to the surface.
The hatch in the top of the sphere could be opened right away. Menzies and Meek were pulled out, like figurines from a snow globe. They were cold and weary but they were going to be all right. The Sea-Link was hoisted on board its mother ship, with Stover and Link still sealed in the diving compartment. Through the portholes, the two could be seen, seated and slumped over. Were they dead or merely unconscious? The pressure inside had reached the ambient pressure of their depth at 360 feet as the two had tried to warm the compartment by increasing the pressure. Link and his crew flushed the sealed compartment with fresh helium and oxygen. Without any time allowed for decompression, the two unconscious men would be dead for sure. Ed Link had scarcely slept since he first called in the Navy rescuers. One can only imagine how wrenching it must have been for Ed Link to peer through a porthole and see his son and his friend Stover, but not be able to open the hatch immediately and rush to their aid.
By ten the next morning, forty-eight hours after the Sea-Link’s initial call for help, doctors on board Sea Diver concluded that Al Stover and Clayton Link were dead and the effort to warm and ventilate the chamber was called off. Later in the day Ed and Marion Link were in their stateroom, holding tightly to one another, tears flowing. Clayton Link left behind a young son. Al Stover had seven sons; his eighth had been killed during paratrooper training.
Ed Link, who had helped lay the groundwork for improved rescue and other undersea technologies, was haunted by thoughts of what he might have done differently. In 1968, four years after the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group sessions, the nuclear sub USS Scorpion disappeared with its ninety-nine-man crew somewhere out in the Atlantic and the Navy had needed to borrow Link’s first submersible, Deep Diver, to search for survivors. Now, five years later, Navy crews couldn’t even reach Link’s stranded craft in waters less than four hundred feet deep. The Coast Guard investigators blamed pilot error and the Sea-Link’s modular construction, which gave it irregular shapes and projections that were more prone to ensnarement. They also noted that Stover and Clayton Link “displayed an incredible casualness in their preparations” for the dive. But a former deputy director of the Deep Submergence Systems Project, F. R. Haselton, in a pointed op-ed piece in The Washington Post, chastised the Navy for its “feeble attempts to rescue these aquanauts stranded a mere three hundred feet beneath the sea,” and called the situation “nationally embarrassing.”
The best medicine for Ed Link after his son’s death seemed to be a return to his drawing board. He spent the next two years working to develop rescue equipment and came up with a tethered, unmanned submersible he called CORD, for Cabled Observation and Rescue Device. It had lights, TV cameras, hydraulic claws, and cutters: just the sort of device that could have set the Sea-Link free. Link continued to lobby for improved rescue operations and followed through with his plans to produce a second Johnson-Sea-Link submersible that looked a lot like the first.
As Captain Bond approached retirement in the early 1970s, he often played the role of elder saturation statesman, preaching his gospel about Dominion over the Seas and undersea living. He was point man for a graduate program called Scientist in the Sea, jointly sponsored by the Naval Coastal Systems Laboratory, the State University System of Florida, and NOAA, then in its infancy, which taught young researchers to use diving as a tool for their undersea projects. In summer 1973, the summer of Ed Link’s tragic loss, Papa Topside watched over a dozen graduate students who were living in a habitat called Hydrolab. Hydrolab was one of the more successful examples of the modest Sealab- and Conshelf-inspired habitats that popped up around the world in the 1960s and early 1970s, most of them limited to relatively shallow waters. Hydrolab, one of a handful made in the United States, was a sixteen-foot-long horizontal cylinder—a third the size of Sealab II—with room for three or four aquanauts to live for about a week at depths of between forty and sixty feet—not exactly barrier-breaking, but the quest to live in the sea was at least being kept alive. Born out of an academic interest in sea floor living, Hydrolab became the most used habitat in the world. It was even featured on Primus, a short-lived underwater TV series that never caught on the way Sea Hunt had in the 1950s and 1960s with Lloyd Bridges as the scuba-diving investigator Mike Nelson.
For the past couple of years Hydrolab had been stationed about a mile off Freeport, Grand Bahama Island, at a depth of about fifty feet, similar to the depth and hospitable conditions for Tektite I. The Tektite habitat was later refurbished, renamed Tektite II, and went on to house a number of scientific diving teams in the early 1970s at the same shallow, secluded cove at St. John in the Virgin Islands.
Hydrolab and Tektite had both been made possible by assorted public and private partnerships that were the principal means of pursuing undersea living outside of the U.S. Navy in the pre-NOAA years. Tektite had been hatched by the Navy’s Office of Naval Research, NASA, and the Department of the Interior with General Electric as the habitat builder. Hydrolab came about through a joint effort of Perry Submarine Builders and engineers from Florida Atlantic University, with consultation from none other than Ed Link. NOAA lent its support to the habitat’s operation in the early 1970s after the agency was formed.
But because NOAA was not the wet NASA that some had hoped for, and despite the lofty goals set forth in the Stratton report, it still took a bureaucratic village, sustained by disparate pools of money, to build and run a habitat, or to undertake any undersea venture whose purpose was more focused on science and exploration than on meeting specific industrial or military needs. That’s why one American entrepreneur even took a shot at turning a habitat into a viable business. Tay
lor A. “Tap” Pryor, founder of the Makapuu Oceanic Center in Hawaii and a member of the Stratton commission, built and tested a habitat for hire in 1970 that he hoped would cater to wide-ranging interests—industrial, military, and scientific—and pay for itself. A couple of former Sealab aquanauts, along with Bond’s old friend Charlie Aquadro, were part of the group working with Pryor but by early 1973, as NASA was getting ready to launch its $3 billion Skylab, market forces turned Tap Pryor’s fledgling undersea business belly-up.
By this time George Bond had relocated to Panama City, Florida, where the Navy was moving the historic Experimental Diving Unit from its brick home on the Anacostia River to the grounds of the former Mine Defense Lab. Bond was serving as a technical adviser for the Ocean Simulation Facility, a major new hyperbaric complex. He and his wife had rented a house on the water where they got frequent visits from a “pet” alligator they called George Foote III—Bond’s older son was George Foote Bond Jr., then in his late twenties. To the astonishment of Bond’s grandchildren, the gator came when called, presumably a result of having hot dogs tossed its way from the grill.
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