Once in the general vicinity of a wreck, the captain of the boat commands a crew member to toss overboard a bright, floating object, such as a large plastic bottle, to which is attached a weighted line. The makeshift buoy marks the location around which a search pattern is conducted to try to find the wreck with the bottom scanner, which looks like a small television set except that it shows only the contour of the bottom, and sometimes schools of fish. The outline of a large wreck that comes high off the sea floor, like the Andrea Doria, is clearly visible with a bottom scanner when the dive boat is directly over the hulk.
Once the bottle buoy has been deployed, the captain now has to judge several things at once: the speed at which the dive boat is moving, the strength and direction of the current and waves, the force of the wind against the dive boat, and finally how long it will take for the anchor to reach the bottom. Steering the boat into position so that the boat will drift with the current over the wreck, the captain calls out to the crew standing on the bow of the boat the moment when the anchor should be dropped. Most often used is a clawlike grappling-hook-style anchor, which is usually attached directly to ten or twenty feet of chain. The chain, in turn, is attached to the anchor line, a thick braided nylon rope. With luck, the anchor will drop down and be carried over the wreckage as the dive boat drifts with the current, so that the hook holds fast on some part of the wreck. If the anchor does not catch the wreck, it is hauled to the surface and the procedure is begun anew.
When the captain is convinced that the anchor is secure, two crew members dive down the anchor line and decide whether the anchor has snagged at a good spot. If not—which is the case most of the time—the crew members grapple with the anchor to free it from the wreckage and swim with it to the spot where the captain has asked them to secure it. Then the anchor is secured on wreckage, and a rope is tied around both the anchor and the wreckage so that the anchor does not come loose and cause the dive boat to drift. During overnight or multiday offshore trips, rope is considered too weak to keep the anchor in place reliably, so a massive steel shackle—which looks like the letter C until a thick rod is screwed into the holders at the open ends to make it look like a letter D—is used to hold the anchor firmly to the wreck. The shackle is usually reinforced with a rope, which acts as a backup in case the shackle’s rod comes loose. Getting the anchor out of the wreck at the end of the trip requires divers to free it by hand.
John Reekie stood nearby. The crew member John Moyer walked over to the Canadian and asked, “I noticed you have on an Empress of Ireland shirt. I’m interested in diving that wreck. Have you been on it?”
Reekie frowned. “Been on it? I run expeditions to it!”
The Empress of Ireland was a passenger liner that went down in the St. Lawrence River on May 29, 1914, not far from the shores of Rimouski, Quebec. The loss of 1,012 lives made it second only to the Titanic in the number of lives lost in a peacetime disaster at sea. Many people referred to it as the Salvation Army wreck because a large contingent of passengers were on their way to a meeting of the Salvation Army in England. The cold Canadian water, strong currents, and the wreck’s crumbling interior made the site formidable—which, when combined with its elegant artifacts, made it one of the world’s top wreck-diving sites.
“I’ve heard so much about the Doria. I have to see if it’s anything compared to the Empress,” Reekie remarked to Moyer. The two men went on to discuss the details of diving the two wrecks, their mutual interest in sunken ocean liners enabling them to establish a friendship.
Moyer had been part of many wreck-diving expeditions, both as a crew member and as a paying diver. A Coast Guard–certified captain, he was one of the most experienced deep-wreck divers in the northeastern United States. He had also experienced a serious case of the bends back in 1985, while he was preparing for an expedition to retrieve one of the Andrea Doria’s two bells. Because they believed the bell would have to be cut free of the wreck, Moyer practiced on land with Bill Nagel, the captain of the dive boat Seeker, to get experience in underwater metal cutting using a welding torch. Moyer then went with the rest of the team to practice their metal-cutting techniques on a 200-foot-deep wreck off the New Jersey shore. The Goulandris was a 362-foot-long freighter that sank in a collision in 1942. Its proximity to shore and familiarity to the divers made it a great testing ground, and its readily accessible large brass spoked steering wheel provided a lucrative trophy divers were motivated to liberate.
When Moyer came up from welding to board Bill Nagel’s boat, the Seeker, the normally strong man felt extremely fatigued and had to be helped up the ladder. He was so confused and lethargic he could not take off his own equipment, including his diving suit. Gary Gentile, a Vietnam veteran who had suffered severe wounds from the Vietcong’s bullets, knew what it was like to feel helpless and hurt; he immediately assisted his friend Moyer and coordinated his efforts with others’.
When he was fully unsuited, Moyer was led belowdecks, to his bunk. He lay down and told the others he had pain, first in his shoulders, then in his elbows, wrists, and hands. Gentile, who had himself been bent years earlier, knew that it was critical for Moyer to be administered oxygen to help the stricken diver’s body eliminate the nitrogen bubbles. Unchecked, the bubbles would leave Moyer permanently crippled or worse. Gentile rushed to get Moyer a cylinder of oxygen.
A Coast Guard helicopter hoisted Moyer from the Seeker uneventfully and flew him to a hospital, where he underwent recompression therapy. Although Moyer showed no outward signs of injury, he was told not to dive for several months so that his body could completely recover.
During the expedition to recover the Doria’s bell, Moyer decided to join the team even though he could not dive. Moyer was a true team player and was content to assist topside with the dive boat’s operation, getting divers into their gear, helping them get back on board the boat, and offering suggestions for retrieving the bell when it was found. Moyer helped hoist the 500-pound brass artifact, bearing the inscription ANDREA DORIA, onto the boat. He continued to dive with Nagel and even worked on the boat as a crew member. Yet over the next two years, Moyer saw Nagel drifting further and further into an alcoholic abyss. By 1987, Moyer felt that Nagel had given in to the urge to drink uncontrollably, which left him seemingly unconcerned with the divers who paid to go on the Seeker. When a diver did die during a Seeker expedition to the Andrea Doria, Moyer perceived that Nagel barely reacted. Moyer quit working on the Seeker, and avoided any association with Nagel at social functions. But Moyer loved diving and divers, and still wanted to work on a dive boat. He approached Steve Bielenda about working on the Wahoo, and Bielenda was happy to have another proven veteran on his crew.
As the roar of the Wahoo’s diesel engines faded to a low hum and the boat slowed, I knew we were close to the Andrea Doria. Chrissy walked over to me, looked at the waves, and said sarcastically, “Great day for diving!” We all had a lot to prove.
6
The Steel Cave
JUNE 28, 1991.
Aboard the dive charter boat Wahoo,
over the site of the Andrea Doria.
THE ROUSES HAD BEEN SURPRISED at the recognition that greeted them when cave- and wreck-diving aficionados found out they were part of the Team Doria ’91 expedition. It was their first real taste of general admiration and acclaim, although they had already developed a solid reputation for their diving abilities and enthusiasm.
As they contemplated what lay beneath the steady six-to-eight-foot waves, punctuated with the occasional large, rolling waves up to twelve feet, that rocked the Wahoo, Chris and Chrissy Rouse started to see firsthand why the Andrea Doria had earned the title “the Mount Everest of scuba diving.” The wreck lay at 240 feet and rested on its starboard side, its hulk rising to 165 feet. At its shallowest point, the hull was 35 feet beyond what recreational scuba-diving agencies in the United states recommended as the deepest safe diving depth. Situated at a particularly nasty patch of ocean where the weather could cha
nge rapidly both on the surface and underwater—just as it had that foggy night in 1956, when the Andrea Doria was sent to the ocean floor after a collision—the wreck lay alluringly below us, a siren calling us to high adventure and high risk.
Deep in the Doria lay many works by famous Italian artists that had been specially commissioned for this liner. Some of the artists had since died, and their paintings, sculptures, ceramic murals, and vases were now far more valuable than when the liner sank. Some of the artworks on the Doria were one-of-a-kind, and were priceless. Even such seemingly mundane items as dinner plates bore special meaning when divers retrieved them from inside the ocean liner that had been dubbed the “Grande Dame of the Sea.” Her sleek, graceful lines recalled other Italian masterworks created in the near and distant past, from sculpture and paintings to architecture, motorcars, and fashion.
Chris and Chrissy Rouse knew that simply by diving this wreck they were entering an elite league of divers: Steve Bielenda estimated that only about five hundred people had dived the wreck since the luxury liner sank in 1956. Some of those had died just 200 feet below us. Others, who wanted to minimize their risk but still have bragging rights, had never recovered an artifact from the wreck: They were content to go down briefly, touch the wreck, and come back up, their only trophy the adventure itself. Those who sought to recover artifacts usually spent many dives building up the experience they needed to go inside safely and bring something out. If Chris and Chrissy could not only dive the wreck but bring some artifact out of it, they would go to the head of the class, the pioneering cave-diving techniques allowing them to trump most of the serious divers in the world. They would feel like accomplished sportsmen.
Standing in the cabin, I watched Sally Warhman peel potatoes for a salad that would be part of the food left out for everyone to snack on after their dives. Her eyes on her work, she said, “Hey, Bernie, what’s this I hear that some of your divers are talking about the huge passageways inside the wreck? It sounds like they think they could drive a truck through there. It isn’t that big. I hope you’ve warned them about the dangers of cables and silt-out.”
“Yeah, they know about the dangers. But once you’ve dived caves, the passageways are large enough for running lines, and making deep penetrations,” I replied.
Sally stopped peeling the potatoes and looked up at me. “I don’t get it. Why would you want to swim through the wreck when you could just find an opening close to where you want to go and then drop right down to where you want to be?”
“Hank asked me the same thing,” I said. The crew member Hank Garvin could not comprehend our fascination with swimming through the wreck. He believed you spent as little time inside the wreck as you could, and those terror-filled moments were solely for the purpose of gathering artifacts. Lingering inside a wreck for any other reason was, to Garvin, an unnecessary flirtation with danger. Sally apparently felt the same way. “Sally, there’s something about just swimming through caves and wrecks. Sure, the artifacts are nice, but it’s great to just see what’s there.”
Sally looked as if I’d told her there were a lot of great restaurants in purgatory. She shrugged and turned her attention back to the potatoes. “Whatever does it for you. Just be careful.”
Steve Bielenda climbed down the ladder from the Wahoo’s wheelhouse deck and walked briskly into the main cabin. “Bernie, we’re anchored in first class.”
I was disappointed. We were anchored hundreds of feet away from where we had planned to start our dives. Steve Bielenda and his crew were very experienced, and prided themselves on being able to anchor wherever they wanted. “What happened to anchoring into the stern section?”
“We’re lucky we’re out here at all, never mind the stern section. Haven’t you noticed? We’ve got some real weather out here, we’re rocking like crazy, and we’ve got a bit of current. You should be happy we hooked the wreck!”
Asking the captain to try to move the anchor would delay our expedition dives another day. That was not a good idea, given the weather, which could easily get so severe that we would have to make a hasty departure. Although I wasn’t happy with this development, we would have to make the best of it and start our dives along the Andrea Doria’s first-class section.
I turned to the Team Doria divers seated in the cabin. “Okay, guys. We’re in the first-class area, not third class like we planned. For now, let’s just go and see what it’s like down there and orient ourselves for our next dives.”
The dive boat underwent a methodical scramble as the Team Doria divers started searching for their dive bags among the piles that had been shoved aside on the platform where the crew members were suiting up. Usually crew members assisted the other divers with their gear and then, after they were in the water, the crew would dive. Today it seemed to be every diver for himself. In order to make room on the platform for many divers to suit up at once, the dive bags had been tossed into a heap at the stern of the boat, which was already packed with diving-equipment boxes. Lashed to the gunwales were scuba tanks several rows deep, taking up to three feet of precious deck space along the Wahoo’s perimeter. The Rouses alone had brought forty tanks, along with multiple boxes of gear, which included several of each piece of equipment for backup purposes in case anything broke. They didn’t want to give the black cloud hanging over them the opportunity to thwart a dive on this prestigious wreck. The Rouses would have been more than embarrassed if an equipment failure prevented them from diving the wreck. Beyond the fact that word would spread among divers, and apart from the damage that news of an equipment failure would do to their budding diving business, it would have been a defeat, and that was not allowed.
I would be diving with Steve Foreman, who had been part of Bill Stone’s team at Wakulla Springs cave. Steve Foreman held cave-diving instructor card number 106, the lowest number among those actively teaching cave diving, with the exception of Sheck Exley. Foreman was very soft-spoken and humble about his many cave-diving accomplishments. He did not have extensive cold-water wreck-diving experience and he asked Hank Garvin, Steve Bielenda, Janet Bieser, and Sally Warhman to give him pointers about the best strategies to dive the Andrea Doria. The crew members all appreciated Foreman’s attitude and wondered why the other Team Doria divers did not display the same obvious respect—or should it be reverence?—for the wreck, and for the crew members’ considerable experience on it, even if Garvin and the other crew members wouldn’t be using guidelines for deep penetrations the way Foreman would. The cave-diving instructor left a lasting positive impression on the Wahoo’s crew.
I was further along in suiting up than Foreman, and the rolling boat made it difficult for me to remain seated while fully geared up. “I’ll meet you on the wreck,” I called out to Foreman. He agreed to let me go ahead and lay out the guideline on the wreck, which he would follow to find me.
As I descended the anchor line, I could soon make out the vast outline of the ocean liner as it spread in all directions before me, resembling a toppled skyscraper with portholes. No matter how many times I behold a shipwreck underwater, I am always amazed that I can actually swim through something that once floated proudly on the surface. Andrea Doria had been an entire floating city; now, sprawled on the ocean bottom, its size meant I could not swim the entire length of the ship on one dive, which always left a piece of the puzzle to explore on another dive.
The anchor line was attached at the shallowest point of the wreck. I looked around to establish my bearings. The visibility was a good 40 or 50 feet in all directions. The water was a light green and contrasted with the wreck’s rust-red steel and the white blanket of anemone tentacles that waved hypnotically at me. Anemones are creatures that affix themselves to shipwrecks; they look like plants, but are actually animals. They feed by catching in their tentacles the plankton and fish eggs that float past with the current. Whenever I swam close to an anemone, its tentacles quickly retracted into the body of the animal, which looked like a soft, brown mushroom stem. The a
nemones’ defensive reaction reminded me that I was an intruder to their world.
Because the visibility on the outside of the wreck was so good, I decided to swim toward the bow and look at the bridge, the ship’s control center where the captain had stood commanding his vessel. As I swam along the outside of the wreck making my way forward, I could see rows of portholes everywhere. The wreck seemed to stretch on forever. When I saw the bridge wings jutting out perpendicular to the hull, I knew I was nearing my destination. The officers and lookouts would stand on the bridge wings to get a clearer view of any objects that their ship might run into. I swam past the bridge wing and looked to my right. The front of several decks sloped gracefully downward. I stopped, hovering in the water just in front of the bridge. I looked inside and tried to imagine exactly what had transpired here to have caused the vessel’s fatal collision.
Steve Foreman swam up to me and gave the “OK” hand sign, which I returned. He had found me by following my guideline, which I had paid out from the anchor line. We both floated 30 feet in front of the bridge, admiring the ship’s graceful, curved lines and the contrast of colors. We dropped halfway down the outside of the bridge to a depth of 200 feet, and then stopped. Time passed quickly as we admired various parts of the wreck’s exterior. Soon, Steve gave me the thumbs-up, meaning he wanted to ascend, and I nodded. Then I signaled that I would stay on the wreck and he could ascend alone. He signaled “OK,” turned, and swam away.
I looked for an appropriate place to enter the wreck and found a large opening that led into the first-class ballroom. Everything seemed so still and the ballroom itself was very large, like Ginnie Springs cavern. Unlike Ginnie Springs, however, sunlight filtered in through the openings where there had once been plate-glass windows. I dropped down, avoiding tables that were affixed to what had been the wreck’s floor but now, because the wreck lay on its side, was the wall on my right. I wondered which famous people had sat at these tables, amusing themselves as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean, heading to and from their business and social commitments. As I dropped down, I liked the feeling of floating through the room where people had once danced and laughed the night away. I came to a large mound of silt. Pipes protruded through it.
The Last Dive Page 17