My head buzzed from the effects of narcosis: I had chosen to dive using air, which I was comfortable with at this depth. Although breathing trimix would have given me a clearer head, it would also have meant carrying more bottles, including a separate bottle of insulating gas for my drysuit, and two decompression gases. When I considered the extra load I would have to carry for diving on gas, and factored in the uncertainty of trimix decompression schedules, I decided to keep things simple and not change what had worked for me in the past; I breathed air and would use oxygen for decompression. The cold penetrated in spite of the thermal insulation I wore under my drysuit. I checked my depth gauge. It read 237 feet. Almost five martinis. I felt fine, bolstered by the martini-induced confidence.
As I swam along the bottom, I saw the faint outline of a bottle. I opened my goodie bag, gently grabbed the bottle, and put it in the bag. I then stuck my hand in the silt, reaching for another artifact. The silt was soft and so light that my motion immediately created a cloud of swirling brown particles around me. During this dive, unlike my dive into the U.S.S. San Diego’s dish room, I had a guideline with me, and felt secure that I would find my way out easily in spite of the curtain of silt drawn by my digging for artifacts. When my arm sank up to my elbow in the silt, I felt another bottle and retrieved it. My third stab into the silt netted a jar. On my fourth stab, I felt a large, round object. I could not lift it with one hand. Putting the guideline reel down next to me, I grabbed the object with two hands and pulled it out of the silt. I did not know what it was, but put it in my goodie bag and positioned it on the bottom with the bottles and the jar on top.
I could not see my diving gauges, but I knew instinctively that it was time to go. I grabbed my reel and started swimming while reeling in my guideline. I had no problem finding my way out and back to the anchor line. As I started my ascent, I checked my two diving computers. I had been underwater for thirty-nine minutes. My first decompression stop was at 60 feet. The decompression timers indicated ninety-nine minutes, but ninety-nine minutes was the maximum number the computer could display externally; internally, the decompression register was in three digits—my decompression time was at least one hour and thirty-nine minutes.
I slowly swam up the anchor line, pulling on it with one hand while I ascended. I did not want to unexpectedly encounter a current and get carried away from the anchor line. If that happened I would have to decompress while drifting in the ocean, and then, when I surfaced, I would be out of sight of the Wahoo and would be very lucky if I was found alive. I kept checking my computers during the ascent, and when I came to 60 feet, I tied my jonline around the anchor line, then slipped my left wrist through the loop at my end of the line and grasped it with my hand. The anchor line tugged up and down, but I stayed at 60 feet, thanks to Jon Hulburt’s neat invention (as a matter of fact, Hulburt was a Wahoo crew member for this expedition). I was required to decompress at this depth only for four minutes, and then the computer display showed me the number 50; next to it was an arrow on top of which rested a horizontal line. This meant that I had a ceiling of 50 feet and could ascend to that depth, but no shallower. I loosened my jonline’s knot and slid it up the anchor line. When I got to 53 feet, I again tightened the jonline’s knot and allowed the slight current to carry me backward, like an astronaut at the end of his tether. I lay facedown in the water, parallel to the unseen sand bottom that lay 190 feet below me.
My strategy for enduring the upcoming several hours of decompression was to relax, and enjoy the feeling of floating weightlessly, while I put my mind into a state of meditation. It was important for me to stay awake and I could not let myself relax to the point of falling asleep. If that happened, my blood flow, breathing, and general body functions would slow down and would not effectively remove the excess inert nitrogen gas from my system. But if I concentrated on my breathing rhythm and watched the marine life floating past me, I could be both awake and content. Unlike Steve Berman and John Reekie, I did not need an underwater stereo and I avoided using one. Perhaps that was because I lived in Manhattan, where I seemed to be surrounded by noise. Underwater, I was comforted by the soothing sound of my steady breathing: first, swisssshhh, as I breathed in and pulled air from my regulator, and then the blub, blub, blub, blub of my bubbles as I exhaled.
My only real concern during decompression was being stung by jellyfish. Although the jellyfish could not sting through my neoprene rubber drysuit, gloves, or hood, my lips were exposed to the water and were vulnerable. Sometimes, long trails of jellyfish tentacles floated toward me, and I would have to gently fan the water to create a current that would move the stinging tentacles away. When the body of a jellyfish pulsed toward me, I would sometimes catch it in my open hand and admire the beauty of its translucent body and the powerful contractions it made trying to thrust itself forward. After a few moments of this, I would gently move my hand to one side with the jellyfish still pushing against it, and then let the jellyfish go, where it pulsed onward, toward its destiny. The anchor line itself often became a snag for jellyfish tentacles and I had to watch out that I did not pull on the anchor line, get a jellyfish tentacle on my glove, and then rub my lip, which could happen when I needed to change regulators to breathe from another tank. Even though these tentacles were no longer attached to the jellyfish, the stinging cells, called nematocysts, were still active and they would burn my lip. In severe cases, my lip would swell and turn very red, as if stung by a bee. Jellyfish stings on the lip were not uncommon, and other divers faced the same discomfort. I spent three hours and fourteen minutes underwater, then surfaced, swam to the Wahoo’s stern, and climbed out of the water.
“Your research pals don’t feel so great,” Steve Bielenda told me first thing. It turned out that Karl Huggins and Mike Emmerman, the decompression researchers, were incapacitated by seasickness. They lay, sea-foam white, on the floor in the Wahoo’s cabin and got up occasionally to stagger out of the cabin and to the railing, where they vomited into the sea. They were far too sick to measure me for signs of inert gas bubbles in the bloodstream, and they had only been able to measure a few other divers—between bouts of vomiting—before they gave up and went into the cabin to lie down. I was disappointed but knew that this was the nature of diving and research. Nothing was guaranteed. In spite of advances in technology, human beings were still often held captive by their own physical and mental limitations, from their guts to their lungs to their motivations.
Unknown to Team Doria members, the Wahoo crew member John Moyer had been reconnoitering the Doria’s first-class area for two important artifacts: the vessel’s second bell, and a wall frieze by Guido Gambone, who had been influenced by Picasso. The frieze was the largest artwork the late renowned artist had ever created. Made of ceramic, which was his favorite medium, the frieze covered an entire wall within the ship and recalled the art of the ancient Etruscans; the meaning of the work was still a mystery to experts. The artwork was near to priceless in value, but it was not because of money that Moyer searched for it. Rather, he wanted to rescue the frieze to preserve something of beauty that would be lost forever when the steel wreck succumbed to the combined effects of storms and the chemical reactions of steel with salt water and completely broke up.
Moyer’s ultimate goal was one he shared with many diving enthusiasts: He wanted to start a permanent Andrea Doria museum, where people could see the artifacts recovered and learn more about the wreck, its fatal voyage, its design elegance, and its art. Moyer hoped that the second bell and the art frieze would become centerpieces for the future museum.
While I knew of the diver’s general ambitions, I didn’t know that he was scouting out the Doria on this expedition. As noble as Moyer’s intentions were, he could not reveal what he was doing: Competition for artifacts among wreck divers was fierce, and someone else could come along and snatch the prizes that Moyer had sought long and hard. The competition for Andrea Doria artifacts was especially strong between Bill Nagel’s boat Seeker and
Steve Bielenda’s Wahoo. During one of the Seeker’s Doria expeditions—when Moyer was working for Nagel as a crew member—John Chatterton and other divers found a cache of dishes spilling out of a supply closet in a corridor. Although the Seeker’s divers recovered hundreds of artifacts from this closet during two expeditions, they did not have enough time to gather everything.
Word got out about the bonanza when the Seeker returned to port between expeditions. The Wahoo already had an expedition scheduled, and when the Wahoo’s crew heard about the dish closet, they planned to get their share of the artifacts. But the Seeker’s crew had other plans for the artifacts: Chatterton descended to the wreck and welded a metal bar across the hole at the point where divers could most easily penetrate the wreck and drop right down to the dishes. Not content with blocking the entrance from the Wahoo divers, the Seeker’s crew went a step further: They brought down a sign and affixed it to the barred hole. The sign read CLOSED FOR INVENTORY. THE SEEKER. As Nagel’s boat departed the scene, everyone on board had a good laugh while they carefully stored their prized artifacts to prevent damage during the long ride home.
The Wahoo’s divers were undeterred by the welded bar blocking their path. The sign only made the divers more determined to thwart their rivals’ efforts. Hank Garvin and Pete Manchee dived to the hole. Manchee took off his tank, and wriggled past the metal bar into the wreck. Garvin then passed Manchee’s tank through the low opening, where Manchee strapped his breathing unit onto his back and proceeded to the artifact area. When he recovered a goodie bag full of dishes, Manchee swam back up, handed the artifacts to Garvin, took off his tank again, passed it through the opening, and then crawled through himself. Garvin helped Manchee put the tank back on and the two ascended, smug in the knowledge that they had foiled Chatterton’s and the Seeker’s efforts. On their next dive, Garvin and Manchee took the Seeker’s sign to add to their trophies and put their own sign in its place. It read INVENTORY COMPLETED. THE WAHOO.
Before our Team Doria ’91 expedition, Moyer confided his plans to his boss, Steve Bielenda, and to Billy Deans, whom he had worked for at Key West Diver, the technical diving facility Deans owned in Florida. Billy Deans had brought along his Aqua-zepp, a diver-propulsion vehicle that looked just like a torpedo with handles on each side and a T-bar welded on top, three quarters of the way back. Once underwater, Deans lay face-forward on top of the Aqua-zepp and held the handles, positioned like a high-speed motorcycle racer. The bullet of a device propelled him so forcefully through the water that he needed the T-bar to hook his legs onto so that he would not flutter and lose control. Moyer held on to Deans’s ankles and was pulled along. He signaled with a tug when he wanted Deans to stop and park the Aqua-zepp on the wreck. Once parked, the divers entered the wreck and searched the first-class area. Though they did not find the Doria’s second bell, they did find the Gambone frieze. Its enormous size and weight meant they would have to bring their own team out to recover this treasure.
After I got out of my diving gear, Chris Rouse walked over to me and said, “You should talk to Wings. He’s really pissed off.”
“Why?” I asked.
“He’s not happy with a bunch of stuff, but he’s really mad about getting an artifact busted because the crew didn’t help him.”
I walked over to Wings, who was clearly agitated, judging by the scowl on his face. “Wings, what happened?”
“Fucking crew. All they care about are their dives. I thought they were supposed to be here to help. When I came up and was on the ladder, I was hollering for someone to help me, but nobody came.”
“Maybe they couldn’t hear you?”
Wings glared at me. “It’s the crew’s responsibility to see a diver when he comes up. Somebody should have been there and I shouldn’t have had to yell.” Wings’s long beard quivered in indignation. “The whole attitude here sucks. Man, these guys would never stay in business if they were in California! And look at this.” Wings reached into his goodie bag and pulled out a few pieces of long, curved, white glass and an oddly shaped piece of brass.
“Wow!” I exclaimed. “It looks neat. But what is it?”
“It was a wall-mounted flower vase in the men’s room. I took it off the wall intact, but it broke when I got tossed around on the ladder. If one of the crew were there to help me, I’d have a nice, intact artifact.” Wings grunted. He bent over the platform we used to gear up for our dives and laid the glass down, joining the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. “See. It went like this,” he said. “Oh, well, I guess I can glue it together, but it won’t be the same.” He sounded like a boy with a broken toy, and I understood his feelings completely.
“Yeah, you’re right. But at least you got something. Let me talk to Bielenda and see what we can do so this doesn’t happen again.”
Bielenda listened to Wings’s complaint and said simply, “I’ll make sure someone’s at the stern to help out. Someone should have been there for Wings, but it sounds like they were off helping somebody else. You can’t be everywhere at once.”
“There’s enough crew on the boat that manpower shouldn’t be a problem,” I replied.
Bielenda looked me hard in the eye. “Bernie, don’t forget, the crew have to work in shifts, so we have one or two people at the radar all night, and to make sure we don’t start taking on water.”
I wasn’t sure I had made my point, but I noticed that when John Reekie came up from his dive, the crew members Hank Garvin and Jon Hulburt were there to help him.
As Reekie climbed the rocking ladder, he handed his goodie bag to Garvin. “Be careful with that!” shouted Reekie. “There’s a glass bowl in the bag. Don’t bust it!”
When he was safely back on board and out of his equipment, Reekie walked over to the plastic drum where Garvin had left Reekie’s goodie bag for safekeeping. Reekie pulled the glass bowl out. It was large and looked ideal for punch, with the top rim cut to look like a series of connected semicircles. But he was disappointed that it did not have engraved in the glass the word ITALIA with a crown above it, the emblem of the company that had owned the Andrea Doria. Hulburt examined the bowl. “Where’d you get that?”
“The kitchen,” Reekie answered gruffly.
“You went to the kitchen?” asked Hulburt, sounding more than a little surprised.
“Yeah, I looked at the deck plans and then went in. This wreck’s bigger than the Empress, but it’s still built the same way,” Reekie said, referring to his baby, the ocean liner Empress of Ireland, which lay in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Hulburt admired the bowl and exclaimed, “Wow! It took me five years of Doria diving before I was comfortable enough to go where you just went on your first dive.”
“Well, it sure helps having a line,” Reekie told him. Garvin, listening to the two men, rolled his eyes at Reekie’s mention of the guideline.
Chris Rouse peered over Reekie’s shoulder. “I wish we’d have gotten something.”
Chrissy Rouse frowned at his father. “We might have if you hadn’t gotten spastic and tangled up!”
“So, guys, what happened on the dive?” I asked, a little alarmed.
Chris had gotten tangled in monofilament, the transparent fishing line used by fishermen that becomes attached to the wreck when fishermen snag their hooks on it and break their line. Monofilament is on every wreck and entangles even the most cautious diver. As Chris tried to cut the fishing line away from himself, he got tangled in his guideline. Chrissy helped his father, but it took some time to resolve the situation. In the confusion, they had abandoned their guideline reel, which lay on the wreck not far from the anchor line. I offered to retrieve the lost reel on the next dive.
“Nah, we’ll get it. You can’t just leave your gear on the bottom,” Chris said indignantly.
I was reminded of Steve Bielenda’s comment to me a year earlier when I complained about leaving my goodie bag, which contained a reel and light, inside the Doria during my third dive with Steve Berman, when he had wanted to
leave the wreck and I had been entangled in the guideline. Bielenda had chuckled and remarked matter-of-factly, “If ya ain’t left nothin’ on the bottom, you ain’t doin’ nothin’ underwater! We all got plenty of stuff left behind in the ocean.”
Reekie looked at the Rouses and quickly threw in, “Why can’t you guys leave a reel on the wreck? You have all sorts of shit on the bottom. What’s the difference if you left a reel there to add to the other stuff?”
Seeing an opening, Chrissy decided to launch his own attack on his father. “Yeah, and you left that stage bottle down there. Why didn’t you bring that up? That tank and the regulator are worth a lot more than a reel.”
Chris set his jaw and turned to face his son. “What? You got some nerve!” He jabbed a finger in Chrissy’s direction. “You were supposed to bring the tank up. You left it there. Don’t try and blame it on me!”
The bickering was heating up quickly. I stepped between the two divers. “Okay, okay. Forget it. Get the tank on the next dive. Hell, I’ll get it if you want.”
My ploy worked. Both Rouses were diverted from clawing at each other by the thought of someone else recovering their gear, which was unacceptable. “No. No. We’ll get the tank,” Chris told me. “Thanks anyway, but we can retrieve our own stuff.”
The Last Dive Page 18