Shadow Divers (3 page)

Neither man could find a clean piece of paper. Nagle reached into his pocket and pulled out two cocktail napkins from the Horrible Inn. He wrote down his numbers for Skeets—a little blackfish snag south of Seaside lump, just a pile of rocks that made for good fishing. Then Skeets began to copy his Loran-C time differentials across a streak of peanut grease left by Nagle’s hand. Captains are not supposed to reveal prize sites. But Nagle could tell Skeets what was down there; Nagle was the one guy Skeets knew who was capable of diving to 200 feet. And Nagle seemed a decent guy, not the kind to blab or sell the numbers to a rival fishing charter.

Skeets handed over the napkin.

“Keep it to yourself,” he reminded Nagle. “And for God’s sake, be careful.”

Skeets let himself out of the wheelhouse, climbed down the steep white wooden stairs, and returned to the dock and his boat. Nagle followed a short time later, pen in one hand, cocktail napkin death-gripped in the other. He walked to the Horrible Inn and ordered a Jim Beam, then began transcribing Skeets’s numbers into code on a different napkin. Nagle kept a book of numbers on the
Seeker,
but those were public numbers—go steal them if you want, you son of a bitch. His wallet, however, was reserved for promise. You could kill Nagle and steal his wallet, but those numbers would mean nothing without the code, and Nagle never told anyone the code. He folded the new napkin and tucked it into his wallet, the safe house for his dreams. Then he called John Chatterton.

If Nagle saw himself in any other diver, that diver was John Chatterton, a ruggedly tall and handsome forty-year-old commercial diver whose booming, Long Island–speckled voice had become sound track to the most important wreck dives of the era. By day, Chatterton worked underwater construction jobs around Manhattan, the kind that required a brass helmet and a ten-thousand-degree Broco torch. By weekend, he masterminded some of the most inventive and daring shipwreck dives ever executed on the eastern seaboard. When Nagle looked in Chatterton’s eyes, he saw his own best days staring back at him.

They had met in 1984 aboard the
Seeker.
Chatterton had no particular interest in the destination that day; he had signed up simply to observe Nagle, the legend. Soon after, Chatterton took a
Seeker
charter to the
Texas Tower,
an old air force radar installation about sixty miles offshore. The tower had collapsed in a 1961 storm, killing its crew. Its bottom lay jackknifed in sand at 200 feet, making it too dangerous for all but the most accomplished divers. But its top could be easily explored at 85 feet, appropriate for every diver on this trip.

One man got cocky. He already had a reputation as a hotshot, so he surprised no one by concocting a plan to dive the bottom. Soon enough, one of wreck diving’s oldest songs sounded from beneath the waves. The man became obsessed with removing a brass window. His air was short but he tried to finish anyway. He drowned. That’s how fast it happens at those depths.

Now there was a corpse on the bottom of a very dangerous wreck. Someone had to go get him. That was Nagle’s job; ordinarily, he or one of his assistants—his mates—would make the recovery dive. But they had just completed their own dives and could not return to the water until their bodies had off-gassed built-up nitrogen, a process that would take hours.

Chatterton volunteered. A diver unfamiliar with the bottom could easily get lost and never find his way back to the
Seeker,
so Nagle asked if Chatterton knew the mangled topography of the wreck. “Not really, but I’ll go anyway,” Chatterton said. That answer spoke to Nagle.

Chatterton reached the bottom of the
Texas Tower
and began his reconnaissance. Soon enough, he found the diver—“Doesn’t look too bad for a dead guy,” Chatterton thought. He tied the man’s tanks to a two-hundred-pound lift bag and inflated the bag with air until the body began its ascent to the surface. For good measure, he tied a spool of line from the corpse to the shipwreck; that way, if anything went wrong, there would still be a trail to the body.

Something went wrong. During ascent, the rapidly decreasing water pressure caused the air in the diver’s dry suit to expand, turning him into a deceased version of the Michelin Man. As the body surfaced, a giant wave collapsed the lift bag, and the man sank back to the bottom. With nightfall approaching, it would be unsafe for anyone to dive again.

Chatterton volunteered to retrieve the body in the morning. That really spoke to Nagle. The
Seeker
stayed overnight; everyone ate Doritos for breakfast. Chatterton found the body again. This time, the poor guy didn’t look so good. His eyelids had been eaten away and his teeth showed; he’d become what divers call a “creature feature.” Nagle reeled in the body when it surfaced. “You did a good job,” he told Chatterton. “You are a good diver.” After that, Nagle and Chatterton were friends.

Before long, Chatterton was crewing on the
Seeker.
In 1987, he made his first trip to the
Doria.
He swam around but did nothing more. The wreck was so dangerous, so terrifying, that he vowed never to return. On the same trip, Nagle recovered a two-hundred-pound wooden sign that read
KEEP CLEAR OF PROPELLERS,
the most beautiful sign Chatterton had ever seen. He shook Nagle’s hand, thanked him for the opportunity, and said, “Bill, I’ve made my trip to the mountaintop. Once is enough.” Nagle, however, knew better.

Chatterton couldn’t forget the wreck. In contemplating the
Doria
’s tilted grandness, he could glimpse shadows of the secrets great shipwrecks offer those who see with their minds. He returned. The
Doria
’s hugeness overwhelmed him; a diver could spend a decade of twenty-five-minute dives on this wreck and never see it all. Again he returned, and marveled at the feeling of being inside places that didn’t used to be places, of becoming present in this vast repository of tiny things that had meant something to people. Soon, the
Doria
ran through his bloodstream full-time. Raking leaves or watching a Giants football game or walking the grocery’s dairy aisle, Chatterton stitched together his experiences on the
Doria,
and gradually his eyes adjusted, until the quilt of his separate experiences aboard that shipwreck formed a single picture in his mind. “This is why I dive,” he told Nagle. “This is what I want diving to be.”

Soon Chatterton was going places and finding things on the
Doria
no one had before, not even Nagle and his cohorts in the glory days. His reputation wafted across the bows of dive boats along the eastern seaboard. And he continued to absorb Nagle. He marveled at Nagle’s instinct to see the big picture, to envision a ship as it had been in its proudest moment, to study deck plans and captain’s logs, to put himself into the mind of the ship’s navigator, to construct a dive plan that envisioned the whole ship when only a tiny portion of it was currently knowable. He was astounded to bring up meaningless rusty artifacts from hidden corners on the
Doria
only to have Nagle examine them and divine exactly where he’d been.

Most of all, he and Nagle shared a philosophy. To them, diving was about exploration, about aiming for the everywhere of the unknown. There were a lot of impossible places to go when the world was as big as Chatterton and Nagle saw it, but for God’s sake you had to try. You were
required
to try. What were you doing alive, these men thought, if you didn’t go and try?

The day after Skeets revealed his secret, Nagle asked Chatterton to meet him at the
Seeker.
The men walked upstairs to the boat’s wheelhouse, where Nagle locked the door and related Skeets’s story to his friend. What could be at the bottom of that site? The men dealt out the possibilities like solitaire cards. Could it be a warship or a war-era merchant vessel? Almost impossible—military records indicated little action in the area during either world war. Could it be the
Corvallis,
a ship reputedly sunk by Hollywood for a 1930s disaster flick? Faintly possible: it was thought that the filmmakers had bothered to note only the most general location for their shoot, an area that included Skeets’s fishing site but also several hundred other square miles of ocean. How about a subway car? Also vaguely possible—New Jersey sunk them purposely to promote marine life, but those locations had been reliably recorded.

Less romantic scenarios seemed more probable. It might be a pile of rocks. It might be a worthless pipe barge. Most likely it was an old garbage barge; in years past, municipalities had stuffed geriatric schooners with trash, cut their masts, and sunk them at no place in particular. Nagle and Chatterton had been to plenty of those.

But maybe, just maybe, it was something big.

Nagle proposed a plan. He and Chatterton would organize a trip to the site. Each would recruit six top divers, guys who could survive a 200-foot plunge into the unknown. It would not be an easy journey—six hours each way in the chill September air. Each diver would pay one hundred dollars to cover fuel and expenses. There would be no promises. Other diving captains offered hush-hush trips to “virgin” sites, but these were always scams; you’d get down there and find a recent diver’s orange crowbar on some junky fishing boat, and the captain would actually look you in the eye and say, “Gee, fellas, I had no idea.” Not Nagle and Chatterton. They would pitch their trip the way they felt it: It’s probably nothing, men, but we have to try.

The trip was booked for Labor Day 1991. Nagle and Chatterton called every good diver they knew. Nearly all of them refused the invitation. Even some of the greats, guys who were supposed to be excited by maybes, turned down the trip. “I’d rather spend my money on a sure thing instead of some wacky pie in the sky” was the standard regret. One diver, Brian Skerry, told Chatterton, “You know what, man? I was born too late. All the really cool wrecks have been found. The age of exploration for shipwrecks is over.” That’s how it was in 1991. Guys wanted guarantees. Nagle and Chatterton kept calling.

Finally, their lists exhausted, they found their twelfth diver. Chatterton was incensed. “Nobody wants to find anything new! What the hell’s going on, Bill?” Nagle, normally bombastic in the face of caution, looked down at the red
X
’s on his list of divers and said to Chatterton, almost in whisper, “These guys don’t have the heart for wreck diving, John. These guys just don’t get it.”

Just after midnight on September 2, 1991, while the rest of Brielle slept, Nagle, Chatterton, and the twelve divers who had signed up for the exploratory trip stuffed the
Seeker
with tanks, masks, regulators, knives, flashlights, and bundles of other gear. They faced a six-hour ride to Skeets’s numbers. Some grabbed a bunk and went to sleep. Others hung around the changing table, catching up on one another’s lives and laughing about the folly of paying to chase a pile of rocks. At one
A.M.,
Nagle checked the sign-in sheet against the passengers on board. “Get all gear secured,” he called to those still awake, then walked up the stairs and into the wheelhouse. Chatterton gave the signal to switch from shore power to generator. The lights in the boat’s salon flickered, then gave way to powerful quartzes that bathed the back deck in white. One of the divers pulled the power leads and water feed from the dock and disconnected the shore-based phone line. Nagle lit the twin diesel engines, which danced to protest
—cough-grumble-POP-chum
.
.
.
cough-grumble-POP-POP-POP-rrmmm—
the disruption of their slumber.

Chatterton pulled in lines. “Bow line off! Stern line hold . . . hold . . . hold . . . okay!” he called to Nagle, then slung the heavy ropes onto the dock. Now the
Seeker
was ready. Nagle switched his wheelhouse lights to dim red, checked his VHF radio, single sideband radio, Loran-C, and radar, and engaged the engines one at a time, the choice method for coaxing a lady from her dock. A few minutes later, the
Seeker
was past the railroad drawbridge and nose up into the Atlantic. Most likely these men were chasing a garbage barge. Most likely the age of shipwreck exploration had passed. But as the Brielle dock faded behind them, Chatterton and Nagle saw possibilities on the horizon, and for that moment the world was perfect and right.

CHAPTER TWO

ZERO VIZ

D
EEP-SHIPWRECK DIVING
is among the world’s most dangerous sports. Few other endeavors exist in which nature, biology, equipment, instinct, and object conspire—without warning and from all directions—to so completely attack a man’s mind and disassemble his spirit. Many dead divers have been found inside shipwrecks with more than enough air remaining to have made it to the surface. It is not that they chose to die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live.

The sport bears only passing resemblance to its cousin, the resort-area, single-tank scuba familiar to the general public. Safety statistics are difficult to divine. Deep-wreck divers make up a minuscule percentage of the world’s twenty million or so certified scuba divers. Their accidents barely blip on the excellent safety record of a sport in which nearly all the participants stay in shallow tropical waters, depend on partners for safety, and desire little more than lovely scenery. In the United States, of the ten million certified scuba divers, it is likely that only a few hundred dive deep for shipwrecks. To those few, it is not a matter of if they will taste death, only of whether they’ll swallow. If a deep-wreck diver stays in the sport long enough, he will likely either come close to dying, watch another diver die, or die himself. There are times in this sport when it is difficult to say which of the three outcomes is worst.

Deep-shipwreck diving is unusual in another respect. Because it confronts man’s most primordial instincts—to breathe; to see; to flee from danger—the layperson need not strap on the equipment in order to appreciate the peril. He need only contemplate the sport’s dangers. They are his dangers, too, and in learning about them he will begin to comprehend the deep-wreck diver and feel his stories. He will understand why capable men give up underwater. He will know why most people in the world would never consider chasing a fisherman’s numbers sixty miles out and 200 feet down into the middle of nowhere.

A deep-shipwreck diver breathing air confronts two primary dangers. First, at depths greater than about 66 feet, his judgment and motor skills can become impaired, a condition known as nitrogen narcosis. As he descends farther, the effects of narcosis become more pronounced. Beyond 100 feet, where some of the best shipwrecks lie, he can be significantly handicapped, yet he must perform feats and make decisions upon which his life depends.

Second, should something go wrong, he cannot simply swim to the surface. A diver who has spent time in deep water must ascend gradually, stopping at predetermined intervals to allow his body to readjust to decreasing pressures. He must do this even if he believes himself to be suffocating or choking or dying. Panicked divers who bolt for “sunshine and seagulls” risk a case of decompression sickness, or the “bends.” Severe bends can permanently handicap, paralyze, or kill a person. Divers who have witnessed the writhing, screaming agony of a bad bends hit swear that they would rather suffocate and drown on the bottom than surface after a long, deep dive without decompressing.

Nearly all the myriad other dangers lying in wait for the deep-wreck diver involve narcosis or decompression sickness. Both narcosis and decompression sickness are conditions born of pressure. At sea level, atmospheric pressure is roughly equal to the pressure inside the human body. Throwing Frisbees on the beach or riding a bus, we are said to be at one atmosphere of pressure, or 14.7 pounds per square inch. Life feels normal at one atmosphere. The air we breathe at sea level, which is composed of 21 percent oxygen and 79 percent nitrogen, also enters our lungs at a pressure of one atmosphere. The oxygen nourishes our blood and tissue. The nitrogen is inert and doesn’t do much of anything.

Things change in water. Every 33 feet below the surface, the pressure increases by one atmosphere. A scuba diver chasing seahorses at 33 feet, therefore, is said to be at two atmospheres, or twice the pressure he experienced at the surface. He barely feels it. But something is going on in the air he breathes from his tanks. While that air is still made up of oxygen and nitrogen molecules in that 21:79 ratio, there are now twice as many of each of those molecules in every lungful of air he breathes. At three atmospheres, there are three times as many oxygen and nitrogen molecules in his lungful of air, and so on.

As the diver breathes underwater, the extra nitrogen molecules being taken into his lungs don’t just sit around as they do in a person on land. Instead, they dissolve into the bloodstream and travel into his tissues—his flesh, joints, brain, spine, everywhere. The longer and deeper a diver stays underwater, the more nitrogen accumulates in those tissues.

At a depth of around three atmospheres, or 66 feet, that accumulated nitrogen begins to have a narcotizing effect on most divers. That is nitrogen narcosis. Some compare the effects of narcosis to alcohol intoxication, others to the twilight of a waking anesthetic, still others to the fog of ether or laughing gas. Symptoms are relatively mild at shallower depths—judgment skews, motor skills dull, manual dexterity suffers, peripheral vision narrows, emotions heighten. As a diver descends farther, the effects intensify. At 130 feet, or about five atmospheres, most divers will be impaired. Some become all thumbs and struggle to complete simple tasks, such as tying a knot; others turn “dumb with the depth” and must talk themselves into believing what they already know. As a diver descends even deeper, say to 170 or 180 feet, he might start to hallucinate, until lobsters begin beckoning him by name or offering him unsound advice. Sometimes divers realize that they are “narced” by the sounds they hear. Many experience the “jungle drums,” the deafening sound of one’s pulse in one’s own ears; or they might simply hear a hum, like a buzzing alarm clock lost under a pillow. Below 200 feet, narcosis can supercharge the normal processing of fear, joy, sorrow, excitement, and disappointment. Tiny problems—a missing knife, a bit of silt—can be perceived as unfolding catastrophes and snowball into panic. Serious problems—a depleting air tank or the loss of the anchor line—can appear as niggling annoyances. In an environment as unforgiving as a deep shipwreck, the short-circuiting of judgment, emotion, and motor skills complicates everything.

The nitrogen in the diver’s breathing gas poses another problem. It accumulates in his tissues with both depth and time. This is generally not a problem on shallow dives of short duration. On deeper, longer dives, during the ascent the accumulated nitrogen is released from his tissues back into his bloodstream. The rate at which this happens determines whether a diver will suffer from the bends, or even if he’ll die.

If the diver ascends slowly, atmospheric pressure decreases gradually and the accumulated nitrogen passes out of his body tissues in the form of microscopic bubbles. The same effect can be observed by slowly opening a soda bottle; if you gradually reduce the pressure inside the bottle, the bubbles stay small. The size of the bubbles is key. Only when nitrogen bubbles are microscopically small inside a diver can they travel efficiently through his bloodstream and back to his lungs, where they can be discharged through normal respiration. This is what a diver wants.

When a diver ascends quickly, however, the surrounding atmospheric pressure drops rapidly. That causes the accumulated nitrogen in his tissues to form massive quantities of large bubbles, just as when you rapidly unscrew the soda bottle’s cap. Large nitrogen bubbles are the mortal enemy of the deep diver. When large bubbles form outside the bloodstream, they can press on tissues, blocking circulation. If this happens in the joints or near the nerves, the result will be agonizing pain that might last weeks or even a lifetime. If it happens in the spinal cord or the brain, the blockage can cause paralysis or a fatal stroke. If too many large bubbles make their way back to the lungs, the lungs will shut down, a condition called the “chokes,” which can stop a diver’s breathing. If too many large bubbles find their way into the arterial system, the diver can suffer a pulmonary barotrauma, or gas embolism, a condition that can cause a stroke, blindness, unconsciousness, or death.

To guarantee that he ascends slowly, keeping the nitrogen bubbles microscopically small, the deep diver deliberately pauses at predetermined depths to allow these bubbles to work their way out of his system. These pauses are known as “decompression stops” and have been optimally calculated by scientists. A diver breathing air who spends twenty-five minutes at a depth of 200 feet might spend an hour working his way back to the surface, stopping first at a depth of 40 feet and waiting for five minutes, then ascending slowly and stopping again for ten minutes at 30 feet, fourteen minutes at 20 feet, and for twenty-five minutes at 10 feet. The amount of time he spends decompressing is a function of depth and time—longer dives and deeper depths mean more decompression. That is one reason why shipwreck divers don’t spend hours working underwater; the decompression time for a two-hour dive might be as long as nine hours.

Narcosis and decompression sickness are the patriarchs on the family tree of deep-wreck diving dangers. A diver does not dare board a charter boat bound for a deep wreck unless he honors these perils.

Atlantic divers in the Northeast reach shipwrecks by charter boats. Though some divers own their own recreational boats, such smaller craft cannot withstand the forces of the open Atlantic. Charter boats, most of which are longer than thirty-five feet, are built for the rigors of the sea. Customers often make two dives in a day, but they must wait several hours between turns to fully discharge any nitrogen that remains in their bodies. Dive charters, therefore, often become all-day or overnight affairs.

An excellent diver boards the boat with a plan. For days, maybe weeks before the trip, he contemplates the wreck, studies its deck plans, memorizes its contours, decides on a work area, sets reasonable goals, then constructs a strategy to accomplish those goals. He believes that navigation is the key to safety and success aboard a wreck, and he is unwilling to dig willy-nilly, as do so many wreck divers, in blind hope of finding a prize. He has seen guys who do that, and some of those guys never came up. A well-conceived plan is his religion. Days in advance, he knows what he is supposed to do and where he is supposed to go, and for that reason he will adapt to contingencies; and in the deep Atlantic everything is contingency.

Equipment is the deep-wreck diver’s soul mate. It grants him passage into an off-limits world, then stands between him and nature. There are hints of love in the way the diver clips, wraps, fastens, and jury-rigs his 175 pounds of gear until he is part modern art sculpture, part 1950s movie alien. Fully suited, he can only lumber, but the rig feels like life to him. Should any of his equipment fail, he will find trouble. He carries several thousand dollars’ worth of gear: strobe lights, headlight, flashlights, up lines, hammer, crowbar or sledgehammer, knives, mask, fins, fin keepers, buoyancy wings, regulators, manifold, compass, mesh goody bag for artifacts, lift bags to float those artifacts to the surface, marker buoy (or “safety sausage”) to shoot to the surface in case of emergency, clips, gauges, dials, tools, writing slate, waterproof marker, laminated decompression tables, neoprene gloves, hood, stopwatch, weight belt, ankle weights, jon lines. Then he packs backups for some of this gear. He shuns the casual diver’s wet suit for the warmer, more expensive dry suit, which he wears over two pairs of expedition-weight polypropylene underwear. He carries two air tanks, not one. He needs every bit of this stuff.

As the charter boat nears its destination, the captain uses his navigation equipment to put the vessel “on the numbers,” or as close to the wreck as possible. His mates—usually two or three divers who work aboard the boat—find footing on the slippery front deck and grab hold of the anchor and its line. A dive boat’s anchor is a steel grapple with four or five long teeth, more like the tool Batman uses to scale buildings than the traditional two-fluke instrument tattooed on sailors’ biceps. It is attached first to about fifteen feet of chain, then to hundreds of feet of three-quarter-inch nylon line. When the captain gives the order, the mates will drop this grapple, hoping that it lands on and snags the shipwreck.

This precise dropping of the anchor line is critical business. The anchor line does not simply keep the boat stationary. It is the diver’s umbilical cord, the means by which he makes his way to the shipwreck and, more important, finds his way back. A diver cannot simply jump off the boat, drop through the water, and expect to land on the wreck. By the time he splashes, his boat likely will have drifted several hundred feet with the current, so that it is no longer over the wreck. Even if the boat remained directly over the wreck, a diver who jumped off and descended without using the anchor line as a guide would find himself a toy in the ocean currents that swirl in different directions at various depths. Those currents might blow him hundreds of feet from the wreck. In the dark waters of the deep Atlantic, where visibility might be as poor as ten inches, a diver who lands even a few feet away from the wreck could wander the bottom for years without finding anything. Even in those rare cases when bottom visibility is pristine, say forty feet, a free-descending diver who lands forty-five feet away from the wreck still won’t ever see it. At that point, he must guess at a direction in which to search, and if he guesses wrong, he will become nomad and soon be lost. Only by descending along the anchor line can the diver find his wreck.

The trip back up the anchor line is even more critical. If a diver cannot locate the anchor line, he will be forced to ascend and decompress from wherever he happens to find himself. Such a free ascent is haunted with bad possibilities. He still must decompress—a process requiring an hour or more, depending on his bottom time and depth—but without an anchor line in hand to keep him steady, he will find it more difficult to maintain the precise depths necessary for proper decompression. This invites the bends. The bends is only his first problem. Without an anchor line to clutch, he will also be blown about by currents. Even if he somehow manages to begin his ascent from directly beneath the dive boat, a free-floating diver who decompresses for an hour in a current of just two knots—about two miles per hour—will surface more than two miles from the boat. At that distance, he will likely never see the boat, and the boat will likely never see him. Even if he spotted the boat, he could not hope to swim to it; he is already down-current and carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment, and even a desperate diver cannot swim against those handicaps. He will not drown immediately, because his gear is buoyant and because his suit and buoyancy wings likely contain air. But panic is not far off. He knows that hypothermia in the cold Atlantic is a few hours away. He remembers in fine detail the stories he’s heard about sharks attacking divers adrift. He knows that even if he is alive in twenty-four hours, the skin around the cuffs on his dry suit will begin to soften in the salt water, allowing air to leak out and cold water to seep in. Now hypothermia is upon him. He knows that no one back at the boat will realize that he has surfaced; they might presume him lost on the wreck or eaten by a shark, but they will never know for sure because the odds are that if no one sees him between the white swells on the Atlantic’s surface, no one will ever find him alive, and to the diver lost at sea, that seems the most terrible result of all.