I had time enough to see the hawser, thick as my ankle, begin to stretch like a nylon rubber band. Then, I too was on a headlong run for the coward’s boat on the other side. If the hawser snapped, anyone standing around would probably have been cut in half on the recoil. I would like to say that I gallantly looked out for Toni at this moment, but, being an equal-opportunity survivor, I crashed into her in the process of diving into the dinghy.
In quick succession, I heard the oomphs from my impact, an unladylike curse from Toni, a loud scraping sound as the Smith broke free from the reef—and after a few seconds of silence, a cheer from the skipper and his assistant, who were the only ones left standing on deck. Disentangling myself from the rest of the gray-and-green appareled cowards in the boat, I heard a concerned protest from Vrana: “Watch the Moosehead, you’re standing on the beer.”
So, we were rescued, and by the time we were hauled into the harbor at Amygdaloid, it was daylight. There is not much to do on the north side of Isle Royale except meditate and libate and this group was definitely not the meditating type. Our rescuers decided not to bother sleeping as it was already light. Instead, they declared a holiday in honor of our being snapped from the jaws of icy death. They drank all day long, occasionally jumping into the frigid waters. This combination they assured me helped them avoid the ferocious price to be paid in hangovers.
The next day I sat across from Chief Ranger Stu Croll, explaining why his North Shore ranger station had closed down for the day. He was also curious about what I was planning to do now that we were here with our equipment, all dressed for a party, and no boat to get there. The Smith was finished for this operation; it was undergoing makeshift repairs and would soon be removed.
This boat karma was starting to bother me. As great a record as we had for dive safety, we were developing a terrible reputation for attrition to boats. It wasn’t just the Biscayne fire, there was a flipped jon boat at Biscayne from a 1975 project, an incident in the Tortugas and . . . anyway, it was getting to be a sore spot. I told Stu that we were indeed at a loss, and hadn’t expected to lose a boat so early in a project. I was about to tell him it usually took a few weeks longer but thought better of it.
Once again, it was the park that saved the day. Stu wasn’t going to see us knocked out over a boat when they had patrol craft and rangers to operate them. He offered a solution that paralleled others that came from parks over the years. “I’ll give you the Lorelei (a thirty-two foot Bertram) and Ken Vrana for the rest of the time, but if there are visitor emergencies on the north side, you have to break down your ops and respond with the boat.” We were back in business. This sort of arrangement had worked well before and would again. Sometimes we found ourselves doing odd things for archeologists: conducting rescues, boarding boats for searches, and helping wrestle down drunks in marinas. But, all in all, it was a great trade-off.
An added benefit to this arrangement was that Ken was a good diver, and he knew the north-shore waters like only rangers get to know them. There was no room for living on the patrol boat, but we could use ranger stations and trail crews’ quarters that were interspersed around the island. This wouldn’t have been feasible in the Smith but this boat had three times the cruising speed of the eight knot Smith and could get us to quarters somewhere each night.
Vrana introduced us to Larry Sand, the young boat owner/operator of the Superior Diver, a thirty-eight-foot craft designed for dive charters. His craft was much smaller than the Smith but slept six and was very well equipped for diving. We were impressed with his knowledge of local conditions and soon arranged to hire him next year.
We also met Ken Merryman and other very accomplished Lakes divers who shared much with us about what they knew of the wrecks and how to deal with the cold. Joe Strykowski, an excellent photographer and cold-water diver, helped us obtain images in the challenging environment. Scott McWilliam, Jerry Buchanan, and other Canadian divers also readily volunteered to help on our projects. We learned a host of little things about how to modify off-the-shelf equipment that made it more comfortable or functional for frigid water dives—things simple and obvious to them but instructive to us.
Also we learned much through trial and error. For example, once in the water, even in the mildest breeze, you didn’t take your regulator out to speak. The air hitting any exposed skin around the face caused convection cooling. This made the regulator feel like an ice cube when it was replaced in your mouth. Removing a glove for even a few seconds would incapacitate that hand. The moment ice water hit your fingers, they were useless. Getting the hand back in the glove was a difficult feat.
With many such lessons under our belt, we concluded our first few weeks at Isle Royale and came back a year older and wiser in 1981.
In the 1981 and 1982 field sessions, we perfected our mapping and documentation techniques on “the difficult” and then started dabbling with the “impossible.”
On the Cumberland/Chisholm we took pride in finding key diagnostic attributes of the two ships that allowed us to quickly distinguish the pieces of the underwater jigsaw puzzle and create a map that clearly assigned each section of the remains to the proper disaster. This was not only critical to the archeological evaluation of the sites but a great aid to park visitors: Sport divers saw the site as hopelessly confusing. We were helped immensely in this task by Patrick Labadie, the director of a maritime museum in Duluth, who joined us on site and shared his intimate knowledge of the architecture of Great Lakes vessels.
We learned that the quarter-mile-long stretch of intermingled wreckage was perfectly decipherable once we determined diagnostic elements of each ship and laid our magical baselines. The taut, thin white cords clipped every ten feet with a Plexiglas tag became a trademark of SCRU. They gave chaotic fields of wreckage straight, measured streaks of sanity. When scaled down and replicated on paper, they became the backbone on which we built our maps. Everything else on the sites could be “trilaterated in.” Measurements from two points on the line to any object formed sides of a triangle. The length of the section of baseline between the two points became the third side. Once we knew those numbers, nothing could escape our illustrators. We called the technique trilateration, rather than triangulation, because it employed three distances rather than three angles as normally done on land. It probably is no surprise that the line we settled on for this purpose was #18 nylon. Cave-diving techniques seemed to have relevance everywhere.
Using primitive reel-to-reel, black-and-white video that required helmets and a surface-supplied diving operation, we recorded hours of video on the sites. We taught ourselves to carefully reference where the video was taken so that, months later, our illustrators could pick details from the tape for inclusion in the final drawings. One by one, the confusing jumbles of timbers started to take meaningful shape. We could then add the sizes of the ship pieces and determine what portions of the wrecks were missing. In some cases, we inferred where the missing components should be, searched for, and found them.
The other impossible sites, due to extreme depth, were the Kamloops and the stern of the Congdon. Here, progress was not as gratifying. Our second run-in with the Kamloops came in the 1982 season.
Among the basic physical realities of deep diving is that underwater, every thirty-four foot depth of fresh water duplicates the entire atmospheric pressure of the earth. At 170 feet, six times the volume of air at sea level is compressed into the same available space—one’s lungs. This means the air is six times as dense, and its chief components (nitrogen and oxygen) have six times the biochemical effect on the diver that they had on the surface. The body tissues suck up the rich supply of oxygen while the brain is dulled by the narcotic properties of the nitrogen. Over-exposure to high-pressure oxygen could make your nervous system blow a fuse while the nitrogen could put you to sleep. Any exertion seriously compounds the problem. In addition, problems with life-support equipment are aggravated when the deep water happens to be freezing cold.
Fren
etic movements or exertion in deep, cold water can cause the mouthpiece to freeze, resulting in a wild rush of air known to divers as a “free flow.” Not particularly ominous in milder waters, this was a serious problem at Isle Royale. With a regulator frozen open, the rushing air can’t be breathed and the physical properties of convection render the oral cavity numb within seconds. Fumbling with rubber mittens over deadened lips, mouth filled with slush, the diver can’t feel when the backup regulator has been inserted. It’s like trying to siphon gasoline from a car by sucking on a hose after receiving a shot of novocaine in all four sectors of the jaw.
Our first dive to the Kamloops was a humbling reminder of how much can go wrong in water that is both cold and deep. Larry and I were the only ones on the team really experienced enough to take on the exceptional demands of the Kamloops. Its shallowest point is on the stern, 180 feet below. At the deepest point of the bow, the diver’s gauge is jogging past 260 feet. Because the wreck is several hours running time from the other sites we are working, we can only afford to dive it as a target of convenience, en route to wrecks on which we can bring to bear the energies of the whole team.
We were accustomed to very deep air diving (approaching 300 feet) in warmer climes and had been as deep as 150 feet at Isle Royale. We descended the line of an anchor we had set in the wreck at a depth of 180 feet. The Kamloops came into focus as an amorphous form extending deeper into the gloom.
It was a ship that had gone missing in 1927 and had been found only recently by a group of very proficient sport divers including Ken Merryman and Ken Englebrecht. The legend of the ship and its demise is one we had pored over in the archives. Now we were about to finally set down on its hull . . . and Larry’s regulator began a violent free flow. I helped him insert his backup mouthpiece and shut off the malfunctioning unit as we ascended up the line to 140 feet.
Shaken, but willing to try again, Larry again opened the valve to the regulator that had malfunctioned—it seemed to be working okay. We were so near that we had to try again. We passed 170 feet, and I was inches from placing my fin on the deck when I could hear Larry’s regulator blow off again, this time popping right out of his mouth, spewing a wild torrent of bubbles. I grabbed him and shoved his spare regulator into his mouth, knowing there was no way he could feel it after what had just happened. He looked at me tentatively, afraid to take that first breath, having to trust me that it would be mainly air, not water. Gagging and coughing down there with a mouth full of slush could be fatal. I could see the relief in his face as precious air began entering his lungs.
We both held his mouthpiece in place for a full minute as we headed slowly upward. He eventually regained confidence in his equipment, pushed my hand away, and continued at a normal ascent rate. I watched Larry cut his eyes ruefully at the Kamloops, knowing that she had beat us on this attempt. It would be a full year before we could venture to the wreck again for a brief inspection. I finally decided it was too dangerous for normal survey operations but I was loathe to give up. The solution presented itself some years later, but we’ll tell that story when we get to it.
During these first couple of years at Isle Royale, there was one other issue that we had to address that most archeologists don’t: the obligation to make the park a safer experience for recreational divers where possible. One ship, the America, had claimed the life of a diver, and the park had received frequent reports of “near-misses.” The problem was a door; divers were penetrating deep into the ship, squeezing through a partially open iron door separating the galley from what became known as the “forbidden room.” The door had multiple “dogs” or latches that caught up regulator hoses. As people struggled to get free, the silt rose, panic set in, and the dive could stretch into an eternity.
We didn’t prohibit divers from exploring the America or any other wreck in the park because of safety reasons, even the Kamloops, at depths well over two hundred feet and already the scene of one fatality and one crippling injury. The park service might discourage diving there but doesn’t prohibit it. The same held for climbing El Capitan at Yosemite; there is no law that says you can’t take risks in national parks.
This is something about which I feel strongly. I believe sport divers should be expected to treat historic wrecks respectfully. But when it comes to their own safety, they should be treated as responsible adults until proven otherwise. In other words, I believe managing agencies should stay out of their faces regarding how deep and long they can dive. It would have inhibited my being able to work for the Park Service if there were disagreement on that philosophy. We decided to take special action on the America because we could fix the problem with minimal consequences for the historical or recreational integrity of the site.
Chief Ranger Croll discussed the matter with Superintendent Don Brown and decided we should “get that damn door off or blow a hole in the side of the sonofabitch.” Stu and Don were sensitive to cultural resources but they were even more sensitive to visitors drowning in their park. Although blasting is usually the quickest and safest way to remove obstacles underwater, this was a historic site. We opted for the less destructive if more labor-intensive method. It proved to be an interesting dive.
I decided to videotape the effort because it would be a first in park resources management. Self-contained video housings were still a year from being marketed, so we had to lug a camera trailing a wire umbilical back to the surface. Four of us, laden with crowbars, camera, and cable, descended through the emerald-green water along the side of the ship. I wore a Superlight 17 commercial diving helmet, with the communication wire and video lead attached to my harness. All of us used double tanks for air supply, although I had the option of running a surface-supply air hose to my helmet with this rig. But that would have necessitated a much heavier, more unwieldy umbilical.
The America leans against an underwater cliff at about a seventy-degree angle from horizontal. We dropped for sixty feet until we came to a side-loading hatch that permitted access to the interior of the old passenger/package freighter. Adding bursts of pressurized air from our tanks into our dry suits slowed our descent until we could level out at the open hatch. Two divers positioned themselves at the top of a staircase to tend the video cable as Larry Murphy and I began our descent into the bowels of the America. Toni Carrell followed us in and scurried back and forth tending my cable back to the surface.
The problem with further descent once we entered the ship was the angle at which it rested. It was so steep that it made it very difficult to orient to up and down. A diver, for all intents and purposes weightless, usually depends on visual cues to orient to an enclosed underwater environment. Descending down the tilted stairs, gravity took over as our suits compressed and we found ourselves falling someplace—not down, but sideways.
We banged and cursed our way down the stairway to a lower deck, turned the corner, and headed down another flight. Larry, at 230 pounds inside the bulky “unisuit,” plowed ahead of me, seemingly larger than the passage he was negotiating. He dragged a nine-foot pinch bar down the stairs behind him.
My progress was slowed by the cable trailing from the video camera in one hand and a five-foot crowbar in the other. The low-intensity lights of the video camera were all I used for illumination; stronger light scarred the vidicon tube of the old unit.
Within minutes we reached the ship’s galley, with Murphy still ahead of me. He was staring accusingly at the large door with the telltale latches. I proceeded toward him and spilled awkwardly over a stainless-steel table to end up in a heap against the door. Having exited the staircase I forgot we were still Alices in a half-inverted Wonderland. Silt rose about us, making it increasingly difficult to see or videotape our activities. Our depth was about seventy feet.
After glancing through the door at the forbidden room, I laid the camera down and pushed inside. Dry goods, cups, plates: It was a damn pantry. This is what drew one young man to his death and six others close enough to feel the rush of the sickle’s sw
eep. Withdrawing from the slot I felt the “dogs,” or latches, grab my hoses. I stopped to experiment disentangling myself. Larry’s reassuring presence made this feel more like a pool exercise than an emergency. I disengaged and backed away from the vicious piece of metalwork.
My glove snagged briefly on something. The seal was pulled far enough back on my wrist to let a small rivulet of water down the side of my hand. Curiously, the icy cold felt as if someone had rolled a red-hot marble along my flesh; the broken seal would limit our dive time. I withdrew to a corner of the galley and tried to position myself for filming the door removal. A scraping and banging of metal began as Larry tried to find a purchase with his feet so he could throw all of his strength into the door. The problem with heavy work underwater is leverage—an astronaut trying to press a button will push his whole body away unless properly braced against something—the problem is similar for aquanauts.
Straining to see Larry through the cloud of sediment our activities had stirred, I was startled by what felt like a direct hit from a torpedo. Another deafening crash, then a scuffling sound. Adrenaline in ample supply, I turned to see that Toni, tending cables, had come into the room. A glance into her face mask told me she mirrored my wide-eyed visage.
Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team Page 16
