Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team Read online

  Dedication

  To Calvin R. Cummings

  Table of Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  MAPS

  PART I - CAVES, DAMS, SHIPWRECKS, AND DREAMS

  CHAPTER ONE - FOR WHOM THE HORN WAILS

  CHAPTER TWO - SCRU

  CHAPTER THREE - THE FLORIDA CAVES

  CHAPTER FOUR - TIME FOR A CHANGE

  CHAPTER FIVE: - DRY TORTUGAS

  CHAPTER SIX - DAMMING THE PAST

  CHAPTER SEVEN - A RETURN TO XANADU

  PART II - THE SCRU TEAM

  CHAPTER EIGHT - BISCAYNE: BAPTISM OF FIRE

  CHAPTER NINE - BULLY HAYES AND OTHER SHARKS

  CHAPTER TEN - IN OUR GLORY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - ISLE ROYALE: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

  CHAPTER TWELVE - PEARL HARBOR: USS ARIZONA

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - CONTEMPLATION VS. ACTION

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - ISLE ROYALE: THE FINAL CHALLENGE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - ISABELLA

  PART III - REACHING OUT

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - PROJECT SEAMARK

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - BIKINI: OPERATION CROSSROADS

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - THE ALEUTIAN AFFAIR

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE MICRONESIAN SWEEP

  Pohnpei: Ancient Temples in Nan Madol

  Kosrae

  Majuro

  CHAPTER TWENTY - SUNKEN LEGACY OF THE CONFEDERACY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - RETURN TO THE TORTUGAS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - PEARL 2001: THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY DANIEL LENIHAN

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Maps

  SITES DIVED BY THE NPS SCRU TEAM (excluding South Seas)

  PART I

  CAVES, DAMS, SHIPWRECKS, AND DREAMS

  A passion for extreme diving combines with a vocation as a Park Ranger/Archeologist. Diving caves in Florida and Mexico and shipwrecks in the frigid water of Lake Superior and behind dams in the desert southwest hone the skills needed to form a permanent cadre of underwater archeologists in the National Park Service: The Submerged Cultural Resources Unit or “SCRU Team.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  FOR WHOM THE HORN WAILS

  The foghorn from the Rock of Ages light at the southern end of Isle Royale National Park wails ominously every five seconds. Its usual dreamy quality is strangely foreboding, oppressive this afternoon. There is no fog about our boat, though the lighthouse is shrouded with wisps of Lake Superior mist. Patches of sunlight play over the glass-calm water surrounding five National Park Service divers grouped on the fantail of the thirty-eight foot motor vessel Superior Diver. The date is June 15, 1982. No one speaks as we intently study the emerald-green expanse of Lake Superior from the stern of our anchored vessel. No flicker of movement, no slick undulating circle disturbs the verdant glass—nothing that would indicate the presence of a diver’s bubbles boiling to the surface. They are late . . . very late, and unspoken fear is tangible. The rising tension has become a sixth member of the team gathered on the deck.

  A stopwatch suspended to a clipboard at the divemaster station ticks relentlessly. The mundane instrument has suddenly assumed an unprecedented degree of importance. If the ticking isn’t an indicator that hope is fleeting fast, the foghorn’s plaintive wailing leaves no room for doubt.

  I am conscious of a faint slapping against the hull from the wake of a passing boat, and the damp smell of lake water steaming off the recently doffed neoprene dive suits lying on the deck. Body heat, a sign of life; it’s not hard to make a connection to the two suits still more than one hundred feet below in the thirty-four degree lake water.

  Lake Superior is not the Caribbean—it is cold, harsh, and extracts heavy penalties for even small mistakes. I have dived over the hulks of many ships that have felt its power, when its explosive temper had turned the placid lake surface into a raging cauldron of foam and freezing spray. Twisted steel and smashed wood mingled at the bottom with the toys of children, bodies of sailors—it is the story we are here to tell. Our task is to unravel the archeological residues of the human dramas that played out in these waters and match them to the written records of the past.

  Below us lie the casualties that resulted from the pursuit of great profits in the industrial hotbed of the Great Lakes at the turn of the twentieth century. One more voyage, just one more capital-driven run, taunting the gales of November. How easy it is for us, swimming over the cadavers of ships through silent depths, ice water in our veins, to relate to the victims of disaster; archeology and history had come alive to us on this lake. Now two of our people, like many a Great Lakes ship, had “gone missing.”

  Our divers are meticulous about tracking their bottom time—the period from leaving the surface until the return to the decompression area, a place under the boat that serves as a safe haven. Here they can switch from air tanks on their backs to breathe pure oxygen from regulators attached to long hoses suspended from large green cylinders strapped to the deck; they have unlimited time to slowly complete a safe ascent.

  Before they had exceeded their planned arrival time by a full minute, the surface spotter registered enough concern that others began gathering around him, peering into the distance and checking the clipboard notation of the divers’ descent time. When I heard the shuffling of feet and spied the hunched-over form heading toward my bunk, I was already getting my shoes on. The voice inflection of the crew, lack of an undercurrent of banter, and sudden muting of the Waylon Jennings tape alerted me that something was wrong as effectively as an alarm bell.

  During the previous decade supervising hazardous diving operations, I had occasionally wondered how I might react to losing a member of my team. I find now that part of my consciousness is operating at warp speed, looking for solutions, while another part stifles images of drowned divers that, unbidden, keep trying to emerge from my memory.

  Seconds later, I become strangely detached, reflective. I notice little things, like Jerry Livingston’s hands. Our diving illustrator has strong sensitive hands, those of an artist. Where he leans on the rail, his knuckles are starkly white. He has spoken not a word but his hands tell it all: He thinks they’re in serious trouble. If this lake were a forgiving place, we wouldn’t be here, anchored off Isle Royale, diving on the broken hulks of ten large ships. Archeologists seldom get to pick where they will dive but almost by definition the area won’t be benign.

  Ironically, nothing has occurred that would signal a casual observer that we have a problem. No distress calls, no evidence of an accident, but the lack of any sign of the dive team as each precious minute ticks away is a chilling testament that the potential of a tragedy is fast becoming a probability.

  Larry Nordby, the blond Viking of a land archeologist who has become a regular on our expeditions, crosses and uncrosses his arms, repeatedly exhales loudly through his nose, and raises his eyebrows in a this-isn’t-happening look when he catches my eye. I know exactly what is going through his mind. Less than four months earlier, he was on the back deck of a park patrol boat in Texas as we surfaced with a lost diver. He’s remembering now how it felt, as we handed up the stiff, lifeless body for him and another ranger to pull into the boat. He’s thinking, I didn’t even know that fellow and these are my friends.

  Whatever has happened, the responsibility ultimately rests with me. But there will be time for self-recrimination later. I keep going ov
er the possible scenarios that would result in my divers not being back beneath the boat at the decompression stop, more than forty minutes after their descent. Their maximum depth was to be 120 feet, the absolute limit of their discretion for bottom time, thirty minutes. Even the thirty minute exposure would mean they could no longer come straight to the surface. Both divers must decompress in increments at twenty and ten feet to release excess nitrogen. They are essentially diving under a ceiling, an invisible ceiling they can’t pass through unharmed.

  But John and Toni are disciplined divers; they don’t make mistakes like this. They had a long underwater swim to the drop-off, much of it through shallows. Maybe the unusual topography has thrown off their timing . . . I know I’m grasping at straws.

  In the Great Lakes, 120 feet is deep. Much deeper than 120 feet in the Bahamas from whence John Brooks had come to join our project. A skilled underwater photographer, he is experienced at greater depths in the tropics: clear, turquoise water, where oppressive cold doesn’t freeze equipment, savage one’s exposed skin, and conspire with the frigid gloom to create a sense of menace that increases in lockstep with depth. John freely admits that the nitrogen narcosis affects his mental acuity here much more severely than it does at identical depths in the Caribbean. He is not alone; it is our third season here, and the rest of us have simply had more time to acclimate.

  Then, there is our (my) decision to use “dry suits,” which utilize air rather than a thin film of water, as do wetsuits, for insulation against the teeth-cracking cold. They keep you much warmer but there’s a tradeoff. Even the newest versions in 1982 are capable of overinflating and sending you in a rush of bubbles, inverted and uncontrolled, toward the surface—something you definitely want to avoid. Lungs can overexpand as pressure drops. Tissue can rupture, allowing air to rush into the bloodstream creating an embolus, or blockage of blood supply to the brain. The effect is much like a massive stroke, resulting in paralysis or death. Because of this “Polaris syndrome” as our divers grimly refer to it, some agencies had banned the use of dry suits.

  But no one is on the surface, no bubbles in sight. What the hell has happened? One of them could have gone through an uncontrolled ascent and embolized, but two? Even in that event, they would still be visible from the boat, unless they hit the surface unconscious, vented, and dropped—but the divemaster would have seen this. Maybe they experienced heavier narcosis or gas problems if the drop-off was deeper than anticipated—but two at the same time?

  John’s dive partner is Toni Carrell, who has been with SCRU since its inception. In her mid-thirties, she is well-trained, in good physical shape, experienced in cold water but has only minimal practice with deep diving. She is also a single mother with two children; it’s her birthday and she’s out there because I sent her.

  Someone can chase after them, but with no clue where to look, he or she could quickly become part of the problem. Also, all of us have accumulated a nitrogen load from dives this morning that would make us even more likely candidates for a third accident.

  “Whaddya wanna do, Dan?” Larry Sand, the boat operator, has edged out onto the deck. His voice is low, tight in his throat.

  “Wait.”

  He indicates with a hitchhiking motion of his thumb a thick blanket of fog moving in from behind us, off the bow. “White-out coming.”

  “Jesus.”

  I can’t send in a search team now without an added complication.

  Ordinarily, divers following our underwater baseline back to the boat over the quarter mile jumble of wreck timbers wouldn’t be bothered by the occurrence of the thick fog. But it would be different for rescuers who would have to stray far from the reference lines in search of lost divers. Sound carries well in fog, much as in water; but also as in water, it’s almost impossible to tell where it’s coming from. Stressed divers fifty feet away in a white-out might not be found until they had succumbed to hypothermia. In fifteen minutes our day has turned from the routine of research diving to the gut-wrenching throes of accident management.

  Goddamn time! That’s what’s so desperate about the scene of a lost diver compared to other rescue endeavors. No gathering the troops, no reassuring smell of hot coffee, the crinkle of topo maps spread on engine hoods of police cruisers, the knowledge that “helo” support, search dogs, and fresh faces are on the way. No “Houston, we have a problem,” and a world-class infrastructure of modern technology leaping in to help. We have only ourselves and time—very little time before their air runs out. Just minutes ticking away with any hope we have; we are it and we have run out of ideas.

  More silence, more ticking, more horn blares. Suddenly, we hear a distinct sizzling, then foaming of bubbles far to the left of where we’d been looking. And then, from across the water we hear finally, a male voice: “Is she there?”

  John is alive, and all right; we know it from the way he sounds—maybe with a latent case of the bends, but a survivor. But from his words we know that the team is separated and that Toni, less experienced in deep diving, is still unaccounted for.

  A suited surface swimmer goes to assist John, but he waves him off. Even through the neoprene hood and glass face mask covering much of his head, John’s expression registers the stress of his emotions. His voice is strained, husky. “I’m okay—Christ, she’s really not here?”

  John is several minutes short on decompression, but he decides it is worth the risk of not finishing his required stop to fill us in on what happened—to feel like he is helping in some way. Back on board, he shows no symptoms of decompression sickness, but we place him on oxygen to help purge excess nitrogen from his system. Before donning the respirator mask he tells us what he knows. While they were taking photos, Toni swam off on a misunderstood signal; he had no idea how far she had gone or in what direction. In searching for her he had gotten lost himself and overstayed his time.

  I am the freshest diver in the group. I reach for my suit. “I’m going in.”

  Larry Sand says softly, almost under his breath, “You don’t find her, she’s dead. You find her it’s only cause she’s dead anyway—let’s wait.”

  “Cold-water drowning,” I say.

  He understands my meaning, but he just shrugs. Sand knew that people can be revived after as much as an hour in cold water without brain damage. However his gesture serves as a dismissal, eloquent in its simplicity, of the merit he sees in looking for a corpse to resuscitate. Toni will either make it back on her own or she won’t make it. The young boat skipper was raised on the Lakes and is speaking from wisdom beyond his years. But inactivity is no longer possible for me to accept; I am ready to leap out of my skin. “I’m going in,” I repeat, and start to suit up. I hear Nordby breathe a sigh of approval. He doesn’t disagree with Sand, but, like me, he just can’t handle the waiting.

  Suddenly, another flurry of bubbles and Toni’s head pops to the surface, much closer to the boat than had John’s. She calls breathlessly, “John, is he here?” The blanket of tension evaporates like fog in a sunburst. Loud voices booming in response from the crew reveal the strain of the last twenty-five minutes.

  Toni’s voice is choppy, like someone trying to speak loudly while shivering uncontrollably. Our anxious hands drag her almost too roughly onto the dive platform, as if we are afraid the lake will reclaim her if we don’t snatch her from its icy grip. We gather from her staccato commentary through blue lips and chattering teeth that she had been able to decompress in open water after becoming lost. She had held her buoyancy stable for twenty minutes with no line to grasp onto until she completed venting excess nitrogen. The splotchy sun-then-fog lighting conditions we had been experiencing probably precluded any of us from seeing her bubbles. She is shaken but unhurt.

  My suddenly rubbery legs carry me below where I sit on my bunk. Toni is all right, John is all right; we’ll unravel the details later. The fog bank has missed us, and the sun is brighter than ever. The rest of the team begins preparations for another dive. Out a side window
in the V-berth I spy the green jeans of one of our rangers. He is hunched over, face in his hands, out of sight of his comrades on the fantail. He is sobbing. I know how he feels. Unlike his, my eyes are dry—so is my mouth. I don’t trust myself to be around the others right now.

  No one died on this dive; no one was seriously injured. It was one of thousands of dives I would supervise or take part in over the course of my career. No one did anything particularly foolish, no strict diving protocols were broken, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that events had begun snowballing toward a fatality. What was most harrowing to me about the experience was that we did nothing to create the problem and we did nothing to solve it. I had no control over the outcome of that incident at any point. That snowball had, through good fortune, stopped on its own before it had rolled us up into a tragedy.

  I had always been wont to say that good divers make their own luck, that fortune is in our hands. Even though well before that day on Lake Superior I had felt the loss of friends and retrieved the bodies of fellow divers on numerous occasions, I always felt with certainty that it would never happen to me or those diving under my supervision.

  Now, anytime I feel that overwhelming sense of confidence and hubris in our preparations for a dive, even two decades later, humility comes easier. I tend to hear the distant echo of a foghorn at Rock of Ages light in Lake Superior.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SCRU

  For twenty-five years I led a group of National Park Service divers with a unique mission. My handpicked cadre of archeologists and technicians were charged with finding and preserving historic shipwrecks and other sites important to American heritage in U.S. Parks and territorial waters. Officially designated the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, it was quickly dubbed the “SCRU team” in the parks.