Covediver's Underwater World

Asking divers over a certain age, say about 45 years old, what inspired them to take up scuba will elicit a variety of responses—“an abiding love of the ocean,” “a call to adventure”, “something I always wanted to try”, and my favorite, “my husband wanted to learn and I didn’t want him having fun without me.” These answers probably won’t be any different when posed to any other age group. Probe a little further about their earliest desire to learn, when they first thought they would like to try scuba, and the answer will inevitably come back as “oh yeah, there was this show on T.V., Sea Hunt….” Ask that question of divers just a few years younger and the answer will be “Flipper” or “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” In the space of a decade, these three shows, actually, two shows and a series of “specials” motivated a generation to go out and get certified.

I have vague, early recollections of the Sea Hunt series. My most vivid recollection is of the episode where Mike Nelson enters an old Spanish fortress to rescue a prisoner. Yet, I probably did not see the series in its original prime-time airing. I would have been around six or seven years old when the series went off the air. My parents were pretty strict with an early bed time for the youngest kids in the family. For me, Sea Hunt would have been part of that time period between finishing homework after school and eating dinner, an hour or so when, if I wasn’t playing with friends, I would watch weekday afternoon television. Sea Hunt transformed those dreary Midwestern winter afternoons into a magic, much warmer place, where guys could submerge in the ocean wearing a bathing suit and scuba rigs. Mike Nelson came to symbolize “guy cool” to pre-teen boys.

Flash forward to 2004. Outdoor Life Network is showing reruns of the series as a summer fill-in for its weeknight line up. The first time I tune it in, I hear the theme song and the memories of my childhood come flooding back when I would drive my parents and older brothers nuts by running around the family room and basement going “blub, blub” mimicking the sound of the double hose aqualung. At the end of the summer, DVDs of all the episodes are offered on EBay. I look at the video of those shows nearly 50 years later and the first thought that comes to mind is “my, how cheesy can a show get?” Then I watch the complete episode with the same fascination that I did as a ten year old kid. It is still pretty exciting stuff when one suspends incredulity at the story line.

My first course helping as an assistant instructor more than 20 years ago was taught by an instructor who, while a few years younger, was part of the same Sea-Hunt-in-afternoon-reruns era as I. To make the point about a diver doing something out of the ordinary or totally unexpected, he would often remark, “the guy was a real Mike Nelson.” At a party after certification (these were college students we were teaching, so a party was not only expected but inevitable) one of the divers came up to me and asked “Jim, who is guy Mike Nelson? Was he a student who really screwed up a lot?” At that point, I felt very old despite less than a decade separating me from the most of the students. I explained the iconic stature of Mike Nelson (aka Lloyd Bridges) and the effect that the show Sea Hunt had on a generation of divers. I am not sure he got the point. I should probably send him a copy of the DVD so he can see what I was talking about.

Just the other day, I was talking to another diver my age about what to do in the event of a situation. I related that in addition to the strategy of “stop, think, act” I asked myself “WWMD—what would Mike do? And after cutting someone’s air hose I would correct the problem.” That elicited a laugh from the diver and a few minutes of reminiscing about some of the story lines from the show. Nice to know that some icons never fade.

A recent entry in this weblog related my first encounter with a real shipwreck, the Peacock (aka Spirit of American). Over the weekend I picked up the new book by Professor Trevor Norton, Underwater to Get Out of the Rain. He eloquently addresses the nature of shipwrecks and wreck diving in the following passage from the Lost Ships chapter.

"On land, castles may crumble into romantic ruins, but if they remain reasonably intact we mend the roof then fill them with story-boards and exhibits so that paying customers can shuffle over the ancient but newly swept floors. Sound effects and atmospheric lighting help to create an ambience of ancient times.

Wrecked ships need no such help. They ooze atmosphere and are the eeriest places on earth. The surrounding haze creates mystery and a feeling of discovery. Sometimes snagged nets wreathe hulks in aquatic cobwebs that add an air of witchery. But it is the gloom inside that generates unease. It is impossible to venture into the black heart of a hulk without feeling the below is the darkness something awaits you.

They may also retain the feeling of sudden abandonment. In the cabins of the Hisperia I found a cup with a broken handle, a scrubbing brush beside the bathtub and a lone shoe slowly filling with silt. Down there, these mundane objects became imbued with a poignancy that they could never possess in a museum case. It never occurred to me that they were merely artefacts or souvenirs to be collected; they were still personal items belonging to the crew."

I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves the ocean, but believe that divers will find it especially insightful and entertaining. It is a good and wonderful read and it has a conservation message without being preachy, unlike too many contemporary books on the ocean.

When I worked for the National Park Service, I gave dozens of presentations on California maritime history and shipwreck preservation, with an accompanying message of why wrecks in National Parks, National Marine Sanctuaries and other designated places needed to be left alone. I did not use the overused phrase, “take only pictures and leave only bubbles” but rather found it ironic that artifact collectors by their very actions deprived forever to others the discovery opportunity that they themselves so diligently sought and highly prized. I defer to Professor Norton, who says it so much more movingly than I.

Today I reached into the mailbox and sorted through the pile of periodicals that arrives this time of month. I found the July 2006 issue of Scuba Diving. Originally, I did not subscribe to this magazine, but became accustomed to it when I started receiving it as part of a deal with DAN Alert Diver a few years back. I know two people associated with the magazine. The magazine featured a two-page photograph of the HMCS Saskatchewan by Brandon Cole, a contributing editor and a diver with whom I have had a fair number of aquatic adventures and a number of misadventures. The other item that caught my attention was an article about Bill Kendig, associated with the magazine’s Scuba Lab feature. The article, Guarding the Guardian, relates how Bill has been working as a safety diver on an upcoming Kevin Costner film about Coast Guard rescue swimmers. Costner selected Bill for the position as the two have been dive buddies for some time. Costner chose well.

I met Bill back in the late 1990s when we both lived in Southern California and volunteered as the tender/safety diver for the Channel Islands National Park’s underwater video program from Anacapa Island, which was held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Bill took Tuesdays the Tuesday show and I took the Thursday show. Working the National Park Service program from the island’s landing cove dock earned me the nickname Covediver and was a lot of work and a ton of fun. Bill impressed me as a diver. He was an instructor at one of the area dive shops at the time. Bill went on to do other roles in the show such as underwater naturalist and camera operator, while I was content to be the critter wrangler, line tender, and safety diver. With the other folks who helped out with the program we made quite a team. Bill dived with my team from the Minerals Management Service on Platform Grace in the Santa Barbara Channel as part of a joint MMS/NPS dive exercise where he took the accompanying photo. Bill also did a DAN oxygen course for me just before my day job took me to the wilds of Alaska, causing me to end my association with the program.

Seeing the article reminded me of the great friends and experiences that I have had in my more than two decades of diving. I don’t get under the water as much as I did when I lived in the lower 48, which makes the memories of these dives and friends even more precious. I look forward to Costner’s movie, not only because of the theme (USCG rescue swimmers are indispensable components of search and rescue in Alaska) but because I know someone affiliated with the show.

When I first learned to dive, contentment came in the form of just exploring the underwater world and discovering its wonders with my new dive buddies. Every place that we went diving led to a new experience, most good but some bad. How I ever got through my first 25 dives is a mystery, doing it with a little help of my friends or in spite of them. I had no sense of mission on these dives other than to take “walks through the park” to see what I could and then try to make some sense out of it.

Two years into diving, I caught the shipwreck bug. My first real “shipwreck” (other than the derelicts placed inside the underwater park at Casino Point on Santa Catalina Island) went by the name Peacock or alternatively Spirit of America. She was an old coastal minesweeper that had sunk off Scorpion Point on the front side of Santa Cruz Island, part of the Channel Islands situated off the Southern California coast. Her sinking and confusion over her name were not shrouded in mystery as much as they were confused by conflicting accounts offered by anyone who had heard the story. Like a good game of “I got a secret,” each authoritative retelling of the story so convincingly added a little embellishment so as to convey the credibility of an eyewitness account. Each version had a core of commonality that made trying to get to the honest root of the story an exercise in infinite regression. With so many accounts, I was convinced I was the only person not present when the ship slipped beneath the waves. Still, I started an investigation of the wreck and learned a few things over the years. Still, the myth and conjecture hang over the wreck like a January fog.

Over the next few years I visited the wreck whenever I could convince the skipper to go to the site. Mickey on board Sea Ventures out of Port Hueneme was usually pretty receptive to the destination but then he liked to take divers where they wanted to go. A few times we steamed toward the area only to find a faster boat had taken up residence over the site. Rather than hang around waiting for them to clear out we would divert to a nearby site. On these occasions, I felt somewhat cheated; like showing up at your girlfriend’s house only to find another guys car parked in the driveway. So it was, hit or miss.

The continuing deterioration of its wood hull was apparent with each successive visit. I was able to get some video of the wreck while diving on the vessel as part of a Channel Islands National Park survey of wrecks. Today, that tape is tucked somewhere in a long neglected moving box. The mylar holds images frozen at a point in time, a very unnatural state for a shallow water wreck in the Santa Barbara Channel. I think a visit to the site would be enlightening but also melancholic. I hear that the site now looks more like an underwater refuse heap; bearing little resemblance to the wreck that I spent many dives exploring. Apparently, the sea has nearly reclaimed the vessel. I never had a chance to say “goodbye, old friend and thank you.”

I found the accompanying photo by Niels Feldman while surfing the net not long ago. Something in the image recalled my time on Peacock and the sense of wonderment that I experienced on my first real wreck dive.

Pursuing information on the steamer John Duncan and other vessels associated with my great-grandfather got me to thinking how I got involved in this on and off again obsession with shipwreck research over the last quarter of a century and how I became a waterman.

Nothing in my background, other than always watching Sea Hunt reruns or never missing an Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau special on TV, would have forecast my interest in this area. As a kid, like most a my friends in the 60’s, I was fascinated by space flight and aviation and any interest I had in ships was strictly as a means of recovering space capsules or launching combat aircraft. As a young teen, aviation cadet activities consumed most of my free time, what little was left after school and work. But during my 15th year, on Saturday mornings after the weekly ritual of paying the bill for the evening newspapers I delivered I would ride my bike out to the nearby airport. For the next few hours, the owner of a B-25 undergoing restoration would allow me to remove the access panels and other grunt work that none of the adults wanted to do like gunking the fuselage to remove the streaks of oil that seemed to stream from the exhaust of the airplane’s radial engines. I was in heaven until I had to return home to deliver the papers paid for that morning.

A move to California a year later brought me into constant contact with the ocean. At first the relationship was tentative. I would go snorkeling with high school friends at a nearby beach using cheap masks and fins purchased from the sporting goods section of Two Guys department store. Most of the time, we ended up wrestling in the surf until we were tired and cold. Our other activities were not especially ocean-oriented. I don’t recall any of us being surfers and boogie boards were still a novelty from Australia. We were all airplane nuts and members of the teen aviation cadet program organized by the Air Force. Our beach activities were just part of the normal adventures that then rural coastal California offered action-oriented boys which included hiking, target shooting, bike riding, swimming, beach volleyball and other sports. Years of occasional contact with the water led to windsurfing, sailing and eventually scuba diving. All this time a tug of war for my soul was waged between the sea and the sky, and the sea eventually prevailed.

While I continued to snorkel, scuba was something I wanted to try just so I could say I had done it. Once certified, I did not anticipate doing it again. I signed up for lessons at the local university immediately following a mid-spring ascent of Mount Whitney. I figured after standing on the highest point in the lower 48, it was time to go under the water and really see what I could beyond the limits of my breath-hold diving. My initial training did not go as smoothly as I would have liked. I was really out of my element underwater, which 1,000 dives later seems quite laughable. But, I had real concerns as to whether or not my instructor, Dave Rowell, would certify me at the end of the class. To my relief, on a fine July day in 1984 at Anacapa Island I earned my basic “I’m a diver” card. At this point in my life, I was at the intersection of Aviation and Ocean and turned right onto Ocean.