Sealab Read online

  Anderson was thirty-one, a couple of years younger than Barth, and the two hit it off from their first encounters at the Unit. Anderson had swarthy features, a slight paunch, and an impish grin. Above all, Anderson was an inveterate prankster whose antics had transcended into legend. Barth himself was no stranger to pranks, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons the two became fast friends. During training that spring, for example, Barth and Anderson engaged in some mischievous “midnight requisitioning”—their way of helping to keep Sealab I’s costs down. Under cover of darkness, they drove a jeep over to the Mine Defense Lab’s salvage yard, where Bond had first shown Barth the surplus floats, and grabbed any old hardware that looked like it could be put to use—steel cables, winches, weights, whatever they could get their hands on.

  Like Barth, Anderson had joined the Navy as a teenager. Andy Anderson was just fifteen when he left his rural hometown of Weldon, Illinois, to enlist after World War II. He worked as a gunner’s mate for a few years but after going through the dive school in the early 1950s, with hardhat baptisms in the Anacostia River, Anderson scarcely returned to gunnery and was able to spend much of his time diving. All four divers chosen for Sealab I were in their thirties and all were fathers. Barth had two kids, Manning had four, Thompson had six, and Anderson five daughters.

  The U.S. Navy’s bureaucratic structure with respect to its divers could be complicated, as Anderson knew as well as anyone. No one joined the Navy as a diver or was ever exclusively a diver, at least on paper. There were also several different types of diver training, including conventional hardhat diving using air, helium hat diving for the deepest dives, and, by the early 1950s, the Aqualung and some other forms of scuba. But diving was considered a means of performing jobs that happened to be underwater, and not a job in itself. Not every sailor who qualified as a Navy diver necessarily got in the water each day. In most cases, those qualified as divers continued to do their primary jobs—gunner’s mate, boatswain’s mate, engineman, mineman, and so on—and were called on to dive as needed. Some job assignments had more need for divers than others. Serving as a quartermaster on submarines, Barth managed to find ample opportunities to get wet. At New London, while an instructor at the escape training tank, he ran scuba training sessions and would take part in the kind of bleak recovery work that had just been called for at Bermuda.

  Anderson’s helium hat training at a specialized six-month Navy course got him assigned to submarine rescue ships, the only Navy vessels equipped for helium-oxygen diving. Anderson may have done a lot of diving in those days, but in the eyes of the Navy bureaucracy he was still primarily a gunner’s mate.

  Anderson joined Captain Bond on the tug for the day-long ride back to Argus Island. Sealab I, freshly cleaned up after being flooded, tagged along on its towline. Some devilish weather had passed, and the seas were blessedly calm, sparkling like an endless sheet of gently rippled glass as Sealab arrived after the journey from Bermuda. They floated the lab away from the barge and into the skeletal shadow of Argus Island. With the aid of support divers, Sealab was secured by a bridle of steel cables and fastened to the island’s crane, as Captain Melson had suggested, in the hope of executing a more controlled descent. Even in the absence of storms, swells, and strong currents, lowering a large, buoyant structure to the bottom of the sea was never easy. Part of the problem was that a stationary sea floor habitat didn’t have the engine power or maneuverability of a submarine. There was also the issue of gradually raising the lab’s internal atmospheric pressure to keep the sea from rushing in.

  By now, after having flooded Sealab a couple of times, they had gained some valuable experience in how to lower the lab without mishap. Support divers put ballast into the open troughs of the lab’s pontoonlike feet, the “ballast bins,” in the form of train axles. The axles were another product of the bargain hunting to stretch the program’s tight budget. Although somewhat unwieldy, the old train axles could be had at a much lower cost than more traditional ballast, like steel pellets, which Ed Link had used to add weight to his inflatable dwelling. Some of the ballasting could be done before Sealab was towed out to the site, but dozens of train axles, one or two at a time, were lowered into the water and support divers, including Tuckfield, wrangled them into the ballast bins. Concrete blocks, each one about half the size of a hay bale, were also used to help distribute weight evenly and prevent the lab from listing.

  The day after Sealab’s arrival at Argus, it hung sixty feet below the surface on the crane cable. Barth and Dr. Thompson made a dive to hook up the hefty umbilical lifeline for the breathing gas, fresh water, power, and communications. They worked inside one end of the cigar-shaped lab in a compartment about the size and shape of an airplane cockpit that was sealed off by a bulkhead from the main living quarters and had its own open hole in the floor where the sea formed a pool just below the brim. They called this section the “air space” because it was pressurized with ordinary compressed air instead of the helium-rich mixture pumped into the adjacent main living quarters. As a safety precaution, the Mine Defense Lab engineers decided to isolate all the umbilical hookups, transformers, and electronic circuits in the air space. Their concern was that some systems might malfunction in the habitat’s artificial atmosphere.

  Following further inspections, the habitat continued its controlled descent. Shortly before two o’clock that afternoon, July 19, Sealab I landed safely on Plantagenet Bank, 193 feet down and under nearly seven atmospheres of pressure. At that point Bond and Mazzone made a final inspection of the lab before the aquanauts were sent down. They rode to the bottom inside the Submersible Decompression Chamber, a stout cylinder about ten feet tall and four feet around that looked something like Hannes Keller’s Atlantis bell. The SDC, like Link’s cylinder, would serve as a pressurized elevator to take aquanauts to and from the habitat.

  Essential to the operation, the SDC was another hand-me-down piece of equipment, this time one that they remade from an old single-lock pressure chamber that Walt Mazzone had to pick up in Virginia on short notice. Mazzone, now promoted to captain, arrived with it on a flatbed truck. An officer of his rank was rarely seen behind the wheel on a delivery job, but Mazzone could be counted on for many things. After they modified the chamber, he gave it a trial run, riding it down to survey the wreckage of the jets at Bermuda.

  When the Submersible Decompression Chamber reached a depth of about 165 feet, Bond and Mazzone each took a full breath, as if preparing for a plunge into the escape training tank, dropped through the hatch in the floor, and swam the twenty yards or so to Sealab. They swam the distance wearing only masks, fins, weight belts, and swim trunks. It occurred to Bond, Mitty-like, that he might be making the deepest breath-holding dive in history—although that distinction likely belonged to Lindbergh and Sténuit, who had to make a similar swim from Link’s cylinder over to the inflatable dwelling. The late-afternoon sun shone down, and though filtered through many feet of cobalt seawater, it was still strong enough to light up the white coral sand on the sea floor.

  Bond swam into the fenced area around the entry hatch—the shark cage. In a pinch, the aquanauts could duck into the cage and slam the gate on unwelcome predators. Like a chain link fence, the cage created a little backyard around the two entry trunks protruding from the lab’s underbelly—one leading up into the main living quarters, and one leading into the cockpit-sized air space. Once inside the shark cage Bond crawled up into the main entry trunk, like a sewer worker going up a manhole. He climbed a few rungs, popped through the liquid looking glass in the floor of the lab, and rolled onto his back in the dry shelter. Mazzone followed him in. The artificial atmosphere felt good—no alarming smells or traces of impurity, although that didn’t necessarily tell them anything. The presence of deadly gases could be imperceptible—until it was too late. The atmosphere was to be maintained at nearly seven times ordinary surface pressure with a mix, ideally, of about 79 percent helium, 17 percent nitrogen, 4 percent oxygen, and less than .5
percent carbon dioxide. A potentially great chapter in human achievement was about to begin, Bond sensed, even if Sealab had had a choppy start.

  Bond and Mazzone popped in to the area around the entry hatch that was a kind of foyer for donning and doffing dive gear. The rest of the interior was a cross between a camper and submarine. A compact shower and toilet were situated near the entry. A simple table with folding chairs was along one side of the living quarters; along the other side was a countertop, cabinets, refrigerator, and electric stovetop. Two portholes the size of dinner plates were built into each side. Four bunks were in the tapered end of the living quarters, at the tip of the lab opposite the entry area. The entry hatch itself was next to the steel bulkhead that separated the living space from the adjacent air space. Bond and Mazzone took a breath and dropped through the liquid looking glass in the floor, down through the short trunk and into the sea. A couple of feet away they crawled up a similar trunk to check out the air space before taking a final breath to make the swim out of the shark cage and over to the SDC, which was hanging about an atmosphere up. Just as they had when they practiced escapes in the training tank, they exhaled purposefully along the way to avoid giving themselves an embolism.

  Within a half-hour the four designated aquanauts followed the same sequence to get to Sealab. The SDC was cramped with four divers so perhaps it was just as well that Scott Carpenter wasn’t with them. Minutes passed as Bond and Mazzone awaited word from the first man in the habitat. They listened to the intercom inside their control room, a converted trailer that made it look like someone set up a campsite on the barge’s deck. They knew each diver would have to make the breath-holding swim from the SDC into the habitat. As Bond and Mazzone had seen for themselves, the waters around the Argus tower teemed with marine life—schools of barracuda, amberjacks, tuna, groupers, countless tropical fish. Some large groupers—one must have weighed almost two hundred pounds—seemed to enjoy congregating inside the shark cage. A four-foot moray eel glided by.

  At last came the sound of a Chipmunk—singing! It was 5:35 P.M., July 20, 1964, and the Navy’s first undersea dweller had arrived, singing a helium-spiked version of “O Sole Mio” as he entered the lab. Bond got on the intercom and said: “Sealab I, this is Sealab Control. I hear you loud and clear—and I believe that is Robert A. Barth, QMC, am I correct, over?” Actually it was Lester Anderson. The familiar Italian folk song was a favorite of Andy’s and the irony of crooning this ode to the sun he would not be seeing for three weeks must have amused him.

  “Well, Lester Anderson, congratulations,” Bond said. “Were you able to hold your breath all the way or did you have to breathe some water?”

  The Chipmunk just chuckled and said, “You know how things are.”

  Bond could hear some falsetto muttering over the intercom and Anderson called out the names of the others as they appeared, one by one, through the liquid looking glass. Next to enter was Dr. Thompson, then Tiger Manning, and finally Bob Barth.

  “As I take it now all four of you are together,” Bond said.

  “All four are together, that’s right,” came the Chipmunk reply.

  Bond then quipped: “If anyone else comes in, kick him out!”

  It was about seventy-four Fahrenheit in the lab, warm by ordinary room temperature standards but chilly in the heat-sapping helium atmosphere. The aquanauts turned on a couple of electric heaters to boost the temperature into the mid-eighties. They also set up the cameras that would allow the topside controllers to watch them, Big Brother style, via black-and-white monitors no bigger than license plates.

  “Sealab I, this is Sealab Control. We have your picture,” Bond said.

  “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera,” Mazzone interjected.

  Anderson shouted back a greeting, then said something that sounded like giddy gibberish in helium speech. Anderson tried again to make himself understood, squeaking as distinctly as possible: “I said: We’re not going to call you ‘Sealab Control.’ We’re going to call you ‘topside.’ Is… that… O… K?”

  “Sealab Control” perhaps had more of a space age ring to it, but “topside” was standard sailor jargon.

  “Well, I guess that’s okay,” Bond said. “I don’t know; I kind of like the title of ‘Sealab Control’ but if I haven’t got control, go on and call me ‘topside.’” Before long they were calling Bond “Papa Topside,” a nickname he warmly embraced. Papa Topside watched the monitors as the aquanauts—“my aquanauts”—began running through a variety of setup procedures, checking life support systems like the carbon dioxide scrubbers, checking circuits, calibrating instruments, organizing the equipment and supplies carefully stowed prior to Sealab’s descent, including a stockpile of boxed and canned foods to last the three weeks.

  Barth and Anderson had done most of the shopping for Sealab and they had packed a sparkling Mateus rosé, inspired by Cousteau and his oceanauts, who had indulged in wine. The Mateus was of course not as fine as anything poured in Starfish House and something was wrong with the thermoelectric refrigerator, so the aquanauts would have to drink their rosé warm. (It would also be flat, as would a soda pop when opened, because the pressurized atmosphere prevents carbonated drinks from fizzing.) Fortunately they still had the use of their electrowriter, an electronic notepad that enabled the aquanauts to transmit facsimiles of handwritten messages to a similar device in the topside control trailer. The electrowriter could only send messages, not receive them, but it was a godsend when helium speech became exasperating. Tiger Manning gave the electrowriter a try, scribbling laconically: “HELP!” He was only kidding.

  The aquanauts found it convenient and somewhat of a thrill to swim out with just a lungful of air. It was like diving at the training tank, but a single breath got them from inside Sealab to the bottom of the Atlantic. Experienced tank instructors had no problem holding their breath long enough to pick up supplies lowered from the surface—or just for the fun of it. Sometimes they’d go out on their own instead of with a buddy, which would irritate topside commanders, who viewed solo swims as a breach of buddy diving protocols.

  Once outside the shark cage the aquanauts could see for a hundred feet or more in crystalline conditions worthy of a Cousteau film, even if the scenery was less dynamic than in a place like the Red Sea. The immediate area was flat like a beach, covered in white sand with scattered patches of marine shrubs. Cables associated with Argus Island operations crisscrossed the sandy sea floor like errant strands of giant spaghetti. The island’s steel legs were encrusted with sea life. The water was about seventy degrees—warm considering the depth, but they would nonetheless find themselves fending off chills. Being saturated with heat-sapping helium was one problem, but water wicks heat away quickly on its own.

  For their working dives, the aquanauts had a choice of several kinds of gear, including scuba and a “hookah,” a type of breathing apparatus that drew its gas directly from the lab’s atmosphere and delivered it to a diver through an umbilical. It wasn’t bad for diving near the habitat but the umbilical could get tangled and also the hookah’s compressor chugged like a lawn mower, killing conversation for those still inside the lab. There was no diver-to-lab communication, and any diver-to-diver dialogue in the water had to be carried on the old-fashioned way, with hand signals. Mostly they used a newly developed variety of Navy scuba called the Mark VI. The name implied that it was a replacement for the venerable Mark V hardhat, but the old-style hardhat system was still very much in use and not soon to be retired.

  To the untrained eye the new Mark VI looked pretty much like ordinary scuba—a pair of tanks worn on the back, with a hose from over each shoulder that connected to a mouthpiece. The most noticeable difference was a pair of breathing bags that hung like a Mae West life vest over the diver’s shoulders and fastened around his chest. A canister about the size of a thermos was wedged between the tanks. Bags and canister were the key components of a built-in filtering system that enabled the Mark VI to recycle a good porti
on of exhaled helium and any unused oxygen. With ordinary scuba, all the exhaled gas—carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and unused oxygen—is released after each breath as a hail of bubbles in the water. The Mark VI burped just a few bubbles from an exhaust valve near the diver’s left shoulder about every third breath. The bulk of the gas, mainly helium, was routed back through the filtering system. With fresh oxygen injected, the proper gas mixture could then be recirculated and rebreathed. This system conserved the expensive helium and also made the gas supply last longer. A diver could get an hour or more out of a Mark VI at two hundred feet, about twice as much time as ordinary scuba.

  The Mark VI rig was not designed with Sealab in mind, but it afforded longer dive times and was thus a logical choice for the project. Its one drawback was that it could be much more temperamental than ordinary scuba. Although less likely to kill a man than its prototype predecessor, the Mark VI could still dupe its user into thinking his breathing gas was flowing properly when it wasn’t. Everything might seem fine—until it was too late. There were no warning lights or alarms. A diver had to develop a sixth sense of sorts to recognize telltale danger signs. A lack of burping exhaust bubbles was one, feeling light-headed was another, but both were subtle enough that a diver might miss them, especially if preoccupied with work.