Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson

work his way back now, and if he moves much at all the silt swells further. In zero viz, a diver might be five feet from the exit and never find his way out. This is the kind of realization that doesn’t play well with narcosis, where small problems grow larger under jungle drums, and zero viz can seem the largest problem of them all. In an overpowering darkness, the blinded diver is a prime candidate to go lost.
    Navigation and visibility issues make for a full mental plate. But the diver must contend with another danger inside a wreck, this one perhaps nastier than any other. In the violence of the ship’s sinking, her ceilings and walls and floors likely vomited their guts. Once-civilized spaces are now spaghettied with electric cables, wires, bent metal rods, bedsprings, couch springs, sharpened pieces of broken equipment, chair legs, tablecloths, conduit pipes, and other now-threatening items that once conducted the ship’s unseen business. All of it dangles nakedly in the diver’s space. All of it stands ready to snag his hose or manifold or any of dozens of other bulky parts that make up the life-support components of his gear. Once tangled, the diver becomes a marionette. If he struggles, he can mummy himself in the stuff. In bad visibility, it is nearly impossible to avoid these nests; there is not an experienced wreck diver who has not become entangled—often.
    A diver lost or tangled inside a shipwreck has come face-to-face with his maker. Corpses have been recovered inside wrecks—eyes and mouths agape in terror, the poor diver still lost, still blinded, still snagged, still pinned. Yet a curious truth pertains to these perils: rarely does the problem itself kill the diver. Rather, the diver’s response to the problem—his panic—likely determines whether he lives or dies.
    Here is what happens to a panicked diver in trouble inside a shipwreck:
    His heart and respiratory rates jump. At 200 feet, when every lungful of air requires seven times the volume as that on the surface, a panicked diver can breathe down his tanks so quickly that the needles on his gauges begin to drop into the red before his eyes. That sight further quickens his heart and breath, which in turn further reduces the time he has to solve his problems. Heavier respiration also means heavier narcosis. Narcosis amplifies panic. A vicious cycle has begun.
    He responds to panic as evolution designed him to, immediately and forcefully. But in a shipwreck, where every danger is first cousin to every other, a diver’s desperation makes an open house of his bad situation. A lost diver who panics, for example, will thrash about in search of an exit. That movement will billow silt and foul the visibility, so that now he cannot see. Blinded, he searches more desperately for a way out; in that struggle, he might become entangled or collapse a heavy object dangling overhead. He breathes harder. He sees his gauges dropping further.
    The diver might call for help. Sound travels well underwater, but it is directionless, so even if someone hears his cries it is doubtful they could trace them. When a man is trapped alone in a shipwreck, his brain starts to think in declaratives, not ideas.
I’m gonna die! Get out! Get out!
The diver tries harder. The needles dip. It is dark. It is likely the end.
    In 1988, a skilled Connecticut diver named Joe Drozd signed up for an
Andrea Doria
trip aboard the
Seeker.
It would be his first journey to the great wreck, a dream come true. To ensure a safe dive, he added a third air tank—a small emergency, or “pony,” bottle—to his normal set of doubles. “Just in case,” he reasoned. Drozd and two partners penetrated the wreck through Gimbel’s Hole, a foreboding rectangle opened into the ship’s first-class section in 1981 by Peter Gimbel, heir to the Gimbel’s department store fortune. The opening is black against the dark green ocean and drops 90 feet straight down, a sight that chills the blood of even the