Oh sh*t!

I think that’s where I left off. Let me go back and check…

Tale of a Really Bad Dive – Part 2

Yep – oh sh*t!

This dive has already taken a turn for the worse, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Not even left the marina and I’d already used up the first of my three available oh sh*ts.

So strap in, its going to get a bit rocky…

7:00am Aug 13th has us rolling out of Gloucester, MA aboard the dive vessel Daybreaker. Aboard is my buddy Michael, NEAq scientist Randi and one of her interns, a safety observer from Excelerate Energy, a safety diver, Captain Fran and his mate. The skies were overcast and blustery. A storm front had rolled through overnight and it was rough, even by northeast standards. Too rough in hindsight (are you counting?) but I had rolled the dice and, you know – plan the dive, dive the plan.

An hour and a half later Daybreaker rendezvous with our security escort, the 124′ patrol ship Gateway Endeavor, at a nondescript patch of grey ocean some 12 NM east of Boston. An hour and a half of getting beat up by the 5 foot plus, tightly stacked seas, while Michael and I turned inward as we mentally ran through the plan – and, speaking for myself, dealt with the usual stomach churning stress that always precedes a big dive.

Meanwhile the little Lophius was battling her way out of Boston Harbor. The small craft advisory most definitely applied to her, but she’s a hearty Eastern hull and is used to taking a pounding. Unfortunately JD didn’t fare as well (as I later found out). One particularly aggressive wave sent him airborne, striking his head on the hardtop, causing a pretty nasty gash. But he and Barb pressed on.

As we waited for the Lophius to arrive on site we set up the Interrogator and started running a search grid, using the interrogator to ping the pop-up whose GPS coordinates we had targeted. As Daybreaker continued running passes topside, the pop-up, laying some 280’ on the seafloor continuously reported back distance readings between it and Daybreaker . The numbers steadily ticked off on the Interrogator’s display – 400′, 390′, 380′,…,280′, 290′, 300′, 310′ – with me feeding Captain Fran course corrections until eventually I was somewhat confident the device was beneath us – or thereabouts – and ordered the dropline to be deployed. But it was basically finding a needle in a haystack.

Okay – sidebar. Dropline. What’s that?

When decompression diving, in open water and subject to strong currents, it is absolutely critical you have a vertical line that you descend on, and more importantly, that you decompress along during your painfully slow ascent. Your dropline is literally your lifeline to the surface – you protect it like it’s your own child. You lose it and, well, not to be a broken record but, you can very well lose your life.

Referring back to my Andrea Doria dive, there’s a bit where I describe using a dropline in greater detail. I’ve been told I’m really wordy, so for those in that camp, here’s a direct link to that section of the video…

For this recovery attempt the dropline was not only our safety line, but was also the guide to our target – we hoped. The pop-up lay on a featureless bottom, an endless sediment drape that once touched becomes an impenetrable silt cloud that no light can penetrate. I knew the bottom features completely because a month earlier the Aquarium had contracted a company to send down a ROV to see if it could locate the po-ups. Though it failed at that task, the video it recorded gave me a pretty grim visual of what to expect on the bottom. Compounding that, at 280′ in the northern Atlantic, there is absolutely no light – it’s so pitch black its oppressive. There is nothing for reference – no up or down, no left or right – just choking darkness. We needed that line – and my placing it at the right spot – to find the pop-up.

So prior to dive day I asked Captain Fran assemble a dropline – specifically a 300′ length of 3/8″ nylon line, with a turkey ball (a large round float) at one end and a 50lb mushroom anchor, with a rolled-up 80lb lift bag attached, on the other. Additionally, I asked him to install an in-line float such that it was 60 feet “up the line” from the anchor. The line was cut to 300′, rather then the expected 280′ depth, to allow for wave and tidal action, but this would mean the descent wasn’t a straight drop to the bottom.  Therefore the in-line float was to ensure the last 60′ to the bottom was a straight run down.

Right – back to the dive. Once I was happy with the boat’s position I had the dropline’s anchor tossed overboard, the line paying out from a tote on the boat (LOL, that sounds funny) until the turkey ball unceremoniously followed. There, bobbing in the rather intimidating seas, floated a blue ball that looked so innocent but, unknown to me, represented a really bad dive that I wasn’t sure I was going to survive.

——

To be continued… (again!)

First off, as you may have noticed in the title, this is Part 2 of this story. So unless you’ve already read Part 1, or you’re the type of weirdo who likes starting a series in the middle, you may want to back up a tic and read this first…

Tale of a Really Bad Dive – Part 1

Okay, so where was I…?

Oh yeah, researchers from NEAq had lost four acoustical popup transducers on the seafloor, 280′ beneath the surface at the Northeast Gateway LNG deepwater offloading port. The “popup” part pf the system didn’t work as planned, and I foolishly said I could get them…

In a nutshell (heh, I guess in a way you could call my drysuit that, especially if I didn’t equalize during descent and got a good squeeze…) my plan was simple. Go to the GPS coordinates for one of the transducers, use the Interrogator to ping the targeted popup, position the boat so the range reading to the popup matches the depth, chuck in a specially made dropline, descend this line, and find and retrieve the unit.

Easy peasy.

But not so easy.

Welcome to the wonderful world of technical diving, where pretty much everything tries to kill you, including your equipment. If I had to define what’s the overarching difference between tech diving and recreational diving, I’d say it’s that recreational divers can solve their problems on the surface, where technical divers can’t…

For starters, I should mention a few things about diving to the depths, and at the temperatures, involved in a dive like this recovery attampt. And note – all of these things will come into play during this dive.

For every atmosphere (33′ seawater) of depth, gas consumption (I say gas and not air because I never breath air during this kind of dive) relative to breathing on the surface goes up as a multiple of the number of atmospheres you’re under. So a dive to 280′ means nine atmospheres , so every breath I take is like breathing nine breaths on the surface (for all intents and purposes), and therefore my gas consumption is nine times faster.

Another issue many may not realize is that the oxygen found in air becomes toxic to humans at roughly 212′ (this is a rule of thumb, effected by temperature, conditioning, stress, workload, etc). What does this mean, you ask? Well, this type of toxicity effects your central nervous system and can lead to involuntary convulsions, with absolutely no warning. And convulsing under water is something to be avoided – you could spit out your breathing mouthpiece and drown, as an example. Suffice it to say, breathing air past 130′ starts to become risky with regards to oxygen toxicity, which is one key reason why 130′ is considered the depth limit for recreation divers.  

Great – so air’s not an option for deep dives.

So what DO you breathe at 280′? Well, the simple answer is you reduce the percentage of O2 until its partial pressure at the target depth (280′) is 1.3 atmospheres absolute (ATA). This works out to around 10% O2 at 280′. But oh, guess what? You need, at minimum, 16% O2 at the surface to maintain consciousness. Meaning, what you breathe on the bottom, known as your “bottom mix”, can be deadly to you on the surface. Jump off the boat with a nice full tank with10% oxygen, exert yourself swimming towards the drop line, and voila! You pass out and drown. Great… So you need to start the dive breathing another tank, one with enough O2% to keep you un-dead. This one is known at your “travel mix”.

But that’s just scratching the surface. I won’t go into all the nitty details (though I do love talking about this stuff!). Summing it up, to dive to 280′ I need the following tanks:

(SIDE NOTE: This all pertains to open circuit diving – dives where you have individual tanks that you breath off. I have since switched to rebreathers, which is basically your own “gas mix bartender”, allowing you to dial in the ideal mix continuously.)

– A set of double 100 cu ft tanks on my back (200 cu ft total), connected together with a three valve manifold. This “back gas” is my bottom mix. These tanks have two completely independent regulator sets attached for redundancy. This gas is a 10/50/40 mix – 10% O2, 50% He (helium), 40% N2 (nitrogen) – and is called “10/50 trimix”. Trimix meaning, you guessed it, a mixture of three gasses – oxygen, helium, and nitrogen.

– A 40 cu ft tank of “travel mix” of 30/30 trimix (so 30% O2, 30% He, the remaining balance N2) . You start the dive on this tank because at 30% O2 it’s good to breathe on the surface, and it’s also the first deco gas to use on way back up.

– A 63 cu ft tank of 50% nitrox (no helium, so 50% O2, 50% N2). Regulator pressurized but turned off. This is the second deco gas. (I’ll leave it to you to sort out why the reg is pressurized then turned off.)

– A 80 cu ft tank of 80% nitrox. Regulator also pressurized and turned off. This is the third deco gas.

-Oh, and since my back gas is trimix, meaning it contains helium, I can’t use it to pressurize my drysuit, because helium is a tiny weenie little molecule and is a terrible insulator. So guess what – you need yet another tank, in this case a 6cu ft tank of argon that is plumbed directly into my suit. And a drysuit is an absolute requirement – the water temperature during this dive got down to 36F, and you are down there for a decent amount of time.

Speaking of cold a** diving – you may want to check out this video of some ice diving I did a while back.

Did I mention decompression? Yeah, that’s the name of the game in tech diving. And deco takes a long time, with many stops and several gas switches along the way, to get you back to the surface. Ascend a prescribed amount, stop at a specific depth, turn on your next gas, purge reg, remove current reg, put in new reg, shut off and stow old reg, rinse and repeat. But NO NOT CHANGE DEPTH! Ascend too quickly and you fizz. (fizzing is bad – don’t believe me? Check my Personal Experience with Getting the Bends)

Oh, and grab the wrong reg by accident (it is, after all, pitch black and you can’t actually see the gear stowed around your body regardless) and you can O2 tox, or you become hypoxic. And then you die…

I know, I know, it sure sounds like I’m being dramatic with all this hyperbole. Sadly I’m not – this particular activity is constantly claiming lives. There’s something known as the “Three oh sh*ts” rule. You may survive the first, and even the second, but very rarely will you make it out in one piece after the third. Generally speaking, the first one most often happens even before the dive has begun, and by then the course has been set.

On this dive I had my three “oh sh*ts”…

Did I mention isobaric counter diffusion? If you switch between a high helium concentration to a much lower one (for example, from the 30/30 trimix to 50% nitrox which has zero He) you run the risk of rapid gas exchange due to a high gas pressure gradient – aka, you can get bent without changing depth at all.

Right, enough about the boring stuff.

Let’s get back to the dive…

For this dive NEAq had to get security clearance from the operator of the deepwater port, Excelerate Energy, who also required an observer to be on board the dive boat. We would also be shadowed the entire time by the 124′ patrol vessel Gateway Endeavor. I had contracted technical dive boat Daybreaker to be the dive platform and scheduled NEAq’s dive boat Lophius as a chase boat. This dive required a ton of coordination among many assets and people’s time, which in turn gave me a very tight window of opportunity – and a lot of stress.

Speaking of people – in my job at the Aquarium I oversaw about a 100 person team of divers, but there was only one person who had the specific skills and experience to be my buddy on this dive. Michael. He was a volunteer diver at NEAq and my long time technical dive partner – we’d trained together for some five years for this kind of diving and had executed similar profiles in the past. He’s the guy I did the Andrea Doria with and we knew each other’s skills, reactions, and behaviors like they were our own. He once cut me free from a drift line in the wreck of the YF-415 at 240′, so I owe him that…

You can check out some interesting details of the YF-415 here.

So I set a date of Aug 13th for this dive and had about a month to get everything set up. Mike and I conducted dry rehearsals, walked through every step of the plan, and worked on blind muscle memory for where each specific bit of gear was located on our own rigs, as well as that of our buddy’s.

As the days progressed towards the planned dive, the New England weather steadily turned worse. An offshore storm was brewing and the seas off Boston Harbor were building. The deepwater port lies some 12 nautical miles east of Boston Harbor and when the wind gets up in any direction other than west it gets rather, um, lively.

But there was very little schedule wiggle room with so many pieces in play – if I lost this window it might not happen at all for the rest of the year. The weather was only going to get worse as fall progressed, and it was doubtful if the batteries in the popups would survive the winter.

The evening of the 12th arrived and I made my decision. We were going to do the dive.

6:00am the next morning found me at Daybreaker’s dock in her home port of Gloucester, MA, where I met up with Captain Fran, his deck hand, a safety diver, my dive buddy Michael, Randi – one of NEAq’s researchers – along with one of her interns, and the observer from Excelerate Energy. The seven of us, with the ton of gear Michael and I required, pretty much filled the boat.

Meanwhile the Aquarium’s dive boat, Lophius, was heading out of Boston with JD, the VP of Animal Care as captain, and Barb, Curator of Fishes, acting as mate.

Both boats would converge at the exclusion zone at 10:00am where we would meet the patrol vessel Gateway Endeavor.

And I had already made my first oh sh*t…

——

To be continued (heh heh heh)…

And here it is — Part 3 of the saga.

Okay – grab a snack kids and pull up a chair. I have a story to tell about about a really bad dive – the kind of dive you never want to experience again. Hell, the kind of dive you never want to experience in the first place. But it’s at least entertaining, so it might as well be told.

However be warned – it’s a long story, so if that’s not your thing then might I interest you in an audiobook?

Part One – The Why…

Back in 2009 the New England Aquarium (NEAq) was collaborating with Excelerate Energy, who was constructing the Northeast Gateway Deepwater Port for offshore offloading of LNG from thousand foot long tankers. It’s a pretty crazy engineering marvel which you can check out here…

Offshore Regasification: Northeast Gateway Deepwater Port

This underwater port was being constructed so as not to bring these very large ships into Boston Harbor for offloading – plug in the word “terrorism” and you’ll understand why.

Keep in mind that though the deepwater port system is massive, it lives entirely underwater. It’s comprised of two Submerged Turret Loaders (STL) with flexible gas risers that run down to the seabed, through a manifold distribution system, and then to a buried pipeline that runs to a tank farm on shore.

Each STL is built to hold a 1000′ tanker securely during a CAT4 hurricane (and indeed one has done just that in Louisiana during Katrina back in 2005). Securing each STL are eight anchor rodes, each running for about a mile in length. They start out as a massive wire cable at the bottom of the STL and transition to enormous chain links the size of a Mini. Each rode terminates at a suction anchor some ten stories high and 40′ in diameter.

These STLs are, well, huge – like 40′ tall spacecraft – that hover some 90 below the surface. Crazy!

Check out the link below to get a visual of what a STL looks like, as well as how it’s drawn into the ship to both act as the anchor and the gas offloading point:

Click to access apl-mooring-and-loading-systems-brochure.pdf

Okay – so what does that have to do with me??

Well, NEAq’s role was to see if the deepwater port was effecting the local habitats of several species of dogfish. We wanted to know if the STLs and associated anchor sites (16 in total) acted as a FAD (Fish Aggregation Device), as well as try to determine if the anchor chains, as they slowly, ponderously, churned up the seabed, affected habitats in a detrimental or even positive way.

Researchers from NEAq, WHOI, and elsewhere captured dogfish throughout the spring of 2009 and tagged them with radio transponders. We then deployed four acoustical popup devices in a diamond pattern on the seafloor (at a depth of ~280′) around one of the two STLs, STL B. These devices would record data transmitted from any nearby tagged dogfish and at the end of the summer would be commanded to release from the anchors holding them on the bottom and float to the surface for retrieval.

Prior to deploying them, these acoustical popups were tested in the Aquarium’s Giant Ocean Tank (GOT) and yes, yours truly was in the water with the Principal Investigator (PI) to conduct the tests. Here I am examining the device as it dissolved the link to its anchor.

An acoustical pop-up is a cylindrical pressure housing containing an electronics payload – in this instance data recorders listening for the pings from the tagged dogfish. It a series of floats attached to the top, along with a radio transmitter for RDF locating, and are mounted to a section of railroad rail which is used as an anchor. They are deployed to the sea floor and record data for a given period of time. When it’s time to gather the data off the unit a boat goes out to the site and used a device called the Interrogator to communicate with them. A transducer attached to the Interrogator is lowered over the side, the unique ID of the desired pop-up is entered into the Interrogator and it transmits a series of commands – such as request for battery status, or distance in feet from the unit to the transducer, etc – to the popup. One command instructs the popup to generate a current that will start a chemical reaction that burns off the attachment point to the anchor (as tested in the GOT), thereby allowing the popup to raise to the surface.

During the summer of 2009 I conducted a series of dives on STL B itself – to video aquatic life that may have taken refuge on and around it. Did I mention that the thing is huge? Well, it is. And it just sits there in the water column – the top of it hovering around 90′, the bottom at 140′. On the surface there’s no sign anything is down there, with the single exception of a tiny flag attached to a 5/8″ poly line barely visible floating on the surface. That line then leads into progressively thicker line, still floating, until it finally attaches to a massive Kevlar hawser that then makes a 90 degree turn and runs straight down to the top of the STL. This Kevlar haswer costs $150,000 to replace. Side note – in 2014 a whale watch boat with 160 aboard blundered into this restricted area and sucked part of the hawser into one of her jets. More on that story:

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/07/29/whale-watching-boat-trapped-at-sea-boston/

Here’s me sitting on the hawser…

This entire section of ocean is completely off limits to boaters – well, it’s supposed to be!. There’s a 110′ ship, the Gateway Endeavor, whose sole purpose is to patrol the area 24/7/365 a year. For me to dive the area I had to obtain security clearances, develop a very comprehensive dive plan, and present said plan to Excelerate HQ for approval. Additionally all vessels involved in the op needed to have a company observer aboard.

When a 1000′ LNG tanker needs to offload it’s cargo of LNG (re-gassify) it pulls up beside the little flag. The crew then couples the 5/8″ line to a line from inside the bow of the ship and a winch inside the ship begins to draw in the line. Eventually it picks up the Kevlar hawser and then begins to haul up the actual STL until it is completely drawn inside the ship, where hydraulic rams on the ship lock into the STL and the ship and STL become one. BTW – the “Turret” of “Submerged Turret Loader”  refers to the section of the STL where the rams lock into it – this section is on bearings and is free to pivot, allowing the ship to watch and rotate  due to sea and wind state.  A hatch on the top of the STL is opened and the ship’s gas line is plugged in. It takes about five days to full re-gassify the LNG and transfer the ship’s contents to land, and the STL keeps it anchored in place while also providing the gas line.

Here’s a really great animation of how a STL is mated to a LNG tanker:

So I spent some dives following the Kevlar line down into blue (grey) open water to the STL, where I attached a reel to the top of the STL and rappelled down to the underside. So cool! Hanging beneath the STL I recorded video of the huge anchor rode attachments and the massive flexible gas riser – all attached to an alien underwater spacecraft (needless to say, there was no ship on it at the time).

But…

But that’s not the story. That’s just the background. This is the story…

Early fall in 2009, the day came to command the popups to, well, pop up. The Aquarium’s dive boat Lophius (bonus points for what the name refers to) went to the site and researchers used the Interrogator to command release from the anchors. All four units obeyed and responded with a Success ACK.

So the researchers waited – and waited – and guess what? Not a single unit popped to the surface. Nor did the distance between the units and the transducer change, meaning they were still laying on the bottom.

A bottom that is 280 feet down.

The next step was to enlist the use of a ROV to visit the site and the video it returned gave the answer everyone dreaded. The non-crushable floats used, well, crushed at that depth, and therefore had lost their buoyancy. Countless thousands of hours of data was trapped on the seafloor. Priceless data. The ROV didn’t have a grabber – just video. So weeks were spent trying to grapple the units from the surface – to no avail.

During one dive on STL B I asked the PI if we could bring the Interrogator with us, and we did some tests on how closely we could use it to pinpoint the location of one of the four stranded popups.

The results were promising and I felt confident I could get them, but it would require some big dives with a lot of inherent risk – and a special team to pull it off. Several high level meetings later and I was given the green light.

I was going to dive to 280′ in permanent pitch black, onto a featureless sediment bottom, to try to find a needle in a haystack…

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the story, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Click here for Part 2…

On July 4th I was five days into some intensive dive training in the caves of north central Florida. Unfortunately that particular day had a less-than-desirable outcome: I ended up getting fairly seriously bent.

Long story short, I ended up getting transported to Southern Georgia Medical Center where I spent five days alternating between the ICU and a hyperbaric chamber. My wife Amy had to fly down to drive me the 1,300 miles home, after which  I spent six weeks recovering. Just this past Friday I had a heart procedure that I hope is the last step in my recovery.

Though this was an intensely personal experience, I am sharing it because not only is it a somewhat interesting story, but I think it could be a some benefit to others who share a passion for diving… So if you want to hear about what happened, and why, check out this presentation I recently gave to the staff at the New England Aquarium: