Deep Dark and Dangerous: On the Bottom with the Northwest Salvage Divers – Rebecca Harrison
Deep Dark and Dangerous
Harrison tells the stories of the pioneers of the salvage diving profession, those men and women who worked – some over 100 years ago – in the cold, murky depths of the Pacific Ocean off Oregon, Washington state and Alaska in the USA. Their courage and the difficulty of the conditions they worked in is palpable. Many of these divers learned the trade from their fathers and uncles. Their work encompassed salvage of cargoes, demolition, search and recovery, and construction of harbours, bridges and other structures… All underwater.
This is definitely a history book – there’s nothing about the current state of the salvage diving industry. The stories are personal and clearly many of them are sourced from living relatives of the divers, and some from the surviving divers themselves. It’s well illustrated with photos of the divers, their gear, and their team members.
If you have an interest in commercial diving, or in the history of diving, this is a good place to start. For more on what being a commercial diver entails today, check out Bottom Time. You can get the book here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise go here. If you want to read it on your Kindle, go here.
It’s rare for me to take as complete and instant a dislike to the author of a book as I did in this case (Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame is the only other example I can summon to mind). Susan Casey is a magazine journalist who counts employment at O Magazine among her career highlights – but this isn’t the reason I took a dislike to her… Keep reading.
I suppose I am looking for a book about sharks that doesn’t exist. Briefly, here and there, this was that book. Casey describes the Farallon Islands, remote and hostile rocky outcrops some 50 kilometres from San Fransisco. Like our Seal Island in False Bay, the Farallones are home to many marine mammals and a large number of great white sharks (some of epic proportions).
Casey describes the birth of her obsession with the islands (she watched a TV show) and the sharks that call them home, as well as their history as a source of seabird eggs (they are an important nesting site). She recounts various visits she took to the islands, culminating in a long stay in 2003.
Casey’s ruminations about how dirty her hair was, what she packed for the trip to the islands, how clueless she is about boats, and how obsessed she – personally – is with white sharks are uninteresting, but her descriptions of the sharks themselves, the research being conducted with them, and the individuals – incredible to a man – conducting that research, are at times rewarding. A keen objectifier of men (like Elizabeth Gilbert, actually), Casey spends a lot of time describing the rugged good looks and well-defined musculature of the various researchers and scientists she encounters – really classy, and respectful of them as scientists and individuals rather than as eye candy. HA! I did wonder more than once if a continuation of this line of thought could explain how she managed to secure a stay on the islands despite them being officially closed to visitors…
Fascinating nuggets are, however, gleaned here and there. The predations at the Farallones generally do not involve the breaching we see at Seal Island, perhaps because the sluggish elephant seals living there do not require the same degree of exertion as frisky Cape fur seal pups do. The attacks mostly take place at high tide. The observations of Ron Elliott, a commercial diver who harvested sea urchins at the islands (the only one who dared) are fascinating – he’d see sharks on almost every dive he did, and hid from them under the rocks where necessary. Upon climing into the water, he’d duck straight under his little boat so as to avoid presenting an interesting silhouette from below.
On two occasions orcas killed a white shark at the island (in one case by holding the shark upside down until it drowned); after both predations, the other great whites vanished – just disappeared en masse. This is intriguing. Many marine mammals pass by – the islands are a popular whale watching location and up to 60 blue whales have been sighted at once. One of the researchers even became the first (and I think only) person to observe humpback whales copulating there. Apparently it takes two… Plus an assistant!
Something else I discovered here that I didn’t know is that the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, one of the foremost aquaria in the world, has had great white sharks on exhibit on several separate occasions, starting in 2004. They don’t keep the sharks indefinitely – they grow fast – but they’ve managed to keep five sharks mostly happy and healthy, before realeasing them (tagged) back into the wild. The reasons for release varied from increased size, increased aggression, to refusal to feed.
Ultimately, this book is an account of a tragedy caused by its author, who seems unaware of the extent of the damage she wrought, and hence unrepentant. She forced herself – there’s no other word – into a delicate web comprising the predators, prey, and the scientists who observed their interactions, and then tore down part of the web by her very presence. Because of her stay on the islands, Peter Pyle, the researcher in charge of the Shark Project on the Farralones, lost his job. Thanking him profusely in the acknowledgements doesn’t really cut it, especially after quoting Pyle elsewhere in her book as saying that he loved the Farallones, and being on the islands, “more than life.”
Aside from shutting down an entire shark research project singlehandedly and causing a ten year veteran of the project to lose his job, Casey also misplaces a borrowed sailboat and breaks the law repeatedly and with gusto. If I’d made such an utter fool of myself, I wouldn’t have written a book about it, but she glosses over her responsibility so thoroughly that I suppose some readers may fail to ascribe to her the blame she deserves.
Buy the book here if you’re South African, otherwise here. Actually, don’t buy it – this woman doesn’t deserve any support at all.
Bottom Time: The Adventures of a Commercial Diver – Norbert Weissinger
Bottom Time
Since before I started diving I’ve had a fascination with commercial divers – perhaps because they work in the industrial places of the world – harbours, oil fields – that also fascinate me.
Norbert Weissinger worked as a commercial diver for a couple of years in the early 1980s, mainly in the oil fields of the American South. His book is a strange mixture of reminiscences about specific characters he worked with, travelogue, and musing on Buddhism, which he seems to have embraced in later life. The majority, however deals, with his activities as a commercial diver, and it is these sections that hold the most interest.
The work of commercial divers seems fraught with monotony (is that possible?) while they wait for conditions to be right for them to work on their assigned task. They wrangle huge pipes and bolts and flanges while underwater, issue instructions to crane operators, and risk losing fingers and limbs (many do) and getting the bends on a daily basis. Crush injuries are common, and ten years is considered a very long career in the field.
Weissinger talks a lot about the effects of nitrogen narcosis – much of his work was conducted at depths exceeding 20 metres, and he describes how difficult narcosis made it to make decisions while working – sometimes he would have to go through a specific sequence of events, deciding which way to move the crane, and keeping himself out of trouble. I do not envy commercial divers having to think about work as well as act on those thoughts underwater!
Because the divers conducted so many dives in a day – six being a common number – and many of them at depth – decompression sickness was a constant danger. Instead of doing safety stops in the water (they did after very long or deep dives), most of the time the divers were bundled straight out of the water into a decompression chamber located on the barge. There they spent intervals breathing pure oxygen (15 minutes at a time followed by 5 minutes of air) and decompressing. The presence of the chamber on the barge also meant that should a diver emerge from the water with symptoms of the bends, he could be placed into the chamber immediately. The dive tables used by the commercial diving companies were more conservative than the navy-developed ones, because of the intensity of the work and number of dives conducted.
Weissinger didn’t do it himself, but he does talk to a colleague who had participated in saturation diving. The tissues of the human body become saturated with gas after a certain time (say 24 hours) at depth, and the decompression time is the same whether you spend an hour, a day or a week at that particular pressure. Divers lived in pressurised environments for weeks on end, shuttling between a chamber and the bottom until it was time to decompress. The diver Weissinger talked to spent his time at about 300 metres’ equivalent pressure, and said the atmosphere was so thick that things didn’t fall straight down but wafted back and forth. He was breathing over 99% helium and 1% oxygen. They spent 10 days returning to normal atmospheric pressure afterwards. This has gone out of vogue, apparently, but researchers and scientists who spend long periods in undersea residences are essentially doing the same thing.
The divers worked alone most of the time, wearing jeans, booties and fins, cotton gloves, and a wetsuit top – the water was warm. They used either scuba or more commonly, an air supply from the surface, tended by junior staff called, appropriately, tenders.
Much of the time the water was dark or extremely murky. The work was often performed around the large oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, which attract large numbers and variety of fish who shelter between the platform legs. Weissinger describes grouper and other fish watching them while they worked, but most of the time he only experienced the local marine life when he and his colleagues dived on scuba during their downtime.
Not for everyone, but definitely fun to read about… Here you will find accounts of dives to great depths, to shipwrecks and into caves, and dives pushing the limits of human physiology. Find a book about extreme diving in this lovely list.
