AD 2016 Q3

DIVE SLATE
16 REMEMBERING THE ANDREA DORIA | 20 CASHES LEDGE | 23 SHOOTING
THE CLICK EFFECT | 26 DAN MEMBER PROFILE | 28 PUBLIC SAFETY
ANNOUNCEMENT, EDUCATION SPOTLIGHT | 29 TRAVEL SMARTER
REMEMBERING THE ANDREA DORIA
By Michael Menduno
In June 2016, the ocean exploration company
OceanGate conducted three nearly fourhour
submersible dives and multiple sonar
scans of the SS Andrea Doria — arguably
the world’s most iconic shipwreck — in
commemoration of the 60 th anniversary of its
sinking. The expedition was cut short because of high
seas and the dense fog common at the site, which lies
110 nautical miles east of Montauk, N.Y., and 45 miles
south of Nantucket, Mass. The company’s findings were
consistent with reports of divers familiar with the wreck:
The “Grand Dame of the Sea” is rapidly deteriorating.
“In the old days she was largely intact. You could go
inside and recover artifacts,” explained Gary Gentile,
who has made 200 dives to the wreck and written two
books about the 700-foot Italian luxury liner that sank
on July 26, 1956, after colliding with the MS Stockholm.
“Today every place I explored inside the wreck no
longer exists. The insides are gone — collapsed.”
What remain are the wreck’s storied past and the
fact that the improbable loss of the Doria, which has
subsequently claimed the lives of 17 scuba divers,
irrevocably changed the nature of wreck diving.
It was prescient that the first divers on the wreck
— investment-banker-turned-explorer-and-filmmaker
Peter Gimbel and editor Joseph Fox — were amateur
scuba divers. The two plunged 160 feet through the
dark, frigid, oily water using primitive scuba gear to
get the first underwater pictures of the Doria for Life
magazine. Gimbel, 28, had negotiated the assignment
two days earlier by phone as the sinking steamer was
being evacuated.
Over the next 25 years, the Doria was visited
infrequently. Gimbel led five expeditions, recovered
the purser’s safe in 1981 using commercial diving
equipment and produced two documentaries and
a TV show. There was a French filming expedition
and an Italian expedition with cinematographer Al
Giddings, who compared diving the Doria to climbing
Mount Everest, leading to the wreck becoming known
as the “Mount Everest of diving.” There were also
several unsuccessful salvage operations that used
saturation diving systems.
BRAVING MOUNT EVEREST
It was only a matter of time before the first wreck divers
ventured out to test their mettle on the famous, artladen
shipwreck. In 1966 Michael deCamp, considered
the father of Northeast wreck diving, chartered a
fishing boat and ran the first of two trips. The following
year on deCamp’s second trip, Evelyn Bartram Dudas
became the first woman to dive the Doria.
But it wasn’t until the early 1980s, with the
introduction of a reliable, diver-friendly means
of getting to the wreck, that Doria diving became
accessible. “We changed the dynamics,” said Capt.
Steve Bielenda, who built the 55-foot RV Wahoo
(which could sleep 26 and had a galley) for that
purpose. “I wanted a dive boat that could run offshore
and stay for a couple of days.” Wahoo, along with
Seeker and Sea Hunter, began running up to three
trips each season.
Diving the Doria on air was a perilous proposition.
Not everyone could tolerate the debilitating narcosis at
the 160- to 250-foot depths, which was compounded
by the cold, murky North Atlantic and disorienting
interior of the wreck, which lies on its starboard
side. In addition, there was the risk of oxygen (O 2 )
seizures, and air decompression was unreliable —
divers routinely got decompression sickness (or “the
bends”). Conditions offshore are also volatile, which
necessitates limiting dive profiles to two hours or less.
16 | SUMMER 2016