Monday night I got a call from my friend Billy, who was part of a private dive club going to visit some "interesting numbers" that one of the dredgers working the NJ coastline had found.
Okay, let me start with a little bit of background:
First of all, there is a small fleet of dredgers pounding back and forth across the shoreline on the NJ coast, sucking up sand to replenish the beaches that have been eroded by years of surf, storms, and finally a major hit by Hurricane Sandy two years ago.
According to Billy, one dredger in particular, the "San Vincente Turgid," had been re-directed here from Boston where it had been working on cleaning out the shipping lanes going into and out of the harbor. According to Billy, the San Vincente Turgid came around Montauk and headed in a direct line to Point Pleasant, NJ. About 45 miles off shore of Asbury Park, it picked up an unusual blip in about 155 feet of water. As luck would have it, the Turgid was testing its new trailing suction hopper dredge when several large pieces of debris got caught in its suction pipe.
Sailors had to bring the suction pipe up to the deck to clear it, and what they found surprised them all. What are the chances of finding a brass name plate mounted onto an old rotten piece of wood? The crew of the San Vincente Turgid, however, was interested in sand, not name plates, so they threw it aside, continued cleaning the dredge of some wood debris, cork and glass which they put into a barrel, and went back to work. Botswain Artudo Smith made a quick phone call to his fiance in South Beach Miami as the crew put the suction pipe back into the water.
Finally, the dredger arrived on site in Point Pleasant, and the crew received some mail, fresh food and liquor, meanwhile unloading the three barrels of trash collected over their 3 day trip from Boston. The trash barrels sat on the edge of a construction site in Point Pleasant for several weeks.
About two weeks ago, Captain Tim of the dive boat "Le Petomaine" which normally sails from Freeport, Long Island, was dumpster diving, looking for scraps of rope, latex tubing, stainless steel snap bolts, double edge clips - anything he could get for free for his scuba diving pursuits. Captain Tim found the blue barrel, and immediately recognized the broken bottle tops, stuffed with rotten corks, as being liquor bottles. Hoping he might find some intact liquor bottles in the barrel, he unceremoniously dumped it over on the banks of the Manasquan river.
Like the crew of the San Vincente Turgid, Captain Tim was also amazed at what he found. A ships brass plaque with the words "Black _uck" in raised green letters. The "_" was not an "F", it was a blob of concretia. Captain Tim quickly put the name plate under his arm, ready to bring it home to put with his collection of marble doorknobs, broken steam valves, brass spikes, the inside half of a porthole, a 1963 "Coca-Cola" bottle with barnacle encrustation and other treasures found in his scuba diving adventures.
A week later, my friend Billy and a third diver friend who goes by the name of "Orlando" were in Captain Tim's man cave, aka his basement, where his wife had banished him with his dive gear, treasure collection, 60" LED Samsung and Sony PS2. Working on their third case of Rolling Rock, the conversation turned to dumpster diving and Captain Tim eagerly searched beneath the pile that was his collection of 1960's Playboy magazines for the name plaque he had found.
Finishing his 3rd six pack of the night, Billy already had his car keys in his hand but couldn't remember which car was his. However, he had his new iPad Air in his other hand and the intrepid diver decided to google "Black _uck ship." When the results of the google search came up, the three men looked at each other in amazement. They had found a ship called the Black Duck. It was a rum runner, purportedly owned by Joseph Kennedy himself, through his prohibition era associate Danny Walsh.
The three men immediately began to ask questions. Where did this name plaque come from? As Captain Tim explained how he found it in a garbage barrel in Point Pleasant, Billy was immediately on his iPad Air, viewing the activity in the area. They were quick to realize it was somehow related to the beach replenishment. "It must have been sucked up by a dredger," Billy said. "All we have to do is find what dredgers are working the area and we can figure out where this came from.
I'll spare the reader the details and just give a quick overview. A few days of phone calls and a few well-shared $50 dollar bills with the right people determined the garbage barrel was from the San Vincente Turgid. Now, to figure out where the dredge had found the items.
Billy and Orlando waited until the San Vincente Turgid was at station off the beach in Point Pleasant, emptying its sand cargo through the pipes, and immediately set out with their Zebco inflatable from Walmart. As expected, the inflatable sprang a leak about a quarter mile off the beach, and was sinking fast by the time they reached the San Vincente Turgid. In keeping with the maritime custom of aiding vessels in distress, Billy and Orlando were taken aboard the San Vincente Turgid as their inflatable joined Big Pussy Bonpensiero on the bottom of the NJ coastline.
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| Big Pussy Bonpensiero |
The crew of the San Vincente Turgid was quite happy to have some visitors to help break up the monotony of the day, and invited them into the galley for their home made dogfish fin soup and some lively talk of the sea. Deftly manipulating the conversation to the garbage barrel and the Black Duck name plaque, the crew was quite amused to hear the story of Captain Tim digging through their garbage.
"Where did your suction pipe get clogged?" Billy innocently asked. "Who knows?" answered Botswain Smith. "We're deckhands, not navigators."
Billy decided to try a different tact. "How far from shore were you?" Now, I don't know how many of you readers are familiar with the local waters and able to find a location using imprecise instructions, but the answer Billy received wasn't much help. "About 6 hours."
"What time of day?" Billy asked, hoping maybe some other ship in the area could be found.
"That I can tell you exactly," the burly botswain answered as he pulled out his cell phone. "I called my wife right when we found it."
Orlando lit up like a lightbulb. In addition to being an experienced east coast diver, he had a second career as the "Electric Wolf" from his mother's attic where his collection of computers,electronic doo dads, thing-a-mabobs and who-ha's would make any NSA spy envious. Once again, to save some time and spare you the details, by 8PM that night, Orlando had hacked into the phone company records, found the botswain's phone records and retreived the GPS location the phone call was made from.
Armed with the new information, the decision was made to visit the site the following Tuesday to look for Joe Kennedy's Rum Runner.
March 31st arrived with a dying cold rainy front from the east, quickly being pushed out to sea by a high pressure front pulling clear skies from the west that brought the prospect of calm seas for our trip the next day. Billy had invited me along, not so much for my skill as a diver but because I knew some good jokes and could be easily cajoled into paying for 1/4 of the fuel for the boat. My major reason for going was that I hadn't been in the water since December and was jumping out of my skin, hoping to get wet. My drysuit had just come back from DUI where they had replaced all the seals and repaired over 80% of the seams, which explained my past season of not-so-dry suit diving. They had even repaired the self-installed duct tape patches on the knees and elbows which I wore as a badge of pride as to the medieval age of my drysuit.
The next day, my drysuit underwear freshly laundered for the new season, we met at the dock in South Amboy where "Le Petomaine" was waiting for us. Following a lengthy argument with Captain Tim about why he couldn't have brought the boat to Perth Amboy so we didn't have to pay the Driscoll Bridge toll, we loaded our gear onto the boat and left the Marina, heading into the calm Atlantic.
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| Diveboat Le Petomaine |
About 2 PM in the afternoon, Captain Tim began to scream the lyrics to his favorite song.
"Here we come, walking down the street. We get the funniest looks from everyone one we meet."
Bill, Orlando and I looked at each other, our eyes opening wide. Captain Tim always sang that song when he found something on the sonar.
"Hey Hey we're the Monkees! And people say we Monkee around...."
We ran out to the deck and began to jump into our dive gear. Our plan was simple. The first dive would be to attach a rope and buoy to the wreckage to make our subsequent dives quicker. The three of us would enter the water together. Billy carried the flashlight, Orlando the lift bag and I had a mesh bag to collect some evidence. All we wanted to do was locate the wreckage and get our bearings. We each wore a GoPro camera on our heads to help record the wreck which we could study during our surface interval. We also attached illuminated Chemical light sticks to our tanks to help keep an eye on each other.
We dropped a shot line to the wreck on Captain Tim's signal and he deftly maneuvered the boat as we prepared to enter the water. He walked across the deck, checking our air tanks and turning on our GoPro cameras. He stopped at Orlando's gear and a puzzled frown ran across his face. "You've got so much crap on this regulator, I can't tell what the hell's going on," he grumbled. Orlando, ever the hacker, had used a vast collection of air conditioner and refrigerator valves and parts to make his own regulator, and the mass of copper and brass hardware attached to the top of his tank looked more like a radiator than a regulator. No wonder he was always getting bent.
"I see something at 15 feet," Captain Tim said. Orlando and I looked at other, perplexed, but Billy explained. "Tim divides everything by 10, so when he says 15 feet, he means 150."
"So we're in 150 feet of water?" I asked.
"More like 15 and a half with the profile."
Before I could say "Billy, you've got an idiot friend for a boat driver" Billy was in the water and Orlando splashed in right behind him. I double checked my regulators and gauges, and as Captain Tim said "Let me make sure your valve's open," I grabbed the railing and hopped over sideways. I wanted to keep that nut away from my tank.
Once in the water, I found Orlando struggling at 20 feet with his regulators. A steady stream of bubbles was flowing from a 3" long copper tube that stuck out of the second stage like a straw. He took a pair of EMT dive shears and used them to bend the tube.
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| Orlando on the line, messing with his home-made regulator |
The bubbles continued to dribble out, and he began using the hammer end of his dive knive, smacking himself in the chin with it to try to crimp the tubing closed. I waited for him, ready to offer assistance, although I have to admit I couldn't begin to guess what kind of assistance I could offer. He noticed me floating nearby and waved me off, making the "OK" sign with his thumb and index finger.
He didn't look okay to me, and I begin to lean in towards him and he pulled his regulator out of his mouth and put it against a lead weight on his belt. He began to hammer the tube again with his dive knife, and started yelling at me through the water. "Nooooooo Prooooooo Blaaaaaaa Mooooooo" I heard in his bubbly rhymical voice as he happily hammered away, so I continued my descent.
Although a little dark, it was easy to follow Billy's bubbles and I found him on the bottom at 120 feet. I guess neither Tim's division or sonar wasn't so good either, but as I was going to find out later, he has problem's reading any number or letter that is round. We found the sash weight that Captain Tim had sent down, lying on top of some muddy debris. I could see fine without a flashlight, but Billy's PC2m did a nice job of bringing out the silty colors of brown and grey muck.
I fanned the pile as Billy directed the LED light, and within moments we found several bottle necks, as well as some fairly well preserved wood. The wood had irregular ends, indicating it had been broken, not cut, and there was no real sign of any marine animal infestation, like worm holes. The glass on the bottle necks was sharp, as if it had been broken yesterday, although the amount of silt on everything indicated they had been on the bottom for a while.
I might mention that we were all diving using 21% air as our breathing gas because of the depth. I sometimes got a little light headed when I hit 140 feet or so, but figured I was good to our intended depth of 150, and Billy was so goofy that he didn't need to get narced to act drunk. As it was, my head remained clear throughout the dive.
We examined the bottles, taking turns holding the flashlight and digging through the pile, looking for the bottom of the bottles, in hopes of finding some type of identification number. I looked from the bottle neck in my fingers to Billy's face, and could see a wild grin behind his mask as he looked past me. I turned around and saw Orlando, his drysuit removed, wearing just a pair of boxer shorts with his rubikesque breathing apparatus dangling from his mouth. Obviously suffering the effects of nitrogen narcosis, he was sitting on top of his tank and was using his inflator hose as a rocket jet to propel himself around.
Billy handed me his slate. "No worys, he's a arsehole," it said.
It took us a few seconds to calm Orlando down and within a minute the three of us were swiming along some five feet above the bottom, perfectly bouyant. Since I was in the middle, I checked everyone's gauges. Billy and I each had about 2200 pounds of air, but Orlando was down to 900, so I waved my hand in front of his face to attract his attention. He waved back and shot his inflator hose again, propelling himself another ten feet in front of us.
I swam fast to catch up with him, this time holding my air pressure gauge in front of me and pointing at his with my other hand. He finally looked at his gauge and saw that it was now down to 700 pounds. He gave us the OK sign and setteled down onto the debris pile on the bottom, kicking up a large cloud of silt. The mass was about 5 feet high, and Orlando began picking through it.
With the cloud of mud, it was hard to see anything, but I could see some sharp reflections in Billy's flashlight as Orlando picked up broken pieces of glass, which he put into his BC pocket,
Billy checked Orlando's gauges which were now down to 500 PSI, which he showed to Orlando. Orlando waved us off and connected his inflator hose to the BC and put some air into it. As soon as he hit the inflate button, a steady stream of bubbles flowed out of the BC around the pocket, meaning Orlando had punctured it with the broken glass. He was still smiling as he put the inflator hose into his mouth and began to inhale at a rate several times beyond what his regulator could provide. His cheeks and chest puffed up and he begin to rise above the silt cloud, gaining speed as he used his lungs as a lift bag.
Before any readers question my sanity in writing this, I'd just like to point out that Orlando has gotten bent so many times that his capillaries had stretched to ten times normal diameter, allowing nitrogen bubbles to pass through them undeterred. In effect, he was unbendable. Orlando had 138 dives in his logbook, and excepting the four checkout dives he did in a quarry to get certified, he had gotten decompression sickness from rapid accents on every single dive. In fact, several medical schools had pooled together a tidy little sum of money in the seven digit realm and bought the rights to his body upon his death. Orlando doesn't need to ever work again, and will probably spend the next 30 or 40 years doing rapid ascents several times a month. Of course, his behavior would kill any of us, and I certainly don't recommend anyone diving beyond their skill level, training capability or taking any risky actions to try to match Orlando's unique phsiological situation.
So, here are Billy and I, 120 feet under the surface of the Atlantic, looking at a pile of silt and broken glass that might have been the remains of the Black Duck Rumrunner. We moved about 15 feet apart to opposite sides of the wreckage; out of sight due to the darkness but we could still see each other's chemical sticks and flashlights.
I fanned the debris and saw a lot of broken glass, many of it necks but also bottoms, middles and other large pieces of broken bottles. I finally found an intact bottle without a cork in the neck. It had a shiny edge around the lip which might have been aluminum or stainless. Then I saw the metal strap around the middle of the bottle and the wire hook looping from side to side. It looked like a glass IV bottle.
I shined my flashlight into the pile and was greeted by a lot of reflections, and it became quickly obvious that we had found a medical waste dump, complete with some old glass syringes, broken bottles, porcelean bed pans and electrodes of the type used in the 40's and 50's to give shock treatments to mental patients and uncooperative wards of the state.
I became aware of Billy waving his flashlight to attract my attention, and I swam over to him. He had found a wooden box, replete with badly decomposed cloth wrapped hoses and several electric leads. A small brass label announced "Black Buck Phlegm Discharge Collector." Our subsequent research would find that Black Buck was a failed medical startup in the 1940's that designed electrical contraptions to remove mucus from the nasal cavaties. In other words, an electric nose blowing device. The government had purchased several, and after testing them on mental patients, decided it was a dumb investment, even for the federal government.
As our breathing gas was reaching our predetermined limit, we began our ascent, albeit a little dissapointed. We had come looking for the remains of a rum runner and instead found a pile of medical waste and electric booger collectors. We followed our buoy marker, and after doing our decompression stops, reached the surface where we found ourselves alone. There was a about a three foot swell, and as we rolled over the top of the swell, we could see Le Petomaine about a mile away, heading towards. Billy and I chatted for a few moments as the next swell come by us, and to our surprise, we saw Le Petomaine turning left.
"That idiot," Billy exclaimed. "With one engine out, the boat's going in circles and Tim doesn't realize it."
The water was very chilly, but it was a full sunny day, and I pumped some air into my drysuit and let it work its way down to my feet so I could float on my back comfortably and take advantage of the warming sun, as we waited for Captain Tim to finally reach us. He had been cruising in ever larger circles for about two hours until his circles finally intercepted our location.
"Geeze, I didn't realize I had drifted so far away," he drunkenly snorted as we climbed up the ladder. There was no point in arguing or yelling at him, because he was incapable of offense or remediation.
Orlando was sitting on the deck, sunning himself, his head swollen to about twice its normal size, and his chest inflated like some giant terrestrial puffer fish. "There's some beers in the red cooler if you want," he gestured, tempting us to join him in the "Hall of fame of bad things stupid divers do that will probably kill them."
"How was the dive?" Tim hiccuped. "Want to come back here tommorrow?"
"No thanks, I'll pass on that one," I said as I booted up my computer to type this log entry for my 2014 April Fool's Day dive report to the Black Duck garbage dump.
Thanks for sharing - and DSAO!
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