Divers help make Andrea Doria discovery

It was a journey that took more than a year to prepare for and could easily have ended before beginning.

Three local divers, part of the Dive N’ Surf instruction team, were invited last year to take part in an expedition to one of the world’s great shipwrecks, the Andrea Doria. Assistant instructor Laila Richard and divemasters Kathy Mallon and Chris Gini spent the year training with expedition leader, Joel Silverstein, one of the most experienced shipwreck divers alive.

They refined their “mixed gas” skills used for deep dives, strengthened themselves to prepare for carrying the 175 to 240 pounds of gear needed for such explorations, and practiced diving in “overhead environments” such as caves – where the escape, in case of emergency, isn’t straight up. They trained in Lake Mead, beneath the Hoover Dam, where there are caverns, small wrecks, and even a submerged B-29 bomber.

But when the divers departed Rhode Island aboard the 42-ft. vessel Explorer on June 24, there were no guarantees. The Andrea Doria dive site, 95 miles off the coast, is regarded as the Mount Everest of shipwreck diving. There is a short window of time each year, between late June and early August, when conditions are potentially calm enough for diving.

As the nine-person expedition set out, things didn’t look good. The weather was overcast and the seas were six feet high.

“It takes all night to get out there, and we were in some thick fog, which was kind of a little spooky,” Richard said. “Then the next morning we get up and it’s completely clear. We were so unbelievably lucky – I mean, if you’d asked for better conditions, you couldn’t have ordered them. It was amazing.”

“I didn’t sleep much the night before, I must be honest,” Mallon said. “We were all pretty excited. I mean, this is it, this is what it comes down to. At every stage along the way, you try to tell yourself not to get too excited, but…”

Part of the challenge is the currents. The site is where the Gulf Stream hits the North Atlantic. Even if surface conditions seem good, underwater conditions still might not allow for a dive. Many expeditions reach the site and never dive.

“You can plan these things for a year….but Mother Nature is Mother Nature,” Gini said.

A young technical diver aboard, Ric Simon, was charged with anchoring the boat to the Andrea Doria wreckage 230 ft. below. He tried several times without success, while the other divers waited.

“It’s an exercise in patience,” Richard said. “The diving itself is the easiest part. It’s really the endurance you build up – expecting the unexpected and rolling with it – that is the hard part.”

Finally, after six hours, the Explorer was anchored to the Andrea Doria. The three South Bay divers formed a team.  With help from the rest of the crew – who literally push the divers off the deck – first Gini jumped, then Richard, and then Mallon.

The descent had finally begun.

Down under

She is known as the last great lost liner.

The Andrea Doria was the pride of Italy, a 697 ft. transatlantic ocean liner whose beautiful lines, lavish artfulness, and three outdoor swimming pools – a first – made it famous worldwide after its launch in 1953, the era just before airliners overtook ocean liners as the main means for oceanic crossings. The ship was also considered nigh unsinkable. It was constructed with 11 airtight compartments that would keep the boat afloat even in the highly unlikely event two were breached.

Then on a foggy night in 1956, the unthinkable happened: after a miscommunication, the 528 ft. Swedish liner Stockholm collided with the Andrea Doria broadside, going 18 knots to the Italian ship’s 21 knots. Seven of the compartments were breached; the Andrea Doria stayed afloat 11 hours – all but 46 of its 1,706 passengers and crew were saved, the casualties occurring upon impact – but finally sank to the ocean floor.

Fifty-four years later, she is a crumbling beauty. Mallon, the last of the three divers, was the first to lay eyes on the fallen ship. As she descended along the line, Mallon remembers being utterly disconcerted both by the increasing depth and by the blinking of a strobe light attached to the line, creating moments of complete darkness punctuated by an eerie otherworldliness.

“There were these two little figures,” Mallon said. “Those were my buddies. Then there is this massive thing below them I started getting brief glimpses of…that was the first time I realized the magnitude, the enormity of this wreck. And I was going to see it.”

Even Gini, who with 27 years diving was the most experienced of the three, found himself disoriented at first.

“Diving is a funny thing, because at any time something can go wrong,” he said. “But everything went smoothly. The gear was working, we dropped in and the current wasn’t too bad, so everybody is going down. It’s a funny thing, too,  because you descend, even in good visibility, and at some point you can’t see the surface and you can’t see the bottom.  You are just kind of floating in space, and then all of a sudden looms this….It’s huge. It’s just huge. That is the first thing you notice.”

Richard had perhaps the strangest experience. As she descended, she kept looking and looking, but couldn’t see anything.

“At a certain depth, your mind kind of plays tricks on you,” she said. “It should have been a shadow, and then I’m swimming around a little bit, and I’m like, ‘Where the hell is it? Where is the ship?’”

Then all of a sudden she realized it was only 20 ft. beneath her. “Oh my god, we are on the ship,” she thought.

“It’s so massive….It’s like a big ghost ship, a big mammoth, something that is there and has been there but is not supposed to be there.”

The Bell

The trio completed two dives to the shipwreck in two days while Gini also did a third dive with another diver from the Explorer. All three stood on the hull at one point, and they dropped into to a disintegrating section that had created a crevasse on the bow of the boat.

“There is this massive section falling forward, and we were all carrying these bright, high intensity lights,” Mallon said. “Imagine standing on the Queen Mary and it is ripped open and you are looking down. Can you imagine? I remember seeing cross beams that used to be the decks….the superstructure, collapsed down on the debris field. And we were just hovering above a line of port holes, all intact, all closed. I remember thinking all those people must have looked out those portholes during the voyage.”

At that depth – between 190 ft. and 250 ft. down – they could only stay 15 minutes at a time. Then they would slowly ascend, using different mixes of gases – including helium and nitrogen – to mix with oxygen and assist with decompression at different stages. As they were waiting on the way up from the first dive, a blue shark swam by.

“The shark swam around us for a while and then would dart in and out of sight,” Gini said.  “Because visibility at that point was 15 or 20 feet, all of sudden, you are just sitting there looking out, and there’s a shark. It can be an interesting experience.”

“It ended up bumping fins with my nose,” Mallon said.

They were scheduled for a third dive on June 25. But a duo of divers who dove right before the team happened upon something that changed everything. Divers Ernest Rookey and Carl Bayer – who were also diving the Andrea Doria for the first time on the expedition – were at minute 18 on a scheduled 20 minute visit to the shipwreck when Bayer saw a distinctive shape sticking up from the sand near the debris field. As he approached it and dug a little bit, his hopes were confirmed – it was a ship’s bell.

The pair dug furiously and dislodged the bell. But by that point, they had run out of time. There was no time to tie a line to the bell, so they just wrapped it in an inflatable bag and sent it up. It was a risky decision, because the bell could easily get lost in a current and might never be seen by the Explorer crew.

“The bell itself weighed about 75 pounds, so they put a bag on it, like a big balloon…” Gini said. “They just ran out of time to put a line on it. So they had almost an hour in decompression, not knowing if it got caught in a current and floated away, lost at sea. I’m sure that was just terrible, not to have a line on it – but if you spend another minute you might get yourself in serious trouble. So they just hoped for the best.”

Richard saw the balloon pop to the surface.

“I was actually down below looking out the window as the lift bag popped up,” she said. “I thought, ‘What is going on down there? Has something happened?’ Then the captain sent one of the crew in an inflatable boat and by that time everyone was on deck. They grabbed it with a hook and it was like, wow, it’s heavy, and pulled it on deck and the captain was like, ‘Oh my God. It’s the bell. Get it up here!’ Everyone was just blown away.”

They pulled it to the swim step of the Explorer. There was a moment of stunned silence before everyone erupted in cheers. The bell was the so-called “forward” or crow’s nest bell.

“That moment I shall never forget,” Mallon said. “The look on everyone’s faces….The bell is a prize, the heart of the ship.”

There was some brief consideration of playing a prank on the divers anxiously waiting through decompression down below, Gini said, but nobody wanted to make the pair suffer any longer than necessary. When the pair finally surfaced and discovered the bell was on the ship, worry gave way to pure exuberance.

“I have never seen men with bigger grins on their faces,” Mallon said. “This is fame for life. And as a first time diver to the Andrea Doria, I was very humbled to witness the recovery of this artifact.”

Everyone on board agreed that with the recovery of the bell it was time to go. The rest of the scheduled dives were canceled and the Explorer picked up anchor.

“They didn’t want to push our luck,” Richard said. “There was a little bit of superstition on board…like, ‘We were blessed today, let’s not push it.’”

Among those on board Explorer was Gary Gentile, the diver who has visited the Andrea Doria more than anyone else – 197 dives – and who in 1985 had recovered the ship’s stern bell. He told the crew that until that moment there was no evidence the bell existed. Many people believed, in fact, that all the treasures the boat had to offer were gone, and that in its advanced stages of deterioration it had almost ceased to be an attraction for divers.

“She is not done yet,” Mallon said. “She is giving up her treasures slowly, but she is giving them up, for sure.”

Full circle

Roughly 1,000 divers have visited the Andrea Doria. Richard became only the 43rd and Mallon the 44th woman to make the descent. The lost ship has been dubbed “the greatest shipwreck killer in maritime history.” Its many dangers – including strong currents, depth, and fishing line that now drapes the hull – have claimed the lives of 15 divers.

The fact that three Dive N’ Surf divers successfully visited the shipwreck thrilled company co-founder and pioneering underwater explorer Bob Meistrell.

“These guys are carrying on the tradition,” said Meistrell, who has visited dozens of the ocean’s deepwater wrecks and last year dove 162 ft. to celebrate his 81st birthday. “That’s pretty neat. It’s pretty exciting they went back and dove on that – that’s unbelievable.”

Meistrell, his brother Bill, and diver Bev Morgan revolutionized diving with the development of the “Body Glove”  neoprene wetsuit in 1953. They were also among greatest divers in the world at that time. In July of 1956, weeks after the sinking of the Andrea Doria, they were asked to be the first professional dive team to visit the wreckage.

Meistrell said they turned it down because they had another job at the time.

“Bev and Bill and I were going to go back there and dive it when it first went down but we had a chance to make some money so we didn’t,” he recalled.

They did, however, make suits for the team that accepted the Andrea Doria job, which included LA County lifeguard Ramsey Parks and Earl Murray from the Scripps Institute.

“We built their suits and set up their regulators so they could breathe real easy at that depth,” Meistrell said.

Gini said all divers today stand on the shoulders of the Meistrells and Bev Morgan.

“It’s their efforts that are now letting us do these things, with technology taking it further and further,” Gini said. “Those guys are the real pioneers.”

Gini said that it is no coincidence that this area continues to produce so many skilled divers, both because of the tradition established by the Meistrell twins and Bev Morgan and because the nearby waters are among the best places in the world to learn. The Redondo canyon, he noted, comes up nearly to the beach below Veteran’s Park, allowing quick access to deep waters for local divers. Over his two decades of diving here and off the Channel Islands, he has explored kelp forests, underwater caverns, and many nearby shipwrecks, including the Palawan and the Sacramento just off Torrance Beach. That said, Gini described diving the Andrea Doria as the highlight of his diving career.

“It’s the logistics, the planning, the mental and physical preparation,” he said. “It really is pursuing something to a fairly high level, and it’s a fairly small group of people who do it. It’s just exciting to be a part of that, and it’s a real challenge…It’s just one of those pinnacle dives you always hope you are going to make some day.”

Richard, who has been diving for 14 years, said the experience was so profound she found it difficult to talk about in the days after returning.

“I think you get a unique connection with that specific dive, and I think for each of us it turned out differently than  expected,” she said. “It turned out to be a kind of achievement I found I didn’t want to talk about when I came back. It was a very personal achievement. You also realize if you dove that ship the rest of your life you could never see all of it.”

Mallon, who has been diving six years, took a piece of her own personal history to the dive – she wore the dog tags of her father, John Mallon, a British WWII veteran and fire officer who was also a diver.

“He trained all his men to use equipment and do this kind of diving,” Mallon said. “He was pleased to talk hours and hours about tanks and pressure. So it was kind of nice…I really felt I was taking him with me.”

Gini said that the sense of witnessing history lingered with him afterwards. The only word to describe it, Richard said, was awe. She said that the team completed another dive two days prior to the Andrea Doria in which they visited a sunken German U-boat. One of the divers recovered a piece of fully intact stationary that read “Nazi Reich” across the top of the page. Richard glimpsed a human femur bone aboard the submarine.

“It was kind of chilling,” she said. “It was definitely an underwater grave…There are different feelings to different shipwrecks, depending on what the circumstances were when they went down, whether they were sunk on purpose or somebody did something silly and there was a tragedy. Most of the people on the Andrea Doria were saved because they sank rather slowly, I think 40 or 50 people died. But the big thing you think is the ship didn’t need to sink.”

This is a feeling that divers have felt since the very first dives to the Andrea Doria. In 1956, only weeks after its sinking, the ship’s still opulent appearance jarred divers – it looked so utterly intact, the hole on its hull hidden on its underside on the ocean bottom, that it seemed wholly out of place on the ocean floor.

“Their exploration ended, the divers’ minds stay with the abandoned ship,” wrote Life magazine of that first dive. “They are obsessed with her dismal loneliness and her unexplored mysteries. ‘You come up,’ said one, ‘and you’re glad to be up, and safe. But you can’t get her out of your mind. You want to go back down right away, and stay longer, and see everything.’”

Mallon expressed a similar sentiment.

“I think I speak for all of us – we have to go back,” she said. “We have to see more of this amazing wreck. I thought I’d put it in my logbook I’ve done the Andrea Doria. But I have to go back.”

The dive team will give a presentation on their Andrea Doria expedition on July 21 at Lou-E-Louey’s banquet hall on the International Boardwalk. Admission is $11 in includes a taco bar buffet. Check-in begins at 6:15 p.m. and the presentations begin at 7:15 p.m.

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