On the morning of the twenty-eighth, Charlie and fellow crew member Wohlleben prepared to escort Seeker customer Darryl Johnson down to the wreck. They planned to go to 210 feet on the dive. Johnson,Wohlleben and Charlie splashed into the water at 8:59, 9:00, and 9:01 respectively, and soon they were moving down the anchor line like beads of dew sliding down a spider's thread. Wohlleben led, followed by Johnson, and Charlie brought up the rear.

At forty feet down, they began to encounter other divers who had gone into the water earlier, but who were now on their way back up. They were hanging on the line, pausing at came upon Alston Trent and Jackie Smith.Wary of the current, Wohlleben and Johnson picked their way over first Trent then Smith, taking care to never lose contact with the anchor line. Charlie decided to pass Trent and Smith at the same time.He had passed Trent and was moving past Smith when, as the two decompressing divers watched, he lost his grip. His black-gloved hand stretched for the anchor line throbbing in the current.

But in a breath he was several feet away from the line, as if someone had hog-tied his ankles and yanked hard. Charlie pumped his fins furiously. His opened hand slowly moved toward the anchor line. More hard swimming.

"Charlie was due out of the water at just past 10:30, so Dan had no choice but to begin an intensive search..."

A few more seconds. Fins snapping up and down. Then, he had the line. He hugged it hard. He hung there for a few breaths.

Then he was on his way. He intended to catch up with Wohlleben. He wasn't sure he wanted to continue the dive. At about seventy feet down, his form disappeared from Smith's view. Charlie caught up with his two dive buddies, but at about 150 feet down--20 feet or so above the reef-like hull of the Andrea Doria--he signaled to Wohlleben.

He raised a thumb in the air. He was aborting his dive and going back up. Then, the OK sign. He was fine.

That morning, visibility on the Doria was superb--about eighty feet. Wohlleben had no problem seeing Charlie's hand motions. He figured Charlie was tired. He and Johnson proceeded with their dive.

Charlie had not indicated that anything was wrong, so no reason existed for Wohlleben to break off his dive to see if he could assist. Charlie had a reputation for caution underwater. Even if he had signaled he had a problem, no particular expectation held that another diver would come to his aid. It depended completely on the circumstances of the moment. In Charlie's case, other Seeker divers had seen him previously abort dives. It was the smart thing to do if you were not sure. Maybe the dry suit leak had reopened. The prudent approach was to cut the dive short, surface, try again later.

After his exploration of the shipwreck, Darryl Johnson began his decompression stops. Although Charlie would have been twenty minutes ahead of him, and visibility on the line was only about thirty feet--murkier than on the wreck--he thought he might see Charlie hanging on the line above him, on his way back up. He never did. As soon as he got back on the Seeker, at 10:18, he asked about Charlie.

No on else had seen him, either.

Pete Wohlleben was also surprised that he had not seen Charlie as he ascended on his decompression. He asked about it as soon as he surfaced, at 10:25.

Dan immediately became concerned. At Dan's request, Wohlleben went back down the anchor line to do a head count. No Charlie. Charlie was due out of the water at just past 10:30, so Dan had no choice but to begin an intensive search for his friend. Dan put Wohlleben and Steve Nagiewicz in the Seeker's inflatable Zodiac to look for Charlie on the surface. They took the little boat as far as two miles downcurrent from the Seeker. A customer, Joe King, climbed to the pilothouse and scanned the waters with binoculars. Dan called the Coast Guard at 10:55.

Within minutes, a search helicopter lifted off from the air station on Cape Cod, forty-five miles to the north.

Diver Michael Carpenter surfaced just past 11, and Dan had many questions about what he had seen. But Carpenter explained that he had felt winded when he hit the Doria's hull and had begun an immediate ascent. He never poked around the ship. He hadn't seen a thing.

The Coast Guard at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, decided now to issue an "Urgent Marine Information Broadcast." It crackled over the Seeker's marine-band radio. "The Coast Guard received a report of an overdue diver in Position 40-29.39 North, 069-51.49 West at the site of the sunken vessel Andrea Doria. Mariners are requested to keep a sharp lookout."

With Charlie now ninety minutes overdue, some on the Seeker began to accept what to them seemed unavoidable. For a while, with denial the best alternative to the sad reality, some of the divers clung to the hope that Charlie was struggling through a "floating decompression," in which divers ascend by increments without the use of an anchor line. It took a good diver to pull that off. Charlie McGurr was not deeply experienced in these particular waters, but he seemed like the kind of man who could bull through that situation, even with the weather deteriorating at midday. For an hour or so, hope partially eclipsed despair.

Carpenter's dive buddy, Michael Kane, emerged from the water at just past noon. After Carpenter had aborted his dive, Kane had stayed. He had entered the ship at Gimbel's Hole and, outside the hull, had swum to depths of 230 feet. He had seen much of the wreck. Quickly debriefed, he gave the answer no one wanted. He said he had not seen Charlie.

By 12:30, the Coast Guard helicopter was above the Seeker, looking for Charlie. Ten minutes later, Dan entered the water with one of the charter's customers. J. T. Barker was a dive instructor from Portsmouth,Virginia (he called himself "Captain J.T." there), and Dan decided to take him to a part of the wreck site Barker had never seen. They would check the debris field. This was the sprawling area next to the ship where the Doria's funnel had thudded into the sand forty-three years earlier, and where sawed-off stanchions and cargo booms held fishing nets, which cascaded like bridal veils from above. The debris field is 230 feet down, and Barker labored to keep up with Dan, who'd combed this area dozens of times and had a sense of where a body might fall and become wedged.

Visibility had worsened since divers were in the water earlier. At 230 feet, Dan and Barker could see 10 feet in front of them. They were like catfish, pecking along the bottom. They saw nothing, however, and began to ascend, past the hanging nets, toward the ship's port hull, into which the Seeker was anchored.