Fatal Depth

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Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Joe Haberstroh's book, Fatal Depth, which chronicles the death of three elite divers attempting to explore the Andrea Doria on the bottom of Atlantic during the summers of 1998 and 1999. A riveting book...

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A week after the death of Chris Murley, the Seeker was back on top of the Andrea Doria wreck site. Besides Dan and Jenn Samulski, the crew once again included Gary Gentile and Steve Nagiewicz. Also on the crew was Pete Wohlleben, a plumbing contractor who did a lot of work on the Seeker engines, and Charlie McGurr.

Charlie's trip was a birthday present to himself. He turned fifty-two on July 27, four days after he drove north to New York, then east across Long Island and to Montauk. Like Dan and Jenn, he lived in Brick, and he and Dan had become good friends in the previous few years. He worked at Brick Auto Body, and he and his wife, Kathy, ran the 18th Avenue Beach House, a sports bar in South Belmar. He had been diving for six years, and he relished bringing up clams and mussels to serve at the bar.

At Brick Auto Body, McGurr was the one who took on most of what they called the "hard hits," the cars most heavily damaged. Even if other guys took the jobs, Charlie was asked his opinion. Charlie was just the sort of guy Dan liked to be around. He didn't sit around and watch TV. He wasn't a Manhattan office worker who had taken up extreme sports in his thirties. Charlie had long competed in skydiving competitions. He was a former Army Green Beret, but you would never know it. He didn't tell many war stories.

"Hanging on to the anchor line with a five-mile-an-hour current can be like trying to stand still in ocean surf."

Charlie had dived the Andrea Doria the previous summer and had even come away with a plate that said ITALIA on it. He told people the plate was his most cherished possession. Despite that dive, however, Charlie had not been diving with much regularity. He did not have the Trimix certification when he'd dived on the wreck the previous summer; he was one of the Seeker family, and had been one of Dan's exceptions to the rules. He and Kathy had been running hard to make the bar successful, and he still had the job at the auto body shop. He had earned his last C card, for another kind of mixed-gas diving, in 1997. Dan had been the instructor, holding the classes in a den behind his garage.

The Friday night before the trip, Charlie stopped by the bar, packed a couple of coolers full of ice for the trip, kissed Kathy good-bye, and hit the road for Montauk.

That summer, Dan wanted Charlie to get the Trimix certifi- cation before he went to the Andrea Doria for his birthday.With Gary Gentile's help, Dan helped Charlie log the necessary dives, and Charlie got the C card on July 2.

The morning of July 27, before 9 A.M., he and Gentile made the tie-in dives, when the Seeker hooked into the wreck. Right away they noticed that the current was strong.When they surfaced, they could hear it sizzling as it eddied around the anchor line where it went into the water.

Eight customers were aboard for the charter, and Dan spoke to them all about the current.The divers needed to be ready for the water's speed. It would affect them the most when they prepared to swim from the boat to the anchor line and when they began to work their way down the anchor line. People needed to keep in mind that every action would require more physical effort.That, in turn, could mean they would inhale more from their tanks. It was a day to keep a close eye on the pressure gauges.

Divers become acutely aware of a strong ocean current during their decompression stops: Hanging on to the anchor line with a five-mile-an-hour current can be like trying to stand still in ocean surf. The danger is that divers blown off the anchor line could ascend too rapidly and be carried away, beyond help. Under just such circumstances, divers' bodies have been found miles from their boats.

To make sure they did not separate from the anchor line, many divers attached themselves to it with short pieces of rope. Clipped in this way, they were underwater kites, popped off the line a few feet, but safely tethered.

The night of July 27, Charlie spent some time patching his dry suit where a pinhole leak had developed.The others aboard presented him with a cupcake blazing with candles and serenaded him with "Happy Birthday."