Deep Descent by Kevin F. McMurray

Deep Descent by Kevin F. McMurray

Author:Kevin F. McMurray [McMurray, Kevin F.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2002-06-24T16:00:00+00:00


Over the winter Steve Bielenda attended a meeting of the Atlantic Wreck Divers Club, and one of the members reported the Seeker’s success in opening up the third-class area. Chatterton claims someone in the club had seen a copy of the video, from which it was easy to determine the location of the hole.

Richie Kohler was a member of the Atlantic Wreck Divers and was at that meeting. Kohler was a frequent Wahoo customer, as were most of the Long Island-based members of the Atlantic Wreck Divers. Over a few beers Steve Bielenda proposed an “ultrasecret trip” out to the Doria to one-up Nagle and the Seeker.

“The bottom line,” as Kohler described it, “was Bielenda wanted to fuck Bill Nagle, and it was put in those terms. But fortunately there was one member of the club who had more of a conscience than the rest of us, and he contacted Nagle and told him of Bielenda’s secret trip.”

Bielenda says he never set up an “ultra-secret trip,” and that all his trips were advertised in advance. The Wahoo’s skipper claims he found out about the trip from Jon Hulbert, who helped Chatterton lay the grate over the hull just prior to the Wahoo’s trip out there. As for “fucking Nagle,” all Bielenda says he wanted to do was to “enjoy the spoils.”

According to John Chatterton, the top-secret Wahoo charter was tantamount to a “claim jump.” Not to be preempted, the Seeker put together its own secret trip with the intent of beating the Wahoo out to the wreck site. Prior to making their run out to the Doria, Chatterton and his friends constructed a grate that weighed over three hundred pounds of case-hardened steel that could only be removed with a custom wrench.

The Seeker, indeed, got there before the Wahoo. All the divers aboard the Seeker came up with bulging bags of third-class china. When dive operations were complete, the grate was placed over the hole, and Chatterton hung a sign on it that read, Closed for inventory. Please use alternate entrance. The crew of the Seeker.

Chatterton says no attempt was made to block the original entrance he had squeezed into. “If they wanted to dive in there,” he said, “they would have to do it the way I originally did it.”

The china fever was so bad aboard the Wahoo prior to arriving at the Doria site that the divers drew straws for who would be the first to splash in. “We were going to bag up all this stuff up and leave it on the hull,” Kohler recounted, “and every third team would send it up with lift bags so we wouldn’t have to hang with it. We had these visions of hundreds of pounds of dishes. It was insane.”

Richie Kohler remembered how shocked he was to discover the grate over the hole. He pounded on the lock with his hammer, “really freaking out,” in his words, screaming in his mouthpiece, “Those motherfuckers!”

Pete Manchee, a former commercial diver from South



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