DIVE SLATE 16 REMEMBERING THE ANDREA DORIA | 20 CASHES LEDGE | 23 SHOOTING THE CLICK EFFECT | 26 DAN MEMBER PROFILE | 28 PUBLIC SAFETY ANNOUNCEMENT, EDUCATION SPOTLIGHT | 29 TRAVEL SMARTER REMEMBERING THE ANDREA DORIA n June 2016, the ocean exploration company OceanGate conducted three nearly four-hour submersible dives and multiple sonar scans of the SS Andrea Doria — arguably the world’s most iconic shipwreck — in commemoration of the 60 th anniversary of its sinking. The expedition was cut short because of high seas and the dense fog common at the site, which lies 110 nautical miles east of Montauk, N.Y., and 45 miles south of Nantucket, Mass. The company’s findings were consistent with reports of divers familiar with the wreck: The “Grand Dame of the Sea” is rapidly deteriorating. “In the old days she was largely intact. You could go inside and recover artifacts,” explained Gary Gentile, who has made 200 dives to the wreck and written two books about the 700-foot Italian luxury liner that sank on July 26, 1956, after colliding with the MS Stockholm . “Today every place I explored inside the wreck no longer exists. The insides are gone — collapsed.” What remain are the wreck’s storied past and the fact that the improbable loss of the Doria , which has subsequently claimed the lives of 17 scuba divers, irrevocably changed the nature of wreck diving. It was prescient that the first divers on the wreck — investment-banker-turned-explorer-and-filmmaker Peter Gimbel and editor Joseph Fox — were amateur scuba divers. The two plunged 160 feet through the dark, frigid, oily water using primitive scuba gear to get the first underwater pictures of the Doria for Life magazine. Gimbel, 28, had negotiated the assignment two days earlier by phone as the sinking steamer was being evacuated. Over the next 25 years, the Doria was visited infrequently. Gimbel led five expeditions, recovered the purser’s safe in 1981 using commercial diving equipment and produced two documentaries and 16 | SUMMER 2016 I By Michael Menduno a TV show. There was a French filming expedition and an Italian expedition with cinematographer Al Giddings, who compared diving the Doria to climbing Mount Everest, leading to the wreck becoming known as the “Mount Everest of diving.” There were also several unsuccessful salvage operations that used saturation diving systems. BRAVING MOUNT EVEREST It was only a matter of time before the first wreck divers ventured out to test their mettle on the famous, art-laden shipwreck. In 1966 Michael deCamp, considered the father of Northeast wreck diving, chartered a fishing boat and ran the first of two trips. The following year on deCamp’s second trip, Evelyn Bartram Dudas became the first woman to dive the Doria . But it wasn’t until the early 1980s, with the introduction of a reliable, diver-friendly means of getting to the wreck, that Doria diving became accessible. “We changed the dynamics,” said Capt. Steve Bielenda, who built the 55-foot RV Wahoo (which could sleep 26 and had a galley) for that purpose. “I wanted a dive boat that could run offshore and stay for a couple of days.” Wahoo , along with Seeker and Sea Hunter , began running up to three trips each season. Diving the Doria on air was a perilous proposition. Not everyone could tolerate the debilitating narcosis at the 160-to 250-foot depths, which was compounded by the cold, murky North Atlantic and disorienting interior of the wreck, which lies on its starboard side. In addition, there was the risk of oxygen (O 2 ) seizures, and air decompression was unreliable — divers routinely got decompression sickness (or “the bends”). Conditions offshore are also volatile, which necessitates limiting dive profiles to two hours or less.
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