New Jersey Scuba Diving

Prologue

reprinted from Where Divers Dare by Randal Peffer

July 22, 2012

A black night on the North Atlantic. Joe Mazraani's eyes feel like they're popping out of his skull as he sits in the steering seat on the dive boat Tenacious. The vessel is lumbering westward at 10 knots, giving off the sour scent of diesel exhaust. It's only about 2240 hours, at night, but it feels like long past midnight. Mazraani squints to see beyond the glow of the chart plotter, the depth sounder screen, the radar, and the compass. More than a few people have noted that when he's at the helm of his dive boat, he puts them in mind of George Clooney in The Perfect Storm.

He has been peering into the gloom for hours, days. Years, if he has to admit the truth about the depth of his obsession for this hunt. He knows that it's not rational, but at some point tonight he has started to imagine flailing, beckoning arms, the flashes of white life vests among the dark waves. Then German cries of "Helfen sie mir." Help me.

He wonders if he's alone with these ghosts. Or are the other men on Tenacious haunted, too? But, of course, they are. Why would they be out here on such a night so far from land if they were not spellbound, caught in the thrall of the dead, the dying, and the mysteries that surround them? Possibly divers Brad Sheard, Eric Takakjian, and Anthony Tedeschi, sleeping in their forecastle berths, are dreaming of the naval battle that took place here, near the edge of the continental shelf, 70 miles south of Nantucket Island on April 16, 1944. It was a day when the Battle of the Atlantic exploded in chaos on America's doorstep.

Maybe sonar operator Garry Kozak, curled on the berth behind the steering station on a short break, is picturing the morning when a torpedo from U-550 split open the side of the tanker SS Pan Pennsylvania on this patch of ocean. Maybe as he snores softly, Kozak's seeing the Pan Penn list suddenly 30 degrees to port. Or perhaps he's seeing twenty-five American men from the tanker scrambling into a lifeboat, then seeing the ship capsize.

Maybe divers Steve Gatto and Tom Packer are sharing the same nightmare as they sit side by side on a bench seat, snacking on peanuts and gazing into the sonar monitor on the galley table in front of them. Gatto and Packer have been deep wreck diving buddies for so long, they sometimes feel uncertain where one man's mind leaves off and the other's picks up.

Maybe together they are lost in the moments when depth charges from the destroyer escort USS Joyce drive the German sea wolf to the surface. Perhaps they are witnessing the withering attack from three destroyer escorts, hearing the pock-pock-pock of 20mm cannons firing as the Americans' shells turn U-550's conning tower into Swiss cheese. Or possibly they are wondering what it must have been like to be one of those German boys who abandoned his sub for the water as the U-boat was sinking. The Americans rescued only thirteen men. That water's so cold. Nobody knows better than divers such as Gatto and Packer how frigid and unforgiving the North Atlantic can be. They've witnessed too many men die in these waters for real, not just in a nightmare hijacked from 1944.

Joe Mazraani hears a groan. It's Pirate, his Portuguese water dog sleeping at his feet. Mazraani shivers a little. But it's not Pirate's groan or the chill of the night air that rattles him. It's this place and its phantoms. If you ask him, he'd tell you that you don't want to ever come to a watery graveyard like this without a serious band of brothers. You don't want to be hunting for a lost U-boat far at sea with bad weather coming without the best of shipmates. You sure as hell don't want to be thinking of diving 300 feet down in black waters unless you have someone you really trust to watch your back.

Ashore he works as a criminal defense attorney in New Jersey, but out here he's the captain of Tenacious. Like all of his shipmates tonight, he's not just a man starting to face off with ghosts. He's a man on a mission. They all are.

This trip marks their second summer of active searching and the pressure's building. While Mazraani's team has been hunting for U-550 in absolute secrecy, another team, led by a respected New England wreck diver, has been publicizing its own search for the 550 with YouTube videos. A recent one shows the New England team laying a wreath on the water over the wreck of the tanker blown apart by the U-boat. And rumor has it that yet another team is also trying to mount a search for U-550. Bottom line: if the Tenacious divers don't find the 550 on this trip, someone else will probably beat them to the long-lost submarine.

Not even treasure is more compelling to these divers than being the first humans on a wreck. And treasure, of a sort, is definitely important to wreck divers. They bring back artifacts all the time, spend tens of thousands of dollars to restore them and display them at their homes and at museums and dive shows. If this wreck were a commercial ship like the liner Andrea Doria, salvaging artifacts from the wreck would be fair game. The U-550 discovery divers have plates, glasses, silverware, and bronze nautical hardware from dives on the Doria. Wreck divers see their artifact collections as preserving history, and at times they share their collections with museums. Tom Packer was one of the divers who helped to salvage a bell off the Doria back in 1985. Gatto has a helm, a steering wheel, from the liner. He, Packer, and diver John Moyer have filed legal papers in court, which makes them Salvors in Possession of the wreck.

But divers cannot own a warship such as U-550. Maritime law unequivocally states that the wreck of a warship forever belongs to the country it served. It's a way of honoring and preserving war graves. The divers aboard Tenacious respect that. Instead of harvesting artifacts from the sub, they want to find 550 to get as close as they can to a moment when the Battle of the Atlantic flared right off US shores.

U-550 is the last unfound German U-boat known to have sunk in diveable waters off America's East Coast. For divers Eric Takakjian and Brad Sheard, the hunt to unravel the mysteries of this submarine goes back twenty years. For others, such as Gatto and Packer, men in their fifties, this dive expedition is another chance to bond with some of the few men who really understand them. They are divers whose names rise from the pages of Shadow Divers as some of the most seasoned deep wreck divers in the Northeast.

All of these guys feel the lure of unearthing history. They crave the opportunity to bear witness to the buried time capsule that is a previously undiscovered wreck. They seek the challenge of the search above and below the water, the planning for both the hunt and the deep, dangerous dive. They love the anticipation of a long and sometimes rough boat ride, crossing the water to the middle of nowhere. They thrill to the interface with sea creatures such as lobsters, immense codfish, sea turtles, rays, dolphins, whales, and white sharks. They relish plunging to places few humans see and fewer return from. Finally, they cherish the chance to resurface in the world of the living again with an artifact such as a bell or a porthole that says, "I have been to the underworld, the land of the dead. I have come back to tell you all." Strong drugs.

And, while Packer rarely puts his motives into words, he's here to watch out for his dive buddies, especially the totally pumped younger men whose enthusiasm for their sport can drive them to take terrible risks. Packer knows how easy it is to get lost inside a wreck or trapped by debris. Diving gear has gotten so much better since he, Gatto, Sheard, and Takakjian started diving more than three decades ago, but equipment is never fail-safe. And when you are going as deep as 300 feet, you probably can't make it to the surface and live if you run short of air down there. Every man on Tenacious has his own personal collection of almost-died stories. All of them have known men who have died diving wrecks. Several of them have led the way to recover dead divers from the dark corridors of a shadowy ghost ship.

But for thirty-four-year-old Mazraani, and the even younger Tedeschi, danger beckons. Finding and diving the U-550 is the ultimate adventure, one seductive enough to prompt Mazraani to buy his own dive boat to chase the dream. It's a fantasy so alluring that the young attorney has hired Kozak to use his high-tech sonar "fish" to scan the inky water for a lost phantom.

And right now it looks like Kozak's fish has a problem.

"What the hell?" Packer's voice brings Mazraani back to the present.

"Huh?"

"The monitor just freaking froze," says Gatto.

Somebody wakes Kozak.

"Hold your course," he says groggily, "until I can fix this thing."

For the past fifteen hours the expedition team aboard Tenacious has been towing their sonar fish, a 6-foot-long, torpedo-shaped echo sounder on a wire, 440 yards behind the boat, 250 feet below the surface of the Atlantic. The dive boat has been steaming back and forth across an 84-square-mile grid where the divers think U-550 lies.

This kind of searching is what deep-sea hunters call "mowing the lawn." It's mind-numbingly boring, and yet it demands total attention to every little detail observed by the sonar fish if you want any hope of finding your needle in the haystack. In this case, the needle is the wreck of a U-boat sent by Hitler to prey on American merchant shipping sixty-eight years ago. A predator sunk by Coast Guard and Navy sailors. The alleged grave of more than forty men.

"You want me to turn around for the next pass to the east?" asks Mazraani.

"No. Just keep going," says Kozak. Tenacious moves beyond the perimeter of the search grid.

Mazraani nods, reminds himself to focus, stick with the program.

It's only a minute or so before the sonar monitor's online again. Mazraani's thinking about turning his boat back to the search grid when one of the guys at the monitor says, "Holy shit. We're going over something."

Instinctively, Mazraani hits the key on the laptop that is his GPS chart plotter to mark the position.

Gatto, Packer, and Kozak are watching a strange bottom anomaly coming into view on the side scan, a mysterious blip. It looks too large to be a submarine, but who knows?

"This could be big," someone's voice cracks. "Wake the others."

It's 2245 hours, July 22, 2012, and maybe these deep wreck hunters have just found their holy grail. But nobody's going down there to see. Not now. Even on the sonar monitor, the ocean looks dark as all hell.

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The entire story, from the sinking of the Pan Pennsylvania to the discovery of the U-550, and the true final moments of the sub, is covered in this excellent book. I dove with Joe way back when we were both just starting out - two brand-new drysuits on Captain Mick Trzaska's boat CRT.