Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [19]
Lying on the deck is a rack of 500-pound bombs. Wedged beneath their noses is a smaller depth bomb. I suck in a little more air and, inflating my lungs, float just a little higher to avoid going near them. The deck below me is covered with silt, and I try not to stir it up. In the distance, I notice that Dan and Murphy’s lights have stopped moving. As I swim up, I see why. They have halted at a plane. Sitting upright on its wheels, wings folded up for storage, is a Helldiver, a dive bomber introduced late in the war. The cockpit is open and the gauges on the pilot’s panel are clearly visible. The plane is ready to roll out onto the
James Delgado and Dan Lenihan drop down to the wreck of USS Saratoga at Bikini Atoll. © Bill Curtsinger
elevator, rise to the flight deck and be readied for combat. If that is not exciting enough, there are two more intact planes in a row behind the Helldiver. Saratoga carried planes on the deck and in the hangar when the atomic blast sank her on July 25, 1946. Since the flight deck above us is largely empty, the survival of these planes in the hangar is something we had not envisioned. Rather, we had figured that being picked up and flung across the water by a nuclear tidal wave had smashed everything inside Saratoga. Not so, and as if to underscore this fact, Dan floats up to a row of unbroken light fixtures.
We move on to a hole punched through the flight deck. Rising up through the hole, we pass scattered equipment lying on the deck and look for the lines dangling from our dive boat. We hang there, above the wreck, decompressing to quiet down the gas in our blood and prevent the bends. We are many miles away from a decompression chamber, so we’re being careful to avoid a dive accident that could cripple or kill us. Bikini is a challenging dive location, to be sure. There are the unexploded bombs, and the fear of residual radiation. And there are the risks of entering rusting hulks that might collapse on us. In addition, the ships are artificial reefs that attract hundreds of potentially aggressive white tip sharks. Then there’s the greatest danger, the depth. The wrecks lie on the bottom of a 180-foot-deep lagoon, with the shallowest depth at Saratoga’s multistory hull as it rises up from the seabed. These are beyond the limits for most divers, particularly when using regular air and not a mixed gas. In 1989–90, our team breathes regular air, all that is available at our remote location, and we decompress with pure oxygen to scrub our blood clear of the nitrogen bubbles that build up on long dives.
Thankfully, no one gets the bends, though we have a few close calls. One dive team member runs out of air and nearly panics until another diver assists with a spare regulator from his tank. A few days later, I carelessly go too far, fascinated by a deck full of test equipment, and turn back dangerously low on air. I make it back to the decompression line with an empty tank and the reminder that as fascinating as wrecks are, you can’t appreciate them when you’re dead.
Fortunately, the bombs turn out to be no danger at all. A Navy team disarms a bomb that looks menacing, and later I learn from the archives that the bombs carried by Saratoga were filled with plaster, not explosives. If marine growth and corrosion had not covered the bombs, we might have seen the stenciled message that I find on the photos of the tests—rows of big bombs marked “INERT.” But the sharks can be aggressive, as we discover when we get too close. They are not “Jaws” size, but they can