Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [20]
The only other close call on Saratoga comes years later, on a dive with Fabio Amaral, as we probe a passageway inside the wreck during a Discovery Channel filming expedition. Dropping down Saratoga’s small bomb elevator, we make our way to a hatch that we are able to squeeze through, into a long corridor running off into the darkness. Fabio has been here before and laid down a line to guide us back should the silt stir up. We follow the line to deep inside Saratoga. More than halfway down, we stop in alarm at the sound of a loud bang behind us. When I look back, my lights pick up a wall of silt racing towards us. Fabio and I grab each other by the shoulder and go mask to mask as the silt washes over us, blacking out the corridor. The powerful glow of our lights is useless in the turbid, muddy water. Holding my light up to my face, I can just make out Fabio’s eyes, wide open and doubtless a mirror of my own fear. Dive training takes over, though, and we grope for the line. Slowly tracing it with our fingers, we move back until we reach a mass of fallen rusty steel. The deck above us has collapsed, burying the line and probably trapping us inside the sunken ship.
Then we both get an inspiration. The deck above us has fallen down, but that means another corridor has opened up. We slowly rise up out of the cloudy silt and find ourselves in a murky but clearer passageway. Following it, we come up to a sealed hatch that must lead into the bomb elevator. Straining against rusty hinges, we push it open to find ourselves floating above a mess of bombs at the bottom of the elevator. After a “thumbs up” sign, we swim straight up and out, breathing a sigh of relief.
Larry Murphy approaching the wreck of the Japanese warship Nagato at Bikini Atoll. Dan Lenihan, National Park Service
The thrills of a close escape, however, do not compare with the emotional impact of looking at these historic ships and the dramatic damage wrought by the atomic bomb. Saratoga has a huge dent in the flight deck caused by the falling column of water and silt thrown out of the lagoon by the bomb. It’s just one dent, but it’s a big one: 230 feet long, 70 feet wide and 20 feet deep. It looks like Godzilla stomped on the flight deck. The battleship Arkansas, a quarter mile away, is in even worse shape. The armored hull is upside down, warped and smashed nearly flat. A hundred feet of superstructure, masts and turrets lie buried in the coral sand, with only several feet of clearance between the main deck and the seabed. The force of the blast flipped and smashed Arkansas, then hammered her down with such violence that she is nearly one with the bottom of the lagoon. The attack transport Gilliam is something else altogether. Caught in an atomic fireball and swept by extreme temperatures equal to those on the surface of the sun, the ship has partially melted. It looks like a child’s plastic toy left out on a hot sidewalk, thick steel drooping and deformed. A bulldozer from the ship’s deck, tossed off by the blast, lies nearby with its thick blade twisted into an “S” by the heat.
On our first dive on the massive Japanese battleship Nagato, Lenihan, Nordby, Murphy, Livingston and I realize that we’re the first to visit her since the 1940s. We swim around the stern, past the huge bronze propellers that are surrounded by a swarm of sharks. Dan Lenihan and I drop down to the seabed and slip under the overhang of the stern to make our way in the gloom towards the barrels of the aft gun turret. As we hover in front of the gun muzzles, we both think of our dives at Pearl Harbor. Japanese ordnance experts modified some of the 16-inch shells from Nagato