This may be a bit long, but there is a lot of background to cover.
"One thing that leaped out at me was the reference to the exploits of some "cutting edge warm-water divers" influencing some of U-who team to switch to trimix. I wonder if this reference had anything to do with the WKPP guys, who iirc had been doing some long dives at almost exactly the same 230-250ft cave dives around then. I'm sure there must have been many others using trimix around then as well, but that caught my attention."
That would be Billy Deans from Key West, he was before the WKPP or at least he was talking about it before George was starting his "stroke" rants. The guy who really started to get the information out to all the divers was Mike Menduna and his Aqua Corps magazine. Hell, some even say that Mike was the one who came up with the term "Technical Diving."
The U-869 dives were in the early 90s and at that time almost all dives were on air going down to 250 feet with 100% O2 at 20 and 10 foot stops on rare occasions, we just did not have mixed gas and we barely had NITROX. The major dive magazine at the time SKIN DIVER was putting out editorials about how NITROX would kill divers and should be made illegal. In my own history, I got my NITROX cert through IANTD in September of 1993, my number is 6247, check out your number and tell me what they are up to after 14 years.
For some others:
Gasses: Mix, we had some but it was all voodoo in that we had no good tables and no mix computers at all. What a few did was dive a 21/25 mix with 100% O2 for DECO and use air tables. It works most of the time, for some, maybe, or maybe not. But you had to mix your own as no dive shop had it anywhere in the Northeast. There was just no professional support for mix and no agency sponsored insurance coverage for the shops.
Equipment: We had mostly normal sport diver stuff. Jacket BC's replaced the horse collar ones in the early 80s and Dive Rite came out with the "classic" wings in the late 80s or about 1990. We all had harnesses that we bought from Miller diving or made ourselves to put the D-rings on. Then we put on the jacket BC over the harness, that is of course if you were diving a wet suit as we did not use a BC with a dry suit, no need just add air to the suit as required. Deep regulators were almost all Poseidon's. Computers were the EDGE which looked and weighed about the same as a blue brick. For computers, US Divers had the MONITOR and SUNTO had a few out by the early 90s, but they were all air computers. I think Dive Rite had one of the first NITROX computers by 1995 or so but it may have been a few years later
Teams: The North East guys tend to be much more solo as what we were doing was artifact collection. When you do that or start digging you can forget about any team interaction, you are in a silt out and had to be prepared for it.
But, did anyone miss the part in Shadow Divers where the Atlantic Wreck Divers are described? They were, and still are, a TEAM. They didn't do all of the drills that some do today, but a tighter team underwater I don't think you will ever see. I have dove with them a number of times and if they were working on a project, each one had specific tasks and responsibilities that were all worked out prior to ever getting onto the boat. If they need to, they designed tools and practiced working with them, if a tight area need to be accessed, well one guy would strip Pink Man's tanks off of him and he would go into the hole with a takn on a long hose, get handed the tools, do the job, get pulled out and be dressed back into his gear with no loss of time. They were efficient in just about everything they wanted to do be it getting a porthole, drinking a lot of beer, or making asses of themselves.
Training: The training that people talk about today has been derived from these earler dives and practices. The cavers have been a very, very, large part of that as they have at least 3 advantages over wreckers 1) the ability to dive year round 2) They dive more often (I'd love to be able to park within 100 yards of a wreck and walk to it) 3) a relatively more controlled environment (not necessarily a less hostile one, big difference so don't flame me) to work things out in.
What is missing in the new training is the human price of the close calls that we all had and that we learned from. All you see is the rules and perhaps a short discussion of them. Your classes and lessons were paid for in FEAR. Until you see a diver at 4 to 6 hours after a real close call or when they realize that they are "The Survivor" and their best friend is not; when you see the shock start to hit hard when it sinks in that his buddy and friend is not coming back; when you see them kind of roll up into a ball and you have to hug them to pull them through; only then will you know what it took to get where we are today.
Pete Johnson
