SAND DOLLARS
St. Martin's Press
May 1998
a preview: page 2

Charles Knief: Author Interview

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Everything this group wore was new. Brand new. I would not have been surprised to find price tags attached. Tom must have been delighted to have these guys walk into his store. They sported about five thousand dollars' worth of gear.

Their certification cards all were current. Their equipment, right off the rack from Tom's shop, was correctly assembled. They listened to my briefing about the dive. They answered my questions intelligently. I was impressed with their depth of knowledge about diving in general, and about diving in Hawaii in particular.

I knew this would be an easy afternoon.

There were four divemasters aboard, each with three to five divers. The boat wasn't full. We would have room to spread out. I emphasized to my group the necessity of staying with me once we were on the wreck of the Mahi.

For a trained diver, the eight-hundred ton minesweeper is an extraordinarily exciting experience. There are few chances to get into trouble. The water is clear, the current nearly nonexistent, and the fauna is, for the most part, friendly. But because fools are so ingenious that nothing is really foolproof, these few chances can be lethal. At nearly ninety feet, the Mahi is at the lower range of safe sport diving. My computer would tell me when it was time to rise. Failure to follow its calculations could result in a case of the bends, a painful, potentially crippling affliction. Worse, the interior of the hull is enclosed.

Unlike other ships that were sunk as artificial reefs, no large holes have been cut into the hull to allow access to the interior. The Mahi is intact. She has been down a long time and inside she is cold, dark and full of accumulated silt. All her hatches are open. The unlimited visibility outside the ship lures some of the foolish to try the interior. With lights, the undisturbed water is at first crystal clear; it's similar to cave diving. What the uninitiated diver doesn't know is that while he's swimming through the still water inside the hull, his fins are kicking up a curtain of silt behind him, decreasing the visibility to zero. Any ship is a labyrinth of holds and passageways, each with several vertical ladders and horizontal ducts. Without an intimate knowledge of the ship, or without a guide line, a diver could run out of air before finding a way out. If he doesn't run out of air, he faces the danger of exceeding maximum bottom time, risking the bends. Invading old ships is a dangerous business.

I knew the Mahi. I'd been inside her more than thirty times. I knew human nature and understood that at least once, for whatever reason, one of my charges would decide to go exploring.

George, one of the other divemasters had a group of three gung-ho college boys from Southern California, smart-ass know-it-alls who were too busy trying to impress each other to listen to instructions.

Watching them prepare their equipment, I concluded that even though they had certification cards, they didn't know what they were doing. Had they been mine, I would have canceled their tickets, refunded their money, and let them live. Unhappy is better than dead. But George has six children at home and augments his Navy chief's pay with divemaster fees and tips; he probably thought it over too many times and decided they would change their attitudes when they got into the water.

Once on the bottom their cocky, look-Ma-no-hands' attitudes got worse. I watched them as hard as I watched my own group, who followed me like baby ducks follow their mama. The kids refused to follow George and, after a brief tour of the upper decks of the Mahi, produced lights and plunged into the hull.

I turned my charges over to George and went, knowing they would get into trouble.

They did. A black wall of silted water hovered bulkhead to bulkhead, just inside a hatchway, evidence of their incursion.

After tying my guideline onto the ship's ladder and yanking it tight, I crept forward into the silt, feeling blindly along the companionway to one of the ship's holds. I didn't bother with a light.

The first diver found me within the first twenty feet. When I touched him he turned and ripped off my face mask in his panic. I put a head lock on him and dragged him toward the hatch. When we emerged from the silt into clear water he tried to bolt for the surface. I collared him again, this time applying intense and specific pressure against one of his nerve trigger points, an experience so urgently painful it got his full and immediate attention. He stopped struggling and got quiet, the way people do when experiencing great pain, and I released the pressure, still keeping my fingers close to the spot in case he needed reminding. I brought him to another divemaster and signaled that this one had to go up. When I was certain he would do as he was told I put my mask back on, cleared it, and went back in.

The other two were together and it took me a long time to find them. When I did, in relatively clear water at the dead end of a large ventilation duct that branched out into smaller ducts that were impossible for a tanked diver to get into, they weren't as panicky as their friend, probably because they could see, but they were anxious. The cloud of silt lay beyond the last bend in the duct and they had realized their problem and stayed put.

I tied them onto the guideline and had them hang onto my weight belt. We inched slowly into the silt, our only path to the surface the thin guideline. It took some time, longer than it should have taken. Halfway there, or where I believed was halfway there, the computer beeped its alarm, an urgent sound, demanding our immediate departure for the surface. All divers know that sound. The hand on my belt pulled me backward as one of the kids tried to get past. I blocked his path. We struggled briefly and suddenly I was fighting two terrified young men, each trying wildly to move ahead of me in the tight confines of the old duct.