Crucible, Part II: The Technical Diving Revolution

In the previous issue (#141), part one ended thus:

Hamilton received criticism in some quarters for working with divers outside “professional” circles. He was unperturbed. His conscience was clear. He would always begin by trying to talk divers out of their riskier projects (like Exley’s), but would do his best to help them if he assessed that, if he said no, they would do the dives anyway and possibly get hurt. Eventually, word of what Hamilton could do reached beyond the cave diving community. (And here, the story continues, in part two...)

Billy Deans, Hamilton: Key West, Florida

Captain Billy Deans started teaching diving in Key West in 1977. He supplemented his income by underwater hunting, and he and his best friend, John Ormsby, started diving deeper because that is where the big tuna would be hanging out, especially around the wreck of USS Wilkes Barre, a decommissioned WWII vintage light cruiser sunk during underwater explosives tests in 1972 and now lying in two sections on the seabed at 76m (250ft). Exhausted after deep air dives, followed by long air decompressions, Deans looked for a solution.

He found one in the US Navy diving manual, which discussed using oxygen instead of air for shallow decompression stops. Following the manual recommendations closely, he and Ormsby found that this worked to reduce their fatigue.

Next, they started developing procedures for deep dives, which involved setting up a decompression station linked to the descent line, with regulators on long hoses from the dive boat supplying oxygen for divers at their 6m (20ft) and 3m (10ft) decompression stops. Safety divers would be positioned in the shallows and tasked with watching over the deep dive teams on their ascent.

In 1985, Deans led a group of Florida divers, including Ormsby, to New Jersey to dive the Andrea Doria. They took along with them their innovative in-water oxygen decompression system. It was the first time Deans had dived outside Florida. The trip was a disaster. Ormsby got trapped in cables inside the wreck and drowned. 

Deans was distraught and quit deep diving for a while. When he returned to it, his quest to find better and safer ways to dive deep continued, given additional force by Ormsby’s death.

Via his military connections, Deans heard about mixed-gas diving and learned how effective it was in reducing narcosis and allowing divers to think more clearly and make better decisions at depth. He started thinking about how to incorporate helium-based gas mixtures into his procedures. It wasn’t easy. He had to work out how to pump the gas, mix the gas and how to use it safely once he actually had the gas available.

Then he heard about Dr Bill Hamilton and the magic he could perform with DCAP. He called Hamilton, introduced himself, and said he wanted to commission custom mixed-gas dive tables. Hamilton was sceptical. Deans was just taking customers fun diving and spearfishing. Going deep on mixed gas added risk. Even commercial diving operations, with all their money, manpower and systems, had accidents. Why not just stay shallow and safe? 

Deans was prepared for this pushback. He explained in detail how he was running deep dives at the time, and the steps they had taken over the years to make their procedures as safe as possible. He described using mixed gas instead of air for the deep part of their dives as a natural extension of his efforts to make the deep dives as risk-free as possible. 

Hamilton listened and was impressed. 

“You’ve convinced me. Now, don’t go killing yourself. Show me you can do it as well as the pros.”

Deans showed him. With Hamilton’s tables at the core of the operation, he developed finely detailed, military-precise diver training systems, and his Key West Diver shop became a Mecca for anyone interested in deep diving. 

Over in California, a tech geek with a diving passion was beginning a new career as a journalist. Deans and his operation were exactly what he was looking for. 

He just didn’t know it yet.

Michael Menduno, Hamilton, Deans: Santa Cruz, California

It was 1987 and Michael Menduno’s life was in flux. He was recently divorced, going through a mid-life crisis, and burned out after years in the computer industry. He needed a change of direction. He decided to: a) get back into scuba diving, and b) become a full-time writer.

He volunteered to join Dr Bob Schmieder’s Cordell Expedition in Northern California. The team was a bunch of Bay Area geeks, and Menduno was a perfect fit. They were exploring deep pinnacles in the 45–60m (150–200ft) range, on the edge of the continental shelf, twenty or more miles out to sea, making planned decompression dives on air following US Navy tables. Menduno was well aware that this was rigorous, edge-of-the-envelope stuff, far beyond what most sport divers were doing at the time. He was excited and thought it was worth writing about. Surely everyone in the diving world would be interested in this.

They weren’t.

Menduno pitched his ideas to dive magazines, but they wouldn’t touch him. What he wanted to write about was way too off-trail for their editorial policy. Finally, Ken Loyst of Discover Diving magazine agreed to take a chance on Menduno and commissioned a piece. It is unlikely that he expected an article like the one he eventually received, which had a flavour that was more Rolling Stone than Skin Diver Magazine, made liberal use of both the f-word and the d-word (decompression), and compared narcosis with psychedelic drug use. Nevertheless, he ran it in the Jan/Feb 1989 issue, albeit with a “do not try this at home” banner caveat on each page. 

But he was convinced enough to commission Menduno to write a series on diving technology, and that was that. The computer geek’s scuba journalism career was off and running.

A couple of years later, as technical diving burst onto the scene, Loyst’s Watersports Publishing would capture the zeitgeist with the release of a series of books on diving topics hitherto considered untouchable, such as mixed gas, deep diving, and solo diving.

Armed with his commission from Loyst, Menduno hit the road. His quest to learn what extreme sport divers were doing elsewhere than California took him to Mexico, where he did cavern and cave diver training, and, along the way, he picked up a copy of Bill Stone’s book on the 1987 Wakulla Springs Project. In Menduno’s words, it “absolutely blew my mind!” His first reaction was, “You can do that?”

Stone’s book placed Dr Bill Hamilton squarely on Menduno’s radar screen. By this time, diving’s newest journalist already had a plan in his head for a magazine, the likes of which the sport diving world had never seen—part revolutionary tome, part messianic call, with a style redolent of rock ‘n’ roll and techno-speak. 

He was going to shed light on the divers who were doing all these incredible things in the shadows and create a forum whereby disparate diving communities out in the Badlands of the diving world could discuss what they were doing and learn from each other. The divers, scientists and equipment junkies who were pushing the limits of sport scuba would not only be the subjects of the features. They would also be the authors, the correspondents, the readers and even the advertisers. 

Hamilton wrote the lead article, “Call It High-Tech Diving”, for the first issue of Menduno’s aquaCORPS Magazine (The Independent Journal for Experienced Divers), which came out just in time for the January 1990 DEMA Show in Orlando, Florida. A lot of people walked past Menduno’s stand and picked up a copy. One of the curious passersby was Billy Deans. A few weeks later, he called Menduno and invited him to come over to Key West. He thought Menduno might be interested in what he was doing. 

Deans, Menduno: Key West, Florida

Every artist has one big idea, although they say Picasso had two. Deans’ big idea was how to make deep, mixed-gas ocean dives safely. Once he had Hamilton’s tables in hand, he modified his deep-air and oxygen decompression procedures, devised a standard equipment configuration using standard gas mixtures and developed a team-based training model. The system was the product of years of trial and error; it was repeatable and adaptable. 

It was also rooted in the concept of safety. Every new recruit would be shown the video of the recovery of John Ormsby’s body from the steely-grey waters above the Andrea Doria so that they understood precisely what they were getting into and knew the consequences of making a mistake. Nobody who watched the video could ever forget that. It was a powerful introduction.

As soon as Menduno saw what Deans was doing, he knew he had found his and aquaCORPS’ spiritual home. He was inspired. This was ground zero as far as mixed gas diving was concerned. Deans was at the cutting edge, and he was pushing the frontiers out further and further. This was the place to be. Here, he could soak up the knowledge and meet all the key people in the field. Not only that, but Florida cave country—another of the cradles of this revolution (as Menduno would often call it)—was just a couple of hundred miles up the road. 

Deans invited Menduno to stay at his home, and the second issue of aquaCORPS began life in Deans’ living room. For a while, Menduno would travel back and forth between Key West and Santa Cruz, but, as interest in technical diving started to explode, he knew there was only one place to be, and he did not want to miss a thing. In mid-1991, he rented an apartment in Key West and would stay there for the next four and a half years.

In turn, Deans was excited to have someone around who had made it his mission to get word of extreme sport diving out to a wider audience. Deans saw himself and Menduno as a double act. They were “the pen and the sword”, as he liked to say.

Deans was first and foremost a businessman. He and Ormsby had started deep diving because—as all dive shop owners everywhere in the world quickly discover—just teaching scuba could not pay the bills, and they had to supplement their income by selling the fish they speared. They could earn more money from catching bigger fish, and bigger fish hung out in deeper water, so that is where they went.

Deans hoped his big idea—how to do deep dives safely—could lift him out of the hand-to-mouth existence of a dive shop owner and become big business if more people heard about it via Menduno’s magazine.

Whatever happened, one thing was certain: The elements in the crucible were generating sparks, and ever more people were taking notice. 

What happened next?

Exley phoned Key West Diver to talk to Deans about mixed gas. Menduno, now on staff, picked up the phone. Exley visited and dived the Wilkes Barre with Menduno and Deans on board. The dive boat almost got run down in the open ocean by a cargo vessel while Exley was on deco beneath. Exley saw this episode as vindication of his preference for diving caves rather than shipwrecks. He thought caves were much safer.

Exley ran courses in Florida cave country, teaching Bernie Chowdhury and other northeast wreck divers how to use trimix. He received criticism from others in the cave diving community for doing this, but, taking a leaf out of Hamilton’s book, Exley’s response was along the lines of: They are going to do it anyway, so best to teach them how to do it as safely as possible. Exley assured his students that, as soon as a training agency started issuing trimix diver certificates, he would make sure they each got one. 

Deans joined the Board of Directors at Tom Mount’s IANTD. His Key West Diver training courses and Hamilton’s tables and schedules would all be integral to IANTD’s mixed-gas diver and instructor certification programmes, the first of their kind. 

In 1991, Chowdhury ran the first trimix expedition to the Andrea Doria. The divers conducted extensive penetrations of the wreck, using reels and lines, procedures they had learned in their Florida cave diver training courses. Both Deans—on his first return to the ship since Ormsby’s death—and Menduno were on board for this momentous conjunction of the cave diving, mixed-gas diving and wreck diving worlds. The meeting of minds on board was not always amicable. Some of the seasoned northeast wreck divers on board were suspicious of what were to them new techniques.

Deans stayed on in the northeast to run trimix courses for leading deep divers in the area. The students included writer/deep diver Cathie Cush and explorer and future Deep Sea Detectives TV star John Chatterton. For just $100, attendees bought a golden ticket to the future of sport diving in the form of a theory class plus a loose-leaf binder with photocopied articles and dive tables. 

No certificates were handed out. Like Exley’s students, if they wanted a card, they would have to wait. Nor did the course include any actual trimix dives, as helium fills were hard to come by. Nevertheless, that single “Benjamin” slipped into Deans’ hand would change their lives.

Both Deans’ and Exley’s students got their cards as soon as IANTD started running trimix courses. Deans was instructor #003, and Exley was instructor #005. 

The accelerated decompression tables and gas-switching procedures that Hamilton devised for Exley, Deans and others became widely available and brought deep caves, reef walls and shipwrecks all over the world within reach of sport divers. Thanks to Hamilton, divers now had a much bigger playground to frolic in.

In Houston, in January 1992, Hamilton accepted Menduno’s invitation to chair the nitrox workshop hastily convened following a DEMA nitrox ban, which was subsequently rescinded. The workshop laid the foundations for nitrox to become part of mainstream sport diving. It was partly funded by Richard Nordstrom, CEO of Bill Stone’s Cis-Lunar Development, Ltd. 

Menduno’s aquaCORPS magazine became the mouthpiece and fount of knowledge for technical divers around the world. Over the years, it carried multiple interviews with Exley, Deans, Hamilton and Stone.

After ten years, four versions and costs amounting to more than US$100,000, Stone finally built a machine that he was confident could handle the Huautla cave, get him through the San Agustín sump and help him “place his boot where no one had gone before”. In April/May 1994, he succeeded. With a million-dollar budget, a lot of big-name sponsors and a large team, Stone and teammate and partner Barbara am Ende used Cis-Lunar Mark IV rebreathers to push the exploration of the deepest cave in the Americas beyond all expectations.

And… in the end

By the end of the 1990s, none of the five pioneers was involved in sport diving. Exley was dead, having failed in an attempt to extend his own world depth record. On 6 April 1994, at precisely the same time that Stone was about to venture into a previously unknown section of the Huautla Cave, Exley and his friend Jim Bowden were also in Mexico, descending into a cave called Zacatón, aiming to bottom it out or reach 1,000ft (~305m), whichever came first. Each was diving independently. Bowden ascended safely with a new record of 282m (925ft). Exley passed into legend. He is still regarded as the greatest cave diver of them all.

Stone’s pioneering work generated influential ripples. Wakulla 1987 proved that mixed-gas diving was a reliable technology, and Huautla showed the enormous potential of sport rebreathers. But his brush with scuba diving was never more than incidental. This was not his world. He was primarily a caver and an engineer. His search to reach the bottom of the world continues today, but, in 1999, he broadened his scope, formed Stone Aerospace, and began turning his attention to outer space as well as inner space, building vehicles that could go where humans could not go and do things that humans could not do, not only on this planet, but on other worlds, too. 

By 2000, Hamilton was semi-retired, but still much in demand for chairing conferences, speaking at events, and receiving awards.

Deans had begun nurse training, having quit professional diving following a year in which he lost another friend to the sport and his dive shop was badly damaged by a storm. Nursing provided him with a steady paycheck, a pension and a positive life change.

Menduno shut down aquaCORPS in 1996 after producing a dozen issues of the magazine and a handful of newsletters, all of which have become much sought-after collectors’ items. By the time of the magazine’s demise, mixed-gas diving had become accepted by, and assimilated into, the mainstream diving world. 

It was hard to find funding for a revolution once the revolution was over. ■

Read part one of this two-part series.