Shadow Divers (2 page)

Soon an idea began percolating in Nagle’s imagination. What if he could run the
Seeker
full-time as a charter boat for divers? That would allow him to earn a living doing what he loved most. “I want to be the guy that turns this into a career,” he told friends. He could make a half dozen trips to the
Doria
every year, then use his free time to search for the
Carolina, Texel, Norness,
and
Pan Pennsylvania—
great ships still missing decades after sinking. His wife and two children lived in Pennsylvania, but he resided in Brielle now; he dated other women and kept a bachelor pad, yet his wife held out hope that he would return someday, and she raised his kids to admire him, so that he could do this now, he could make this business happen. He commissioned a second
Seeker,
this one nearly double the length of the first. It would be outfitted to transport divers to the great wrecks, the ones that required a pioneer’s heart.

Almost immediately, Nagle struggled with the business. It wasn’t that he lacked for customers. It was that he couldn’t abide the customers. This was the wrong problem to have in the charter-boat business. On a dive trip, the captain’s real job is to schmooze his patrons; at the end of the day, what the weekend, bread-and-butter customer really wants is to bond with a man of the sea. Nagle had envisioned his business as an endless series of trips to deep and dangerous wrecks like the
Doria
or the
Choapa.
But his patrons desired only the easy, nearby sites, wrecks like the
Stolt Dagali,
SS
Mohawk,
and the
Tolten.
To Nagle, these people weren’t divers, they were tourists. He watched them climb onto the
Seeker
with their brand-new lime green fins—lime green!—and listened to their giddy plans to take pictures of lobsters or touch the side of a “real” shipwreck, and he could not hide his contempt for them. He had established a business in order to explore, and now he was beholden to customers who were thrilled precisely because they didn’t have to.

And Nagle was drinking. Jim Beam didn’t like the
Seeker
’s customers any more than Nagle did. Before long, Nagle became surly with his clients. Often, he stood outside the wheelhouse atop his boat and rained down commentary on stunned customers. He’d shout, “This isn’t what diving’s about!” or “Look at you greenhorns—go to the Caribbean with those green fins!” or “You dive shop guys got balls selling that garbage equipment to these innocents—you’re crooks!” At the end of a trip, after he’d been drinking for hours, he might say, “Get these fucking cattle off my boat!” Friends and crew pleaded with Nagle: “Bill, for Christ’s sake, you can’t talk that way to paying customers. This is a business!” Nagle didn’t care. This wasn’t what diving was about.

His drinking worsened. During one charter, Nagle unilaterally decided to reroute to a more challenging wreck, a site that had captured his imagination and begged to be explored. The 150-foot depth of the new wreck was beyond the abilities of the divers on board. The man who had chartered the boat was incensed. “What the hell are you doing, Bill? We’re supposed to go to a hundred-foot wreck. My guys can’t handle this kind of depth.” Nagle growled, “You gotta teach these guys to do decompression diving!” then stormed into the wheelhouse. And that was it. Nagle went where he wanted—he was no goddamn taxi driver, he was no sellout, he would not betray the spirit of diving. But as the 1980s gave way to a new decade, Nagle’s drinking began to bleach the greatness of his skills. His shoulder blades became spires on his emaciated frame, his jaundiced skin and stringy hair a goulash of self-abandon. He still swam beautifully, somehow, in the way retired baseball greats still throw gracefully at old-timers’ games. But experienced divers noticed that his
Doria
dives had become less strenuous, that he wasn’t quite going anymore where no man had been. “Ah, I just gotta get in shape,” he’d grumble to his few close friends, which they took as code for “I gotta stop drinking.” By 1990, Nagle had made his last
Doria
dive—you couldn’t challenge a wreck like that without every ounce of your faculties tuned high, and there had been recent corpses aboard the
Doria
to prove it. Nagle continued to lose customers. Every day, he told the few remaining people he respected about how right things had been in the old days, in the days when diving was great.

This was Nagle’s life and business in the late summer of 1991, as Brielle shut down for the season and returned to the rhythms of its regulars. Nagle had spent much of this August day washing the
Seeker
and contemplating his life. Now, with the sun setting, he took a short walk across the dock, through the cratered, dirt parking lot, and into an establishment seemingly placed there for him by God. The Harbor Inn was open late year-round. It served Jim Beam. Nagle was thirsty.

No one quite recalls when they started calling it the Horrible Inn, but everyone can tell you why. Hard-core smokers choked on the mushroom cloud of cigarette smoke that hovered over the bar. Bathroom smells wafted with impunity into the small grill area. Skin stuck to everything. Drunken fishermen painted the names of sweethearts onto greasy walls. Once, the owner decided to water-blast off years of built-up nicotine. A fully rigged crew showed up. They turned on the hoses. The water blew holes through the wall.

And there was the clientele. The Horrible Inn didn’t serve many, but its faithful were hard-core and local. Bikers, fishermen, street toughs, boat mechanics, deep-wreck divers—this was the constant, unshaven dance card at the Horrible Inn. These men—you didn’t dare bring a lady here—weren’t interested in pinball machines or pool tables, and they didn’t question management’s policy to refill peanut dishes with leftovers from other peanut dishes. Customers drank beer and booze from plastic cups, then extinguished their cigarettes in same. Fights erupted. Nagle never budged from the Horrible Inn. Once, word spread through Brielle that a bartender had thrown Nagle out of the Horrible Inn for indecent behavior. No one believed it. It wasn’t the idea of Nagle misbehaving that seemed impossible to the town; it was the idea that anyone could do anything indecent enough to warrant expulsion from such a place.

This evening, Nagle took his usual place at the bar and ordered a Jim Beam. And then another. A half hour later, a thirty-eight-year-old fishing boat captain with a dirty shirt ambled into the Horrible Inn to pay his fuel bill. Everyone knew the man as Skeets. Skeets had been around the dock for years and tied up his boat just a few slips from the
Seeker.
His business was small—he took out only four or five fishermen at a time—but he ran it well, which in the charter fishing trade meant two things: he knew where the fish were; and he knew how to keep his mouth shut.

Finding fish, of course, was critical. Customers who chartered fishing boats didn’t come back if a captain took them to the desert. Guys like Skeets had to be able to sniff the air, look at the sky, and say, “Gentlemen, today I smell tuna.” And then the captain had to take them there, to little sites recorded in tattered notebooks stashed in wheelhouse bottom drawers. Sometimes, this meant a location along the beach; other times, it meant a long journey offshore to one of the canyons. Most often, it meant a trip to the shipwrecks.

To fishermen, shipwrecks mean life. A mass of steel and wood that might have buried human souls becomes a rapid city of marine biology along the ocean floor. Shipwrecks are where the food chain poses for a snapshot. Tiny creatures attach themselves to solid objects. Those creatures attract predators, which in turn attract their own predators, and so on. Soon the wreck has become its own ecosystem. The pelagics—open-water traveling fish like tuna, codfish, and pollack—visit and get fat. Fishing boat captains get fatter.

Keeping your mouth shut was essential. Every fishing charter captain kept a book of public wrecks, the ones everyone knew and cleaned out regularly. But it was the secret wrecks that mattered, and the secret wrecks made the captain. Over the course of his career, a good fishing charter captain like Skeets might build a repertoire of a dozen shipwrecks known just to himself and a handful of others. He might discover some by scanning his bottom finder for sudden humps while out at sea. He might be gifted a prime location by a retiring fisherman to whom he had been kind. He might even trade sites with another captain he trusted. The more wrecks he knew, the more money he made. The more secret wrecks he knew, the more customers coveted his boat.

Fishing charter captains protected their secret sites. Customers were forbidden to bring aboard navigation equipment or even to enter the wheelhouse, lest they stumble upon a site’s coordinates. If a captain spotted another boat while fishing, he would pull up his anchor, move off the site, and wait until the potential spy had passed. If another boat shadowed him out of port, he might zigzag into the middle of nowhere, then fish for nothing until the spy slipped away. All the time, he had to stay sharp or he risked his livelihood. They still talk about a captain from the Viking Fleet in Montauk. The man charged a fortune to take two brothers fishing. When he fell asleep, the brothers tiptoed inside the wheelhouse and videotaped his book of numbers. A year later, that captain’s golden sites were Grand Central Station.

For the last few years, Skeets had been fishing a once-in-a-lifetime spot, a site about sixty miles off the Brielle coast. He had come upon the place one foggy day while trolling for tuna, a technique whereby a fishing boat drags monofilament line and lures through the water to mimic the movement of squid and other bait. Because the fishing boat is moving while trolling, the captain must keep alert for other boats in the vicinity. In the fog, he does this by scanning his radar. Skeets scanned his radar. Soon he spotted another boat on the screen. But its green blip never moved, meaning that this boat was anchored. To Skeets, that meant one thing—the boat on his radar was fishing a shipwreck.

Skeets turned his boat hard to port, then set course for the anchored boat. Before that boat could respond, Skeets had “jumped it” and had the numbers. The boat turned out to belong to a friend. The friend radioed to Skeets: “Don’t tell a soul about this site, Skeets. Don’t ever tell a soul about any of this. This one is special.”

A few days later, Skeets returned to the site, and the place was glorious—fishermen needed only cast their hooks before schools of fat tuna, sea bass, and cod leaped onto their lines. The best part was that only Skeets and his friend knew about it, which meant he could visit anytime without worry that other captains had wiped out the prize.

But a curious thing happened to Skeets whenever he visited this site. Even as he basked in its largesse, he could not stop himself from wondering about the object at the soul of this underwater bounty. It was big—that much he could see by the crude green blob the mass painted on his bottom finder’s screen. It was deep—at least 190 feet. And it was made of steel; he could tell that by inspecting the rust flakes that sometimes stuck to his fishing lures. Beyond that he could divine nothing. He was curious. Something about this site pulled on his instincts. Over a lifetime at sea, a fisherman develops a feel for what matters and what does not. To Skeets, this site mattered.

For years, when Nagle had seen Skeets in the parking lot or washing his boat or paying his fuel bill at the Horrible Inn, he had asked this question: “Say, Skeets, you come across any wrecks out there that haven’t been hit by divers?” For years, Skeets had given this answer: “Sorry, Billy, nothing.” Today, however, Skeets looked over to Nagle and said something different.

“Billy, I’ve been fishing this site. You can’t believe it. Tuna. Pollack. Big fish.”

Nagle raised an eyebrow from the bottom of his bourbon. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, Bill. About sixty miles offshore. And deep, your kind of deep, maybe two hundred foot of water. Something’s down there. Something big. You should check this thing out. I’m thinking something really big is down there.”

Even after several Jim Beams, Nagle knew the difference between dockside chest-puffing and a man’s heart. He considered Skeets an excellent captain and a man who knew his ocean. He didn’t doubt that Skeets’s instinct was pinging properly. Still, Nagle could not and would not request the numbers. Captains had only their reputations, and it would be the reddest violation of professional territory to ask.

Skeets made an offer. “Billy, I’m looking for a little inshore blackfish wreck I know you dive every so often. Give me those numbers, and I’ll give you my numbers. But you gotta keep them to yourself. You can’t tell anyone.”

Nagle nodded.

The two men agreed to exchange the numbers the next day on Nagle’s boat. That night, Nagle could not sleep in anticipation of the appointment. The next day, he arrived an hour early and paced the rotted wooden pier that led to the
Seeker.
His instincts throbbed through his body. This meeting was about more than just an object at the bottom of the ocean. This meeting was about the tides turning.

When Skeets finally arrived, Nagle invited him into the
Seeker
’s wheelhouse. The men stood in the tiny compartment, surrounded by hanging navigation equipment, a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam, and the crumpled cowboys-and-Indians sleeping bag Nagle had used since boyhood. They looked each other in the eye.

“Bill, I gotta tell you something,” Skeets said. “This site I found is a bad place. This part of the ocean is a bad place, it’s a dangerous place. It’s in a little depression, there’s an edge there, with a huge current coming up over the continental shelf, lots of moving water—”

“Ah, don’t worry, Skeets—”

“Really, Billy, it’s a bad place. Your guys gotta be top-shelf divers. You can have dead-calm air and still water, and still the boat could be drifting at three knots. You know what that means, how dangerous the currents are underneath. And it’s deep. I’m thinking two hundred feet. I don’t know anything about diving, but you better watch your guys.”

“Yeah, Skeets, I know, I know. Don’t worry. Let’s swap the numbers.”