Makai - The Documentary Of An Open Ocean Dive (1973)

[Applause] What I propose to do here today is to give you a brief history of saturated diving, man in the sea, as seen through the eyes of a naval servant. I think any treatment of saturation diving, whether it be within the United States Navy or anywhere else in the world, has to begin with the mention of a name, Captain George Bond, United States Navy, who is regarded by all in the field as the father of saturation diving. It was his concept that started the entire movement. George Bond was forced to prove first of all that man the human physiology could withstand prolonged exposure to high pressures without permanent damage of one sort or another. He further had to prove that uh man could withstand these hyperbaric conditions uh with a background gas of being helium rather than nitrogen because of the nitrogen narcosis problem. He was successful and the world took notice. Jacqu Kustoau was the first to uh carry on George's uh work in the open sea, but then others uh followed suit. There would come a time when man could look back at this planet he calls his home and wonder about the deep, rich color of the earth. For it is a planet covered by immense seas, oceans so vast that they sweep across threearters of its surface in this strange liquid bless which once incubated the very beginnings of primordial life. [Music] In the past 50 years, man has just begun to penetrate this unique watery lake, which has for so long floated him across its surface. Yet to many, it is still a strange, mysterious barrier, which hides the secrets of one of the last frontiers. [Music] [Music] [Music] Monday morning, November 15th, 1971, 17 mi from the city of Honolulu, along the southeast corner of the island of Aahu, the United States Navy began final countdown for its 200 ft Open ocean saturation died. After six long months of intensive preparation, this would be the last chance for completing a 100 tiny details. At 8:00 that night, six divers would step inside the habitat and begin compression for a dive designed to explore a number of techniques for open ocean diving and salvage. The whole concept of saturation diving simply means that the diver is saturated with as much inert gas as his body can hold at the depth at which he is saturated. For example, you and I right now at sea level are saturated with inert gas because we're at one atmosphere of pressure. If we were to go down to 33 ft, the pressure would then be two atmospheres absolute and our bodies could take up that much more inert gas. After the body then takes up as much more inert gas as it can hold. The amount of time it takes to decompress it back to one atmosphere, back to sea level, doesn't change. It's just the same no matter how long, whether you stay 24 hours or 24 days at that depth. And this is the big advantage of saturation diving. The big difference between scuba diving and saturation diving, it's a whole different ballgame. You have to be a scuba diver before you can get into saturation diving. It's just the first step in the training to become a saturation diver. any scuba diver training, you take in, you learn that if anything goes wrong, you try to come up to the surface immediately. You dump your weight belt, dump your tanks, and come to the surface. In saturation diving, you can't come to the surface. Once you've been committed for 4 hours to a depth, you're committed to that time into normal decompression. So, what we do when we go out in saturation diving is we go out very heavy. And if anything goes wrong, and hopefully it won't, but if anything does go wrong, the only way we can do is come back to the habitat or the PTC from what we left. Like a man in outer space, the saturation diver must be outfitted with a suit which can cope with the extreme of depth and pressure. a suit which will regulate his breathing mixtures, his communications, and at the same time protect him from the severe cold of the helium atmosphere within which he must ultimately survive. One of the most unique aspects of the dive was the utilization of a new type of oceanf flooror diving station, a self-contained platform which could monitor its own life support system and compress and decompress its divers at the pier. The AI system is named after the North Sea god AI. The system consists of two main ballast tanks which run forward to aft. Seated on that is the sphere which is the main control center, the lab compartment and the living space. Right, I think now we'll move and we'll go up to the the top of the atria and have a look down and look at some of the controls. Two boatlike objects that you see either side are the emergency transfer capsules. These um if you had to evacuate a year, you would go inside and you would go to the surface on that winch being rolled on the wire going up. They will take um four people each side. You have your H air system which is a try mix which is for your pressurization system of your sphere your living um and your lab compartment plus your bib system. Okay, now I think we've seen everything um on top and we'll go down and have a have a look at the inside. Right, this is the sphere. On this side we have the lab and on this side the living compartment. Now the sphere is where all the diving is done from. During any dive, this hatch is open and will remain open during all the bottom time. Right? This is the living um compartment which was built to sleep four but in fact on this dive we will sleep six two on the deck in CS. It's quite a simple compartment. It has its own life support system. Uh exactly the same as the other compartments. uh dehumidifiers, heaters, which are most important because at depth the helium atmosphere, we require a lot of heat. A comfortable temperature is about 92 degrees Fahrenheit. We're particularly interested in observing and recording the patterns of behavior that divers show both in the habitat and in the water during the course of this dive. We're planning to collect our data by continuous monitoring over closed circuit television of diver behavior in the habitat and also through observing the divers again on television while they're working in the water outside. What we hope to do is use these data to think about eliminating problems in habitat design that may interfere with with diver performance on the bottom. And for that reason, of course, the Mai project is interesting because it gives us a third much more Spartan habitat to contrast with uh with earlier ones. Of all the many spectators who watched the progress of the dive, none were more curious than a pair of tame porpuses named Lelay and Aboca. [Music] sheltered in a safe enclosure at night. In the daytime, they were allowed to swim completely Day after day, week after week, the divers continually familiarize themselves with the equipment, diving, testing, practicing its use. Then, once satisfied with their basic performance, they began to turn towards a series of exercises which would simulate the conditions and practicality of open ocean salvage. For a number of years, we've had a program of study sponsored by the Office of Naval Research in determining what are some of the better ways of measuring man's underwater work performance capability. We have in our laboratories developed a number of instruments for measuring man's ability to work underwater. And we needed a standardized work test to be able to use as a baseline for performance comparisons. And we selected the pipe puzzle. The pipe puzzle is a we call a macro task. It's not sorting nuts and bolts. Rather, it's using the regular kinds of tools with about the same kind of uh pipe and whatnot that people use in various underwater construction jobs. This is the manifold. Probably the most difficult part of the puzzle to put together. And the requirement here is to have these holes all lined up with an appropriate washer in between, batten down, so that when we turn the handles, we put a hose on the end here as we get air in. And when we turn these handles, we can pressurize the two parts of the system uh independently. And what we're trying to determine that what the effect of changing environments, different kinds of equipment, different degrees of stress, what these have variables have on the divers's work effectiveness. Monday evening, 8:00 at night. There were some hurried words, a few photographs, and then the six divers step down into a habitat in which they would live for the next seven days. The steel hatch is closed and sealed. At 8:15, the long careful pierside compression begins. At an atmospheric depth of 14 ft, helium begins to bleed steadily into the system, gradually replacing nitrogen as the inert dilluent for oxygen. Minute by minute, foot by foot, the density and concentrations of the breathing atmosphere inside the habitat begin to change. Can I have your 1100 P2 PCCO2 settings please? Setting the micrometer is at a 120. [Music] The dangers inherent in the compression phase are mostly related to the uh uh the rate at which we compress the divers. In saturation diving uh operations, the uh the compression rate can be held down to a rather slow rate, say uh 20 or 30 feet a minute, because you've got all the time in the world to get your job done and you don't need to hurry the divers down and so that they have a reasonable length of time to work on the bottom. The most dangerous times during this dive are probably during ascent from from the depth of the dive and descent to the depth of the dive merely because there's changes in atmospheric pressure going on at that time and uh a great number of opportunities for something to go wrong. By midnight the 200t bottom point is reached. The compression stable. All systems still go. Inside the diving station, one man takes up the watch while the others go to bed, resting away the long, slow hours of the night. At Pierside Control, one hour creeps slowly by the next. Patiently, carefully, they watch the instruments and check the gauges. And they wait for the most difficult portion of the dive is still to come. [Music] 9:00 a.m. Tuesday morning, the AIR swings out into the open ocean, destined for a control barge anchored 1.7 mi out to sea. [Music] After an hour of struggling through heavy seas, the aer finally reached the surface. [Music] [Music] The communication and power cables are connected with the surface platform. The last ropes free and down she goes. [Music] Destined with their crew of six men for the ocean's floor, 200 ft below. Then at 100 ft, a near disaster. A come in a here. Over. A here, we do not read you. Over. Come in. A here. Over. A we do not read you. Over. Something is drastically wrong. [Applause] Aar, come in. Hey dear, gear a drift on the platform. Her communications cable snagged by a moing line and twisted around a corner of the station. In a freak accident, the 3-in cable has been severed like a piece of string. Acting quickly and efficiently, carrying out an emergency plan which had been drilled many times before, the divers bring Aer back to the surface. There is no other alternative. The cable must be repaired. Heartbroken, they fasten the toll lines and turn around, heading slowly back for shore. Then the rains came. And when the divers emerged from Ager after 2 and 1/2 days of decompression, they learned of another stroke of bad luck. Sometime during the dive, the two corpuses had disappeared. Boats were launched in hopes of finding them and somehow coaxing them back, but it was no use. Perhaps they had joined a school of corpuses traveling nearby. It was never known. After four years in captivity, Lelay and Aboca were gone. For the next nine days, rough seas and storms continued. Even though the cable was repaired, there was little else to do but wait. Gentlemen, we have a storm here at ADAC moving toward Kodiak. It's sending high seas in the direction of Midway. Well, what's concerning us today is the tropical disturbance about 300 miles southeast of us here. Although it'll move on in about 24 hours, we will see tomorrow a combination of the wind waves from the trades and the swells reaching 12 ft. November 26, 10 days after the first attempt at the 200t dive, a break in the weather. There's a patch of sun and then a rainbow drifting across the horizon. A good omen that the long awaited change may have finally come. Less than a quarter of a mile away, the support vessel, the YRFT, floated on a four-point mole, stationally waiting the arrival of the agent, now scheduled 4 days away. During the interval, as final preparations began for the second dive, there was little time for leisure. But for most of the divers, off hours meant a return to the scene, to this pale blue, silent world whose mysterious shadows had become so much a part of our life. On the morning of November 28th, now two weeks behind schedule, with blue skies and fair seas, the vessel Hulkai begins the long pull out to sea. Inside, the six-man team compressed to a depth of 200 ft again make ready for their descent. [Music] The hookup with the support vessel YRST is successful. The ballasts are filled and slowly the diving station begins to sink. 50 60 [Music] ft. [Music] At 100 ft, the last divers push away and stare downward as she fades from sight. First a faint pale yellow, then finally disappears. In less than 30 minutes, the 200 ft ocean floor is reached and team leader Lieutenant Commander Majesty radios up that all is well. [Music] A careful checklist is followed as the Mark 10 diving suits are prepared. And then the first team of three divers eases down through the portal and out into the open sea. The decompression time for a saturation dive at this depth is now almost 64 hours. Even though it will be the same as long as they remain upon the bottom, the last bond with the surface has been broken. Their home and refuge of safety is now one place, the habitat. And ironically, the atmosphere and land upon which they've lived their entire lives is suddenly as foreign and dangerous to these men as the atmosphere of an alien planet. for placing them on the surface now would result in fatal decompression. [Music] Over the next 4 days, there will be more than 24 excursions out into the water by the divers as they test a number of tasks made to simulate the conditions of underwater salvage. Hydraulic powered tools are evaluated along with lifting equipment and underwater winches. [Music] The pipe puzzle is assembled and timed. Each team of divers comparing their own performance with the last. And the diving station itself is evaluated as a possible platform for future salvage and deeper saturation dives. At the end of each dive, the teams return, [Music] tired, sometimes exhausted, unable to communicate clearly with each other because of the helium speech. Yet they press on. For like the Hawaiians who had ventured across these waters 2,000 years ago, these men too had ventured into a new frontier. Their research, their explorations, and their evaluations, all part of a continuing program sponsored by the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, the Office of Naval Research, and the Navy Supervisor of Diving to advance man's knowledge of the sea. For these first steps taken out in the open ocean with Makai may one day light a safer, better trail for man's exploration of the ocean floor in future years to come. [Music] Hallelujah. [Music] Hallelujah. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]