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their minds. He returned. The
Doria
’s hugeness overwhelmed him; a diver could spend a decade of twenty-five-minute dives on this wreck and never see it all. Again he returned, and marveled at the feeling of being inside places that didn’t used to be places, of becoming present in this vast repository of tiny things that had meant something to people. Soon, the
Doria
ran through his bloodstream full-time. Raking leaves or watching a Giants football game or walking the grocery’s dairy aisle, Chatterton stitched together his experiences on the
Doria,
and gradually his eyes adjusted, until the quilt of his separate experiences aboard that shipwreck formed a single picture in his mind. “This is why I dive,” he told Nagle. “This is what I want diving to be.”
    Soon Chatterton was going places and finding things on the
Doria
no one had before, not even Nagle and his cohorts in the glory days. His reputation wafted across the bows of dive boats along the eastern seaboard. And he continued to absorb Nagle. He marveled at Nagle’s instinct to see the big picture, to envision a ship as it had been in its proudest moment, to study deck plans and captain’s logs, to put himself into the mind of the ship’s navigator, to construct a dive plan that envisioned the whole ship when only a tiny portion of it was currently knowable. He was astounded to bring up meaningless rusty artifacts from hidden corners on the
Doria
only to have Nagle examine them and divine exactly where he’d been.
    Most of all, he and Nagle shared a philosophy. To them, diving was about exploration, about aiming for the everywhere of the unknown. There were a lot of impossible places to go when the world was as big as Chatterton and Nagle saw it, but for God’s sake you had to try. You were
required
to try. What were you doing alive, these men thought, if you didn’t go and try?
    The day after Skeets revealed his secret, Nagle asked Chatterton to meet him at the
Seeker.
The men walked upstairs to the boat’s wheelhouse, where Nagle locked the door and related Skeets’s story to his friend. What could be at the bottom of that site? The men dealt out the possibilities like solitaire cards. Could it be a warship or a war-era merchant vessel? Almost impossible—military records indicated little action in the area during either world war. Could it be the
Corvallis,
a ship reputedly sunk by Hollywood for a 1930s disaster flick? Faintly possible: it was thought that the filmmakers had bothered to note only the most general location for their shoot, an area that included Skeets’s fishing site but also several hundred other square miles of ocean. How about a subway car? Also vaguely possible—New Jersey sunk them purposely to promote marine life, but those locations had been reliably recorded.
    Less romantic scenarios seemed more probable. It might be a pile of rocks. It might be a worthless pipe barge. Most likely it was an old garbage barge; in years past, municipalities had stuffed geriatric schooners with trash, cut their masts, and sunk them at no place in particular. Nagle and Chatterton had been to plenty of those.
    But maybe, just maybe, it was something big.
    Nagle proposed a plan. He and Chatterton would organize a trip to the site. Each would recruit six top divers, guys who could survive a 200-foot plunge into the unknown. It would not be an easy journey—six hours each way in the chill September air. Each diver would pay one hundred dollars to cover fuel and expenses. There would be no promises. Other diving captains offered hush-hush trips to “virgin” sites, but these were always scams; you’d get down there and find a recent diver’s orange crowbar on some junky fishing boat, and the captain would actually look you in the eye and say, “Gee, fellas, I had no idea.” Not Nagle and Chatterton. They would pitch their trip the way they felt it: It’s probably nothing, men, but we have to try.
    The trip was booked for Labor Day 1991.