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Nagle and Chatterton called every good diver they knew. Nearly all of them refused the invitation. Even some of the greats, guys who were supposed to be excited by maybes, turned down the trip. “I’d rather spend my money on a sure thing instead of some wacky pie in the sky” was the standard regret. One diver, Brian Skerry, told Chatterton, “You know what, man? I was born too late. All the really cool wrecks have been found. The age of exploration for shipwrecks is over.” That’s how it was in 1991. Guys wanted guarantees. Nagle and Chatterton kept calling.
    Finally, their lists exhausted, they found their twelfth diver. Chatterton was incensed. “Nobody wants to find anything new! What the hell’s going on, Bill?” Nagle, normally bombastic in the face of caution, looked down at the red
X
’s on his list of divers and said to Chatterton, almost in whisper, “These guys don’t have the heart for wreck diving, John. These guys just don’t get it.”
    Just after midnight on September 2, 1991, while the rest of Brielle slept, Nagle, Chatterton, and the twelve divers who had signed up for the exploratory trip stuffed the
Seeker
with tanks, masks, regulators, knives, flashlights, and bundles of other gear. They faced a six-hour ride to Skeets’s numbers. Some grabbed a bunk and went to sleep. Others hung around the changing table, catching up on one another’s lives and laughing about the folly of paying to chase a pile of rocks. At one A.M., Nagle checked the sign-in sheet against the passengers on board. “Get all gear secured,” he called to those still awake, then walked up the stairs and into the wheelhouse. Chatterton gave the signal to switch from shore power to generator. The lights in the boat’s salon flickered, then gave way to powerful quartzes that bathed the back deck in white. One of the divers pulled the power leads and water feed from the dock and disconnected the shore-based phone line. Nagle lit the twin diesel engines, which danced to protest
—cough-grumble-POP-chum

.

.

.

cough-grumble-POP-POP-POP-rrmmm—
the disruption of their slumber.
    Chatterton pulled in lines. “Bow line off! Stern line hold . . . hold . . . hold . . . okay!” he called to Nagle, then slung the heavy ropes onto the dock. Now the
Seeker
was ready. Nagle switched his wheelhouse lights to dim red, checked his VHF radio, single sideband radio, Loran-C, and radar, and engaged the engines one at a time, the choice method for coaxing a lady from her dock. A few minutes later, the
Seeker
was past the railroad drawbridge and nose up into the Atlantic. Most likely these men were chasing a garbage barge. Most likely the age of shipwreck exploration had passed. But as the Brielle dock faded behind them, Chatterton and Nagle saw possibilities on the horizon, and for that moment the world was perfect and right.

CHAPTER TWO
    ZERO VIZ

    D EEP-SHIPWRECK DIVING is among the world’s most dangerous sports. Few other endeavors exist in which nature, biology, equipment, instinct, and object conspire—without warning and from all directions—to so completely attack a man’s mind and disassemble his spirit. Many dead divers have been found inside shipwrecks with more than enough air remaining to have made it to the surface. It is not that they chose to die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live.
    The sport bears only passing resemblance to its cousin, the resort-area, single-tank scuba familiar to the general public. Safety statistics are difficult to divine. Deep-wreck divers make up a minuscule percentage of the world’s twenty million or so certified scuba divers. Their accidents barely blip on the excellent safety record of a sport in which nearly all the participants stay in shallow tropical waters, depend on partners for safety, and desire little more than lovely scenery. In the United States, of the ten million certified scuba divers, it is likely that only a few hundred dive deep for shipwrecks.