The Most Dangerous Dive: Last Call For Diving’s Greatest Prize?

The Andrea Doria shipwreck will never have its own Travel Channel special. A visitor finds no reefs thronged with colorful sea creatures, no bikini-clad sirens frolicking in warm aquamarine water. But what the Doria does have is mystique. Its reputation as the Mount Everest of scuba diving dates back to a foggy evening in 1956, when the 700-foot Italian luxury liner collided with another ship, killing 51 people and sending the Doria to the ocean floor, 250 feet beneath the notoriously turbulent waters that swirl a hundred miles off the eastern tip of Long Island. Worldwide media coverage quickly drew undersea adventurers. Those who reached the Doria in its early days surfaced with tales of a site that looked every bit the part of a romantic Hollywood shipwreck. The liner became a must-do for serious technical divers, even as new technology made deeper wrecks accessible—and as the Doria claimed the lives of 15 victims over the years. Now, with the boat breaking down and new points of entry opening up, divers are drawn by the chance to enter previously blocked compartments, and by the knowledge that each season may be the Doria’s last. “It’s just a matter of time before she implodes,” says Richie Kohler, who has dived the Doria 126 times and leads expeditions there. “For divers who have been waiting until they get more vacation dollars saved up, well, I’d say it’s now or maybe never. --Brendan Spiegel

1. If natural deterioration progressed this winter as expected, the cargo holds—said to be laden with the stuff of scuba lore, like jewels and 50-year-old bottles of whiskey—may be open for the first time. 

2. The Doria’s engine room is another never-before-seen feature that divers hope to glimpse this summer. Until now, access has been blocked by the ship’s steel hull, which is splitting.

3. When divers emerge from the Doria–usually out of Gimbel’s Hole–they face strong, unpredictable currents capable of sweeping them miles from their boats.

4. Scoring china from the vestiges of the first-class dining room is a major coup. But souvenir hunting can be deadly. “We’d risk our lives to find the saucer that matched a teacup,” Kohler says.

Illustration by Emily Cooper

Dispatch From the World's Best Dive Spot: GPS, Google Earth, Coconut Crab Headlamp Thief

You’ve got to travel pretty far these days in order to find an ecosystem unaffected by human activity. Just ask National Geographic Fellow Enric Sala, who is currently studying some of the most remote, pristine coral reefs in existence around the southern Line Islands, a province of Kiribati located about 2,000 miles south of Hawaii. The team will spend six weeks aboard the 157-foot Hanse Explorer, researching the reefs around the islands of Flint, Vostock, Millenium, Starbuck, and Malden in an effort to document and study every aspect of these untouched ecosystems. If his crew, which includes renowned biologist-explorer Mike Fay, can understand how reefs work without human interference, the hope is that they will better understand how to preserve these threatened natural wonders in other parts of the world. "This is the very best dive of my life," Sala proclaimed in a video dispatch. Needless to say, we wish we were there.We got this highly entertaining dispatch from Sala yesterday. Track his progress and follow his daily blog at ocean.nationalgeographic.com

ADVENTURE: Can you give us a sense of how much more vibrant the southern Line Islands coral reefs are than other more famous reefs?
Enric Sala: The main difference is that there are no people on the southern Line Islands, so there is no fishing or pollution. These reefs may be still affected by global warming, but if these corals have bleached in the past, they have recovered very well. 

So these reefs are intact simply because humans can't get there very easily to mess with them?
These reefs are intact because people have not touched them. It’s as simple as that. We know that humans can degrade the entire coral reef ecosystem, from microbes to top predators such as sharks. Here the ecosystem is intact, with all its components; it’s an ecological machine that functions optimally.

What's the funniest thing that's happen since you departed?
Mike Fay left his headlamp at Vostok Island by mistake, retraced his steps, but couldn’t find it. He thought he had gone crazy. The day after, he suddenly saw a light inside the forest. Puzzled, he went toward it and saw his headlamp turned on and all chewed up. An inquisitive coconut crab, a gorgeous animal of bright blue and orange color that can reach the size of a basketball, had grabbed his lamp while he left it on the ground next to him, and ran away with it. Unimpressed by the taste of plastic, he dropped it in the forest. The same coconut crab hung around Mike’s camp and interacted with him for three days. He named that crab Vostok.

How is GPS part of the expedition? Any other technical innovations?
Technology is a key component of this expedition. First, satellite photos and GPS are essential to find the very islands we want to visit. Traditional marine charts are several miles off their real position! So we rely more heavily on Google Earth and GPS coordinates. Second, we use GPS to decide where to conduct our surveys. We try to spread our sampling stations evenly around the islands, about one kilometer apart. With GPS we can draw the sites on a satellite photo before arriving to the island, and then dive on those exact spots with very marginal error.

Can you give us a sense of your daily routine while on this expedition? Are you living aboard the boat?
No doubt about it, an expedition like this is exhausting. We wake up at 6:30 a.m., have breakfast at 7:00, and then lower our four inflatable boats to the water. We have two teams of scientists, and two teams of photographers and videographers diving at the same time. Getting into the boats and taking off from the back deck of the ship can be slightly nutty. There is gear everywhere, lots of gear, and people everywhere; but everything works out extremely effectively despite the apparent chaos. We do two dives in the morning, come back to change tanks and replace batteries, eat a quick lunch, and go back in the water in the afternoon. We return to the ship from the last dive of the day at sunset, which is 6:00 p.m. We rinse our gear, recharge batteries, download photos, and have dinner. After dinner we enter the data we collected in our dives in the computers, edit photographs and video, and discuss what we saw during the day and make plans for tomorrow. Yours truly writes a blog entry and climbs to the upper deck to send it back to the headquarters in Washington D.C. By that time it’s already midnight. As soon as touch my bed I collapse into a deep sleep. We are sailing to uninhabited islands where getting ashore can be very dangerous. Mike and Lindsey are the only people staying ashore overnight. The rest of us stay on the Hanse Explorer.

Field FAQs with Holly MorrisDiving Africa's Fishbowl

Holly Morris is a TV host (Treks in a Wild World, Globe Trekker), and the author of Adventure Divas and founder of the multimedia company Adventure Divas. Post your travel questions here and they could get answered in the magazine.

A friend told me that the diving in Lake Malawi is incredible. Is it worth the flight around the world?

A. Lake Malawi, the third largest lake in Africa, barely gets a blip on the diving world’s radar—but it should. The 9,000-square-mile glittering gem of the Great Rift Valley that borders Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania is one of the planet’s first freshwater national park and home to a colorful spectacle of aquarium fish. When I dove there last year, zoologist Ken McKaye, a scientific advisor to WWF, explained why Lake Malawi is ideal for those with a passion for the Darwinian. “If you want to see evolution in action, you go diving in Lake Malawi,” he said. “Over a thousand fish species have been generated here, more than any other place in the world.” However, if you want to see barracudas or sharks—or anything much bigger than a silver dollar pancake, for that matter—or if you explore with Hemingway’s gusto rather than, say, a bird-watcher’s delight, Lake Malawi might not be for you.

Still, perhaps because of the sub-Saharan region’s struggles with poverty and a high AIDS rate, the way of life around what explorer David Livingstone called the “lake of the stars” nearly 150 years ago remains largely unchanged. Men paddle dugouts along boulder-strewn beaches and lush shores; village women carry laundry piled high on their heads; fishermen hawk the day’s catch. After exploring Malawi’s underwater world, we decompressed at a locally operated ecolodge, Kaya Mawa, which is tucked away on the blissfully remote, five-mile-long Likoma Island (kayamawa.com). Each of the ten rooms and chalets has its own luxe-rustic design, such as a private deck leading straight from a bed with zillion-thread-count sheets to a Lake Malawi morning dip. Getting there requires flying in by single-engine plane or taking the Ilala ferry, which offers a taste of the refugee experience but brings you to spots well worth the strenuous transit.

Illustration by Olaf Hajek

David de Rothschild: Voyage of the PlastikiDestination: The Eastern Garbage Patch

When I first starting looking into how we could make an expedition around waste, I came across a report by Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who actually discovered and named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which talked about this vast expanse of debris in the middle of the Pacific Ocean held in place by swirling underwater currents. My initial reaction was, Wow, there’s an island of rubbish floating in the middle of the ocean that you can walk on and explore.

However, when I investigated the facts, it became clear that the reality is a bit different. It's not really an actual plastic island. The reality is that this area of ocean is saturated with tiny fragments of plastic suspended mainly below the surface of the water, forming a sort of plastic soup. When we finally get there, were not really expecting to see anything astonishingly different on the surface of the water. We will see more of the effects of the plastics when we take samples of the water and measure the fragments of suspended plastic, like shaking a snow globe.

I will definitely be diving and exploring throughout this expedition, not just exclusively at the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. The team and I will be doing routine dives to check the bottom of the vessel and make sure that the integrity of the boat is holding up to the journey and that we are not losing any bottles. We will be we be doing a number of dives when we reach a point of interest, whether it be a whale sighting or where we see flotsam.In truth, I am a bit of a merman. It will be difficult to keep me out of the ocean.

David de Rothschild, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and founder of Adventure Ecology, will depart in March 2009 on a 7,500-mile voyage from San Francisco to Sydney (see the route map) in a boat made of plastic bottles. Find out more about the expedition in a feature article by Contributing Editor Paul Kvinta ("Voyage of the Plastiki," October 2008 issue of ADVENTURE). Check in here for de Rothschild's dispatches.

Honeymoon SCUBA Murder? (And How to Find a Trustworthy Dive Buddy)

Text by Andrew Burmon

In 1911, the 150-passenger steamer Yongala sank for unknown reasons near the Great Barrier Reef. In 2003, an American honeymooner named Tina Watson inexplicably blacked out and drowned while diving the wreck. Now one of the shipwreck's mysteries may be solved.

On June 20, Queensland Police issued a warrant for the arrest of David "Gabe" Watson, a diver from Helene, Alabama, Watson stands accused of murdering his wife Tina while the pair dove the Yongala. (Read more about the investigation >>)

As Watson faces the possibility of free trip back to Australia courtesy of the 1974 U.S. Australian Extradition Treaty, the grim honeymoon story has served as a reminder to dive enthusiasts everywhere that dive buddies should be chosen carefully. To help you find a perfect—or at least non-homicidal—SCUBA partner, we've compiled a guide to the five best dive-buddy matchmaking websites.

1) Facebook.com
Of course Facebook has a dive buddy application! With the most thorough diver profiles, the easiest interface, and probably the largest number of users, the Facebook Dive Buddy Application is the online place for divers to see and be stalked by people they don't know.

2) DiveBuddy.com
A social networking site for the amphibiously inclined. Allows users to check out each other's experience levels, specialties, and, of course, relationship status.

3) ScubaMatch.com
While slightly less streamlined than DiveBuddy and a little bit (water)buggy, ScubaMatch does an excellent job of documenting its users' credentials and experience.

4) FindaDiveBuddy.net
A small but well-organized networking site that reads sort of like the neoprene personal pages.

5) ScubaYellowPages.com
Not so much a networking site as a list of divers from various areas, the ScubaYellowPages include the contact information for around 100 divers in England, the United States, and beyond.