Divers risk all for a date with Andrea Doria

Buoy tender Hornbeam stands by the sinking Andrea Dorea in 1956Editor's Note: Thirteen men have died trying to dive on the Andrea Doria, 50 miles south of Nantucket, since 1981, five since last summer. Here is the story of one of those divers who perished a year ago this month.

DOUG FRASERWhen you're going deep, divers say your most important piece of diving equipment is your brain.

One hundred and eighty feet down in the Atlantic, Bill Cleary's mind was troubled.

August 4, 1998 was a beautiful summer day. Even 50 miles out to sea, those on the deck of the dive vessel Seeker basked in balmy 70 degree sunshine, unlimited visibilit breeze to boot.

On the ocean floor, conditions were distinctly different. Water temperature was a bone-chilling 42 degrees. Clouds of algae and plankton swirled in the water, limiting visibility to 20 feet.

Divers on the Andrea Doria just after it sank in 1956 told of a sleeping beauty of a ship, rolled over on its starboard side, covering the fatal gash torn in it by its collision with another ocean liner. The ship seemed suspended in time. The blue hull stood out smartly from the white sandy bottom. Curtains waved in the windows. The bridge was empty but intact, as if captain and mates had just left for dinner. Cape Cod is the graveyard of the Atlantic

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- As water transport grows, so does the potential for

At nearly 700 feet long, the Andrea Doria would have towered more than 150 feet over Boston's tallest building at the time. Think Prudential Center tipped on its side and sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Forty-two years later, Cleary saw a greatly changed Doria. Empty lifeboat davits loomed overhead as heavily-barnacled hooks. Gone was the bright blue paint. Sea anemones bloomed on the rusty hull like dull flowers. A heavy layer of ashen silt blanketed the interior.

Fishing nets and monofilament line now veiled what remained of the superstructure, and were still snaring fish, which were in turn being eaten by other fish.

To Cleary, diving had been fun, a relaxing, challenging counterpart to a busy professional life. But that sunny day in August, all the fun drained out.

Before the day was out, the Seeker would see her third fatality of the season, this time an experienced deep wreck diver, with numerous trips to the Doria, causing even the old-timers to wonder at the fatal lure of the deep.

* * *

A New York attorney, Cleary was desk-bound day after day. He enjoyed the physical challenge of deep diving, the sense of achieving a goal, and the camaraderie of other divers, their banter, the pranks, and celebrating a successful trip with beer and cigars. And always, there was the satisfaction of diving with some of the world's best deep-wreck divers, who number their dives in the thousands and have made hundreds of Doria dives.Artists depiction of the wreck of the Andrea Doria as it lies50 miles south of Nantucket.(Staff illustration by James Warren)

That process, of working up to deep dives, starts with a weekend course that certifies a diver to go down to 60 feet breathing compressed air. Many of the estimated one to three million recreational divers stop there. But to an elite group, estimated at between 15,000 to 30,000, the goal is to get certified for deep diving using tri-mix, a combination of oxygen, nitrogen and helium that makes deep diving easier and lessens some of the concern about getting "the bends."

That branch of the hobby is called technical diving.

Sunk in nearly 250 feet of water, a 10 hour boat trip away, the Andrea Doria has long been thought of as the dive that shows you've arrived at the pinnacle of the sport. In that sense, it is similar to Mount Everest for mountaineers.

With its strong currents, cold murky water, the Doria is a formidable dive. Add the massive size of the vessel, and the challenge of negotiating its labyrinthine interior to find prizes like crystal and china, and it becomes irresistible.

"Some just want to get china, china, china," said Dan Crowell, the captain and owner of the Seeker. "China's not the whole thing."

But china can be evidence of proficiency, of how deep you penetrated into a dangerous wreck.

"There's a bit of machoism for both guys and gals in saying you dove the Doria," said Sally Wahrmann, an accountant and college professor in New York. "They say it's not a competitive sport, but it is."

The Seeker routinely carried as crew many of the divers - John Moyer, John Chatterton and Gary Gentile - who wrote the book on deep-wreck diving.

"It's the most extreme boat with the most extreme crew," said Cleary.

* * *

Cleary had been there before, he'd met the challenge, he'd had his fun.

But on that day last August Cleary was not having fun. A nagging headache had developed into a pounding in his ears Cleary later recognized as carbon dioxide build-up. With only 23 minutes of air to get in and out of the ship, Sicola could not afford to get lost, but Crowell believes that's what happened.

Worse was the bad feeling that dogged him on this dive.

Already, the 1998 Andrea Doria dive season was shaping up as the deadliest ever. Two divers had died earlier that summer, both off the Seeker.

China proved a fatal attraction for Craig Sicola, a 32-year old building contractor and surfer from Surf City, New Jersey. Gene Peterson, another diver on Sicola's fatal trip, told investigators Sicola was "headstrong, like he wanted to prove something."

After seeing the china brought up by other divers on the first day, he badgered the crew about where to get some. He was told he was not ready yet.

Captain Crowell and crew understand the desire to bring something back. They also know the danger.

"If I personally go down and get a bunch of stuff, I'll give them a trinket. But I'll tell them, where I'm going is nowhere near where you belong," he said.

That was a challenge to Sicola, who worked out his own route and dived alone the next day, finding his way into the kitchen area deep in the ship.


Whether it was silt clouding his vision or a simple wrong turn, Sicola was lost. Although he found a way out, he was nowhere near the anchor line running back up to the ship. Forgetting about the emergency supply he carried, he apparently panicked, hit the "check out" button inflating his buoyancy vest and shot to the surface. He was dead by the time rescue swimmers reached him.

In his bag, he had three pieces of china.

While Sicola's end could almost have been predicted, Richard Roost, 47, a Michigan dive shop owner, seemed the perfect man for Doria dives. Cool and competent, he had thousands of dive hours behind him.

This was his first trip out to the Doria, but he seemed to have little trouble on his first three dives. On his fatal fourth dive, some believe Roost may also have become lost inside the vessel. He was found floating in the First Class Lounge. Crowell believed he probably passed out from a deadly build-up of carbon dioxide because of his breathing technique.

* * *

Cleary had had his own bad dive just that morning. Negotiating a corridor, he had become entangled in cables inside the wreck. The unthinkable prospect of running out of air on the bottom was a sudden reality.

Without any signal, a fellow diver, a Wall Street financial advisor named Vincent Napoliello, came to his aid, freeing him from the cables and guiding him out of the wreck.

"He was just a calm, cool and collected guy," recalled Cleary, who'd met Napoliello several years before. The two struck up a friendship based on their love of diving and their mutual understanding of the sacrifices of balancing a demanding professional life with a time-consuming hobby.

To the pressure of being a rising star at Legg Mason, a Wall Street securities firm, the 32 year-old Napoliello was about to add marital responsibilities. He was engaged to be married the following spring.

One of the first calls Cleary made when he decided to charter a boat to dive on the Andrea Doria was to Napoliello. On the trip out to the site they talked about the two previous deaths that summer.

While it did not deter them, the loss of two divers that summer did make an impression.With all the gauges, regulators and hoses, he looked like a pilot wearing his cockpit on the outside of his uniform.

"We made light of it, but in our approach to things, used extra caution," said Cleary. "It was always in the back of your mind."

After the close call with the cables, Cleary descended to the wreck a second time but had made up his mind not to go into the wreck again. At the surface Napoliello was getting ready to come back down.

Over his drysuit, Napoliello strapped on a dizzying array of equipment: five air tanks, dive computers, lights, and tools that more than doubled his body weight, adding more than 200 pounds of equipment onto his six-foot 180-pound frame. With all the gauges, regulators and hoses, he looked like a pilot wearing his cockpit on the outside of his uniform.

At 3:40 p.m., he shuffled his now 400 pounds over to the dive ladder and lowered himself slowly into the water, where dive partner, Denis Murphy, was waiting.

* * *

Located close to the edge of the continental shelf where the last vestige of land drops off dramatically into deep ocean, the Andrea Doria sits on a constant tidal treadmill. Tides here do not run in and run out, but circle in giant ellipses, with no true slack tide.

On any given day, the current could be running one way on the surface, another direction midway down the line, and a different direction and speed on the bottom.

Even a competitive swimmer would have a hard time swimming against the two knot current which sometimes races by the site. With all that gear, a technical diver trying to make headway against a current was like trying to walk against the wind holding up a sheet of plywood. A diver losing his grip on the line could be carried 50 miles from his dive vessel in 24 hours.

In a one-knot current, divers had to kick hard and pull their way down the line to the wreck. It was hard work.

The current that day was half a knot, a relatively easy swim down the line.

Napoliello pressed a button on the front of his suit. Air hissed out of the inflatable black wings surrounding his backpack tanks, making him slightly less buoyant as he started his descent down the anchor line tied into the shipwreck below.

Buoyancy was a fundamental skill that could not be underestimated. Half the thrill of deep diving was the feeling of weightlessness, of balancing your buoyanc your weight. Hovering next to a large wreck was like taking a walk in space.

But once you were in the wreck itself, where there was little room for error and even less time to make the right decision, knowing how much to inflate or deflate those wings was essential to survival.

A mistake could send you plummeting like a stricken plane to the bottom of the wreck and the debris and thick layer of silt there. In 1985, John Ormsby misjudged his buoyanc plunged nearly 70 feet, from the top to the bottom of the First Class Foyer. He then panicked and swam into electrical cables, becoming so entangled it took divers two days to cut him out. His body was brought to the surfacestill wrapped in cables.

* * *

It took just a few minutes for Napoliello and Murphy to kick down the line to the Doria.

Cleary had finished his swim around the wreck and was very relieved to see them at the anchor line.

"Both seemed very happy. Like two kids," recalled Cleary. "They almost seemed mischievous."

When they met at the anchor line, Cleary said Napoliello sensed something was wrong. He grabbed Cleary's arm and wouldn't let go until he signaled that he was OK.

Cleary swam up to begin his hour-long decompression. Napoliello and Murphy then entered the ship through the same entrance used by First Class passengers boarding for their trans-Atlantic voyage.

Now, with the doors removed by salvors more than 20 years ago, the entrance known as Gimbel's Hole looked like a dark mine shaft. Napoliello stared into the complete blackness of the First Class foyer. Even his brightest light could not penetrate to the bottom.

As they dropped in, their lights shone on a screen of long, thick electrical cables hanging from what used to be a ceiling like a net to snag the unwary.

Turning to face the stern of the ship, their lights found what appeared to be a flat landing, the top of a ventilator shift that formed one side of an eight-foot wide corridor.

The wood partitions that once made up this corridor and the rooms off it had fallen away into the big debris pile below. As they kicked down the corridor, the pinpoint lights of a row of portholes glimmered overhead. It was like a walk down the aisle of a cathedral.

The china was in a closet, mixed in with silt and mud, beneath the tread of a staircase. With the boat on its side, the stairwell climbed crazily up a wall and overhead. It was as disorienting as a funhouse.

Napoliello picked up a rake left behind by another diver. Silt swirled like a black cloud around the two men.The pounding in his ears stopped as nitrogen bubbles forced under pressure into body tissues moved back into the blood stream and the lungs, where they would be safely breathed out of the body

Approximately 12 minutes had passed when Napoliello signaled for Murphy to take a turn at the rake. Three minutes later, Napoliello reached over and yanked the air regulator out of Murphy's mouth.

Murphy immediately switched to a bail-out regulator, attached to an emergency supply of "bottom" gas, grabbed Napoliello and turned to face him.

Unaccountably, Napoliello still had his own regulator in his mouth. He was holding Murphy's in his hand.

"Out of air?" Murphy signaled.

Napoliello signaled "No," but when Murphy signaled to exit, Napoliello shook his head "yes."

Napoliello took the lead, swimming over and past Murphy.

Once back in the foyer, the light from Gimbel's Hole seemed just a postage stamp overhead, but it took only about a minute to swim up and out of the hole onto the side of the hull.

Murphy watched in amazement as Napoliello swam right past the anchor line and vanished in the murky bottom light.

* * *

Nearly a half hour and a half-dozen stops into his decompression, Cleary was just 50 feet from the surface. His headache began to abate. The pounding in his ears stopped as nitrogen bubbles forced under pressure into body tissues moved back into the blood stream and the lungs, where they would be safely breathed out of the body.

He check his watch and glanced down the line. A wave of emotion washed over him as he realized there was no one below him.

Pressure changes are greater the closer you get to the surface and divers must nearly double the time they spend at each stop along the line. Traffic tends to get backed up at that point.Cleary's watch corroborated the feeling he had that Napollielo and Murphy were way overdue. He calculated that Napollielo should be just 10 feet, maybe 20 feet at the most, below him on the anchor line.

Against his better judgment, he dropped back down on the line to see if he could see them at a lower stop.

He met two divers coming up.

They just shrugged their shoulders at Cleary's inquiry. They hadn't seen either diver.

Cleary looked down the line again and saw no one.

"I had a very, very terrible feeling. They were nowhere on the line. I knew it was bad."

After more than an hour in the water, Cleary was feeling the cold. He was congested, and he knew he didn't have enough gas to go back down. With a feeling of dread combined with helplessness, he headed back up the anchor line, the 13 minutes at each stop feeling like hours, going over and over in his mind what might have happened, feeling very dejected.

Suddenly, a mate from the Seeker named Vince came steaming down the line and pulled up in front of him, peering into his face mask, checking his identity. The mate had no hood on, and Cleary knew then that someone had surfaced without doing a decompression. This was an emergency check on those left on the line to see if anyone else was having trouble.

"I knew it couldn't be good, but I suspected it was Denis Murphy, and that Vince was trying to help him," he said.

It was a terrible 15 minutes he had to wait, just a few kicks from the surface, but the price to pay for breaking decompression was intense pain and possibly irreparable physical damage.

When he finally burst the surface, he yelled to those on the Seeker that Napoliello and Murphy were missing.

"People were hanging off the back of the boat, insisting that I get out of the water, but I didn't want to step up on deck and see his body," said Cleary.

Glancing over at the Sea Inn, another dive vessel anchored just 300 feet away, he could see the crew laboring over someone on the dressing table, administering CPR.

Cleary started to swim to the vessel, overtaxing his already exhausted body.

He gave up and was hauled on board the Seeker

* * *

Like many deaths in this extreme and isolated environment, no one really knows what happened to Napoliello. Murphy assumed he had missed the Seeker's anchor line and swam to the anchor line of another dive boat.

Ironically, he was seen by several divers, floating over the hull and emitting a bubble stream. Seeker skipper Dan Crowell even videotaped him kicking slowly next to the hull.

Divers thought at the time that he was resting before heading back up. Investigators now believe he was unconscious, suffering an involuntary muscle spasm after a possible heart attack.

Before his fatal dive, two Seeker crew members told Napoliello the labels on two of his tanks had the wrong percentage of oxygen, a mix that would cause fatal convulsions. "Sometimes, it feels to me like a cruel hoax. Five fatalities are unfortunate and they have taken an emotional toll on me."

Napoliello assured the crewmen the tanks were simply mislabeled. A subsequent analysis showed they indeed contained the right mixture.

The autopsy cited drowning, the ultimate cause listed on almost any diving death. Among the possible conditions contributing to death was listed a severely blocked coronary artery.

For skipper Crowell, it was an especially tragic end to the season. It was the deadliest diving season in the history of diving on the Doria. All three deaths had occurred on his vessel.

While Roost and Sicola were not considered experienced Doria divers, Napoliello was a veteran of numerous dives.

Until he received the autopsy results, Crowell couldn't rule out it wasn't his crew's fault in not examining the gas in Napoliello's tanks.

"Vince was a good friend. A guy I've known for I don't know how many years," he said.

* * *

The 1999 dive season hasn't been any kinder to Crowell.

With most of the season behind him, back-to-back tragedies occurred within a week of each other. On July 22, Christopher Murley, 44, of Cincinnati, Ohio, died of an apparent heart attack while swimming from the Seeker to the anchor line. Five days later, Charles McGurr, 52, an auto body mechanic of Brick, N.J., died, possibly of a heart attack., after aborting his dive and attempting to swim back to the surface.

Crowell takes a kind of cold comfort in the knowledge that these deaths could have happened regardless of whether the divers were diving off his boat or on the Andrea Doria.

"Sometimes, it feels to me like a cruel hoax. Five fatalities are unfortunate and they have taken an emotional toll on me," he said.

A "one or two drink person," Crowell said he went to a pub and got "hammered" after McGurr's death.

"One guy left me a note that said 'I can't imagine a better time I've had. I'll remember everything.' Unfortunately, I'll also have to remember Charlie," said Crowell. "What a roller coaster.

On the 10-hour ride back to Long Island, Cleary lit a cigar and had a drink in Napoliello's memory. He didn't get to sleep until four a.m. and then woke up an hour later praying it was all a terrible dream.

His worst duty had been the call to Napoliello's family.

"You can't get any lower than that. I've had no lower moment, certainly not in my diving life or my personal life," he said.

A year later Cleary still gets emotional over Napoliello's death. But he still goes diving, and he still goes out on the Seeker.

"You can't let it stop you," he said of the tragedy. "It would be an insult to Vince to let it stop you."

"On a good day, I could take you down with no problem," said Crowell. "But the Andrea Doria will give you all the rope you need to hang yourself."