In memorium for my friend and mentor Carl Spencer who tragically died while exploring Britannic on this expedtion.

I joined two different expeditions to the wreck of the HMS Britannic. In both expeditions the call went out some of the top technical divers and underwater imaging experts in the world, and I was honored to work and dive alongside such talented people.

2009 National Geographic Britannic Expedition

Britannic Courtesy of Ken Marschall

Carl Spencer’s phone call is the kind that wreck divers like me LOVE to get; “hey mate, I’m heading up a dive team back to Britannic in 2009, you in?” He had to be smiling like the Cheshire cat on the other end of that transatlantic phone call cause he knew there was no way I was going to let this pass. This is what I do, and the Britannic is the simply the best wreck dive in the world. That by itself would be enough but Carl knew better. Back in 2006, the expedition I led along with John Chatterton to the Britannic had been cut short by a permitting gaff with the Greek Government, just as I was a dive away from pushing further into the wreck and answering a question that was never clearly answered; why did Britannic sink even faster than Titanic? I HAD to get back to the wreck and figure this out.

As Carl laid out the details I realized this project was larger and even more ambitious than the one he and his pal Leigh Bishop had help mentor me with back in 2006. For starters the dive vessel we would be using was like something out of a wrecks divers dream; a 200 foot long ship from Belgium called the Cmdt Fourcault. The vessel was totally geared for technical diving with multiple compressors, inflatable chase boats, tenders and even an onboard decompression chamber. The vessel operated regularly as a diving and salvage vessel and would also provide the all the support staff we would need, both topside and in water. The Fourcault would even pick up all the dive gear, sofnalime, dozens of helium/oxygen cylinders and camera equipment in the UK prior to steaming to the Aegean Sea, so all the logistics issues that had plagued us in 2006 was removed in one fell swoop! And as if to add a cherry to the top, the Fourcault included an onboard helicopter for aerial filming!

Our Dive platform the CmDt Forcualt

Not only was this the best platform you could ask for, but the team Carl assembled was also some of the best technical divers and U/W cameramen in the world. Carl planned to field up to four dive teams per day, each team operating on various missions throughout the wreck at the same time, so the team would be equally split between veteran Britannic divers and new guys. The roster included; Carl Spencer, Leigh Bishop and Richie Stevenson (UK),  Evan Kovacs, Jarrod Jablonski, Casey McKinlay and me (USA), Eduardo Pavio (Italy), Danny Huyge (BE) and Pete Measly (NZ). Just like the 2006 expedition, the Lone Wolf Documentary Group would be aboard for topside filming along with the techs from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), who would be providing not only hi-definition fiber optic controlled AND 3-D camera systems, but two ROV’s that would be in the water not only with the divers, but around the clock for unmanned filming and exploration of the wreck.

Also aboard were three DAN hyperbaric technicians and doctors including Dr. Petar DeNoble, who would oversee all the testing of the team, both pre and post dives. The historical and design expert Parks Stephenson was also back, as was Britannic’s owner Simon Mills and rounding out the research team, WWI historian Marty Morgan joined the group.

Explorer Club team members, Leigh Bishop, Casey McKinley and Jarrod Jablonsski

One of the most daunting penetrations planned would be to reach and film the famed “Turkish Baths” an opulent steam room located deep in the bowels of the ship. It was never verified that this room was even completed before ship was turned into a hospital ship and it was a mystery Carl intended to solve. To get this area of the wreck is confusing even on blueprints so Carl tasked legendary cave explorers Jarrod Jablonski and Casey McKinlay with figuring a way in.

Richie Stevenson and I would go back to the fireman’s tunnel and figure out a way to get past the obstruction in boiler room six that had blocked our path back in 2006. Our mission was to get to the back of the compartment and see if the door to boiler room five was open or closed. This was by no means an easy penetration, but both Richie Stevenson and I had been in the compartment before, as a matter of fact it was Richie Stevenson who had found the open doorway into the fireman’s tunnel back in 2003. If we could get into boiler room five we might be able to solve a mystery surrounding how and why the ship sank even faster than Titanic.

Carl would dive with cameraman Evan Kovacs and planned to deploy a new science experiment on the boat deck and recover the one we left back in 2006, and then drop into the radio room to see if the Marconi telegraph (the only one known to still exist) was still sitting precariously on a steel beam as it had been back in 2006. Negotiations were ongoing for permission from the Greek government to recover this priceless artifact before it fell from its perch and was destroyed or lost forever, and once located it was hoped antiquities minister would allowed it to be removed. Other missions for this expedition were to gain access into the engine room via the skylights, and also document the first class dining areas, both areas that had not been exxplored. The WHOI imaging experts were tasked with creating the first ever photomosaic of this 1000 foot long ship, as I said before, there was no shortage of aspirations on this aggressive agenda!

Mentally preparing for the dive.

But before we could even start, we needed to establish a down line to the wreck, and that where I was going to earn my salt. Carl asked me to “set the hook” on Britannic. I had been on the wreck twice before, so I knew the lay of the land, so to speak, and I had done deep “tie in’s” on other wrecks too many times to count, so I was a logical choice for the water work. I would be setting the hook in a three man team; veteran Richie Stevenson, (who was carrying a camera so couldn’t be of much help), Danny Huyge, who was making his first dive to the wreck, and me. The dive was a bear with a strong surface current that didn’t abate until about 100 feet, and there was too much scope on the line so we were stuck descending and fighting the current much longer than we should have. When we finally landed on the high side of the wreck at 300 feet, Danny helped me drag the line and chain, (no easy task in that current) across the upper deck to tie into a mooring bollard forward of the bridge, exactly where Carl wanted it. Richie Stevenson was able to get a little video done of the bridge area and then it was time for us to head back up. During our ascent the current was still strong and but didn’t stop the other teams from getting in the water that day. As we were decompressing on the deco station, and the other teams were on the bottom, the Fourcault started to swing on her anchor line and the stern of the ship snagged the top float attached to the downline, severing it near the surface. Fortunately almost all of the dive team had already transferred to the floating deco station which was still moored to the wreck, but Jarrod and Casey had to do a drifting decompression when they found the severed downline laying on the seafloor!  These possibilities had been planned for and with the proper support teams and equipment, were handled quickly and all divers recovered safely.

The next day I was tasked with going and setting the hook, again. I would set again with Danny Huyge and Eduardo Pavio would join our trio, and just like the day before Eduardo would have a camera, (this was after all a film expedition!) Given the problems with the current the day prior we had shortened the down line but this time the line didn’t land on top of the wreck, it was down at 400 feet in the sand about 30 yards away from the wreck! In the fanatstic visibility we could see Britannic in the distance, rising 100 feet above us, it is an awesome sight. There was long chain clipped to the heavy drop weight and unclipping the sacrificial weight, I draped the chain across my shoulders and started to walk across the sand toward the wreck while Danny pulled the 500 feet of ½” line behind me. I think Eduardo just shot video, or he may have been helping I was too focused on my breathing, slow and evenly, making sure I didn’t work too hard. When we got to the wreck, I paused and looked up the nets that hang down the wreck like a curtain. With the chain around my neck I slowly climbed hand over hand in my hand while Danny pulled up the line and bore the weight from above me, each of us trying to make sure, neither I nor the chain, fouled in the net. It is almost 100 feet straight up and I was exhausted when done. Even though I moved slowly and deliberately it had taken a toll. I sat on the hull for a few minutes catching my breath and enjoying the view, but there was no time for any exploration the dive took almost 40 minutes to tie in. The other teams fared much better achieving some of their goals on day two, but the surface current was still strong and made the decompression phase of everyone’s dive sporty, to say the least.

On day three we awoke to find the large orange floats marking my down line gone! Everyone looked at Danny Huyge and me at breakfast; we knew we did a solid tie in, where the hell was the line? Did a ship run it over in the night? Carl came to me and said “I can’t ask you tie in three days in a row, but if you are up to another dive today, do you think help them with the locating the right spot?” Under the best of circumstances I shouldn’t have made three dives in a row, but I felt good and rested and agreed to dive. As Carl and I were talking, the Captain of the Fourcault put the tender in the water and the boat driver went over the top of wreck and reported he could see the large orange float underwater with the line still attached! The strong current had pulled the 1 meter round orange float down to seventy feet, collapsing most but not all of its buoyancy. Relieved I wouldn’t be needed to tie in again, the Captain then sent down a support diver who affixed lifting bags and sent the line and limp float to the surface, where more floats where attached. I was one step away from pondering if I would dive at all when word came that Richie Stevenson was going to head back to the fireman’s tunnel and try a new route to the next boiler room, and I decided I would join him, this is what I was here for!

The plan was simple and played out just as we had discussed on the boat. Richie Stevenson would lead the way through the fireman’s tunnel and lay new penetration line inside the wreck, and I would film and light him from behind with the two huge HID lights on the one of a kind 3-D camera I was using. Once through the long narrow corridor, we pushed through the tiny space between the huge double-ended boilers in boiler room 6 and then dropped down to the next corridor which would lead on to boiler room five. The water going into boiler room 5 was gin clear and as Richie Stevenson swam in. I stopped at the doorway and filmed as he continued on through the next set of boilers and into boiler room four. We were 360 feet down and nearly 200 feet into the wreck, further than anyone else had ever been inside Britannic! As I watched his fins disappear in the tiny crack separating the huge boilers I took a few private moments to look around at the pristine condition of this compartment; glass faced gauges and huge brass plaques mounted on the bulkhead, light fixtures, shovels and wheelbarrows, all with wood handles intact, all with a blanket of silt and mummified in the still dead water.

Once through the boiler’s and on the far side of boiler room four, Richie tied off the line and swam back, a quick “ok” hand signal followed by thumbs up indicated it was time to turn the dive and head back out. Letting him pass me, we now had to go back through the turbid water we had disturbed on our way in through the boilers, our lights useless in the milky brown water. The incredibly thin white line was our only clear sense of direction in the swirling storm of silt. I felt rather than saw myself pushing through the restriction of the boilers, my stomach pushed down in the century of soft silt, the top of my rebreather bumping along the huge boiler above me. Pushing the camera in front of me, I could hear the clank and bump of Richie ahead but couldn’t see anything at all. I moved painfully slow, this was a true “braille” dive, feeling and innate sense of location working with memory to create a visual in my mind of where I was. This helped when I sensed more then saw that my head and camera had passed through the boiler and was in free water. The visibility improved only slightly as Richie’s exit ahead of me had made it appear that the compartment was on fire, thick silt mimicking billows of smoke rolling through the water around me.

As I made my way across the compartment, I was suddenly stopped dead in my tracks, something was caught behind me. Sensing it was on my right side I kept the guideline in my left hand and grabbed out to the vague pipe shape it was looped around to steady myself. This area of the compartment was a lattice work of piping and walkways, everything “topsy turvy” as the wreck lays on her side.  There was path I needed to stay on in this maze, and in the near zero visibility that line was my only clear direction out. I needed to hold the line at all costs, but I also wanted to steady myself in order to free whatever was knitting me to the wreck.  As I grabbed hold of it, the frail pipe it collapsed and I started to descend deeper into the silt choked water, the broken pipe now causing my lifeline to sink down. Still maintaining my loose grip on the lifeline to lead me out of this mess, I pumped a little air into my dry suit and caught my buoyancy, and just floated there, blind in the coffee colored water. The huge camera now dangled between my legs on a lanyard, threatened to get further entangled on objects I couldn’t see in this mud soup.

I found something solid to hold onto in the murk and I focused on the only thing I could see; the two green lights of my HUD, (heads up display). Those beautiful little lights that told me that at least everything was going well with my rebreather, and that made me inwardly smile, because when things go sideways while diving, the mantra I have always told myself is “if your breathing, everything is ok, so just focus on the problem at hand, fix it completely and move on”. Reaching back, I felt a thin wire or line had wedged itself between my oxygen valve on my rebreather and then had looped around the emergency bailout tank I carried under my arm when I had descended.

My fingers methodically traced the wires path around my equipment and visualizing this in my mind’s eye, I was able to gently work it around the tank and off the valve, and I was loose! I could now move and picked the camera up, and thankfully it hadn’t gotten caught on anything else. I swam out of the huge silt cloud and into the long tunnel that would take me out of this labyrinth of pipes and cables, back into the open water. As swimming out of the wreck and into the blue water, I looked for Richie Stevenson and saw him about 75 feet above me, holding onto the ascent line and looking straight down at me. It appeared as if he was willing me to make my appearance. Making eye contact, he raised his arm in a fist pump of victory and elation to see me get finally get out. The entanglement had delayed my exit by only 2 minutes, but for Richie Stevenson waiting for me to exit, it seemed like hours!  As I slowly ascended and began the long decompression ahead, I looked back down at this huge and magnificent wreck. It occurred to me then, and I still believe, it was one of the best dives of my career.

After the long seven hour decompression, I surfaced and was towed back to the Fourcault by the diving tender, and quickly lifted up on onto the deck by the crane operated stage lift. I was immediately aware something was very wrong. When I had surfaced from the two previous day’s dives there would be a throng of people, and cameras. The film crew would be asking questions about the dive and the DAN techs want to poke and prod asking “how do you feel”.  But aside from two of the Fourcault’s deck crew who helped me out of my gear, the deck was empty. As I secured my gear, the lead imaging expert from WHOI, Bill Lang finally walked over to me. Bill normally has a “no nonsense, tough as nails” disposition, but his face was etched with such sadness and pain it startled me. Putting a hand on my shoulder he quietly said “he didn’t make it” the words almost inaudible as his head tilted down to the deck. A mixture of fear and confusion rose inside me. I asked “what… who…what are you talking about Billy?” It dawned on him that I had no idea what had happened and grabbing me by both shoulders he looked me in the face and said, “Carl…Richie…its Carl…he didn’t make it………………..Carl is dead”.

I couldn’t register this information. I felt as if I had been struck hard in the gut. I couldn’t really grasp that Carl was dead. We had spoken just eight hours ago, a smile and a back slap wishing me luck in the boiler room. Now he was gone. My mind struggled with this, and my heart felt stabbed as I thought of his wife Vicki who would soon get this terrible news. I slouched down and sat there on the deck stunned and shattered. After a while, one of the DAN techs grabbed me to go to their cabin for my post dive examination and make sure I was okay after my long dive. It was all a fog, and everything seemed faraway and slow.

The details of Carl’s tragic accident became clearer in the hours and then days ahead, but did nothing to assuage the terrible emptiness of his loss. Carl made his first dive of the expedition that day and had successfully deployed a new science experiment on the wreck before going inside to check on the Marconi radio. For reasons that will never be clearly known, Carl exited the wreck swimming quickly to the ascent line and then bailed off his rebreather at 300ft. He began a controlled open circuit ascent up the line and was fully supported by his dive partner Evan Kovacs, who followed procedure and signaled topside of the emergency below. Support divers with even more gas were provided to Carl within minutes, who continued to ascend under open circuit decompression protocol to 120 feet.

Carl had placed a small yellow cylinder labeled air, on the down line before his dive. It is unclear what this tank was to be used for, as air (and this tank) is not part of the emergency decompression protocol nor had this tank been filled or tested by anyone on the project. As it was Carl’s personal tank that he had brought with him on the Fourcault, and not part of the team program, it had not been checked. It was labeled “air” but in fact was a 50% oxygen mix. Carl took out the regulator of bailout gas he was breathing and started to breathe from this tank. Within minutes Carl began seizing from oxygen toxicity and became unconscious and unresponsive. He was immediately brought to the surface by the support divers and flown to the recompression chamber and hospital in Athens by a Hellenic Navy helicopter. Despite all efforts at resuscitation, Carl never regained consciousness and died.

The Greek Government suspended all diving operations the next day and the project was shutdown.

Carl Spencer was my friend, a mentor to me and true explorer in every sense of the word. The world is a smaller place without him.

For more information about HMHS Britannic, check out www.britannicfoundation.org