nadwidny:
Happy to (all quotes from your source):
"I gave them my pat speech," he (Belinda) said, "that their first dive on her should be just a touch dive to dispel the myths of diving the
Doria, reducing it to just another dive."
Bielenda used to reason back then, "You think you know, but you don't know what a diver will do once they are on the wreck. Of course I know now that a wreck diver is gonna do whatever they want to. I could only hope that maybe some of them will go down with some of my words of warning, but most of them won't. And in Ormsby's case, he definitely paid me no heed."
Gimbel's Hole was a wide opening cut out by underwater adventurer, cinematographer, and department-store heir Peter Gimbel. The hole had been the double doors of the first-class gangway, where the passengers entered the vessel. Gimbel and his crew had broken the portholes out, burned off the hinges, secured a chain through the portholes, and pulled out the doors for a 1981 documentary, an effort that had almost killed Gimbel. During one of the dives Gimbel took an oxygen toxicity hit and had to be pulled from within the wreck and up to the surface by a fellow diver. Gimbel would later say that the shipwreck had a "malevolent spirit."
Sally and Gary dropped down the corridor shaft through a jungle of hanging cables and wires. At one point, fifty feet in, the corridor branches off aft to the first-class dining room and forward to the chapel. The first-class dining room, located near the center of the ship to provide the most stability for the wealthy diners, was the mother lode for divers seeking china. Hence, the corridor just inside Gimbel's Hole was the most logical entry point for divers seeking artifacts.
Below the branch-off point, Sally and Gary had to duck under some collapsed beams dropping into an area that fell off to a watery blackness. From there they had to rely on their depth gauges to bring them to a spot on the wall at 223 feet. The room was once glass-enclosed. Shelves from the gift shop had slid down, dumping their contents onto the walls. That was where Gary and Sally began to dig.
Sally was shoulder to shoulder with Gary when they started digging through the muck for the precious artifacts. While she was concentrating on digging through the now billowing silt, something big suddenly slammed into Sally Wahrmann. "At the time I didn't know what it was," she said. "Whatever it was, it really whacked me hard, it was all over me. It was almost like I got socked in the jaw. My regulator got knocked out of my mouth, my mask flooded, I lost my buoyancy, and I went barreling down to the bottom of the corridor coming to rest in a pile of rotting wood and debris."
Stunned, Sally was still able to get her regulator back in her mouth, then she cleared her mask of the invading seawater. It was no small task, but Sally had presciently secured her mask to her face by pulling her neoprene hood over the mask strap, a practice Bielenda ardently endorsed. Had she not had the mask under her hood, she would probably have lost her mask, her underwater vision, and any hope of escaping death from deep inside the ship.
Sally frantically tried to orient herself to where she was. Telling herself to calm down, she located the telltale stream of air bubbles spent from her regulator in the silt-blackened waters, which told her which way was up. Following the bubbles and making a slow, cautious ascent, she was finally able to make out the faint green glow of light from the surface. The glow of light was no bigger than the circumference of a tablespoon but its welcome sight added to the flood of adrenaline that was furiously pumping through her system. Sally was sucking down air at an alarming rate. She knew she had to get out of there -- and fast.
Dropping down deeper into the hole, he then saw Ormsby, and that he was in trouble.
Ormsby, floating faceup, was tangled in cables. His regulator gave off intermittent trails of bubbles, and his eyes were shut. Deans cautiously came down behind him and shook him. The response he got was, in his words, "not from a highly cognitive individual but from a person that was unconscious."
Deans told himself to stay calm, stopped, looked, and tried to assess the situation. Seeing the amount of cable wrapped around Ormsby's body reminded Deans of a fork that had been stuck in a plate of spaghetti and twisted. Deans tried to release his friend's weight belt, but because the two quick-release buckles were cinched too tight, Deans could not get the belt off. Every pull just torqued John's body. Deans pulled frantically on the cables and cut at them with his knife -- all to no avail. He remembers saying to himself, "There's no ****ing way, he's dead, and there's no ****ing way I'm getting him out." With tears welling in his eyes he reluctantly swam out of the hole and made his ascent.
Deans, pulling himself hand over hand up the anchor line, ran into divers Gary Gilligan and Sally Wahrmann. Deans pulled out his writing slate and quickly scrawled, "HELP BUDDY STUCK IN HOLE." Gilligan nodded his understanding, then Deans swam to the traverse line at fifty feet and followed it under the boat. He made it to the weighted end and swam up the line, reaching the surface amidships.
A diver usually enters Gimbel's Hole feetfirst, slowly dropping in. Ormsby must have gone in headfirst. Apparently he did not have enough buoyancy to sustain a slow and safe penetration. Speeding down the corridor, Ormsby must have aimed for a protruding bulkhead to grab something to stop himself. What he got was a handful of electrical cables. But the cables pulled loose and cascaded on top of him, adding to his weight. Ormsby plummeted down to his collision with the unsuspecting Wahrmann.
After sending Sally Wahrmann to the bottom, Ormsby managed to swim, despite being ensnared by cable, up from the 223-foot depth to 206 feet. But then he was hopelessly snared.
Gilligan and Wahrmann never saw the struggling or unconscious Ormsby when they exited the dark and silted corridor. By the time Deans and Delotto arrived at Gimbel's Hole, Gary and Sally were already making their slow ascent up the anchor line.
Back aboard the
Wahoo, Ormsby's death cast a pall over the expedition. Bielenda notified the U.S. Coast Guard about the fatality. If someone was hurt or lost, the Coast Guard would have dispatched a chopper or cutter, but since the death was confirmed, there was no need for an emergency trip far out into the ocean at the taxpayers' expense. The
Wahoo was instructed to recover the body.
Bielenda was unwilling to risk a nighttime recovery of the body. As Captain Janet Bieser said, "You never send live marines up the hill to get the dead ones." Divers Rick Jaszyn and Gary Gentile were given the grim task of recovering Ormsby's body from the hold of the
Doria the next day. In his panic-stricken struggle to free himself from the jungle of wires and cable, Ormsby had wrapped himself cocoonlike in solid-core wire. Knives were useless. Fortunately, a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters was aboard the
Wahoo.
When Jaszyn and Gentile got to the bottom, they secured a seventy-five-foot line to the anchor line with a carabiner and took the free end into the hole with them. Reaching Ormsby's body, they slipped the free end onto one of his D rings on his harness, so that once his body was cut free, it would be tethered to the anchor line.
Jaszyn and Gentile began to cut away at the cables on either side of the body. A few minutes into the effort Gary felt a tug on his tanks. He knew immediately he was snagged in the cables. He froze and started to flash his light at his dive buddy. Rick looked over and seeing Gary pointing his thumb to his back, quickly understood the predicament. Rick swam over and freed Gary.
"It was a scary couple of minutes for me," Gentile would later relate, "but one thing you learn in wreck diving, when you get tangled, you have to remain calm, because twisting and fighting will only make it worse. When you have a buddy there, you let him do the work."
Gentile and Jaszyn created a cloud of silt in their effort to free the body. Jaszyn was amazed how tightly Ormsby was wrapped in the cable. He could not even get his finger between the cable and Ormsby's dry suit, so he had to cut the suit to get at the cable. While he worked to free the body, Ormsby's face was never more than six inches away from his. He and Ormsby were the same age and had been friends. It was hard for Rick to set aside his emotions. It was a "****ty job," but John Ormsby had a family, Jaszyn had to remind himself, and they could not just leave John behind like that.
Once they had gotten most of the cables cut free, Gentile snapped another lift bag to a D ring on the body and inflated it, figuring they could now raise the body out of the hole. They couldn't.
(continued)
