THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 18, 1994 TAG: 9407180049
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERRY TOMALIN, ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
DATELINE: LARGO, FLA. LENGTH: Long : 148 lines
The telephone was ringing when Coleen Marshall opened her dive shop that Tuesday morning.
``We were their last hope,'' she said. ``They had nowhere else to turn.''
Three young men had died scuba diving in a cave in the Bahamas.
Divers quickly recovered the bodies of Matthew Fidler and Ryan Smith, 17-year-olds from Virginia Beach. The youths were memorialized in April by their high school soccer teams. Fidler played for Cox and Smith played for Princess Anne. Their numbers were retired and the Matthew Fidler/Ryan Smith Memorial Fund was created to dedicate one of the fields at the Virginia Beach Soccer Complex in their memory.
The third diver the day the boys died was Jayson Hensley. His body had yet to be found.
The caller, a friend of the missing man's family, found Sea Hunt in the yellow pages.
``Our advertisement mentions cave diving,'' explained Gary Perkins, who co-owns the Largo dive shop. ``I guess that's why he came to us.''
The victim's family was willing to pay, the caller said. How much would it cost?
Nothing, Perkins replied.
``Who could accept money for something like that? We had the training. How could we say no?''
Locals call it the ``Blue Hole.''
From the surface, you'd never know it was there. Saltwater caves appear inviting to divers in search of lobster or grouper.
They enter, swim a few feet, and wonder, should I go on? Most back out. But a few, overconfident or, perhaps, simply naive, resist the natural urge to stay in the safety of daylight. They kick toward the darkness and die.
``I think the real truth of the thing is that there were two young adventuresome boys, who never broke the rules, a master diver that knows better than to break the rules, and I frankly think they all did,'' said Charles Fidler, Matthew Fidler's father. ``They either went up into the tunnel and got disoriented as to which tunnel got them back out, or, perhaps they got into some of the currents that sweep through the tunnels and caves. I'm just not sure.''
The elder Fidler said he had checked out the cave's reputation with some other local diving experts, who told him the area was safe.
Matthew Fidler and Smith, the Beach teenagers, didn't have much scuba diving experience. Smith had learned to dive only a few weeks before.
Hensley, who had been living in the Bahamas, had led divers on tours of the ocean cave before. He wasn't a trained cave diver but was comfortable in the water. He loved to surf, fish and sail.
``He knew the water,'' said his mother, Judy Miller. ``It was as if he were born in it.''
Divers had found Fidler and Smith together, 100 feet from the cave's entrance. They didn't want to go back down into the cave to look for Hensley.
``It was too much for them,'' Miller said. ``One of them got sick. They just couldn't do it again.''
But the Wilmington, N.C., woman couldn't bear the thought of her only child, alone, in that cold, dark coffin of the sea.
``I couldn't leave him down there,'' she said. ``If I had to sacrifice everything, spend all my money, whatever, I'd do it. I had to get my son back.''
Florida has about 500 certified cave divers, and about 50 of them are trained to recover victims of cave diving accidents. Law enforcement maintains a list of trained recovery divers who will respond anywhere in the world.
Al Pertner and Gary Perkins' names are on that list. But Judy Miller had a friend who acquired their services the old-fashioned way - the telephone book. It was three days after Easter.
``We didn't have much time to get ready,'' Perkins said. ``We got the call and a few hours later we were on a jet to the Bahamas.''
The plane set down at 1:30 p.m. They told the pilot to wait.
``We didn't think it would take that long,'' he said. ``We were wrong.''
At 4:30, after an 18-mile boat ride, they reached the dive site. They strapped on their gear and descended about 75 feet to the cave.
Their electric lights glistened off white walls as they moved slowly across the sand bottom. A passageway led off to the right, and Pertner paused to look.
``Something hit me . . . like I got punched in the face,'' he said. ``I knew he was in there.''
But the rescue divers stuck to their game plan. They traveled deep into the cave, trailing a safety line to guide them out.
``That's the natural course . . . when somebody panics, they swim toward the clear water,'' Pertner said. ``And that is usually deeper into the cave.''
But the cave was empty.
When Pertner and Perkins came back without the body, Miller began to panic. Please don't give up, she thought, please don't leave my boy down there.
Pertner and Perkins stayed the night. They did what rescue workers shouldn't do.
``We ate dinner with them, looked at photographs of the boy and shared stories,'' Pertner said. ``I wish we hadn't. It's hard enough to do something like this without becoming part of the family's sorrow.''
Neither man slept that night. Pertner paced the room. He's in that cave, he thought to himself, he's in that cave.
Perkins went over the possibilities. Maybe he went into another cave. Maybe he surfaced and was swept out to sea.
Dawn brought no answers, just another long boat ride and an empty cave at the bottom of Blue Hole.
The first and second dives of the day were discouraging. Adjacent caves produced nothing.
They were running out of time; they had been too deep for too long. They could squeeze in one more dive.
Let's try the first tunnel again, Pertner told Perkins. I've got a hunch. I know he's down there.
It took time to get through the narrow passageway. They were running low on air. Then Pertner saw a fin mark in the sand.
``It was one of those `belly in the silt, tank on the roof' kind of openings,'' Pertner said. ``But once I was in, I knew exactly where he was. I couldn't see in all the silt, but I swam right to him.''
They tied a guide line to his body and swam back to the surface.
They brought Jayson Hensley to the dock in a body bag. His mother wanted one last look, but Pertner advised against it.
``I remember pulling away from the dock and looking back,'' he said. ``She was standing there alone. She didn't say anything. She just waved softly. That was all the thanks I'd ever need.''
``Those men were special,'' Miller said of Pertner and Perkins. ``I know how hard it was for them. They helped me, how much I can never say. Now, finally, I can move on.''
Hensley's body was flown to Nassau for an autopsy. A few months before, he had told his mother that if anything ever happened to him, he wanted to be cremated, then returned to the sea.
``He was environmentally conscious and believed that our future was tied to the ocean,'' she said. ``His life was the water.''
On a warm morning, Hensley's surfing buddies paddled his ashes out beyond the break. They scattered his remains, then, one by one, rode waves back to the beach. ILLUSTRATION: SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Scuba divers Gary Perkins, left, and Al Pertner are trained to
recover victims of cave diving accidents. They volunteered to help
find Jayson Hensley, who drowned in April.
Matthew
Fidler
Ryan
Smith
KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT DIVING FATALITIES DROWNING by CNB