THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 17, 1995 TAG: 9507170035
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 121 lines
As living room knickknacks go, the bell from the sunken luxury liner is downright impressive.
The 150 pounds of solid brass still show a lot of the corrosion and sea-life buildup from nearly 30 years deep in the Atlantic. But the name etched into it is clear - ANDREA DORIA - and it evokes the chills of the most legendary disasters at sea.
The Lusitania. The Titanic. The Andrea Doria.
The bell is right there, on the coffee table, as you walk in the front door of Mike Boring's house. Ten years ago, Boring was part of a seven-man dive team that recovered it from the ill-starred Italian liner, which lies on its side 245 feet beneath the surface, 45 miles off the coast of Nantucket, Mass.
Boring and other members of the dive team rotate the bell among themselves. For a scuba diver, it's about as treasured a relic as one can imagine.
``A ship's bell,'' Boring said, ``is the ultimate artifact you can get off a wreck.''
The Andrea Doria, one of the last of the palatial trans-Atlantic steamships, collided with a Swedish liner on July 29, 1956. Fifty-one people died, but more than 1,500 were rescued as the 700-foot ship wallowed for hours before dropping to the bottom.
The ship was an immediate legend. Rumors flew of massive amounts of treasure aboard. Salvage operations of varying success were tried, the most spectacular resulting in the 1984 television broadcast of the opening of the ship's safe. It was stuffed with soggy currency.
Most of those operations had the benefit of state-of-the-art equipment, pressurized dive chambers, and backers with deep pockets.
The team Boring dove with on July 10, 1985, was different. Though dedicated and experienced, they were largely amateurs, and were diving from the surface with tanks of compressed air. Submersible dive computers were not yet in use, and the Navy dive tables they used for planning bottom times and ascent rates did not allow for dives as deep as the Andrea Doria.
``It was really kind of dicey, especially for that time,'' Boring said Thursday as he relaxed on his couch, the bell looming on the table as a silent but ominous third party to the conversation. ``We kind of extrapolated the Navy tables. . . . There was a bit of guesswork involved.''
With their bottom time limited to 20 minutes, and diving just twice a day in two-man teams, it took five days to recover the bell.
``It took a long time just to locate it,'' said Boring, a 39-year-old civilian computer specialist for the Navy. On a wreck as deep as the Andrea Doria, visibility might be 20 to 30 feet. It's cold and dark, like swimming through iced tea.
With a 700-foot ocean liner, that means you see the ship in little pieces at a time. Because it's lying heavily on its side, things you'd expect to see on the wall are now on the ceiling. And much of it is encrusted with rust and sea life.
Compounding the danger is the effect deep-water pressure has on the body. At 245 feet, the pressure is nearly eight times what it would be on the surface. The risky part is what that pressure does to the body's ability to process oxygen and nitrogen.
Stay too long at that depth, or surface too rapidly, and a diver risks decompression sickness, or ``the bends.'' It is caused by nitrogen bubbling its way out of the circulatory system. The result can range from mild discomfort to death. Surfacing too quickly can result in an embolism - a burst blood vessel caused by rapidly expanding gases.
Boring has been ``bent'' twice, and seriously. ``The first time was my fault,'' he said, ``I was pushing the (decompression) tables, trying to get a porthole off a wreck, and I overextended myself.'' He ran short of air on ascent and had to surface sooner than he should have.
He was numb from the waist down, and in his left arm. He was treated at Bethesda Naval Hospital and walked away - cured, as well as lucky - after more than six hours in a recompression chamber.
He was less lucky the second time. After a couple of relatively deep dives - 160 feet and 90 feet - he was hit by the bends off the coast of North Carolina and had to be taken to a chamber at Duke University. After five treatments he was still weak and in pain, and it took him seven months to recover.
That was eight years ago. Not only is Boring still diving, he has fallen in with a small fraternity of East Coast divers who are pushing new frontiers of underwater exploration. Employing varying mixes of oxygen, nitrogen and helium, in different proportions for different depths, Boring and divers like him are searching wrecks as deep as the Frankfurt, a German light cruiser that lies in 420 feet of water off the Virginia coast.
Other wrecks, many of them unidentified and long out of the reach of sport divers, are coming into range through those new techniques, which a growing number of technical divers up and down the Atlantic coast are employing.
Boring uses brass windows from the Andrea Doria as picture frames and has porcelain plates, a glass pitcher and silverware from the ship. Beautiful relics from a score of other wrecks are scattered throughout his house.
The brass and glass artifacts, though, explain but a small part of what motivates Boring and other deep-wreck divers.
``There's so much history out there begging to be identified,'' he said.
For those who argue that artifacts should be left at the bottom of the sea - and many preservationists feel that way - he counters: ``The sea takes these things back, especially in the salt water. Shipwrecks deteriorate, they break down and collapse into themselves. . . . I've dove the Andrea Doria 27 times and I've seen it deteriorate over time.''
And he's not a heartless marauder. On one wall is a color photo of a ship's wheel in so pristine and accessible a setting that he thought it best to leave the artifacts alone, for future divers to enjoy.
``One hundred to 150 years from now all those things will be gone,'' he said. ``For most people, the only way they'll see them is if they are brought up.
``And for every ship you can identify, that's a small part of history that you can bring back to life.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by MARK MITCHELL/
Ten years ago, Mike Boring was part of a seven-man dive team that
recovered the Andrea Doria's bell. It's now at Boring's Virginia
Beach home.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
File photo
Fifty-one people died after the Andrea Doria collided with a Swedish
liner July 29, 1956. More than 1,500 lived.
KEYWORDS: ANDREA DORIA SHIPWRECK SUNKEN SHIP by CNB