By James Heinz

As a kid, I learned about diving watching TV reruns of Sea Hunt. But the show that really inspired me was The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau on ABC. I was entranced by the thought of swimming in warm, clear ocean water looking at beautiful marine life.

I took night SCUBA lessons in 1975 at John Marshall High School. Training was conducted in clear, warm water, not dissimilar to the conditions Jacques Cousteau portrayed. So I thought I knew what to expect when I jumped into Lake Michigan, only to find the water was cold and dark, and I couldn’t see a thing.

My first open water dive was in 1977 to the wreck of the Dutch PRINS WILLEM V, which sank October 13, 1954, when it ran into the tow cable of a tug, three miles off Milwaukee. The wreck of the Willie lies directly in the path of the Milwaukee River’s outflow. At that time heavy industry was still the pride of Milwaukee and water and air pollution were considered signs of prosperity. Years later, flying over the river, I saw the silt plume from the river flowing for several miles into the lake, the wreck of the Willie right in the middle of that outfall.

The Willie lies on its right side, so the port side is a sheer sheet of steel. When the dive boat dropped us on the wreck we landed on steel. In those days we often referred to diving as braille diving. You did not see the wreck so much as feel it. Visibility was about three feet. Six feet of viz was a day you talked about for months. But visibility was more likely to be worse. Like maybe six inches. Or even so bad that the only way to view a wreck was to put your mask against the hull. So it proved this day.

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I had been told there was an orange stripe running along the side of the hull close to the deck. When I found it I would know where I was. Unfortunately, all alone and not able to see anything except the rusty, slimy hull in front of my mask, I did not know which direction to crawl. Choosing a direction at random, I crawled along the hull until the orange stripe appeared. At last I knew where I was.

That was my introduction to Great Lakes wreck diving.

When the 258-foot ship sank, it came to rest in the main shipping lane to Milwaukee. The lake bottom was eighty feet deep. The ship, lying on her side, was 42 feet wide. The U.S. Corps of Engineers ruled that a navigational channel must have forty feet of clearance.

When the Corps asked for bids to remove the obstruction a local diver said he could do it for a mere $46,000. He got the job. Using SCUBA gear, he discovered that only two parts of the ship were above the forty foot line. One was the gangway, a steel staircase rigged on the ship’s left side where it tied to the dock. When the ship sank, the left side rotated upward and now was above the forty foot line. The diver cut the ropes that held the gangway in position and pushed it over the side. The other obstructing part was the pilothouse door, which had been latched in the open position and was now pointing at the surface. The diver closed the door, surfaced, and told the Corps, “Pay me my money.”

The Corps declined to pay, assuming the wreck would be completely demolished. “My brother is a lawyer, my father is a judge, let’s go to court,” the diver Max Gene Nohl said. Two years later the federal court ruled Nohl had fulfilled his contract, ordering the Corps to pay him.

Fast forward to 1960. A free, outdoor, interracial music concert was held in Little Rock, Arkansas. The headliner was Jesse Belvin, a pioneer of the west coast doo-wop sound. The concert did not receive universal approval from the Little Rock community. Belvin was advised to leave town quickly. Belvin, his wife, agent, and the agent’s spouse set out into the Arkansas night in Belvin’s car. Late at night near a small Arkansas town Belvin’s car crossed the centerline, colliding head-on with a car driven by a couple returning from vacation in Mexico. All six people were killed. There were rumors that Belvin’s car had been tampered with, making this a civil rights murder case.

*  *  *

The man driving the other car was Max Nohl, Milwaukee’s Jacques Cousteau. Max went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1930s to become an intrepid underwater explorer. He set a world deep diving record off Port Washington, Wisconsin, using a heliox gas mixture. He founded a company called DESCO — Diving Equipment and Supply Company. The company still exists in Milwaukee’s Third Ward. The company is the last to make old fashioned copper diving helmets. Which is why Hollywood turned to DESCO to manufacture the diving gear used in the movie, Men of Honor, about the Navy’s first black master chief diver, Carl Brashear. The movie stars Cuba Gooding Jr. and Robert De Niro.

The small town in Arkansas was Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s boyhood home. The Nohl family lived in Fox Point; my great aunt worked for them as a maid when she first came to this country.

Max’s sister Mary Nohl became a well known Milwaukee artist. A recluse, she lived in a cottage along the lake shore on Beach Road in Fox Point. She crafted large figures she placed in her front yard. A tall, thin woman with long grey hair she came to be regarded by rowdy teenagers as “The Witch of Beach Road.” One North Shore teenager who occasionally harassed her by knocking over her sculpture didn’t know until he became a diver that she was linked to the Willie.

Max Nohl later unsuccessfully attempted to raise the Willie using World War II Army surplus rubber bridge pontoons. The pontoons are still resting on the wreck. Other attempts also were made to raise the wreck. Metal pontoons and wire cables used in those attempts still litter the lake bottom. Swirling Milwaukee River currents have carved a hole around the wreck so that the Willie now rests in ninety feet of water, ten feet deeper than it was when it sank.

I once got to meet a diving legend. Commercial and Navy divers are often portrayed in the movies as muscle-bound tough guys built like a former gubernator of California. A West Bend dive club had as a speaker a former Navy master diver who helped salvage sunken battleships at Pearl Harbor. I went to the meeting expecting to see a hulk of macho muscularity.

What I got was a Don Knotts.

This diver was a thin, nervous, elderly birdlike man you’d never have imagined spent a  lifetime facing danger beneath the waves. It’s a Navy tradition that old divers assume a supervisory surface role after being trained to operate decompression equipment. Navy divers do not complete their decompression in the water. They do a partial decompression and then surface, remove their gear, and complete the process in a decompression chamber. When they retire, some operate the same type of chamber in hospitals. That’s what Bird Man had done.

He told the story of descending with other Navy divers to the USS ARIZONA to salvage what they could. He entered submerged passageways filled with the floating bloated bodies of sailors. One of the divers, a sailor himself on the Arizona, saw bodies of his fellow shipmates. After completing the dive, the sailor removed his gear and walked over to an officer who wearing a holstered handgun. He was there to guard the ship’s safe and its contents when it was brought up. The sailor pulled the officer’s pistol out of the holster and shot himself in the head. The Navy later ruled that a diver would never be assigned to work on a sunken ship he crewed. Later, I read the same story in books on Pearl Harbor salvage.

*  *  *

I can’t explain why I continued diving other than to quote what someone said about climbing Mount Everest: It is not a rational activity. I tried quarry and lake diving but found that  unsatisfying. I know divers who like plunging their arms into lake mud, disappearing into a cloud of silt, while groping blindly in the muck for old bottles. One woman I dove with was an avid bottle collector. She filled her house with them, worth thousands of dollars to collectors. Each shelf had a net stretched beneath it. When I asked her what the nets were for, she replied “Earthquakes.”

I always came back to wreck diving: partly because I am a history buff and a shipwreck is a moment from the past frozen in time; partly because Great Lakes diving is not a rational activity.

I remember diving the wreck of the SEBASTOPOL off Saint Francis in the seventies. Located halfway between the shore and the breakwater, only its ribs remained. I recall going out one wintry day when we thought the visibility would be better (it wasn’t), digging in the sand and coming up with the remains of coarse, black wool blankets and old leather shoes. That was  part of the ship’s cargo when the she sank in the 1850s. When we finished diving, we played around on the ice floes imitating Arctic seals. With black wetsuits and flippers, we looked like seals.

Our equipment limited our diving. Modern divers have gauges that tell them how much air they have left. We didn’t. We had J valves. You dove with the J valve in the up position. When you had 300 psi left in your tank, your air supply cut off. That’s how you knew you were low on air. You then pulled the J valve down with a metal rod, giving you access to your remaining air supply.

Our wetsuits were made of neoprene. Unable at that time to buy an underwater suit that would not leak, wetsuits were designed to let in a small amount of water next to your skin. Body heat warmed the water. The sensation of ice cold water trickling into your suit is something I’ll never forget. After a while you run out of body heat.

Neoprene has the disadvantage that it compresses with water depth, becoming less buoyant. As the material thins, ripples in the fabric form as you go deeper. If you wear enough lead weights to aid in your descent, on the bottom you’re too heavy. As the Neoprene thins, your weight belt becomes loose, requiring you to tighten it.This requires removing the regulator from your mouth and blowing into the buoyancy compensators. It’s like blowing into your car’s air bag to inflate it just before a collision.Over time the suits lost buoyancy.  You’d learn to wear five pounds of weight when others might wore twenty or twenty-five pounds. Under these conditions, I would pull myself down the descent line to the depth I wanted without having to carry too much weight. 

Even though Neoprene suits were difficult to put on and cold to wear, I continued using them for many years after drysuits were introduced. After listening to other divers’ complaints about leakage I realized that those drysuits were an aspirational product that never quite worked. They were functionally wetsuits marketed as drysuits for considerably more money. My opinion changed when I dove the shipwrecks of Isle Royale in Lake Superior.

*  *  *

Most of the lower Great Lakes warm somewhat during the summer. Warm temperatures will produce one or more thermoclines in a water column close to shore, although the deeper waters are unaffected, remaining a balmy 36 to 38 degrees Fahrenheit year round. Thermoclines are as sharply defined as a brick wall.

Sticking my hand into a thermocline made my fingers colder than my arm from the wrist up. Prolonged warm weather sometimes produced three separate thermoclines. I know this because I not only felt them, I saw them! Because cold water is denser than warm water., as you descended into the lake you can see the colder water ahead of you, kind of shimmering.

One August I dove the wreck of a dredge 306 feet off St. Francis after six weeks of warm weather. It was a flat bottomed harbor work barge with a large steam crane mounted on it. Fastened to the side of the barge was a large metal pole called a spud or dog leg. The pole was driven into the harbor bottom to anchor the barge in place. When the barge sank it rolled upside down and the pole, which was in the up position, was now pointed at the bottom, propping up one end of the barge. In this position, the deck structures now hung upside down about twenty feet above the lake floor. Divers could freely swim under the inverted barge. One of the first divers who found the wreck opened a box of some kind that now hung upside down and was hit in the head by a cascade of heavy metal tools.

That August there were no thermoclines. The water was a balmy 72 degrees all the way to the bottom. I could see pockets or puddles of colder water on the bottom. If I stuck a hand into them, it would become colder than the rest of my arm. I could push the puddles of cold water around the bottom with my hands.

Lake Superior does not have thermoclines. It’s always the same toasty 36 to 38 degrees from top to bottom. Diving twice a day in a wetsuit near Isle Royale left me so cold I was too cold to feel cold. My skin was numb. I pinched myself. I could barely feel it. When I got into my sleeping bag to warm myself, I felt I wasn’t radiating any body heat. I had read that the traditional Eskimo diet was pure fat, because it’s the only food source that provides enough nutrition to maintain body heat in a cold climate. Arctic explorers eat sticks of pure butter like candy bars and crave more. That’s what happened to me. In the middle of August I was freezing to death. I instinctively craved snack chips because they contain so much fat. A friend of mine once lit a potato chip on fire, watching it burn for minutes. I ate all the chips on the boat much to the dismay of the cook.

After that I bought a drysuit.

*  *  *

In the course of diving I once shared a beer with a member of the Milwaukee Police dive team. He told me this story:

At the Jones Island water treatment facility there are large tanks filled with raw sewage. Each tank has a large horizontal paddle that rotates around the tank to mix the sewage with bacteria to produce the fertilizer Milorganite.

A worker happened to drop a shovel in the tank jamming the paddle. No one can accuse the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District of not trying to save money. Someone called the police dive team, asking an officer to go into a tank thirty feet deep filled with unprocessed sewage to retrieve the shovel so the paddle could continue to function.

I still remember the sputtering outrage from the officer who told me this story. A short conversation between him and worker ensued that went like this: “Is there a dead body at the bottom of the tank?” No. “Is there evidence of a crime at the bottom of the tank?” No.  “Then we’re not going.” The officer peered at me over his beer: “You know, I have to take a lot of crap from people in my job. But I don’t have to take that much crap from anyone.”

Realizing that the Sewerage District would have to pay to have the shovel removed, Clint Lovelace was called. Clint was an early SCUBA diving pioneer in the Milwaukee area. He had a shop at 26th and North.

Clint agreed to remove the shovel for $5,000. With his 1950s gear, he jumped into the sewage, went to the bottom, pulled out the shovel. The poop processing paddle resumed its circling of the tank. Clint took off the dive gear and threw it into a dumpster. At home he spent the next several days ill.

Another time I was diving the wreck of the steamer AMERICA at Isle Royale. AMERICA lies on a steep slope. The bow is in about six feet of water. Standing on the bow,  you’re only waist deep in Lake Superior. The stern lies at about eighty feet as I remember. I dove it, got separated from my diving buddy, and followed a passage way down into the stern of the vessel. I entered a room filled with racks of wooden frames that looked like windows without glass. The ship had been an excursion steamer. I realized I was looking at screens that were rigged on the deck to control bugs in summer; the metal screens had rusted away.

Wreck penetration diving is like bank robbery. Getting in is the easy part. I turned around only to find that my escape route was concealed by a cloud of silt and rust disturbed when I swam through the passageway. I realized that the silt trail was the way out. There were no currents inside the wreck so the silt trail just hung there. I swam into the trail knowing that as long I could not see where I was going I was going the right way. If I started to swim into clear water I knew I was going the wrong way. I followed the silt trail blindly to safety.

I didn’t panic. I am proud that I didn’t. I did not repeat the experience, however. A man who dove the Willie often told me that he had gotten in a similar situation in a small room. He did find a porthole and escaped by taking off his tank, pushing it out the porthole with the regulator still in his mouth. He somehow squeezed himself through the porthole whose measurements proved later were nearly impossible for him to do. He tore his drysuit (and his skin) to shreds. I believe he became one of the four divers to die on the Willie, a shipwreck which claimed no lives when it sunk.

Why did I and others keep diving? Because Great Lakes wreck diving is not a rational activity.

What finally ended my wreck diving career was the bends — decompression sickness. Whenever I tell people that I have had three hits or episodes of the bends they look at me as if I had three episodes of terminal cancer — everyone except my primary care physician who had no idea what I was talking about. The bends is like the flu. You can have a mild case or a serious case. I had mild cases.

*  *  *

My first plight came when I foolishly exceeded the recommended 150 foot maximum depth for compressed air sport divers. I had fallen in with the wrong crowd. They were experienced wreck divers who often exceeded the recommended safety limits without any adverse effects. I went to 185 feet on the wreck of the JOHN B. COWLE at Whitefish Point and then dove the next day. At home I experienced weakness, swelling, and tingling in my right arm that would not go away. I put it down to muscle strain from lifting heavy tanks and weights. After a week or so I realized I had the bends. I went to St. Luke’s Hospital emergency room. A decompression chamber technician was called to “blow me down” to 60 feet and bring me back up gradually over a six hour period.

I was put in a clear acrylic monopod decompression chamber, which was ironic. The technician told me he had been called by a National Enquirer reporter writing a story about Michael Jackson sleeping in the pure oxygen environment of a decompression chamber to achieve immortality. The tabloid wanted to check how a chamber operated.

Hyperbaric treatment is commonly used to treat burns, the type Jackson suffered when his hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial. Jackson slept in the chamber. I can attest from personal experience, there is nothing else to do in the chamber. I had to remove all my clothes and don an anti-static set of coveralls. It had a special grounding wire I had to attach to the tank. There was concern that a stray spark could cause the chamber’s pure oxygen atmosphere to ignite. This happened to the three Apollo 1 astronauts on their launch pad.

My symptoms were gone when I got out of the chamber. If the symptoms go away after the ride, you did indeed have the bends.

The doctors told me that I should wait two weeks before resuming diving. I waited, did a single dive on the wreck of the MILWAUKEE car ferry, and had no bends. I then did two dives in one day on the wreck of the WISCONSIN off Kenosha. The symptoms returned. After another chamber ride, this time in a large walk-in chamber with the technician inside with me, I was told that I probably had a microscopic piece of scar tissue that trapped nitrogen bubbles, partially blocking a nerve to my right arm. If I kept diving I would keep getting the bends. Diving was over for me.

I could not bear to say goodbye to my good buddies and my gear. I kept going to the Ghost Ships Great Lakes Dive film festival. Ten years later, through an elaborate process of rationalization, I concluded that my problem was not diving per se but rather that I did two dives in one day. After all, I did not get the bends when I did just one. So if I just did one dive, I would not get the bends? Makes sense, right? What could doctors with sixteen years of training know that I didn’t? So, I got back into diving.

On my old friend Willie.

I went down on the wreck, only to be surprised at the changes in water clarity. Although I had been diving the wreck for twenty years, this was the first time I actually saw it. A combination of pollution controls, outsourcing to China, and the explosion of zebra mussels had made forty to fifty feet of visibility routine. I felt like I was diving in the Caribbean with my old friend Jacques Cousteau. I did not get the bends. It was great.

Until I dove the second time.

The bends came back with a vengeance. This time the chamber ride did not result in symptom relief. I underwent several additional chamber treatments. The symptoms finally went away. My arm never felt quite right for a couple of years after that. I realized that my aging neurological system was sending me a clear, unmistakeable message.

Quit diving.

I did. I sold my equipment to avoid temptation — only to find out that my ancient tanks were made of an alloy that had been taken off the market because of its tendency to explode under pressures. My final episodes of the bends may have saved my life. After buying the tanks back, I took them to the scrap dealer near Miller Park. I told him not to sell or give them away but to cut them up. My diving career had ended at the same place it began.

On my old friend Willie.

*  *  *

Photo at top:
The diver and his four aides are not identified in this October 11, 1898,  photograph other than that it was taken during the construction of the Buffalo, New York, breakwater. It’s part of the Norris S. Works collection in the Great Lakes Marine Collection of the Milwaukee Public Library and the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society. The photo’s file name includes the words “Story Point” which may refer to the south lighthouse at Stony Point breakwater, which also was known as the Buffalo Harbor south entrance light.

More photos:

Reading resources:
DESCO History
Wisconsin Shipwrecks

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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.