My trips to the Titanic 1986

A Titanic Tale  by Will Sellers

Jason vs the Volcano

[From Will's wife:]

Here's a link to podcast interview from Will's  days as Chief Pilot of Jason in the Deep Submergence Lab at WHOI, circa 2006, where he talks more about that undersea erupting volcano:
 
link to YouTube video

my favorite part is ~3:06 where you hear someone in the background yelling 'Hey... Wow!.... Holy Moly!.. look at that red!'... that's about as excited I've ever heard a Geologist get! Good stuff.

Here's a more in-depth article:
http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/jason-versus-the-volcano

The Beginning

When I was seventeen years old I joined the Navy. I had just graduated from the Boston Public School system and knew that to do anything in the world I'd need to know how to do something. I had bagged groceries part time after school and knew that was no career.  So off I went to boot camp. I turned eighteen there in Orlando. I stuck around in the navy for almost eight years. They sent me to electrical school and taught me everything I know about tubes and transistors. An obsolete education to fit the obsolete equipment I worked on. I was in the reserve Navy. I was active duty, though we took care of the reserves on the weekends. But I'd had enough. This was the first full time job I'd ever had and now I was 25 years old. If I reenlisted it would be for four more years. I would not be able to get out of the Navy until I had 12 years in and who does that? Twenty and you get a pension. So I left thinking I could always get back in. As it turned out I never looked back.

I grew up in Boston but shortly after I enlisted my mother sold the house and moved to Falmouth with my twin brother and sister and my grandmother so after leaving the Navy in San Diego I moved into my mother's basement for what I hoped would be a short stay. Like every other guy who gets out of the service I went straight to the unemployment office. While in the Navy I had heard all the stories of not only state unemployment but federal extension that gave an ex-serviceman 52 weeks of checks. I wanted a piece of that action. So bright and early that first Monday morning home I went straight down there only to find out that my president, Ronald Reagan had passed a law only a week ago that said basically that not reenlisting meant that I had quit my job so was not eligible for any benefits. I felt betrayed. Little did I know that this was just the start of how veterans benefits would begin to erode. Today I think it is at a criminal level.

So what to do? I painted a couple of houses and did just about anything legal for cash. I still had no clue of what to do with my life. I never was what I thought of as college material. I did well enough in high school but the thought of becoming a poor student didn't appeal very much.

I just finished eight year vow of poverty and now I wanted money, cash, a good paying job. Although the unemployment office wouldn't give me money they did pass along job tips. One such tip was for a job as an electronics tech at WHOI. I submitted my resume and a week later I got a call for an interview.

So here was my situation, I'm a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy. For the last eight years the only dress up clothes I owned were my Navy uniforms. I hate to admit this but I showed up for that interview wearing a brown polyester machine washable suit from Sears. I went to the third floor of the Smith Building in Woods Hole as instructed and asked for Barrie Walden who would interview me. Barrie was wearing cut off blue jeans and T-shirt from the White Horse Tavern in Bermuda. "Nice suit." he says. "Ok, I'll leave the tie and jacket here", I think, as he sends me down to the dock where the Lulu is tied up to ask for Ralph Hollis, Alvin's chief pilot. At this point I was wondering what I was getting into. I had never heard of Alvin and why did I have to go to this ship?

When I got to the dock I discovered that these folks used the word 'ship' in a very liberal way. The Lulu was not so much a ship as someone's lifelong welding project.

Anyway, I walked up the gang way and asked for Ralph. As I waited while a crewman went in search of him I was captivated by the centerpiece on the deck, the submersible, Alvin. Holy shit! Is this what this job is about? I never imagined this!

Ralph decided to do the interview inside Alvin's sphere. I guess he was asking all these interview questions but I really don't remember. I was awestruck just by being there. It was as though Captain Nemo had brought me onto the Nautilus.

After thirty minutes or so Ralph said they would call me by that evening as there were seven candidates for the job. I collected my machine washable jacket and went home not knowing what to think.

That was a long afternoon. I had the interview in the late morning and was antsy all day. They finally called at 6:30 that evening and offered me the job at $16k/year. I accepted and was told to be at

personnel by 7AM as the ship was sailing at 1000. Wow! That night I was trying to pack... for what? I don't know.. it was an exciting time. That was in 1981.

Woods Hole reserves the right to fire you without prejudice up to 6 months. When I got to 6 months and a day, I asked Ralph what was my big qualifier at the interview. He said, "You were in the Navy for almost eight years. I know you can handle a high level of bullshit for a long period of time"... a valuable skill in this job.

The Beer Machine

In 1987 all the UNOLS ships went dry. What that means is before that date you could buy and legally consume an unlimited amount of beer, booze, or wine aboard one of these ships. I know because I did and I had lots of help. You bought your beer from the ship's steward anytime and the Captain had “slop chest” open once a trip. This was for crew only and usually took place on the day after we left port and we were clear of U.S. taxes.

This was the early eighties and we would get a case of Bud for 6 bucks. A bottle of Appleton’s rum from the Captain was 4 dollars. Cigarettes were equally as cheap. Maybe 8 bucks a carton. None of this goes on any more, not even the cigarettes. They want us all to be healthy, happy sailors. Now a days some drinking still goes on but it is very much in the closet. You could loose you job over it.

On the Atlantis II one deck above the main lab was the beer machine. It was a regular 6-hole coke machine but had three soda and three beer selections. The steward was always trying to save money and one place he cut corners was beer. Not being a beer drinker himself he saw nothing wrong with stocking the machine with the likes of “Red, White and Blue” or “Dixie”; real bilge wash. That was OK for the masses but Jon and I were beer snobs. Life was too short to drink that crap.

While in San Diego, my old stomping grounds, I rented a Chevy Chevette for 19 dollars a day. This thing was tiny. No one wanted to ride in the back seat. It could hold one adult. Jon and I took it to the Liquor Warehouse, A cavernous place in Imperial Beach with a world class selection of beer. We managed to load 30 cases of bottled beer in this little car. (No canned beer for us!) All the way back to the ship Jon had two cases on his lap. We felt every little bump as the suspension system on this little car was flattened right out.

The rooms on the ship are small. Two men live in about 200 square feet or less and it definitely is less when you put 15 cases of beer in there. We managed though. That stash lasted all summer. It came in handy while hunting the elusive grad student.

One great beer machine moment happened during the Titanic trip. After we settled in there were daily transfers from ship to ship. Lots of sailors wanted to come over and check out the AII but no one wanted to go over to the Navy ship. I mean, what for? After the sub went down the first boat load came over for a tour. There were about 25 enlisted men with one chief. We started to give the standard tour. As we moved forward in the ship I said “this is the main lab and up there is the beer machine”. “The what!!?” That was all they needed. I got the steward to sell them some quarters and the tour stopped there.

It took those Navy boys about an hour to empty that machine of beer. It was good timing because their chief came around to collect them for the ride back. There would be another boat load in 30 minutes. This was just enough time for the steward to reload the machine with beer. It was still early afternoon.

The next boat out was full to the brim with sailors. We gave them the standard schpiel, “this is the main lab”. “Yeah, yeah, where’s the beer machine?” they asked. I told them I would get the steward to sell them some coins. “We brought our own” I was told. Obviously the tour was ending here. As if on queue one of our more enterprising Alvin pilots started selling the boys mixed drinks with that rum I was talking about. A buck a pop. Alas after 2 hours of this these intrepid sailors had to head back to their own ship. Some were having trouble with simple navigation. The next group that came out brought along a Senior Chief who positioned himself at parade rest in front of the beer machine. That was the end of that party!

The Batteries

One job I knew I would never miss after leaving the Alvin group was servicing the batteries. Every 3 to 4 months the batteries would have to be removed, disassembled, rewatered, reassembled and reinstalled. The whole evolution would take about 5 days and was done during a port stop which meant that the electrician (me) would not get any time off during that stay in port. Today it’s much different. There is a spare battery tank that is changed on a rotating basis so that there is always one being serviced and the sub suffers less down-time. Now a days there are no five day port stops.
Also, on board the Atlantis they have a hydraulic lift to raise and lower the 1800 lb. tank from its resting place in Alvin’s belly. This lift has an air hockey table like surface so that the tank can be slid around with ease for alignment. This was not the case on Lulu. To change a battery tank on the Twin Tubes of Terror you had to wear a life jacket while you climbed around under the sub on the cradle frame just 8 ft. above the water. One slip and you were going swimming. A lifting rig with two chain falls had to be assembled piece by piece under the sub to lower and raise the tanks from their bay. This was a precarious place to be working as you had to hang on with one hand to stop from falling in.
Alvin always tied up at the same place at the WHOI dock and I imagined there was a big mound of wrenches and ratchets resting on the bottom under there. After getting the lifting rig into place we would raise it up with a 5 foot spacer the same footprint as the tank on the rig. The plan here is to lower the tank till the rig bottomed out then hang the tank from chains, remove the spacer and raise the lifting rig to the bottom of the tank, lift and remove the chains, then lower the tank the rest of the way. It’s obvious this can only be done in port on a calm day. There would be one man on each chain fall, fore and aft with a spotter on the side telling them when to lower and keep the tank level. If it didn’t come down strait it might bind and get stuck. Once the tank came ½ way down the chain fall men could not see each other and were too close to the tank to check its level. This is where the life jacket came in handy. Standing there on a 4” steel I beam, the only thing between you and falling in the water was a good grip on that chain. Once the battery tank was lowered all the way it was moved to the port side out from under the sub and lifted on deck by the ships crane. The ships crane on the Lulu was like most of it’s equipment, a very Spartan affair. It was no more than a boom with a hand cranked winch and lifting the batteries to the deck was its primary use.

In the Lulu days there were three battery tanks. One was 30 volts DC for controls and the other two were 60 volts DC for propulsion and lights. All three tanks had the same kind of batteries, just configured differently. They were 6-volt golf cart batteries made by Exide. These were common and bought off the shelf. They were assembled in racks that stacked on top of each other inside the tanks and the tanks were filled with mineral oil. Taking them out and placing them on deck was a messy affair as they would drip oil for days. We set them down on sheets of homasote to absorb the oil. It is very important not to spill any oil over the side, especially in port, or the Coast Guard will be paying a visit with a hefty fine.

Once laid out on deck, I would then use a small vacuum pump to suck the oil out of each cell. When the batteries were used the electrolyte or acid level would go down over a 3 month period and the oil would take its place. It was very important to remove only the oil and none of the acid. The cells would then be refilled with distilled water and recharged over night.

Bright and early the next morning I would secure the charges and hook all the batteries up to a large resistor bank to discharge them at the 30 amp rate. At 30 amps this would simulate the batteries working moderately hard. Every 15 minutes I would take a voltage reading on each and every battery for the next 6 to 7 hours looking for weak ones. There would always be at least a half dozen. At the end of the day I would change out the bad batteries for new ones and put them all on charge again over night. This process would be repeated three times till all the weak cells were eliminated. After the 3^rd discharge the tanks were reassembled and readied for installation the next day.

Putting the batteries in was a lot slower than taking them out. Hauling on that chain fall to lift the 1800 lb. tanks into place was an aerobic workout. Also the alignment of the tanks was critical so the last few inches always went painfully slowly. This was a long day under the sub but it had to be done as we were sailing the next day.

Working with all that acid would cost me a set of clothes every time I did it. We were never reimbursed for that. But I guess it didn’t matter, working with all the oils that we did day in and day out most of us were dressed in what looked like rags every day anyway. During my first experience with the batteries I wore a pair of green coveralls that I had from my navy days. They looked fine after we got the tanks back in the sub but after I did my laundry it looked as though I had been standing next to several sticks of dynamite when they went off. They were shredded to the point that they were not even suitable as rags. No, I don’t miss those batteries one bit.

Styrofoam

Everybody wants a souvenir of their big adventure with Alvin. It’s still a big thing. Alvin is up to over 4000 dives and a little dirty arithmetic tells me that about 8000 people have seen the bottom through those view ports. Still a small number and definitely a life long memorable experience. Souvenirs rarely come from the bottom. I have a small rock collection but by and large anything that comes off the bottom is a scientific sample and is highly prized.

The single most popular souvenir is the Styrofoam cup. A regular sized coffee cup will have all of the air squeezed out of it by the tremendous pressure of the oceans depths and come back the size of a thimble. If you write clearly with a waterproof marker you can still read it after the shrinking. People will put the dive number and the scientists name along with the location. Many put their kid’s names on them for show and tell at school.

Other forms of Styrofoam came out. Mike Nolan sent a 6-pack cooler down that came back in beautiful shape. It would hold 1 can of beer. Wig heads were cool. They would come back about the size of something you would stick on a pencil. I learned how to give them hair by sticking strands of Poly Pro line in the scalp with a small screwdriver. The “follicles” would close up as the head shrank and held the hair in place.

 Most of the time the volume of cups is easy to handle by using a mesh laundry bag. There was this one time though that that didn’t quite work out.

It was 1986 and we were over the wreck of the Titanic. The U.S. Navy was paying for this show and they brought a lot of people along. So many that they had to bring their own ship, the U.S.S. Ortolon. She was a submarine rescue vessel but they were using her as a hotel. There would be several transfers ship to ship each day. The Ortolon was full ship with about 450 men aboard. For their souvenirs they sent over many trash bags full of cups. It was an overwhelming volume of cups!

One big problem with cups is that if one slides inside another and then shrinks they will never come apart again. My solution to this was to string them like pop corn on a Christmas tree. I used a narrow cotter pin and a 20 ft piece of thin but strong nylon line.

I threaded the cups butt to butt and open end to open end to keep them apart. We did 4 of these 20 ft. strings and it didn’t even put a dent in the pile of trash bags of cups. Back by the motor controllers on Alvin is a cavity that is protected by the sub's skin that would hold the cups nicely. To get them in there we stuffed them through a limber hole at the top of the skin. Limber holes let water or air flow in and out of this cavity easily. I should say now that this limber hole was located about 6 inches from the port aft thruster.

Ralph had the first dive. He got to the bottom but didn’t stay long due to a flooded battery tank. Alvin was on deck by noon and we worked all night to get it ready for the next day. It was a short dive but long enough to get the cups shrunk. The next day we doubled our efforts and stuffed twice as many strings of cups in that cavity as the day before. A piece of duct tape and we were good to go. A brilliant plan. Dudley had the second dive down to the wreck. Everything was going smooth till midday when Dudley called up and said the port aft thruster was not working. No big deal, he just disabled it and continued on for the rest of a normal dive. We never put 2 and 2 together at this point.

After running his batteries down on a full day at the bottom Dudley dropped his weights and headed for the surface. 2 ½ hours later he popped up right where we expected him to. The little white sub with the orange sail and hundreds of white dots floating all around it. What the hell is that?! That, is all those damned cups! I guess when the duct tape gave way covering the limber hole that port aft thruster sucked up those cups like Auntie Em’s house in a twister! I must have pulled 60 yards of that nylon line from around the shaft of that thruster. That’s what caused it to fault out. Oops!!

Well, no harm no foul I say. Losing the thruster during the dive didn’t slow Dudley down. The Navy boys lost some cups but they had bags full more to go. And to top it all off we got 3 hours of overtime to replace the blown motor controller. Not a bad day after all!

Roger Maloof

On the same day I started, the Alvin group also hired a mechanic, Roger Maloof. We sat across from each other in the Personnel Office early that morning frantically signing all the paperwork needed to become employees so we could dash down to the dock and get aboard the Lulu which was sailing in a couple of hours.

Roger was a few years older than me, maybe 30 at the time. He was about my build with dark hair, glasses and a quick wit to go with his easy sense of humor. We both shared one thing in common on that first trip on the Twin Tubes of Terror, we were both sick as dogs.

Don Carlos would be Rogers’s immediate supervisor in the mechanical department. Dave Sanders and Jim Hardiman would fill out that crew. Don liked being in charge and kept the boys busy even if it was make-work. Maybe a month into the job Don had Roger scrape the paint off the Mahue oil pump and repaint it. The pump looked fine. Maybe just a little rust here or there. This was finally the last straw for Roger. He threw down his paint scraper and went into a rant about how he didn’t hump a radio up and down the hills of Vietnam and then go to graduate school for a Masters degree just to do shit jobs for some self important asshole! He ranted and raved to the point where he said “Fuck you! I quit!”, Got himself a resin chair and sat up on the bow. That was one thing about the Lulu; you couldn’t get more that 50 feet from some one if you tried.

Ralph at this point had to get involved. There were a couple of radio calls back to Barrie on the beach and soon enough Ralph got us all together and announced that Roger was now Barrie’s liaison to the mechanical group at sea. Unknown to us Ops. Monkeys, Roger had a deal with Barrie that he would go to sea with us for three months to get the lay of the land so to speak. He would then be the resident mechanical engineer back in the office. We thought he was just one of us, not future office scum.

Roger was a good guy and none of this had an effect on the group dynamic. He and Don got along well. He was a good engineer and came up with top-notch ideas and solutions to the mechanical problems and modernization of the sub. I came to call him “Roger Maloof, Liaison to the Elite”.