Tag Archive
Remembering Mike deGruy
Diving lost of one its true gentlemen and most creative filmmakers on February 3rd. My dear friend Mike deGruy was killed in a helicopter crash in Australia while working on a project for famed Hollywood director James Cameron. Also with him was Andrew Wight, another talented filmmaker who produced the feature "Sanctum" in 2010. Wight was piloting the Robinson R44 helicopter that crashed and burned shortly after takeoff. Both men were killed almost instantly. Mike had just turned 60. I was lucky enough to do a variety of projects with Mike and we shared the stage at nearly a score of film festivals and dive shows across the country over the years. [caption id="attachment_1213" align="alignright" width="400" caption="Bret and Mike at Beneath the Sea"][/caption] We first met on a documentary for National Geographic Explorer over 16 years ago and instantly hit it off. We were filming humpback whales on the remote Silver Bank and the production had all sorts of complications that led to setbacks that we always managed to overcome. I learned immediately that nothing could dampen Mike's enthusiasm and we discovered that we shared the same wicked sense of humor. When the producer would panic about the whales not cooperating or weather that turned calm seas into a washing machine... Mike and I would inevitably lose ourselves in a laugh and counsel the anxious topside "suits" to chill out with promises that the next day would be better. It always was. We used rebreathers for the work with whales and this was during the early era of such units for mainstream diving. I had to teach Mike and other members of the dive team to dive the complicated apparatus while we were on location at sea bouncing around in large swells while the whales watched us with amusement. It was sort of like... More »
Room with a View
[caption id="attachment_1056" align="alignleft" width="303" caption="Layne Salvador appreciates the view from main window port"][/caption] Nearly forty years ago I had the chance to spend some time in an ambitious underwater habitat project known as La Chalupa placed on the sea bottom off Puerto Rico. My host was Mike Kilbride (son of the BVI's infamous Bert Kilbride) who had hired on as a project diver after finishing up a commercial underwater blasting job we had both worked on for Hess Oil Co. in the Virgin Islands in 1972. "You've really got to see this operation to appreciate it," he said over the phone. "There's some real bright guys running this thing that are veterans from the Tektite saturation program. You'll get a kick out of what they're up to. And you have to meet my boss, Ian Koblick." So I was off to San Juan on the next plane from St. Croix. Arriving at the remote site, Mike was quick to fill me in. "We're set up to handle five divers in saturation for a month at depths up to 106 feet. But what really makes this different is that La Chalupa can operate up to 10 miles from shore with a minimum of surface support. That's never been done before and we've added a few other twists that are pretty innovative." Koblick, an aquanaut and engineer for both Tektite I and II, had designed the habitat and provided joint sponsorship from his Marine Resources Development Foundation (MRDF) with the Puerto Rican government. He wanted a habitat that would offer more mobility, more independence from topside infrastructure, longer and deeper mission durations, and flexible contingency plans to handle decompression and life support emergencies. While most other habitats of this era were fairly conventional looking using various designs of spherical compartments linked to shore or ship-based umbilicals,... More »
Submersible Stress!
There is really nothing new about deep diving submersible vehicles. Ed Link and other innovators dreamed up models back in the 1960s that seemed like they were excerpted from the pages of a Jules Verne novel. Originally, these subs were employed in pioneering oceanographic and scientific projects and were responsible for opening doors to the oceans' depths that had previously been considered unexplorable. As submersible technology became more affordable and diversified, the expanding commercial diving market quickly adopted such applications for survey and inspection work. In many instances, this proved far more cost effective than subjecting a diver to such an exposure. I had firsthand experience with exactly this same scenario while working with Navy diving teams in early 1971. Our project was based in St. Croix, the largest of the U. S. Virgin Islands, giving us close proximity to the 11,000-foot depths of the Virgin Islands Trench only an hour's steaming time from the Fredericksted pier where our support ship docked next to our operations partners, the sleek "fast attack" Navy submarines. Our job was to film these submarines and we had already passed the 300-foot depth mark several times as our work gradually moved deeper. This posed obvious risks including oxygen toxicity, narcosis, prolonged decompression some 10-15 miles offshore, and a rather overwhelming population of oceanic white tip sharks that liked to try to chew on us with unabated enthusiasm. Our unit had been sent a small Kittridge one-man submersible but it was accumulating mostly dust and rust as it sat stored in a Quonset hut warehouse waiting for a suitable mission to justify its use. This sub was decidedly small: about 10 feet in length overall with barely enough interior space for a single operator to squeeze in. Most of the contraption was taken up with compressed air ballast,... More »
No Problem!
There are certain people that you instinctively know are in control of situations. Some may be natural born pilots who could land a washing machine on a trash can lid. The ship captain who could bring in a cargo when the rest of the fleet hid in port from the storm. Maybe the engine mechanic who gets the island's generator going again with a handful of mismatched Volvo parts, three hair pins, and part of Kate Moss's Wonder Bra for a fan belt. Or the guy who survived for sixteen days in a life raft with nothing but a soggy Twinkie, two rusted fish hooks, half a Grateful Dead concert ticket, and four ounces of three-day old Bong water from a 1960's vintage hash pipe. Yeah, these are the characters that you jump up behind and follow out of the burning movie theater without even considering another exit. Or you simply take their advice without argument as they casually say, "don't eat the purple berries," when you're a couple hundred miles up the Amazon basin. Because beyond all doubt, they've got the "right stuff" and the only stuff you've got is still stuck to the bottom of your hiking boots. I knew a guy like that named Dave Coston. He was about thirty-five when I first met him in 1971 and, of course, it amazed me that he could still walk upright unassisted at such an advanced age… much less stand the rigors of professional diving. My perspective, honed from accumulating twenty-one birthdays of my own, left me convinced on my own absolute immortality and Dave spent the next five years or so showing me how idiots like myself could survive extraordinary circumstances in spite of our immaturity. St. Croix in the early 1970's was gold mine for a guy like Dave who... More »
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