Sam said, “Find that lead, and we might find your son.”
Chapter Three
The Anabelle May was a custom-built pleasure cruiser that took the name of Senator Perry’s late wife. As he motored slowly toward the main channel into the lake’s deeper water, Sam noticed that he handled her with the surprisingly adept love of a seasoned sailor. She was a custom designed motor yacht by the German shipbuilding company, Blohn and Voss. She had a length of sixty-five feet and a beam of twenty-eight. Her hull was made of high tensile steel, while her three decks were made of aluminum alloy, with a teak outer deck and helipad. Above its bridge, were an array of high tech radar and satellite communications and plotting equipment. Powered by twin MTU diesel-electric marine engines — a marine division of Rolls Royce Propulsion — and with sleek, angular sides, it could achieve a top speed of forty knots.
Once outside the channel and into deep waters, Senator Perry opened up the throttles and the Blohn and Voss shot forward, its bow quickly riding on the plane.
“How long until we reach the dive site?” Sam asked.
Senator Perry answered without hesitation. “It’s thirty minutes from here.”
“Great. Do you need us or can Tom and I start preparing our dive plan and equipment?”
“Go. I’m fine. I’ve been navigating these waters since my dad first took me out here as a kid. It’s like my second backyard.”
Sam nodded. “All right. We’ll be on the back deck if you need anything.”
On board the aft deck Tom had opened their large storage crate and laid out the two Dräger Closed-Circuit Oxygen Rebreathers on the teak deck. They were originally designed for military use, police diving, and search and rescue, but to Sam their rectangular, rigid aluminum backpack, gave them the awkward appearance of an astronaut’s personal life-support system. Mounted on either side of this backpack were two gas cylinders. One of these was filled with Oxygen and the other with a diluent called Trimix. Basically, even oxygen becomes lethal at varying depths beyond thirty feet and so the gas needs to be diluted with something. For extreme depths approaching two hundred feet, a combination of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium was the most practical gas diluent.
On the port side of the aft deck, at a small entrance to the Anabelle May, was a fully equipped dive locker that housed top of the line recreational and tech diving equipment, including rows upon rows of dry suits, dive masks, gas cylinders and a commercial grade air compressor and a mixture of large, H-sized gas cylinders for filling tanks, including, Air, Oxygen, Nitrox, Heliox, Trimix.
Sam ran his eyes along the cylinders.
They would need Oxygen and Trimix for the dive.
Sam and Tom agreed to do an initial bounce dive, take some photos, and if the answers to where the Senator’s son had gone still eluded them, they could set up for a more prolonged dive and come back tomorrow.
The concept with a bounce dive was to descend rapidly, spend less than ten minutes bottom time and then ascend before the compressed nitrogen had a chance to significantly build up in their bloodstream. This would result in a shorter decompression time and less risk of hypothermia. Heated underlay or not, prolonged diving in near freezing water was far from a lot of fun and increased their risks.
Sam and Tom methodically and efficiently worked their way through their dive equipment, slowly going through the laborious process of preparing each part for the dive.
Sam opened the aluminum backpack. Inside was an axial type scrubber unit filled with the granular absorbent used to remove C02 from the closed-circuit during the dive. He removed the half-used cartridge and replaced it with a brand-new unit, filled with five pounds of sodalime and then reinserted it, locking the lid with a heavy-duty thread.
He then began to test the unit for leaks. Two leak tests were conducted. These were generally known as the positive and negative pressure tests, and are designed to check that the breathing loop is airtight for internal pressure lower and higher than the outside. The positive pressure test ensures that the unit will not lose gas while in use, and the negative pressure test ensures that water will not leak into the breathing loop where it can degrade the scrubber medium or the oxygen sensors.
The Anabelle May’s engines reduced to an idle and the pleasure cruiser drifted into a round arc, coming to a complete stop with the port bow just next to the historic mooring buoy, which displayed the details of the J.F. Johnson’s wreck.
Sam looked at the buoy and then stepped inside the main pilothouse. “Do you want me to pick up the mooring line, Senator Perry?”
The Senator stepped by, carrying a retractable hook, and shook his head. “No, I’m fine.”
Sam smiled as he watched the heavy senator move with surprising agility toward the bow, where he leaned over the gunwale and hooked the mooring line. It took him little more than a moment to kneel down, feed the line through the cleat and secure the Anabelle May.
“All right, gentlemen,” Senator Perry said. “I’ll be here until you return. I’ll have some warm soup to heat you up again when you get here. Thanks again and good luck.”
Sam nodded. “We won’t be too long. An hour at most. We’re going to do a bounce dive. Straight down, take some photos and back up again.”
“Seems like a good plan,” the Senator replied.
Sam stepped back to the aft deck. South-east of their position, he spotted the tall boreal forest of Balsam fir and White Spruce along Isle Royale's rugged shoreline. From what he guessed, the J.F. Johnson’s wreck lied somewhere smack bang in the middle of the imaginary line that ran along the surface of Lake Superior and delineated the U.S. and Canada’s border.
Confident that his equipment was set up correctly and ready for the dive, Sam undressed and then donned his thermal vest and switched it on. The undergarment used state of the art fiber heating technology that generates Far Infrared Rays, which heats and warms up the blood in two locations along the divers back, enabling heat to penetrate deep into the body core. Over which, he wore a Thinsulate underlay. He then slipped into a thick dry suit, putting on a thick woolen beany before pulling the dive hood over.
Tom was already kitted up and testing his rebreather. “You’re slowing down, Sam.”
“Give me a break,” Sam said, “This is exactly why I don’t like diving in the cold. It takes too long to get everything ready. Give me a shallow tropical dive in a pair of board shorts and a BCD any day.”
“All right, we’ll get in and get back out before the cold has the chance to hit you.”
“Thanks,” Sam said and then donned his full-face dive mask.
The full-face mask had several benefits in deep cold-water dives, such as the wreckage of the J.F. Johnson. It functions to provide a wide lens through which the diver can see clearly underwater, it provides the diver's face with some protection from cold water, while at the same time increasing breathing security because if any level of altered conscious state occurs, the diver doesn’t need to keep a regulator in his mouth. Within Sam’s mask, there was another benefit, it provided space to house his diving radio to communicate freely with Tom throughout the dive.
He took a deep breath and started pre-breathing the unit — a process of breathing normally for about three minutes before entering the water to ensure the scrubber material gets a chance to warm up to operating temperature, and works correctly, and that the partial pressure of oxygen within the closed-circuit rebreather is controlled within the predefined parameters.