NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES

CHAPTER 3

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES

Before I begin here, I feel that it is necessary to define what I mean by a near death experience.  It is an experience in which I had the distinct feeling that I was about to die.  In one experience presented below, the flying bomb, I did not know how close to death I really was until after the event.  This event will be posted next week.

SHARK FOOD (OCT. 1963).  This event took place on the second cruise of my career.  It was in the Caribbean Sea.  I mentioned this cruise in the previous chapter.  The navy had been practicing nuclear bomb runs in a test range on an island in the Caribbean.  Somehow, the test bomb (almost certainly a dummy and not carrying a nuclear payload) had been accidently released over water and simply disappeared beneath the waves.  The navy wanted the bomb back but could not locate it.  We were called in to measure water currents for determining possible drift of the bomb and seafloor properties to determine possible burial of the bomb.  The latter was what I was involved in.
To measure the bottom properties, we used a device called a Kullenberg corer.  It is, essentially, a long, 10- to 20-foot stainless steel tube with a plastic liner inserted in the tube.  A core of the bottom sediment is collected in the plastic liner when the corer penetrates the bottom.
To deploy this device and collect a bottom core was fairly involved.  We were operating from a navy auxiliary ship that had a power winch (to lower and recover the device) and an A-frame with a meter wheel (to smoothly allow the wire cable to be let out and recovered).  Also, it was necessary to have a platform rigged on the

Figure 2.  Kullenberg Corer.
  Notice the Lead Weights Above the Corer Tube.

                                 SEE FIGURE 2 BELOW

side of the ship on which the oceanographer (me) could stand on and attach the corer device to the wire.   This platform was attached to the side of the ship with hinges so that it could be raised and secured in the vertical position to the side of the ship when we were underway.  To keep the platform in the horizontal position so that I could stand on it, 2 chains were attached from the ship to the top outboard side of the platform. To do my job of attaching the corer to the wire rope, I had to climb down from the ship’s deck about 3 feet onto the platform.  What made all this scary was that the platform I was standing on was not a solid metal plate.  Rather, it was a gridded, corrugated platform that I could see through.  Throughout this cruise, 3 or 4 large great white sharks were staying in the shade provided by the hull of our ship.  Whenever I descended onto the platform, the great whites would come out from under the ship and swim in circles right under me. To say that this was disconcerting is an understatement.  I was constantly being referred to by the crew as shark food.
To deploy the Kullenberg corer was a 2-man operation; me and the winch operator.  He was a seaman boatswain’s mate in training.  Once on the platform, I would attach the corer to the end of the wire cable with a heavy-duty shackle.  I would give a hand signal for the winch operator to lift the corer close to the meter wheel so I could swing the device outboard so that it was hanging free.  I would
then signal him to lower the device to the proper level so that I could place six, 50-pound lead weights on the top of the corer (See Figure 2).  The 300 pounds were necessary to drive the corer into the bottom when it hit.  Once the weights were in place, I would signal the winch operator to slowly lower the corer until the lead weights were below the platform that I was standing on.  Once this was done, we were ready to deploy the corer.  This is when it got exciting.
I gave the winch operator a counter-clockwise hand signal to let the device free-fall to the bottom; however, he turned the wheel clockwise, and the corer came up and not down.  The lead weights caught underneath the platform I was standing on, and it began raising up to the vertical on its hinges pinning me between it and the side of the ship.  I immediately thought that I was going to be crushed to death (or badly injured, at best).  However, incredibly the wire cable broke, and the platform fell forward.  At this point, I now felt that I was going to be thrown into the water where the sharks were eagerly awaiting me.  Fortunately, the chains held, and the platform stayed stable.  I somehow caught hold of the chains which kept me from falling into the water.  We lost the Kullenberg corer, but I didn’t become shark food. I scrambled back onto the deck greatly shaken.  We never let that boatswain’s mate in training near that winch again.
In retrospect, as I think about this experience, the miracle that I see is that the wire cable snapped.  This stainless steel cable is extremely strong and will break only under extreme workloads.  But it did break, probably saving my life.  It was far more likely that the chains supporting the platform would break.  But they, somehow, held, and I did not become shark food to several great white sharks in a feeding frenzy.

 FIGURE 2.  KULLENBERG CORER.

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