Forty-five minutes later and about eight miles offshore, Teddy backs off the engines. He consults the GPS, makes a couple of adjustments in course, slows down to idle speed.
There's nothing to distinguish our position from the miles and miles of open water that surround us, except for a slight darkening of the water about fifty yards off our bow and the occasional whitecap that crests over it. Teddy keeps an eye on the spot as he maneuvers the boat.
Boggy is already at the bow, ready to drop anchor. Another glance at the GPS and Teddy gives him the signal. The line feeds out, the anchor hits bottom. Teddy pops it into reverse, the anchor holds. He shuts off the engines.
As Teddy busies himself around the boat, I ask him how Miss Peg got her name.
"After my late wife, bless her. Died long before her time," Teddy says. "It's more boat than I need these days, but I can't bring myself to part with her. We've been through it, the two of us. It was on Miss Peg that I found the San Miguel de Verona and, just a few months later, the Beatrice"
"Beatrice ... that's the wreck the scepter came from, right? Schwartz's Scepter."
Teddy nods.
"And after that, Miss Peg was so well known that every time I went out on her to look for something new, there would be boats following us, hoping to pick up the scraps. Got so bad I had to buy another boat and send Peg out in one direction as a decoy while I went in the other," says Teddy. "Rough and wooly days, I'm telling you. Used to be you could come upon a boat out here and risk getting yourself shot at."
He lifts a hatch seat and in the compartment below I see a leather rifle case, a box of ammunition.
"Old habit to keep it aboard," Teddy says. "I fire off a few rounds every now and then, just to make sure it still works. You can never tell."
Teddy opens a locker, pulls out a wet suit, and starts putting it on. I stand around, waiting for instructions. It's Teddy's boat and I don't want to start yanking gear out of lockers until he gives me the go-ahead. Particularly after his little scene back at the boathouse.
He hasn't laid out our dive plan yet. Trips like this, though, you go to all the trouble of packing up and heading out, they're usually two-tank dives. Depending on how deep you go, the first dive might last forty-five minutes or so, followed by a surface interval to get rid of the nitrogen that builds up in the blood when you're breathing compressed air at depth. The second dive is typically a bit shallower.
Boggy doesn't do scuba. He's strictly a free diver. So we've already decided that he'll keep an eye on things topside while Teddy and I blow bubbles down below.
While Teddy suits up, Boggy sits atop the boat's transom in full lotus position, eyes closed. He inhales deeply, exhales slowly.
After a couple of minutes of this foolishness, he stands and says: "I go now, take a look below."
"You've got about a hundred feet of water down there, right off the boat," says Teddy.
"Good," says Boggy.
And then he springs overboard, hardly making a splash as he slices into the water.
I'm antsy, ready to get into the water myself. But Teddy still hasn't pointed me to my gear.
"So what's this site called?" I ask him.
"Sock 'Em Dog," he says. "There's a seamount juts up about fifty yards astern, looks like the head of a Labrador, at least in the eyes of some. It's poked holes in many a boat, the most famous being the Victory, a stern-wheeler used by the South as a blockade runner during your Civil War. When she broke up, part of her went down one side, part of her the other. There's not all that much left to look at, but I like to come out here because the commercial dive boats seldom venture this far and I can have it all to myself."
Teddy stands up and adjusts his wet suit. He attaches his buoyancy compensator vest to one of the dozen or so steel tanks lined up in their slots behind a bench that runs along one side of the deck. He grabs a regulator, hooks it up to the tank and vest, then checks the gauges.
He looks overboard, to where Boggy entered the water.
"It's been a couple of minutes," he says. "Is he all right?"
"He's fine. Just showing off."
Teddy sifts through a plastic crate, pulls out a weight belt, checks the lead on it, then fastens it around his waist. He slips on a mask and lets it dangle under his chin.
He looks overboard again, this time with real concern.
"Don't worry," I say. "He's good for at least six or seven minutes."
"You're joking."
"Afraid not. I've timed him."
"Has it got something to do with that tea he made?"
"It might, along with that breathing thing he was doing. He calls it 'putting on his fish brain.' Boggy, he sets his mind on doing something, and then he does it."
"Quite a remarkable fellow."
"He has his moments," I say.
The ice chest sits under one of the benches. Teddy opens it. Inside, there's a block of ice and some jugs of water.
Teddy pulls an ice pick from a drawer by the console and chops off two chunks of ice.
"A little trick of my own," he says, taking a chunk of ice in each hand. He wedges them behind his ears and presses them against his skull. "Causes the inner ear to contract, makes it a little easier going down."
He keeps up the ice treatment for another minute or so, until the chunks have melted away. He reaches into the drawer again. This time he pulls out a Ping-Pong paddle. He holds it in one hand, the ice pick in the other.
"A treasure hunter's two best friends," he says.
"A Ping-Pong paddle?"
Teddy nods.
"Nothing works better for fanning away sand and silt. And an ice pick is still the tool of choice when it comes to prying something loose without totally destroying it."
"We looking for something down there?"
"Not really. Believe me, if anything's down there, then I've already found it," he says. "But it never hurts to be prepared."
His bulky dive bag hangs from the console. He zips it open, puts paddle and pick inside, along with whatever else he's got in there. He hooks the dive bag onto his BCV. He sits down on the bench, slips his arms through the BCV, and cinches it around his waist and chest. He grabs a pair of fins from below the bench and puts them on.
I'm beginning to wonder if I'll be joining Teddy on this dive. He's ready to go, and I'm still just standing around.
As Teddy stands and begins backing his way toward the transom, Boggy pops out of the water. A couple of strokes and he's at the boat. He climbs aboard, barely winded.
"Is nice down there," Boggy says.
"How deep do you figure you went?" asks Teddy.
"To the bottom."
Teddy seems skeptical.
"Oh, really now?" he says.
"Yes, there is a big coral ridge and it is shaped like ..." Boggy traces it in the air.
"Sock 'Em Dog, all right," says Teddy. "That's one impressive display of free diving, I must say."
Boggy shrugs off the compliment. He turns to me and says: "You will like, Zachary, there are many fish and the water it is very clear."
"Can't wait," I say. "But I'll need to get geared up first."
Only then does Teddy seem to realize that I'm lagging way behind him.
"Oh, I'm sorry," he says. "I was operating purely on instinct, just thinking about myself. Help yourself to whatever gear you want. If you don't mind, I'll be waiting for you down below."
He steps backward off the stern, surfaces briefly to let all the air out of his BCV, and then he's gone.
It's another ten minutes before I find gear that will fit me. Boggy sips at a bottle of water, watching me while I put everything on.
"What troubles you, Zachary?"
"Just not accustomed to diving like this, that's all. I'm used to everyone going down together. You know, never lose sight of your buddy and all that."
"Teddy, he started diving long ago, before there were so many rules." "Yeah, he's an old mossback. I guess it's just his way," I say. "It'll be all right."
I step to the transom, slip the mask over my face, stick the regulator in my mouth. Then I take a giant stride and hit the water.
21.
In diving parlance, I am what is called a "slow descent." Some people zip right to the bottom. But for me, the first 45 feet are hellish.
Maybe I should have tried Teddy's ice treatment, but I was in too big of a hurry to catch up with him. I swallow and gulp, pinch my nose and blow, trying to equalize the pressure against my eardrums. It's painful, but after I get over the hump, everything's good.
It takes me a couple of minutes to level off at about sixty feet. I check my air-just under 3,000 psi. Meaning, I didn't consume that much on the way down.
The visibility is good, 150 feet or so. Schools of reef fish swim all about-blue tangs and parrot fish, wrasses and snapper.
But there's no sign of Teddy Schwartz.
While I can't make out anything even vaguely resembling a Labrador's head, I spot the seamount and start swimming for it. It would be impossible to miss, actually, thrusting upward from the murky depths to within twenty feet or so of the surface, like some crazy underwater skyscraper. Pity any ship that collided with it.
I fin along, getting into the scuba groove. Breathe in, breathe out. Relax, relax. It's like yoga and flying all at once, the closest I'll ever come to being an astronaut at zero gravity.
The relaxing part is important. The more relaxed you are, the less air you use, the longer you can stay down. And I'd like to stretch out this dive as long as I possibly can. Partly because it's plenty beautiful down here and I want to see everything there is to see. But partly, too, because I want to look good in front of Teddy Schwartz.
Scuba diving isn't supposed to be a competitive sport. Still, there are all sorts of ways that divers take measure of each other.
For some, it's the gear-who has the most technologically advanced dive computer, the newest state-of-the-art fins. For others it's a dickson-the-table, depth thing. You did 140 feet at that blue hole off Andros? Well, at Cozumel, we shot the tubes at Maracaibo Reef down to 152.
Just a lot of swagger and macho bullshit. Because the real yardstick is air consumption. The slower you are to drain your tank, then the greater your cred as a diver. It means you move through the water with efficiency, are at ease with your surroundings. The coolest divers don't suck much air.
The equation is stacked against big guys like me who just naturally need more air to keep us going. Then again, I've been diving with hundred-pounders who were in constant motion, flapping their arms and legs and getting all excited. Their tanks were empty before they knew it.
Experience levels the playing field. The more you dive, the more comfortable you feel pretending to be a fish. Bottom line-when your tank hits 500 psi and you have to go sit on the boat while everyone else enjoys another ten minutes of bottom time, then that definitely places you on a lower rung of the scuba hierarchy.
Breathe in, breathe out. Relax, relax ...
As I near the seamount, I pick out scatterings of ship's timber on the sandy bottom, most of it encrusted with coral and anemones. Part of the Victory, I assume. I hang in the water and turn slowly, looking in all directions. Still no sign of Teddy Schwartz.
I can no longer see the hull of Miss Peg, but I've got a pretty good idea of her general vicinity perpendicular to the seamount.
I check my air-2,500 psi. I've barely dented the tank. Yep, Zack, you're one cool diver guy.
I start swimming to my left, the shortest route for getting to the other side of the seamount. I figure that's where Teddy must be. I keep close to the coral wall, stopping occasionally to peek under a crevice or to watch tiny fish-redlip blennies, I think they are-poke their heads out of hidey-holes.
As I move around the far side of the seamount, the bottom begins to drop off and I can make out another scattering of timber on the seafloor, maybe 120 feet below.
I'm not familiar with the story of the Victory, don't know how many aboard her perished. I can only imagine the sheer and utter horror of chugging along on a ship in the night-the night, it's always the night-and then comes the sudden tumult, the awful noise, the impossibility of escape.
I pause a moment, pay tribute to those souls now resting in the deep.
Just ahead of me there's an overhang in the seamount. I move past it, peer underneath at the lip of a shallow cavern. And there, flat against the sand, lies what's left of Victory's paddle wheel-a half-circle skeleton, spokes radiating from a rusted iron hub.
The water is murkier here, as if there has been a recent commotion. I see movement near the remains of the paddle wheel-a figure swimming toward me. It's Teddy.
When he's just a few feet away, I give him the OK sign, meaning: Everything's fine with me. How about you? He returns the OK.
I swim past him, heading toward the paddle wheel. The rubble around it looks ripe for exploration.
But there's a tug on my fin. Teddy stops me. He signals for me to follow him around the seamount.
We angle upward, past purple gorgonians and bucket sponges. Nothing quite nearly as interesting as the wreck of the Victory, but Teddy's the tour guide. I'm just tagging along.
Suddenly, Teddy stops. He rolls over, looking up at the surface. I look up, too, glimpsing the silvery trail of a boat, a big one, as it churns past the far side of the seamount.
Teddy turns to me. He makes a hatchet-chop signal: Back to Miss Peg.
Then he's off, finning like a madman. It's everything I can do to keep up with him.
We make a slow ascent on our way back until we come to Miss Peg's anchor line. At about 30 feet, I grab hold of the line to make my safety stop. I only need a few minutes to decompress since I didn't have much bottom time.