He was
a World War II Marine, a Gloucester firefighter, father, and diver.
Joe Paynotta was not just a diver, he was The Diver. He was one of the
first to dive on the Andrea Doria. They call the Andrea Doria the Mt.
Everest of wreck dives. Since 1963, when Joe dove it, people have come
from all over the world to dive on it. Many have died.
I asked
him years later why he made a dive that is somewhere to the right of
extremely hazardous and a little short of suicidal. I received a retort
that explorers have given since saber-toothed tigers dined on the first
of us to leave the cave. "Huh?" he bellowed, "Because
it was there."
He made
the dive in what I call dinosaur gear, a double hose regulator (it was
a real pain to clear of water, which can really ruin a dive), no submersible
pressure gauge (tells you how much air is left in your tank, always
useful thing to know with a couple hundred feet of water over your head),
a wet suit, mask, fins, a knife, and a weight belt. The decompression
tables he dove by were designed for 20-something Navy divers in perfect
shape, not 30-something divers in less than perfect shape (a decompression
table tells you how long to stay at what depth to let the nitrogen bubbles
dissolve out of your blood on the return from depth to avoid the bends).
In the commercial diver world, we always went to the deeper tables,
i.e., on a 120-foot dive we would use a 130-foot table; we called it
the fat factor.
The dive
on the Andrea Doria was on a 160-foot decompression table. When I was
younger and much dumber, I did a 200-foot bounce dive on air. At 150-feet
I was blasted out of my mind. "Nitrogen narcosis" is its technical
name. "Rapture of the deep" better describes it as it's an
intoxication brought on by nitrogen in your blood. The deeper you go,
the more intense it gets. At 100-feet I was raptured all right. I took
off after a very fine looking cod fish before realizing it was time
to surface and live.
Joe did
a 250 foot air dive, made the bridge of the ship, penetrated into it,
and tried to take the radar off. He ran out of air, barely made the
down line, and barely made the surface, blowing by all his decompression
stops. He lost consciousness with a bad case of the bends (the bends
can best be described as being burned alive from the inside out). He
spent the better part of the day in a decompression chamber about the
size of an MRI machine.
Joe was
Portuguese, dark with a barrel chest. His son Steve used to call him
the Brown Bear. On hot Saturday afternoons, as he and I, each on one
oar of a skiff, towed him around off Niles Beach looking for a mooring,
we called him other things.
During
the summer Joe was easy to spot on Niles Beach. All one had to do was
look for a group of bikini-clad young mommies, and there would be the
Mayor of Niles dispensing advice to his council who listened to every
word he had to say. Joe would have to lean forward to listen to the
girls' retorts - like most divers who spend any amount of time underwater,
his hearing was shot. At least that's what he told me.
Before
going off and entering the world of the commercial diver, I sought Master
Diver Paynotta's advice. "Think!" he shouted. "When it
gets bad, think, then breathe. Don't panic. Panic and you die."
That advice
saved at least two fingers, and one hand, and one day it saved my life.
Thanks, Joe.
The doctors
say it was some type of head trauma in the brain that occurred long
ago that finally ruptured, ending his life quickly, saving him from
any extended pain. I think the trauma happened when he was on the Andrea
Doria, a gift to the bold man who dove on her so long ago.
I've heard
more than one diver call for his mother when things went south at depth.
Not Joe. As his time came to an end, Steve went to the hospital to find
Joe surrounded by the nurses who had to tend him, plus every other nurse
on the floor, who gravitated to the ever-joking and entertaining Joe.
Why did that not surprise me?
It's been
said that there are old divers and bold divers but no old, bold divers.
Joe was the exception to this rule. Some say God respects nothing more
than courage and bold men live in heaven forever. I'd like to believe
this.
Joe, I
hope the beach you sit on is as warm and soft as Niles, the view of
the breakwater and the castles on the western shore as dazzling. When
the southwest wind blows the water white every afternoon, I hope it
is as soothing now as it was on those warm afternoons on Niles.
May all
your dives be in warm water with unlimited visibility. May your air
tank never run dry. Joe, I hope the girls who surround you now are even
better looking than the ones on Niles and, Joe, I hope they have less
clothes on.
