Discovering the Everest of the deep

It should have been a quiet night, the chance to catch up on some shut-eye before the next day's arrival in New York City. There were nine days of fun and partying to sleep off, nine glorious days aboard Italy's most luxurious liner as it crossed the Atlantic. No one saw the other ship coming.

The Andrea Doria was the queen of the Italia Line, a 213m beauty that had set to sea in 1953 amidst a burst of national pride and claims that she was unsinkable. Emerging from a fog bank on July 25, 1956, however, the Andrea Doria was rammed amidships by a smaller passenger liner called the MS Stockholm, which was heading East.

The collision crumpled the front of the Stockholm beyond all recognition, but the damage to the Italian ship was far worse: Stockholm's ice-breaking prow had pierced the Andrea Doria's starboard side to a depth of almost 12 metres. As water gushed in, she started listing perilously, a sight chillingly echoed earlier this year when the Costa Concordia ran aground off the coast of Italy.

Stockholm miraculously stayed afloat. But the Andrea Doria went down 11 hours after the collision, taking 46 of the 1,700 people who had been on board with her.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, it's hard not to think of the Andrea Doria and the thousands of other ships that litter the floors of the world's oceans. Their awful, churning deaths as they sank to the bottom is the stuff of nightmares, and yet to a certain group of people, a handful of these wrecks have become the stuff of dreams. 

Fatal attraction

Ocean liners don't go down every day, and when they do, there's a likelihood they'll plummet to the kind of depths that few but James Cameron and his super-rich friends could hope to see. But the Andrea Doria is different. A tricky-but-reachable 100 kilometres from the nearest landfall, she came to rest, on her side, barely 50 metres down. You could touch her on a dive that was almost at what divers call "recreational levels" - though not quite. As a wreck, she is tantalisingly close but, as many have come to realise to their peril, she can be deadly.

"People don't think about how many adjustments you have to make before you dive the Doria," says Bill Campbell, who once went missing for several hours on a dive to the wreck. "You spend 13 hours getting there on a boat, you don't sleep right, you're not feeling yourself - then you have to get in the water and start making critical decisions.

"It's similar to an Olympic athlete who, before the big race, sleeps in his car and eats four Reese's Peanut Butter Cups for breakfast."

Fog banks, swirling currents, heavy shipping traffic and the cool Atlantic waters all add to the difficulties of divers who want to cross the Andrea Doria off their ‘to do' list. It is little wonder that she has been nicknamed the ‘Mount Everest of scuba diving'.

"She got that name from a cameraman," says Dan Crowell, whose 200-plus dives on the Andrea Doria arguably make him the world's leading authority on the wreck.

"He was trying to film down there and there was so much particulate matter whizzing around that he said it was like shooting in a blizzard on top of Mount Everest."

Dan, who now works in TV production, is the former skipper of a boat called Seeker, a once legendary craft that would regularly take out parties of experienced divers to the wreck. Having seen the liner take shape through the gloom more times than anyone, he fully understands the magnetic pull it holds over fellow divers.

"I was diving it before I was running expeditions," Dan told a magazine in an interview. "To a non-diver it's kind of hard to describe, but the fascination for me was this huge shipwreck on the bottom of the sea, which, on days with good visibility, you could actually see sitting right there on the bottom. I enjoyed exploring it, I enjoyed seeing what was happening to it over the years, but the bigger draw for most guys was the artefacts."

Not so much modern-day treasure hunters as souvenir seekers, the world's wreck diving community has been quietly picking the bones of the Andrea Doria clean for more than 50 years. There has been silver, ornate window panels, thousands of pieces of china and more, but these are trinkets, not serious valuables - highly unlikely to offset the costs of actually getting there. 

Costly hobby

"There are no big operations taking divers out to the Doria any more," says Dan, "but smaller boats will take you there, for a fee." It'll be in the thousands of dollars, and no one in their right mind would attempt the wreck without first having spent several times that amount on dedicated deep-dive training. For many, though, the cost involved is irrelevant. If diving is in your blood, the wreck of the Andrea Doria may simply be something that just has to be done.

"Once the Everest nickname caught on the lure to divers was set in place," says Captain Steve Bielenda, another Doria veteran, whose boat, Wahoo, like Dan's Seeker, once ran regular trips to the wreck. Steve stopped in 2001, citing multiple reasons, including divers' increasing reliance on technology, rather than old-fashioned experience. "Their greed and desire to penetrate the wreck to recover artefacts have made it more risky," he says. "The wreck is steadily collapsing, but it's an inanimate object: it's the divers who make it dangerous."

"Over the years we've seen this big, intact shipwreck slowly rot away," adds Dan. "The hull has creased and eventually kind of ripped open like a ripe watermelon. It's collapsing more and more, it's sinking into the sea bed, and the more it falls apart the less there is to recognise, which makes it harder to navigate your way around. You can be down there and get lost because it's like trying to find your way around a junk yard."

National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry, who shot the wreck in the 1990s, recalls the time he had a near-miss with the Andrea Doria: "I was photographing inside, and whenever you penetrate a shipwreck, it's very disorienting. You have to remember where you're going. I remember turning a corner and for just a second I didn't know which way to go.

"I knew I was close to the exit, less than 50 feet [15 metres] away, but it might as well have been a mile. One wrong turn and it could be all over. I stopped for a moment and tried not to panic. I said, ‘OK, let me go this way.'"

Other divers have been less lucky. No fewer than 16 have died while diving the Andrea Doria, victims of everything from heart attacks and decompression sickness to plain bad luck. 

Diving in the Gulf

Fishing nets drape the hull and an invisible web of thin fishing lines add to the crumbling, groaning melange that make the Andrea Doria as unforgiving now as the night she died. And yet, just like Mount Everest, she continues to pull people in.

"There are just some places whose very names make people fantasise about them," says Laurent Estrugo, Master Instructor at the Pavilion Dive Centre at Dubai's Jumeirah Beach Hotel. "Places like Truk lagoon, USAT Liberty and the Andrea Doria. The Doria is special because she's the only one close to any big urban cities, and she's never the same, the Atlantic is continually beating her up."

With clear, warm waters and around 20 diveable wrecks scattered around the Gulf, the popularity of scuba diving in this corner of the world is steadily growing. But in terms of magnitude, nothing can compare to the rusting, 56-year-old hulk off the north east coast of America.

"I haven't dived her yet, but I will, once all the required training is done," says Laurent. "She's definitely on the bucketlist of any wrecky."