Sea Control - Sea Control 542 - Ready to Dive with Curt Newport

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

Links1. Ready to Dive – Five Decades of Adventure in the Abyss, by Curt Newport, Purdue University Press, 2024.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Kurt Newport joins me today and we're gonna discuss a lifetime spent beneath the waves in his book, Ready to Dive. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarvie. We are looking once again for more editors for Sea Control. So if you have an interest in maritime security and the willingness to learn a few new skills,

please reach out to seacontrol at simsec.org. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how

you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security Aloha, shemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control My guest today is Kurt Newport, and we're going to be discussing his book, Ready to Dive, Five Decades of Adventure in the Abyss So, Kurt, welcome aboard. Could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, please? Let's see. I live in Mount River, Virginia, and I started working in the subsea business in, I don't know, 74, 75. I had been doing a variety of jobs, like running a Gardner Denver rock drill for a blasting company.

I was out of a job, and I saw an ad in the Washington Post looking for diving systems technicians, and that was for a company called Ocean Systems, Inc. And I went down to apply for the job, and I got hired. And for $3.50 an hour, I started building ship fenders. They had a shop over in Chantilly right across the street from Redskin Park. And so I did ship fenders for, I don't know, a year and a half, a couple of years, then slowly graduated into building and maintaining saturation diving systems. At the time, most of the systems had what's called the ADS-4 system,

which was a 600-foot rated diving bell, decompression chambers on the deck and stuff like that. And they relocated down to Houston in, I don't know, 75, 76. And I went down there with them, kind of got bored with it because I wasn't making much money. So I left Ocean Systems and went to the Commercial Diving Center in Wellington, California, learned air and mixed gas diving. And when I got out of school, I decided to get into remotely operated vehicles. And he hired me back to be part of the team with the Scorpio 1 ROV. So that would have been in 77. We did a brief job in Taiwan for coral harvesting or something along those lines.

And I came back and they started buying some IAC vehicles, International Submarine Engineering up in Canada, which was really the first company to start building work-capable ROVs. And so I did oil field work for a while, both in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea. Eventually got into installing and maintaining submarine cables for various companies like NT, Teleglobe, whatever. And they always had contracts of people to operate their equipment. And so we were operating these Scarab-class underwater vehicles, which were specifically designed by Amatek to maintain submarine telephone cables. and eventually went from there into deep ocean search and recovery. You know, we were actually doing cable work off of Providence, Rhode Island

when Air India Flight 182 went down, and I was supposed to be on the ship 10 days. Next thing I knew, we were going across the Atlantic to Cork, Ireland to salvage that jetliner. And so I just kind of kept doing that ever since, you know, mostly through the Navy search and recovery contract, which is put out by NAVSEA and the supervisor of salvage and diving. So I've been pretty much doing that for a long time. And I think it was in 2022, I decided 47 years was enough. And I was finally in a position to retire, so I retired.

And that's where I'm at right now. Well, thank you for coming on. As a reminder, all opinions today are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. What was your relationship with the SEAT prior to starting your diving career? Well, I really didn't have one. I mean, until I went out to sea in 77, I'd never really been on a boat or ship or anything like that. I think my father had taken us on some fishing trips and stuff like that, but I'd never really spent any significant time at sea.

I mean, certainly not overnight. But I always had an interest in underwater operations. And so for some reason, when I was a kid, 12, 13, 14 years old, I read about submarines. I read books about Simon Lenk and John Holland and became very interested. And I used to design my own submarines, you know, try to fabricate my own underwater breathing apparatus. So that interest was always there. But other than that, I really had never been out in the ocean to any extent. And you mentioned working on a lot of your own systems.

Did you have a technical background, an actual scientific training or technical background, or were you just sort of a natural tinkerer? I guess I was more of a natural tinkerer. I think my first breathing apparatus, I had a plastic garbage bag, and I put a piece of garden hose into that and made a little flapper valve. And I used to wee-breathe my own breath in the swimming pools until I got kicked out. Another time I took a fire extinguisher and converted that into a breathing sort of system where I had a breathing bag and a flapper valve and a free flow valve. And I tested that once and I was lucky I didn't kill myself because, you know, I just inflated it with air from a gas station. But as far as a technical background, I didn't have any formal technical training until I was in my 30s. Everything else was pretty much self-taught.

I mean, I raced cars back in the mid-70s with a couple of Formula Vs. So I learned a lot from that about how to build things, how things were constructed, how to repair stuff. So I sort of had a natural ability with all things mechanical. Can we talk about your name for a second? Because you sound like someone who would appear in like a Clive Cussler novel. It's like, oh, Kurt Newport's on the scene. We're calling him in. He's flying in to operate this underwater vehicle for us.

Did you feel pressure to live up to that? No, it's actually, it's Curtis, C-U-R-T-I-S. I shortened it to Kurt. I never really liked Curtis, middle name Wayne, last name Newport. I think my middle name, my dad totally came from a friend of his. So, no, that's just my name. I mean, not much I can do about it. So, how did you get your first job operating the Scorpio, and what happened?

Well, like I said, I was hired back to work with the Scorpio 1. vehicle, which was a prototype. And at the time it was being built in Amatek Straza in El Cajon, California. And so Ocean Systems didn't even really own it. And they got a contract with a company called Deep Sea Ocean Development Corporation or something like that. They were based out of Taipei and they wanted to harvest pink coral, which at that time was by weight was worth more than gold so they saw this new technology as a way to do that and you know we all got sent over to Taiwan they said they were going to supply us with a suitable fishing boat but what we got was about a I don't know 60 or 75 foot fishing boat steel hull wooden superstructure

with an a-frame and a stern and it really wasn't suitable for what we were trying to do we all stayed in one cabin, which was originally supposed to be for eight people. And we cut it down to six. Two of the guys slept on the bridge. And, yeah, their living conditions weren't good. And at that time, we really didn't have any way to track the vehicle. We really didn't have any acoustic tracking systems. So we put a heli pinger in the vehicle,

and we had a hand-manipulated tracking device on the side of the ship. And we would try to use that to figure out where the sound of the pinger was the loudest. And we would call out the bearing and elevation angles to a guy on the bridge. He crunched the numbers on a calculator. And presto, supposedly, we would have our position. Well, it didn't work very well. And we ended up mostly just dragging the vehicle around. And let me see.

I remember one time in particular, we said, well, you know, clearly this ship is not working out. And we're going to go out and give it one last try. And so we went out, and right after a typhoon had passed by, and I noticed that all the fishing boats were still tied up in port. Of course, I didn't know anything about anything. You know, this was really the first time I'd ever actually been to sea. So we go out after this typhoon passed by, and in the morning I'm laying on my bunk and I feel something hitting my face.

It was seawater hitting the side of the ship, and it was squirting in underneath the watertight door and splashing in my face while I was in my bunk. And we had these two big air conditioners in the room, and they always dripped water, in particular, into my bunk. So my bunk was always wet. So I get up, and we had a consultant from Ametek, cracked open the hatch, looked up and said, holy, yes. I mean, it's like, we had like 35-foot seas running, high winds, and the boat couldn't do anything. It was a single-pile fishing boat, probably didn't even have a bow thruster. All it could do was stay under the wind, so we couldn't even go out on deck.

And so we just kind of hunkered down in the cabin for a while. And I remember that night, I didn't get seasick, but I didn't feel well because we were rolling around so much. I had to take a Comrac monitor and a spare CTFM sonar display into my rack with me just to keep them dry because there was salt water on the bottom of our floor. But eventually we got up, got up in the bridge and just said, you know, this is ridiculous. You know, we shouldn't even be out here. And Ocean Systems declared that deep sea development was in violation of a contract. They were supposed to supply a suitable support vessel.

They had not. And we said, well, we're not going out anymore. And so then there was a period of time where it was just this big legal war of words going on. And we couldn't even get our equipment off the ship because it was outboard of about three or four other fishing boats. So we just all went back up to Taipei and just hung out, waiting to see what was going to happen. And one of our guys, Russ Austin, was going down daily to check in a boat. One time he went down there, it was gone. So they had sailed with all of our equipment, which Ocean System didn't know and they didn't know.

And after they did that, we said, well, no reason for us to stay over here. So we went back to Houston, and about six months later, we got all of the equipment back except for the vehicle. They claimed that they had repaired the umbilical from the damage we had sustained during our last drive, dive, and loss of the seat. So that was kind of the end of that story, and I ended up hanging around in Houston working on a subversible pipeline alignment rig, And then eventually we started using ISE vehicles made by Jim McFarland up in Canada. So, yeah, my first job at sea was kind of a disaster. I mean, I didn't know what to think about it at that point in time as to whether or not I even wanted to stay in this business. Because I'm like, man, are all these jobs like this?

I mean, so it was pretty bad. Yeah, I do feel like you're underselling just how bad the seas would have been in that small of a fishing vessel. So was that your closest call above water, or did you have any other notable experiences above water before we talk about all the diving stuff? That was probably the closest one, although I remember we were doing a search for, I think it was an F-15. No, it was an F-16 that went down off of Taiwan, and we were deploying transponders. And the way you deploy it is you flake the line out on the rail of the ship, and you hang the transponder over the side. and you drop the transponder and make sure the line goes free and it has a little glass ball on it, and it goes down to the bottom of the ocean.

Well, I was out there doing that once, and I don't know, for whatever reason, I wasn't wearing a life jacket. And we took this one big wave in the port side, and I just floated along the rail. I mean, it was like I almost got washed overboard. And so I got all soaked in seawater. It was obviously off Japan. It was really cold. And so me and a buddy went back, sat in a sauna on that ship for a while.

It was a Japanese salvage ship. So, yeah, that would be the only other incident. I mean, you know, just working on a deck of a ship is hazardous. I mean, it just is. Because, you know, especially when you're doing salvage work, you've got all this heavy equipment around. There's all kinds of lines and stuff, and you've just really got to be careful. How did you get into salvage? Well, because the company I work for had the salvage contract with Supesal.

And just by nature of the fact I work for them, I ended up getting sent out on salvage operations. So, like I said, the first big operation I did was salvage of Air India Flight 182, which went down on June 21st, 1985. And from there, it's just been a mixture of commercial aircraft, like, you know, a lot of airliners and mostly helicopters. We do a lot of helicopters, sometimes C-130s, a lot of fighters, you know, F-15s, F-16s. And I haven't been out on these jobs, but I know that Phoenix has been doing some F-35s and a few drones and stuff like that. I think at least two or three F-35s have been lost in the ocean. And I think one of them was operated by the U.K. So that's kind of, you know, just sort of a natural progression.

Yeah, you as you go through the book and I encourage your readers, we're going to have the link posted in the show notes. You can go find it for yourselves. And I would encourage you to read it. The probably the most high profile job that you were associated with here was the challenger. What made that job so difficult? Well, it was a lot of things. The biggest thing was that we were working pretty much right in the middle of the Gulf Stream. and the current could be three knots, could be four knots. And it just got to a certain point where we couldn't work.

So we had a vehicle called the Gemini that had a top hat launching system where the vehicle would detach from the top hat launching system once it was down closer to the bottom underneath the highest current areas. Because typically the current's the strongest of the surface, and as you get down through the water column, it drops off. So on the bottom, we might have had maybe a quarter, maybe a half a knot on the worst. You know, we could handle that. But at the surface, I mean, we had a current meter that we would lower down every day just to check how strong the current was.

Because, you know, the axis of the Gulf Stream is not always in one place. It shifts east to west. But unfortunately, we had to stay in one spot because we were looking for particular records from the right-hand rocket booster. So if the current was above a certain point, we just didn't dive. I mean, because there was just no point to it. So we would do that. But I would say, yeah, the current and visibility, not from the particular matter in the water, but from the fish. You know, wreckage attracts fish.

And we would go through a piece of booster wreckage, and it'd just be fish everywhere. So many fish. We couldn't see what we were doing. So I came up with an idea to put a fish light on the back of the vehicle. And so we'd go down there and find a piece of wreckage, and we'd turn off all the lights in the front of the vehicle, turn on the one in the rear of the vehicle. Eventually, the fish would leave the front of the vehicle and congregate by the rear. And then I'd turn on the lights in the front, and we'd do as much as we could until they came back around. So it became a constant thing going from front to back of the vehicle.

So there was that, and there was a lot of unknowns about what would happen to the piece of the booster wreckage once we recovered them, because they still had several inches of ammonium perchlorate composite propellant on them. And some people said, well, you know, potentially when you get them out of the water, they're just going to spontaneously ignite. Fortunately, that didn't happen. But still, you know, we were on a ship called the Stenowork Horse. It was about maybe 320 feet long, heavy work boat, had a moon pool, 250-ton cranes on the stern. And we'd be loaded up with all this wreckage, you know, with a fair amount of propellant on board.

And they told us that, you know, if just one piece of that wreckage caught fire, it'd just burn a hole through the ship and sink the ship. So, yeah, that was another hazard, you know, besides the regular stuff of recovering wreckage that has razor-sharp edges to it. But, you know, my main job was to fly the vehicle and to attach the lift lines to the wreckage. And then after that, you know, get the vehicle back on deck. than the actual recovery well that was done by other people like there was a guy named morton ulof who ran the deck during all the wreckage recovery and he was i think he was with the stena line and so they were the guys they bring the wreckage up attach tag lines to it and haul it out of the water that eventually we relocated on deck and it all gets stacked up

and covered up with canvas tarps so yeah i mean you know it's all dangerous i mean so You just got to be careful. What sort of precautions were you taking with your propellant? Or was it just you're going to set it in wherever it's stored and hope nothing happens? I assume no one's smoking by it. Well, initially, actually, we were smoking on deck. But we had all the propellant covered with tarps. And I think for the most part, they would just wet them down, keep them damp.

But then eventually we had a guy from the Air Force who was on board, and he convinced us that we really shouldn't smoke on deck, so we didn't anymore. And it's just, you know, okay, yeah, I know we shouldn't have been doing that. We're all young, you know, and, you know, there's a lot of stress associated with the work, which leads to smoking. But we did stop that. But really all I could do is cover the wreckage up with tarp, keep it wetted down until we were all loaded up,

Then they would take us in a trident submarine base, and a bunch of people in white jumpsuits with hard hats from NASA would offload it, and then we'd go back out. So that was the extent of the precautions. So then a final question for you here. What was it about the USS Indianapolis that caught your attention, and how did you go about trying to find her? Well, I mean, I knew about the circumstances of the sinking of Indianapolis. And when we had a successful completion to the Liberty Roll 7 search and recovery with the Discovery Channel, I talked to Mike Quattrone, and we said, well, do you want to do something else? And he said, well, we talked about the Indianapolis because we knew that Ballard, Robert D. Ballard, had been planning to look for it. So really in – let's see, 1909 – probably September of 1999, I started really researching that.

And I did that for several months, mostly getting deck logs and any sort of navigational information I could for the National Archives. And at that time, I didn't have the means to computer plot all these navigational positions. So I literally had a large chart on the side of my office. It was about, what do you think? I think it was about eight feet across and about four feet wide. And I just plotted all this stuff out. And I came up with a time-based database which listed every single piece of records that had been found, who it was found by, how long it had been in the water. And, you know, generally everything pointed roughly back to where the Navy said the ship sank.

But it didn't sink there. It actually sank about 30 to 35 nautical miles west of where the Navy said it did. And the big problem was we'd never had a pedigree for that location. We didn't know where it came from. I suspect that after Captain McVeigh was rescued, before he sent out his communication saying that the Indianapolis had been lost, he probably got with the navigator because Commander Janney from the Indianapolis was lost and was sinking. So he probably got with the navigator and the ringless and kind of looked at the numbers and said, well, I think we were roughly here. Well, they weren't there. They were quite a bit farther west.

So when we did our search for the Indianapolis in 2000, we were searching in the wrong area. There was no chance we were going to find this ship. Plus, it's a very difficult area to search in. It's right on the Cayuga Palacios Ridge. The bottom is very irregular. It's very volcanic. And it's not easy to do with a towed sonar. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today.

I'd like to thank my guest, Kurt Newport. Kurt, where can we find you online, and what are you working on next in retirement? I don't know. I got a 1959 Austin Healey that I'm making look good. Right now, I got the windshield off. I'm having all the gaskets replaced up in Pennsylvania. I'm doing that. Of course, I'm doing some promotional stuff with the book. And other than that, just taking care of the house. I mean, it's funny. A few people have asked me, they said, well, do you really miss doing this? And I'm like, no, not really. I asked the same question to my dad. My father was was a professional aviator with the army for 30 years and i asked him i said well dad why don't

you you know don't you have any interest in getting your private pilot's license and flying and he said nah you know i was a professional aviator for 30 years that's enough and you know he was in korea flew ambulance helicopters from ash 4077 he was in vietnam two tours he was in second world war and he thought yeah i'm you know i'm kind of done with that and that's kind of the way i look at it you know i've done my part spent my time at sea and i wrote about it and you know that's enough so just taking it easy well thanks again for joining us uh for the listeners again this will be linked in the show notes here highly recommend it to you great read there's story after story after story uh packed in there uh in the in the various chapters here but to listeners

thank you for tuning in we'll see you next time Thank you. Butter, rum, and a pot of gin, oh. Where have they put it in the alley? Butter, wine, both white and red, oh. Put it on the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm putting it in the alley. Where have they put it in the alley?

Help me, Bob, I'm putting it in the alley. Put it on the shimbo now.