Deep Sea Explorer

First Published in the New Zealand Herald Canvas Magazine. Saturday 12 September 2009 By Greg Dixon. Copyright New Zealand Herald © 2009.

In the deep blue of the Aegean’s fast-running Kea Channel lies one of Auckland diver Pete Mesley’s deams.
The ghostly wreck of a leviathan rests there, her 53,000-tonne body torn in two, her heart ripped out by a German mine in the third year of the Great War. The HMHS Britannic she was named, the third and largest of the White Star Line’s famous trio of gigantic transatlantic liners. Built in Belfast by Harland and Wolff, she was launched in 1914, in the last months of an age of hard steel, misplaced pride and doomed optimism.
The sister ship of the RMS Olympic, scrapped in 1937, and the equally ill-fated RMS titanic, she was designed for peace but saw only war. In 1915 she was commissioned not as a luxury liner but as a hospital ship and, the following year, had set out from the Greek island of Lemnos to collect the wounded from the brutal beaches of Gallipoli.
“Suddenly, there was a dull, deafening roar,” reported a survivor, “the Britannic gave a shiver, a long drawn-out shudder from stem to stern, shaking the crockery on the tables, breaking things till it subsided as she slowly continued on her way. We all knew she had been struck.” She sank in less than an hour, taking 30 lives with her, just after nine in the morning on November 21, 1916.
For more than 90 years since, she has slept quietly on her starboard side in 120 metres of water, visited by just a few since her remains were discovered by legendary French adventurer Jacques Cousteau in 1975.
For years Mesley had hoped he, too, might follow in Cousteau’s wake, and those of the five expeditions to the wreck since the mid-1990s. Finally, this year, the deep-sea diver and photographer from oh-so-suburban Wattle Downs in Auckland had his chance after being named in a team shooting a new documentary on Britannic for the national Geographic channel. On May 24 he and four other divers – using cutting edge “re breather” equipment – made the difficult, dangerous journey to the bottom of the Kea Channel.

Underwater Explorer and Deep Sea Diver Pete Mesley Before a Dive at the Poor Knights Marine Reserve, New Zealand. Tuesday 01 September 2009 Photograph Richard Robinson.

“When I did my descent on to the wreck, that was like my whole diving career had kind of funnelled into this point, and it was overwhelming emotionally,” says Mesley.
“When you get to tick off one of your life’s ambitions, not only just to dive deep on the wreck but to be with a great group of people and some of the world’s leading technical divers and explorers, it was just the best feeling ever.” Within an hour, however, the best dive of Mesley’s life would also become his worst.
MAN HAS dived the depths for centuries. From the breath-holding sponge divers of Ancient Greece to the development of a rudimentary diving bell in the 16th century, to the invention of the first diving helmets with surface air supplies in the early 19th century, people have sought to go deeper into the oceans for longer – with, it should be said, varying results.
It wasn’t until the 1940s that Cousteau and others invented modern diving techniques, employing compressed air in tanks harnessed to the diver’s back, allowing both commercial and, from the 60s onward, recreational divers to more fully and more personally explore our oceans and the treasures they hold.
In the decades since, the hardcore have sought to go to greater and greater depths, with the current confirmed Guinness record held by South African diver Numo Gomes, who dived to 318.25m in the Red Sea in2005.
Gomes got there in less than 20 minutes, but – and here’s the really overwhelming bit – took 12 hours to resurface in order to avoid decompression sickness, commonly known as “the bends”.
Diving deep, or what insiders called “technical diving” is, you can probably guess, not for the risk-averse. And the bends – or “getting bent” in diving lingo – is not the only risk when diving, but it is the greatest.
As arguably new Zealand’s top technical diver, Mesley knows those risks intimately and has been facing them down for almost 20 years.
Born the youngest of three brothers in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, 40 years ago this December, he is one a handful of divers in this country who are capable diving deep wrecks like the Britannic, according to diving buddy Dr Simon Mitchell, one of the world’s leading specialists in dive medicine as well as a consulting anaesthetist at Auckland City Hospital and a senior lecturer at Auckland’s School of Medicine.
“You could confidently say that Pete would be New Zealand’s leading technical diver,” says Mitchell. All of which seems, well, a little paradoxical for a bloke raised in one Africa’s land-locked nations.
Raised in Harare and educated at a boarding school, Mesley didn’t actually see the ocean with his own eyes until he was 11, when his family holidayed in South Africa. About a year later, he had his first, short crack at scuba diving in a murky green training pool, courtesy of a young mate’s father, a senior army officer.
“I couldn’t see a thing, it was green as …
but I thought this is just the bee’s knees, this is what it’s about.” It wasn’t until 1990, however, that Mesley, then in London working for a relative’s painting and decorating business, finally got his diving ticket, after joining a mate on a dive course.
“I just jumped into the pool and all the cogs clicked into place. I was amping, I was buzzing. I said [to the instructor] ‘I want to become an instructor, I want to get into this’.” Which, he admits, is rather typical of him. He still has, unused in his garage, a paraglider he bought 15 years ago after a few paragliding jumps in South Africa lead to a similar bout of (as it turned out, short-lived) passion.
“He’s enthusiastic all right,” says Dave Moran, editor of Dive New Zealand magazine.
“He has big dreams and sometimes I have to say ‘hey Pete, divide them by half and we might end up with something realistic’.
That’s why we like him, because he is full of enthusiasm and reminds of us what we were like at his age-and good on him. We need a few more Pete Mesleys around the place.” THEY CALL it “lust for rust”. We might call it an obsession, not for diving deep but for diving shipwrecks, particularly historic shipwrecks.

Time stands still for Rebreather Diver Pete Mesley as he looks at a ship clock deep on the starboard side of the Lounge Deck of the wreck of the Mikhail Lermontov. The Ivan Franko class, Soviet Union built cruise ship measuring 176 meters / 577 feet with a gross tonnage of 20,500 tons rests on the sand in Port Gore in the Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand. She sank on February 16th 1986 at 10:45pm after hitting Hawea Rock situated bellow the water between Cape Jackson and the Jackson Head Beacon. Saturday 31 October 2009 Photograph Richard Robinson.

It is this passion, this preoccupation, that has become Mesley’s life and work.
In the years since that London course he’s completed thousands of dives around the world – including Scotland’s Scapa Flow (where 51 World War I German warships were scuttled in 1919), South Africa, the Great Barrier Reef and the Pacific – and he has worked as an instructor at resorts in places like the Red Sea and Cyprus.
Since coming to New Zealand in 1994- he followed his New Zealand wife Kim, who he met in London-he has worked full-time in the diving industry here, running dive shops until 2002 and, since then, operating dive-related businesses of his own.
As a qualified course director, he trains other diving instructors as well as teaching recreational and technical diving and the use of the rebreathing equipment used on technical dives. He also imports diving gear and does a bit safety work on the side for television, film (including Whale Rider) and TV commercials. He has been involved with two National Geographic series already – a programme called X-Force: The Science of Diving in 2000 and the Britannic programme this year – and has signed on as a stills photographer for another show next year investigating the wreck of Nazi Germany’s only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin.
But it is his charter work – and his underwater photography – which probably best blend business with his rust lust.
When I met Mesley in late August, he was not long back from a charter to Micronesia’s Truk Lagoon, a place he calls the ultimate dive location because it contains scores of WWII-era Japanese warships and planes.
And he will run charter dives this month and next to the largest wreck in New Zealand waters, the Mikhail Lermontov. The 20,000- tonne, 175m Soviet-era liner lies in 30m of water in Marlborough Sounds. A common enough recreational dive, but Mesley likes to get deep inside the wreck – as an eerie photo of the ship’s bar on his living room wall demonstrates.
He has dived to many other local wrecks, including the Rainbow Warrior and the HMNZS Canterbury. However, it’s what he calls the Captain Kirk stuff – the boldly going where no one has been before – that really rings his ship’s bell.
His most significant dive here was on one of only two New Zealand ships to be sunk in our waters by the Germans during World War I. Although not widely known until recently, a German Imperial Navy raider, the Wolf, hunted off our coast, laying mines near the top of both the North and South Islands.
New Zealand freighter the Port Kembla was sunk by a mine in deep water off the coast of Farewell Spit in late September, 1917.
It wasn’t until 2007 that the wreck was found and positively identified by Mesley and Mitchell using information from German naval archives sourced by fellow Auckland diver Mike Fraser.
“The biggest thing about exploration diving is it is high risk and a lot of work but then it can have extremely high rewards – or nothing,” Mesley says. “But the feeling of descending on to a wreck that you know nobody has ever set eyes on before is nothing short of breathtaking. [On the Port Kembla dive] we could have just descended on to the bottom to find HMS Seabed or it could have been this big pile of rubbish. And if it had been, we would have turned round and said ‘that’s just the way it is’. But we didn’t.” Mitchell says the successful finding and identification on that dive is something wreck divers might achieve just once in their diving life-which is why the footage of the find is, well, rather amusing, partly due to the pair using a mix of oxygen and helium.
“You can hear Pete yelling ‘f**king hell’ …
it sounds like Mickey Mouse saying it, which is obviously very inappropriate. But it is a moment in time I will never forget.” The pair recovered the Port Kembla’s shipping line plaque and its bell. The bell is currently stored at his home. Mesley says it will be given to the NZ Maritime Museum, though he can’t say when.
TECHNICAL DIVING is a complicated and expensive business. It involves mixing gases such has oxygen and helium which are not expelled into the water as bubbles, as with standard scuba diving, but recycled using rebreathing equipment. And unlike recreational scuba, which doesn’t extend beyond 30 to 40m, tech diving requires “stage” or gradual decompression, which involves, often for a half a dozen hours or more, a slow, regimented, computer-aided return to the surface.
Experience, nerve, good gear and money (rebreather units start at $16,000, he has $25,000 of gear) are needed. But sometimes these things won’t keep a diver safe.
And, as Moran points out, tech diving is completely unregulated. “What you are doing is relying on a mechanical device to give you what you need but you’ve also got a huge amount of physiological changes happening to your body, because you’re breathing these mixed gases and you’re breathing at extreme depths.
“One of the scary things is that a lot of the gurus of rebreather diving are all dead. People who have written books about rebreather diving or extreme diving, a lot of them aren’t here. Every two years, over in Australia, we have a tech diving conference … and practically every two years I go over there and one the guest speakers of two years before is no longer with us.” According to research done for the international Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, scuba diving is somewhere between 36 and 62 times riskier than climbing in your car. Here, two people died scuba diving last year and there have been 14 deaths, an average of three a year, since 2004.
However, Mitchell, who is hugely experienced, underlines there are very few people he dives with who he feels enhance his safety underwater. “I could count those people on one hand and Pete is one of them. I say that because most people you end up diving with are not as experienced as you or not as technically competent as you. Pete is all of those things and more.” But Mesley has faced his own near-death too. On a dive Mesley and Mitchell did in 2005 on the RMS Niagara – a gold-laden freighter sunk in 1940 off Bream Head by a mine laid by another German raider, Orion – Mesley found himself in trouble on the long trip back to the surface.
“I started experiencing extreme vertigo.
In a nutshell my mind felt like I was doing 3000 rpm around the ascent rope – and of course it made me violently sick. I ended up holding on to the line and I had my eyes closed and I would open my eyes ever-so slightly to look at the time I had left for decompression at that depth and when I wanted to be sick again I would move over to my open-circuit valve equipment.
“But if I had surfaced with three and half hours’ decompression left I would not have even reached the duck board [the climbing board on the back of the boat]. I’d be dead.
The amount of trauma on the body due to all those gas bubbles building up a system, I would have just turned into a giant Aero bar, I would have multiple organ failure.” Mesley stuck it out. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be here.
“THE VISIBILITY in Kea Channel is just phenomenal,” Mesley says. “There is a huge amount of current and I was really having to work hard to get to the bottom but from about 65 to 70m I looked down and from the blueness emerged this massive hole. The Britannic has broken just forward of the bridge section. It’s kind of a 10m wide split near the bow section, and the descent line was moored just forward of the bridge.” He was, it would seem, ecstatic at the sight of the leviathan. “I felt like there were angels, a heavenly choir going “ahhhhh!’ I don’t know whether it was some form of gas in my brain, but I felt that. It was close to a spiritual experience.” For around an hour he and the four other divers, including one of the world’s most accomplished deep-wreck divers and a close friend of Mesley’s, Carl Spencer, worked around the wreck.
“One of the biggest highlights of the dive for me was that Carl and I entered the wreck area called the grand staircase … I was taking stills, and he comes over to me and gives it the old bro-hug, we gave each other a bit of a bro-hug underwater and he put his hand behind my head. It was just to say ‘mate, we’re here’ … I’d spoken to him about [diving it] for a long time and it was like ‘we’re here and it’s great that you could be in on the team’. It was very uplifting and emotional.” And then tragedy stuck. Why it happened is still a matter for an official report. According to Mesley – who was on the spot – Spencer blacked out and his regulator came out of his mouth. “There is an adage: it’s better to be bent on the surface than dead on the bottom. With him unconscious and not being able to get the reg back in his mouth, well, there was zero chance of him surviving underwater, so that’s why we took him to the surface. Now for someone to survive missing four to five hours of decompression is non-existent, but again he might have come to at the surface and they can dramatically recompress him in the chamber [on the dive tender]. There is always a chance.” Spencer, a father of two, died 35 minutes later without regaining consciousness. Just three days into a 10-day diving schedule, the shoot was called off. The future of the documentary remains unknown.
“I’d completed one of the best dives in my career and, of course, you want to celebrate, you want to talk about it. But obviously with Carl dying on the best dive that I’ve ever done, emotionally it’s like a bloody rollercoaster. Best dive, worst dive.” Spencer’s death is one of the hardest things Mesley has ever had to deal with.
Like Spencer, Mesley has young children, (his girls are 4 and 7). Both men were the same age. They both had huge reputations in diving circles.
These echoes of the other might have led some to reconsider deep-diving. However, the bloke from Wattle Downs has a sangfroid about his dangerous line of work and, though he admits he probably has just 20 or so big dives left in him, plans to keep boldly going where few have been before.
Besides, the Britannic is still waiting for his return. “Am I putting myself at a higher risk? Absolutely. With these bigger dives you could do everything 100 per cent correct and you still go wrong. So why take that undue risk? That’s a question every single person has to answer. Do I want to make my wife a widow? Of course I don’t. But I guess it’s the very essence of what makes people who they are.” !

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