50's Diving


	Under Sea Adventurers Dive Club

Diving in the early 50's

by Ray McAllister

In 1951, when I went to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in LaJolla, California, for work towards a doctors degree in Oceanography, SCUBA diving was in its infancy. The Navy was using SCUBA and a few hardy souls had made regulators of a sort from surplus aircraft oxygen demand regulators. I did not succumb to that temptation, since I had heard of quite a number of casualties caused by failure of these devices. My only previous diving experience had been with a homemade diving helmet in 1939, when I was 16. Somehow I survived that. Now there was SCUBA.

A few days after my arrival at Scripps, a WWII DUKW came into the compound and loaded up two divers and their equipment and headed out thru the surf into LaJolla Bay. I begged a trip and finally they took me along to keep me quiet. After a few trips they let me try the gear, again to keep me quiet.

Our equipment was a hodge podge. The regulators were French, and a few months later, Canadian. They were "Aqualungs". My faceplate was a round, red rubber Japanese mask and my fins were Duckfeet, and later Churchill fins. We had no BCs, no non-return valves in the two hose regulators, and weight belts were often war surplus cartridge belts with weights stuck in the pockets intended for ammunition clips. Very primative.

On my sea checkout dive, with absolutely NO training in advance, Chuck Fleming and Connie Limbaugh told me to watch how they put on their gear then to tog up and come in the water after they were on the bottom. "Stay in our bubbles and if your ears hurt don't push them too hard or the eardrum might rupture. Oh yes, when you come up, don't hold your breath or it will kill you."

I went down in their bubbles and at 20 feet was in agony from ear squeeze, but I was hooked! The next time they let me do it I got all the way to the bottom, pushing my ears as hard as I could, in 90 feet of water. Wow!

My third dive was in the Scripps Submarine Canyon, starting, according to the echo sounder, at 145 feet. Connie and Chuck had triple 70 cubic foot tanks, probably with as much as 210 cu ft total, banded together with foam between the tanks to make them lighter. I had a French triple tank rig, possibly 80 or 90 cu ft, total. My instructions were, "Stay with us. If you have to leave us, let us know so we wont worry. And, oh yes, don't hold your breath going up or it will kill you." Over we went into the Canyon and I was enthralled. After a while, as we swam DOWN the canyon, going ever deeper, I began to have trouble breathing. When I finally realized that I might be out of air I swam after Connie and Chuck who were going further down canyon.

Soon I was in extremis. I headed for the surface exhaling what little breath I still had, thank God, for we were probably at 175 feet or so (third dive, untrained diver). I came out of the water like a ballistic missile, threw off my faceplate and screamed. After they picked me up with the DUKW, I found out that there was a reserve on the French triple, at the bottom of the middle tank, requiring nearly six full turns to get more air. No one had mentioned this! My shaking was one half extreme cold and one half fright.

I convinced Connie that we needed a training program for new divers, because others were beginning to show an interest in this fabulous research tool. We started using the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club pool for training and I developed a course of instruction which was not too primitive even by todays standards. Scripps gave me Instructors Card #1, maybe the first civilian Instructors card in the US, about the middle of 1952.

Cold was our worst enemy. The water ranged from 50 to 65 degrees, depending on the season. I started diving in October so that cold was a very severe problem. We would go to class shivering and I still have pages of illegible notes to show for it. I tried diver's long john woolies. They helped some but we were still hypothermic at the end of a dive. Then we got some Italian Perelli dry suits, of thin rubber. We had both waist and neck seals. The seals consisted of a ring of grooved hard rubber over which the upper and lower halves of the suit were stretched and a rubber ring held them in the groove.

With these "dry" suits we could be sure of one thing. They followed Murphy's Law. They WOULD get snagged on something and a stream of icy water would flow inside. They helped a lot though. When we came out of the water we had elephantiasis and had to pour the water and urine out before we could walk in them. The next step was to obtain 10 US Navy UDT "dry" suits, entered thru a back entry which was rolled up and clamped off. These were less easily snagged than the Perelli suits but usually leaked around the arms and face.

Finally, in about 1953 came the ultimate coldwater protection. Huge Bradner, at the California Radiation Laboratory, was experimenting with protection of humans immersed in a tank of water that could be cooled to very low temperatures. He constructed three suits of foam rubber (or neoprene?) for his experiments. When he was done he gave them away, one to Wheeler North, a biologist, one to UDT Chief Gianotti at Coronado, and we never did find the third. I begged them from the two recipients and the smallest one fit one of our divers, Jim Moriarty, like glove. We dove off the end of the Scripps pier in the winter. When we came out I asked Jim how he felt and he said "great". I pulled out the back of his wet jacket and shoved an icy hand into the furnace. Everyone had to try that while Jim screamed at each frozen hand.

Shortly afterwards Bradner formed a company, Engineering Development Co., EDCO for short, and EDCO wetsuits took California by storm. I hocked everything I owned, sold poached abalone to bar girls and bought EDCO serial #85. To put it on, since it was slick rubber on both sides, we used tire talc or powdered cornstarch to lubricate it. We were real happy when rubber compounds that slipped on easier were developed some years later. Soon things got real sissy. The non-return valves for Aqualung mouthpieces came along about 1953 and there was no more flooding both hoses and having to drink salt water to get air. We found US Navy inflatable life jackets and cut them down for diver's emergency flotation. Better faceplates and fins followed, and in a few years everybody was diving.

One of the earliest and most exclusive dive clubs in the USA was probably the LaJolla Bottom Scratchers. Most of us wanted to belong but I was unable to pass their initiation rite because of eustachian tube blockage and sinus problems which made every dive painful and left me with a faceplate full of blood from broken sinus capillaries. Indeed at our first diving physical, the doctor told me NEVER to dive again. That was 42 years ago. Needless to say I ignored his advice.

The Bottom Scratchers required that you take 5 abalone on a single free dive, and that you capture a hornshark bare handed. The hornshark is a small, relatively harmless shark with a large horn or toothlike process on the end of the dorsal fin. With its rough skin it was easy to catch. Even without being a member I was still accepted peripherally by the Bottom Scratchers. As a result I was able to get a LaJolla Long Rifle, one of the early rubber powered spear guns capable of taking BIG fish. That is a tale by itself.

A couple of the Bottom Scratchers worked at a large aircraft plant in San Diego, Convair as I remember. They assembled aircraft from parts kept in bins and bays in a large building. One of the guys drew up plans for the various parts of the Long Rifle, to be made of aircraft quality stainless steel. He ordered about 50 of each part and had them in bins, not sequentially numbered. The handle, the trigger, the trigger guard, the sear, etc. were each a separate piece. If you were one of the favored ones, they collected the parts from a closely guarded list of part numbers and you recieved a bag of stainless scraps which a stainless welder could make into a speargun. You provided the stock made of local wood, and the rubber bands. Mine took a 550 lb grouper or jewfish off Grand Isle, LA, in the late 50's. I probably still have the stainless parts in one of the boxes I've been carrying around for 30 years, unopened.

When not diving for Scripps we used paddleboards, which we made of wood and shellaced till waterproof. They were like full sized surfboards or windsurfers with a couple of strips of innertube rubber stretched over the forward end, and a piece of fishnet sewed to the rubber. We carried a tank and speargun under the rubber, got in a rip current, squirted out to sea and put on our gear. A light line pulled the paddleboard with us wherever we went and our catch was shoved under the net for the trip back home. I still don't know why the paddleboard has not caught on in SE Florida where the reef is only a mile or two offshore. Well, the halcyon days of the earliest SCUBA divers have turned into days of much safer diving with all kinds of high tech gear and pretty clothing, etc. Like many other old timers I remember the great times and forget the cold, the danger and the inappropriate training of the EARLY DAYS OF SCUBA DIVING. I'm still diving and hope I go, underwater, in the mouth of a great white shark, 30 seconds before my massive heart attack!!