Richard Kohler got his first taste of scuba diving in 1969, and he was hooked immediately. In the more than five decades since his introduction to the underwater world, he has pushed further into deeper waters, exploring shipwrecks, such as the Titanic and its sister ship Britannic, and performing acts of service, such as locating and recovering the remains of lost airmen from World War II. His latest book is: “Mystery of the Last Olympian: Titanic’s Tragic Sister Britannic.” Kohler discussed his career with Sea Technology.

What initially attracted you to diving?

As a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I enjoyed watching television shows like “Sea Hunt” and “The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau,” but there were two things in 1969 that would cement my drive to become an underwater explorer.

The first was watching the Apollo moon landing that July. Like every other young person around the world, I wanted to be an astronaut and explorer.

That same summer, my father took scuba diving lessons, and I was allowed to join him as he did his pool training. As he put the double hose regulator in his mouth and disappeared in a boil of bubbles into the pool, I was amazed. Scuba diving with its life-support system exposure suit was allowing a regular guy like my dad to explore “inner space” and its alien environment.

Once he was certified, he would often allow me to assemble his diving gear and breathe from it, first on land and eventually in shallow water from behind our family boat. In time he would let me explore the turbid NYC waters, with a rope tied around my waist to a cleat on the boat. I could only wander so far and so deep, but the raw excitement of being an underwater explorer bit deep into my soul. In the shadows around me were jellyfish and crabs, tiny animals, and large fish. Strange things poked out of the mud, begging to be examined. The mechanical metronome of my exhaust bubbles was the music that filled my head as, with eyes wide open, I took it all in.

I may never have become an astronaut, but at eight years old, I was already an explorer and fledgling aquanaut. I would dive as often as allowed, and finally, at age 15, I was certified as a junior scuba diver, with my basic full certification the next year. Forty-six years later, I am still diving and as enthusiastic being underwater as was when I was eight.

As you worked your way into technical diving into deeper waters, what skills did you focus on, and what was your technology toolkit?

In my 46 years of scuba diving experience, I have watched the sport of scuba diving, its techniques, training and the equipment, change. And with each change, it expanded the range and depth of my exploration and ability.

In 1977, I used a single steel tank with 72 cubic ft. of air, and a 10-min. dive to 80 ft. was considered deep. There was no deep diving training, as deep diving was seen as a dangerous stunt and not approved by the training agencies.

My guides and mentors were older divers who had pioneered techniques to stay safe in deepwater and borrowed equipment from both the military and commercial dive fields, adjusted to the needs of the sport diver. Some of these included harness and rigging for double tanks, neoprene commercial drysuits for both exposure and buoyancy, as the equipment we would wear became heavier. Other techniques borrowed were carrying redundant, or backup, supplies of air to breathe in an emergency or to decompress, as well as carrying redundant underwater lights and knives.

In 1987, I was using double aluminum tanks with a total of 160 cubic ft. of air and doing decompression dives, exploring shipwrecks as deep as 250 ft., like the famed Andrea Doria, known as the Mount Everest for shipwreck divers due to its dangerous and difficult conditions. The techniques for entering and exploring shipwrecks, I had now mastered, including the use of guidelines, fine motor skills to prevent kicking up the silt inside a shipwreck, and the understanding of how ships themselves are built and how they come apart as well. My dives were planned with the U.S. Navy decompression tables, which I would write on a slate, and I would use a depth gauge and redundant watches.

In 1997, I was using the largest steel diving cylinders available, giving me 240 cubic ft. of a helium-oxygen mixture to breathe at depth and another two tanks with 160 cubic ft. of oxygen mixtures under my arms for decompression. No longer breathing air underwater, I was much like commercial divers, but without the hoses and support of a hardhat diver, I was limited to the breathing gas I could carry and the amount of decompression I was willing to do in the open ocean. The maximum range for me at that point was 360 ft. for 30 min. spent exploring the bottom, paid for with a decompression obligation of 3 hr. to ascend slowly, lest I suffer the bends, decompression sickness.

Another advance at this time was the diving computer, worn on the diver’s wrist, that calculated decompression obligations in real time. The computer is more efficient and accurate for calculating a bell curve type of profile, taking into account where the diver is at every second underwater versus the tables method, which is a square linear dive profile based solely on maximum depth achieved and time spent at that point. In short, a dive computer gives a diver more bottom time for less decompression when used correctly.

In 2003, the availability and affordability of closed-circuit rebreather [CCR] technology for civilian divers would provide a quantum leap to my exploration ability. With this technology I can now dive to 600 ft. and spend almost 12 hr. underwater with a single closed-circuit rebreather before needing to resupply. Although CCR’s have been as deep as 1,000 ft., there is a trade-off for getting a reasonable amount of time to explore versus the time spent in decompression for the technical sport diver who is not going into saturation, or spending time in the open ocean adrift at night.

You’ve done a lot of research into the Titanic’s sister ship, Britannic. Can you tell us how you found the wreck site and what were the most memorable parts of diving the wreck?

In 2005, while working for the History Channel, I led an expedition to the RMS Titanic and made a series of dives to explore the wreckage and debris field in the Russian MIR submersibles. Those dives led me the following year to explore her sister ship, the HMHS Britannic in search of answers to questions about the way these ships were constructed and why both of them sank as quickly as they did.

Where Titanic is 12,500 ft. down at the bottom of the Atlantic and requires a submersible for people to explore and see firsthand, Britannic rests at 400 ft. in the warm and clear Aegean Sea, close to the Greek Island of Kea, and is accessible to the trained technical sport diver. Where Titanic is shrouded in darkness and death, Britannic is surrounded by shoals of fish and covered in colorful marine growth, very much alive in its environment. This resonates with me as an explorer, and although I enjoyed my exploration of Titanic in the MIR submersibles, the ability for me to touch, swim into and around the wreck of the Britannic, is at the core of who I am as a diver. Understanding the history of the Olympians, as the Titanic and her two sister ships are known, makes for exploring the Britannic so much more poignant.

Originally designed as an opulent passenger liner whose primary purpose was to move immigrants from the Old World to the New, World War I changed her destiny and fate. Conscripted by the Royal Navy, Britannic never got to carry a single paying passenger. Most of her opulent fittings were removed and replaced with the equipment she would need to serve as His Majesty’s Hospital Ship.

For the past 20 years, I have had the rare opportunity to go inside this massive intact ship, exploring and filming areas that have not seen the light of day since she sank over 100 years ago. Artifacts and equipment like hospital beds, wheelchairs and medical equipment clearly align with her intended missions of mercy, but hidden away are vestiges of her more stately lineage. Expensive china silver and crystal serviceware were secured aboard and never used, and in the very bowels of the great ship we have found the beautiful hand-painted tile walls of the Turkish baths, proof that her designed purpose for luxury and pleasure were always there beneath the red cross and white hospital paint. I have explored in the darkest spaces of the boiler rooms, weaved my way in and around the engine room catwalks and down corridors and berthing compartments. I still have not seen it all, and there are yet more mysteries to answer.

You’re a founding member of the Atlantic Wreck Divers. What stands out to you from those experiences?

In 1982, I met divers who took me under their wing and began to school me in the ways of deep shipwreck diving. No agency offered this type of education, as deep decompression diving and shipwreck diving in particular were considered dangerous. These men, all older than me and with years of diving experience, directed me on what equipment I should be using and why. The schooled me on techniques for safely navigating inside broken ships and understanding the plethora of dangers deep diving brought with it: nitrogen narcosis, deepwater blackout and the bends.

When the leader of our group told me he would rather slit his own throat rather than break decompression and suffer the bends, I believed him. The gravity of what we were doing was never lost on me as I would occasionally hear of a tragic diving accident and its fatal outcome.

Of all the lessons they hammered into me on our hours-long boat rides to and from dive sites, the ones of controlling panic have often gotten me out of a pickle. Fix a problem fully and completely lest it create a “snowball” effect and everything turns to crap. A loose strap can mean entanglement, which can lead to zero visibility and then increased breathing and then out of air. When panic rises inside, stop, close your eyes and control your breathing, as long as you’re breathing, you’re alive and can calmly and slowly fix the problem and live to dive another day.

We often found new shipwrecks as we pushed further and deeper offshore, and although that was and still is very exciting, I feel that the camaraderie of our group, the collective knowledge and shared passion, is the best part of being in the Atlantic Wreck Divers.

You’ve done a lot of television work. Can you describe the technical challenges of diving while filming and how you approach those?

My first TV project was diving on a German submarine 230 ft. deep, 60 mi. off the New Jersey coast in 1996. This was an exciting time as we had just begun adapting commercial diving gases like trimix and nitrox into our toolkit, and this was expanding our range, clarity of mind and safety. Of course, it was now more complicated and requires more equipment.

Doing this while working with a film crew aboard was taxing and at times distracting. But I learned how to serve two masters. The first was me and my dive safety; the second was to get the “shot.” Working with a topside and underwater crew requires a clear sense of timing and the ability to intuit what the cameraman is looking for.

Speaking on camera was also a new skill I had to learn on the job, and some of my very early jobs are a little difficult to watch. Funny how I can dive deep into shipwrecks with little fear, but stick a camera in my face and try to remember a line and, boom, stage fright!

What are you working on now?

Some of the most satisfying work I have been doing of late is the projects that can make a real difference in people’s lives, like locating and recovering the remains of lost airmen from their downed aircraft from World War II.

I have also been back to Britannic the last five years, documenting the wreck inside and out with both video and still photography, as well as locating artifacts for possible recovery.

I also spend a few weeks each year looking for unidentified shipwrecks around the U.K. as far west as Donegal, Ireland, and as far east as Dover in the English Channel. The diving there is as varied and diverse as the hundreds of years of shipwrecks that surround the island nations.

Anything you want to add or emphasize?

I like what Tom Eadie said. He was a U.S. Navy diver who was awarded the Medal of Honor in peacetime for his work diving on sunken submarines and rescuing a fellow diver. To paraphrase: Any man can dive deep, but not every man can dive deep and accomplish something.

I like to think, with my work underwater, I’ve accomplished something.

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