Massachusetts man lives a life of adventure

By STEVE PFARRER
Daily Hampshire Gazette
 
BELCHERTOWN, Mass. (AP) — He was swimming, very slowly, in about 150 feet of ocean water, trying to make his way through the darkened wreckage of a Japanese freighter from World War II. To avoid stirring the silty water any more than necessary, he didn't use fins, but instead pulled his way past an old catwalk in the freighter's engine room.
And that's when it happened - the crumbling path gave way and began to fall, sending other catwalks tumbling through the murky water. The diver cowered near the bottom of the ship, his hands covering his head, trying to avoid being battered by 250 pounds of corroded steel.
Just another day in the adventurous life of Peter Piemonte.
Piemonte, of Belchertown, laughs and shakes his head as he recalls this episode, which took place last November near the island of Peleliu (now Palua) in Micronesia, site of a famous invasion by U.S. Marines during the war.
"I remember thinking, 'I'm going to get pinned down here, and no one knows I'm even here,' " he says. "What a spot to be in. In the end, I was fine, I didn't get hit by anything, but there was so much silt stirred up, it was just pitch-black — I had to grope my way out."
That's a risk you take when one of your hobbies is deep-sea diving. There's also passing out underwater because of problems with your air supply, or getting decompression sickness — more commonly known as "the bends" — when you ascend too fast, allowing bubbles of dissolved gas to spread through your body.
But Piemonte, 57, knows a bit about handling risk — and minimizing it so that it doesn't get in the way of adventure. He's a longtime commercial pilot who's flown all over the world and navigated any number of storms and difficult, windswept landings. He's been diving off and on since his teenage years, fascinated with exploring old shipwrecks and the stories and artifacts they reveal.
Piemonte has pursued diving as a serious hobby for about 15 years, sometimes crewing with a research vessel based on Long Island that takes divers to famous wrecks like the Italian passenger liner Andrea Doria, which sank off the coast of Nantucket in 1956. The boat, the Garloo, also searches for possible wreck sites. Piemonte does cave and lake diving, too, sometimes alone and sometimes with other enthusiasts.
Sure it can be dangerous, he says, but the potential threats are outweighed by the challenge and thrill of discovery that comes with Piemonte's full-throttle pastimes.
"The idea of seeing something that no one has seen since it slipped beneath the waves is just fascinating," he says of diving. "You're looking at a moment that's frozen in time."
In late September, Piemonte was relaxing at his Belchertown home after 10 days of flying to various spots in the western United States. He's the aviation manager and one of three pilots for a small company that flies clients to business meetings and vacation destinations on a trim, three-engine jet — a Dassault Falcon 900. The plane operates out of Bradley International Airport in Connecticut, but Piemonte books the flights from his house.
It was a chance encounter at a small eastern Massachusetts airport in early 1973, when Piemonte was about 19, that led him to explore the air.
"I was working for a brick mason at the time who was taking flying lessons, and he took me up in a plane," Piemonte recalls. "It was kind of fun. Then sometime later, this buddy and I were bored, so we pulled into this place at the Beverly Airport that said 'Scenic Rides.' The guy behind the counter said, 'Why would a guy like you want to take a ride? For another $15, I'll give you a log book and let you fly the plane.' "
So Piemonte began taking flying lessons, though he says he had no intention at the time of becoming a professional pilot. He was more interested in exploring the outdoors on the ground: He was studying wildlife biology and conservation technology at a community college, and he also hunted and did motocross racing. He figured he would look for some kind of career in the outdoors.
But after a while, he says, "The siren song of aviation got really strong."
Once he got his pilot's license, he took on a variety of jobs out of that same Beverly Airport: towing banners, hauling freight, doing some flight instruction himself. In 1978 he was certified to fly small jets and began his career piloting corporate jets, working out of a couple of airports, including Westfield-Barnes Regional Airport. He's been with his current employer, Janus Equities, for about 20 years.
His schedule is highly variable from week to week, with the most typical trip lasting three to five days. He and a co-pilot shuttle up to a dozen clients per flight on three to four separate trips a month. Those journeys have taken him all over the world: to South America, Europe, the Caribbean.
"I've been very fortunate that my career has afforded me a tremendous amount of travel and opportunity to try different things," says Piemonte, who is single with no children. "I have enough time off between flights to do things I really enjoy like diving, golf and shooting and to have great friends and camaraderie."
Though he's lived in Belchertown since the late 1970s, when he started working at Barnes, Piemonte grew up in Salem. He first got the scuba-diving bug by reading about submarine warfare in World War II and the underwater explorations of Jacques Cousteau. Piemonte dived in the ocean, and also in inland waters like the Merrimack River.
His zeal for the sport waned a bit following an episode in 1978 helping a friend salvage a small plane that had crashed in the Merrimack.
"This was in February, and I spent a week in the water, in a wet suit, and I froze my ass off," he says with a laugh. "I said to myself, 'That wasn't any fun.' I didn't dive again in New England for a long time after that."
But in the mid-1990s, when his pilot duties began taking him to Mexico and the Caribbean, he took up saltwater fly-fishing and spear fishing. That prompted him to buy a 20-foot boat, which then prompted another thought: "You know, I could go scuba diving off this."
For some years he'd also been doing aerobatics in a rented propeller plane for fun — he was considering investing in his own plane — but he abandoned recreational flying once he got serious about diving again.
"I couldn't do both at the same time," he says. "They both demand your full attention, and I thought, 'If I don't drop one of these, I'm going to get hurt.' "
And Piemonte has been hurt. Once he was badly sickened during a dive when the carbon dioxide filtering device on his rebreather, which contains a mix of lithium and sodium hydroxide, got wet, causing the chemicals to foam up into a caustic cocktail. He burned his lips, mouth and lungs and had to use air from a spare oxygen canister to get back to the surface. "I was so sick," he says. "I couldn't taste anything for two weeks after that."
Even though scuba divers sometimes swim together, they operate as individuals; it's not like flying, where there's a co-pilot, Piemonte says. "You can't communicate," he says of diving. "Any problems you encounter, you have to solve them underwater ... That puts a burden on your equipment, your training and your ability to maintain control. You have to think your way out of the problem."
Sometimes that's not enough. He's lost a few friends over the years who ran into trouble like equipment failure that causes a rapid ascent and a fatal case of the bends. Just this year, he notes, five divers from the Northeast have died. "It's something you always have to be aware of."
But if you plan carefully, he adds, and you keep your cool in tight spots, you get the rewards — like investigating a sunken German U-boat, the U-853, near Block Island, R.I.; the Empress of Ireland, an ocean liner that sank in the St. Lawrence River in Canada in 1914; or the entwined wrecks of two coal-carrying schooners, the Palmer and the Crary, which collided and went to the bottom of Massachusetts Bay in 1902.
"Even though people will say I do risky things, I don't really agree," Piemonte says. "There is an element of risk, no doubt about it, but I always feel that my temperament, my equipment and my training will trump most any problem I encounter — and so far it has."
Piemonte's living room is a shrine to many of the underwater sites he's explored, a window to the past: old clocks, portholes, navigation equipment, well-preserved china and bottles decorate his mantel, cover his walls and fill his shelves.
"When I pass, I will give all my artifacts to people who value them," he says. "They'll be taken care of, they'll be displayed and in the end they'll go to a museum somewhere."
These days Piemonte's doing less diving, but not because of safety concerns. He is devoting more time to his newest hobby, target shooting with pistols.
He says he used to be a good shot when he hunted game birds, like grouse, with a shotgun. Piemonte jokes that he's having a harder time with small arms.
"Eh, I'm old," he says by way of explanation.
But that's a bit of an under-sell: Last year Piemonte, who makes his own ammunition, took fourth place in the senior classic division of a revolver championship hosted by the International Confederation of Revolver Enthusiasts in California.
Piemonte doesn't know what new hobbies the future might bring, but he figures whatever they are, he'll do them full tilt.
"I'm a busy guy," he says, "and I like bringing new challenges to my life."

Portion of Georgia reef reserved for researchers

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — A portion of a reef sanctuary off the Georgia coast has been closed to fishermen and scuba divers.
The Brunswick News reports that officials with Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary say the southern third section of the 22-mile reef will be reserved for research.
Although fishing and diving are now prohibited there, vessels will be allowed to travel across the area as long as they do not stop.
George Sedberry, superintendent of the Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary, says the protected area will be used by scientists to study potential impacts from various activities on natural resources, including bottom fishing, climate change and natural events such as hurricanes and droughts.

Learn how to save a life with CPR and first aid training

Done properly and with adequate training, scuba diving is tremendous fun and relatively safe.

Still, functioning in an underwater environment is unnatural and potentially dangerous.

That’s why all divers, regardless of how often they dive, should become competent in life-saving measures.

After all, there aren’t many things more important than learning how to save a life. Unfortunately, too few of us really know what to do if we come across a person in trouble and in need of medical attention.

That was part of my motivation for getting certified on Nov. 12 in first aid, CPR and O2 provider. I hadn’t had a CPR, or cardio pulminary resuscitation, class since I was in Cub Scouts, and I was a little surprised by how much the certification class had changed.

First of all, the speed at which the chest compressions are admininistered is TWICE as fast as I recall. And this change, as recommended by the American Heart Association, has taken place in just the last two years.

Perhaps you remember saying “one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand” as the pace to provide the compressions used to restart the heart. In my most-recent class, we were instructed to deliver compressions at the speed of the beat to the Bee Gees tune “Stayin’ Alive.”

Sing it with me now: “Ah, ah, ah, ah, Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive. Ah, ah, ah, ah Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive.” Apparently disco is back in vogue.

The reason for the increased speed, according to our instructor, BJ Stapp, a firefighter, medic and instruction coordinator for Michigan CPR, is the need to deliver as many beats to the heart as possible in the crucial first five minutes after a person goes into cardiac arrest. The American Heart Association recommends 100 compressions per minute, exactly the beat speed of “Stayin’ Alive.” Going too slowly  doesn’t generate enough blood flow, and going too fast doesn’t allow the heart to fill properly between compressions.

For those of you still burning any disco records you can get your hands on, the beat to Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” will also work.

There are several other changes to CPR procedure, (too many to mention here), made as recently as five or six years ago, which is another reason to refresh your certification.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that the first five minutes, the first couple of minutes that someone is having a medical emergency, are the most important,” Stapp said. “And that’s usually the time that it takes the medical responders, the professionals to get there. So if people can learn what to do correctly, and learn how to do it with confidence, they can make a big difference.”

Regarding scuba diving, Stapp said it’s not necessarily injuries caused by the dive that require the most medical attention, but rather inherent problems the diver had before he or she undertook the dive that are triggered under the application of the dive.

“What we don’t realize with the pressure changes and some of the activities and things that we are doing, there is a lot of demand on our bodies.  And all this demand can cause a lot of problems. They can be as simple as an underlying problem that we already have, like diabetes, or asthma, or something more serious like a diving emergency.”

The most serious diving emergency, according to Stapp, is a heart attack, most often brought about by physical exertion under the water.

“When diving, there is an increased workload on the heart. Because when we go under that pressure it kind of pushes the blood to the core of our body and makes our heart work more. And so when it works more, we have an increased chance for a heart attack,” he said.

Stapp spent about six hours Saturday teaching a small group of students first aid and CPR, and how to use an AED, or automated external defibrillator. We were also taught how to administer oxygen to victims in need. Each of the certifications is good for two years.

Most commonly, divers will need to inhale pure oxygen if they ascend to the surface too quickly. The oxygen helps push out the nitrogen loading caused by the quick ascent and reduces the chances of decompression sickness.

I also discovered breathing pure oxygen can cure my biggest problem: headaches caused by a high number of dives in a short period of time. When I go on a dive vacation, I try to cram as many dives as I can into that short period of time. I usually do a minimum of three dives a day, and sometimes four if I can squeeze in a night dive. All of that diving builds up carbon dioxide (CO2) in the blood, and causes my head to feel like a large pumpkin. Stapp said taking deep breaths and long exhales just before asending to complete a dive can help, as well as taking in oxygen after the dive has been completed.

The students were put through a variety of emergency situations and taught how to respond. In addition to the CPR, students were also taught how to help someone who is choking by using both adult and infant manikins. First aid training included what to do for allergic reactions, heart attack, fainting, diabetes and low blood sugar, stroke, seizure and shock. The procedures not only provide aid for the victim, but also provide protection for those administering the aid.

Stapp said first aid and CPR programs are available through the American Heart Association, the Red Cross, fire departments, places that train lifeguards, local universities, and of course Stapp’s program, Michigan CPR, for which more information can be found at www.MichiganCPR.com

This article and video are scuba specific. My general story and video about the CPR and first aid training can be found at macombdaily.com with this link: www.macombdaily.com/articles/2011/11/12/news/doc4ebf350c20aae105287714.txt

Don Gardner can be reached at don.gardner@macombdaily.com

Police postpone retrieval of cannon from river

DETROIT (AP) — Police divers on Sept. 7 postponed retrieval of a possibly centuries-old cannon from the Detroit River after strong currents and murky water thwarted efforts to raise it to the surface.
The divers were assisted by the U.S. Coast Guard until the operation was shut down, Detroit police spokeswoman Eren Stephens said.
No new recovery date was announced.

This photo shot by Sgt. Ken Stiel and provided by the Detroit Police department shows a cannon believed to be more than 200 years old in the Detroit River. Divers planned on recovering the cannon on Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2011, before murky waters and a strong current forced a cancellation of the project. It's the fifth cannon found in the area in three decades.

Dive team members discovered the cannon about 200 feet from Cobo Center in downtown Detroit during a training session in July. It's the fifth cannon found in the area in three decades.
Once it's recovered, the Detroit Historical Society hopes to restore and preserve the cannon, which is more than 6 feet long and likely weighs about 1,200 pounds.
Three other cannons were recovered in the 1980s and a fourth was recovered by the department's dive team in 1994. Those are believed to be British and French. Detroit Historical Society Curator Joel Stone said the latest find will be studied to try to determine its age and where it came from.
"This is all kind of a detective thing," Stone said. "You get one piece of the puzzle, and then you get another piece of the puzzle."
The cannon could be one of several believed to have fallen into the river in 1796 when they were being transported by the British, Detroit police said. Cannons that have been found in the area, however, also may have gone down anytime up to the War of 1812, Stone said.
Sgt. Dean Rademaker, who took part in the dive when the last cannon was found in 1994, spotted what turned out to be the latest one in July. Department divers previously had been to that area of the river hundreds of times without finding it, Rademaker said.
"I thought to myself, 'You gotta be kidding me,'" he said of the discovery.

Divers more typically find cars and guns. In 2009 during a training session, they turned up a 6-foot, 300-pound bronze statue that had been missing for more than eight years from the Grosse Pointe War Memorial. The statue was returned to its suburban Detroit home.

Exploring the Eliza Strong shipwreck in Lake Huron

As promised, here is a short video of my weekend dive with Bruno's Dive Shop, located in Clinton Township, on the Eliza H. Strong. The Strong was  a barge that was carrying lumber when it caught fire and sunk on Oct. 25, 1904, about a mile from Lexington. She sits in about 20 feet of water and is home to many interesting treasures, including the old-fashioned square-headed nails and a sink that is still attached to the craft. In fact, during the video, you will see me "washing" my hands in the sink.
The video is courtesy of Michael Lynch, an instructor who runs his own Great Lakes diving site called michigandiver.com, and Bruno's Dive Shop.

Dives on the Strong and the Sport provide chance to watch father and son begin checkout dive process

Do to an unexpected change in my work schedule, I had been unable to do much diving this summer.

But I was able to get out recently and did a couple of wreck dives in Lake Huron near Port Sanilac and Lexington in Michigan’s thumb on the Great Lakes Diver, the dive boat owned by Bruno’s Dive Shop, which is located in Clinton Township.

I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen and Ryan Puckett, a father and son from Grosse Pointe Woods, who were doing there checkout dives for their open water certification.

Here is an interview I had with them before the dives, during their dive briefings with instructor Rick Davies from Brunos, and then after the dives.

Watching them deal with a combination of excitement and nerves while preparing for their first dive outside of the swimming pool brought me right back to when I was in their position so many years ago.

Am I ready? Can I do it? Will I remember everything from my training?

Since we were doing checkout dives, basically the final exam for new divers, both dives were relatively shallow. Our first dive was down to the Eliza H. Strong, a barge that was carrying lumber when it caught fire and sunk on Oct. 25, 1904, about a mile from Lexington. She sits in about 20 feet of water and is home to many interesting treasures, including the old-fashioned square-headed nails and a sink that is still attached to the craft.

Our second dive was aboard the Sport, a 57-foot tugboat that sunk in a storm off of Lexington on Dec. 13, 1920. She also has the rare distinction of having an underwater state historic site plaque, which was placed there in the early 1990s.

Thanks to some lousy weather, visibility was pretty poor for both dives, but for what I could tell, the Pucketts did fine.

It was great to get back in the water. It made me realize how much I miss it. I only hope I’ll have more chances to dive next year.

Soon, I will add some underwater video and photo stills of my two dives on the Strong and the Sport.

Explorers find 2 shipwrecks in northern Lake Huron

PRESQUE ISLE, Mich. (AP) — A team of underwater explorers has found two long-lost shipwrecks in northeastern Lake Huron.

Thunder Bay Marine Sanctuary on Wednesday announced the discovery of the schooner M.F. Merrick and the steel freighter Etruria in deep water off Presque Isle (PRESK' EEL').
They were detected during an expedition called "Project Shiphunt," which involved scientists and historians from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and five high school students from Saginaw.
Both ships sank after colliding with steamers in dense fog.
The 138-foot-long Merrick went down in 1889. Five crew members were killed. The intact hull was found resting upright on the lake bottom.
The Etruria, which was 414 feet long, sank in 1905 — just three years after it was launched.
A documentary about the expedition will be released Aug. 30.