I recently met my longtime friend again, the diving pioneer and living legend Spence Campbell, at Tom Hemphill’s NORTHWEST DIVING HISTORY ASSOCIATION meeting on April 12, 2022, at Tom’s well-furnished, neighborhood association Clubhouse. I hadn’t seen Spence for a few years and took the opportunity to sit down next to him at the meeting in order to acquire more knowledge, history and words of wisdom about the magnificent and unusual activity we call underwater diving.
Written by Tory van Dyke for the NORTHWEST DIVING HISTORY ASSOCIATION, as recollected to him by Spence Campbell. www.divinghistory.org © 2022. All Rights Reserved.
Tom and Linda Hemphill hosted our pleasant and well-attended Spring meeting of the Diving History Association. At one of the break times, Spence related to me of his “Break-in” dive in the Deep-Sea Diving Industry at the Buffalo Bill Hydroelectric Dam on the Shoshone River west of Cody, Wyoming. He said he made a dive in the U. S. Navy MK 5 Deep Sea Diving outfit to a depth of 230 feet to perform a simple fastener installation job, securing a large steel fixture to the inside face of the dam. No lights, no visibility, total black water and out of this world Nitrogen Narcosis, breathing compressed air for more than 30 minutes of bottom time. It was a very brief discussion and I knew I had to learn more about this amazing dive that Spence had made in 1960.
I got Spence’s phone number from Tom Hemphill, via an email he sent to Spence, explaining my intention to write a more detailed article of the impossible dive for the Association website at www.divinghistory.org . I thought the Association membership might enjoy reading about Spence and his Mission: Impossible break-in dive job in deep, black water behind the Big Buffalo Bill Dam.
Several phone calls and many answered questions later, I began to get the visual big picture of the numerous details involved in the deep dive and about Spence’s early career in the Deep-Sea Hard Hat diving construction industry. Spence told me that he had detailed many of his career highlights from the Hard Hat Diving Industry in his first book he wrote some years earlier entitled: LEWIS & CLARK and ME, now out of print. I had read his second book entitled: AFTER THE SWIM, which detailed his many expeditions and diving adventures on the famous COBB SEAMOUNT, some 285 miles off the west coast of Washington State, in the mighty, big, blue Pacific Ocean. I missed his first book and look forward to obtaining a copy from the used book market to read it soon.
Spence began SCUBA diving in the local lakes around Spokane, Washington, during his High School days. He also joined the local scouting group and worked his way up to Explorer Scout level, with extra emphasis on aviation and the airplane industry, for which Spence had a lifelong keen interest in and a love for flying.
Spence joined the U.S. Air Force in 1954, right after his High School graduation. He spent the next 5 1/2 years on active duty in the service and became part of the early Para-Rescue Special Forces Branch of the Air Force, using SCUBA for pilot rescue and recovery water operations.
Upon his Honorable Discharge from the Air Force in January of 1959, Spence moved down to Oakland, California, to attend the Coastal School of Deep-Sea Diving. He graduated from the school and returned to Spokane, Washington, where he answered a newspaper ‘Want Ad’ for a Deep-Sea Diver position with the Bill Harris Diving Company in Spokane.
Bill Harris hired Spence to work as a topside diver tender and recompression chamber operator. Spence had not made any working dives in the Hard Hat Diving Industry, having just completed dive school. He did receive extended instruction and hands-on experience in chamber operations both at the Oakland Diving School, and also in Alameda, California, at the Submarine Physiology Laboratory, one of the nation’s premier research facilities in human submarine physiology.
Later in his career, from 1968 to 1971, Spence worked to develop the very extensive Virginia Mason Hospital Hyperbaric Research Laboratory and Recompression Chamber Treatment Facility in Seattle, Washington. Spence authored more than 20 technical papers in the field of Submarine Physiology Research, with emphasis on the now famous Doppler silent nitrogen bubble detection system for early indications of potential decompression sickness symptoms and treatments related to underwater divers.
When Spence told me about his extra deep dive in MK 5 to 230 feet behind the Buffalo Bill Dam, I had to learn more details. Being a former U.S. Navy Deep Sea Diver and fully accustomed to diving in the MK 5, I knew firsthand how difficult the Hard Hat Diving Apparatus was to work in underwater. The extraordinary, extreme exposure, high altitude depth of this dive Spence had made sounded beyond the pale to me.
Spence explained to me that the construction job on the Dam had been an ongoing project for about eight months. At the beginning of the project, the water behind the Dam in the huge reservoir was 50 feet deep. The Dam had been completely shut off and sealed for the entire length of the construction project. Now, some eight months later, the ever-flowing Shoshone River had raised the reservoir level to 230 feet deep right behind the Dam.
Extreme depth exposure, high altitude diving on compressed air is absolutely reserved to the realm of emergency exigent circumstances because of the super catastrophic risk of Decompression Sickness and the debilitating effects of Nitrogen Narcosis on deep working divers. Deep diving to 230 feet, while breathing compressed air, is so dangerous, that most divers cannot tolerate the conditions and dare not to risk the exposure for the fear of loss of life. Spence was called upon to make this dive as his first working dive in the Diving Industry, dressed in the MK 5 Hard Hat rig. Add in the factors of high-altitude exposure, with over 5000 feet elevation, and the zero visibility black water conditions, and you end up with the Mission: Impossible dive.
Spence had the youthful energy and enthusiasm of a new Deep-Sea Diving School graduate. He saw this as his opportunity to make a mark in the challenging field of the Underwater Diving Industry. His inexperience and naivety were not enough to dissuade him from making the Herculean effort, helping out Bill Harris, and ultimately completing the eight-month long contract for his boss. It was hero time, and Spence summoned all his courage to make it happen.
His mission was to descend 230 feet down the descending line to the bottom of the reservoir, find the large steel plate fixture mounted on six 10-inch-long stud bolt shafts, install six flat plate washers and retaining nuts, one set to each 2 ¾-inch stud shaft, and tighten them down. No problema! Under general circumstances, with minimal depth and some degree of underwater visibility, it was a very doable task. In the conditions Spence faced underwater, it was Mission: Impossible.
Underwater diving construction work is extremely challenging under the best of circumstances. The huge wild card to contend with on underwater work is the constantly changing underwater and topside environmental conditions that working divers must face daily on their mission to succeed. The extreme depth, the zero visibility, the muddy river water surface and bottom debris accumulation of eight months of river water stoppage, and the fact that Spence’s mental discernment and judgment would be violently impaired, making this task one of gigantic obstacles and monumental proportions. Underwater working divers live by the creed: adapt, improvise, innovate and overcome. It is not an activity for the faint of heart and the weak of courage, possessing limited intestinal fortitude. It was very lucky and fortunate for Spence Campbell, the brawny Scotsman, that he was a natural-born Water Gorilla!
Underwater lighting is invaluable for the working diver trying to accomplish his task in limited visibility conditions. In this case, no lights were available, and according to Spence, the river water was so fouled and muddy, that light penetration would be impossible in the thick and muddy mire. And still, that ever-present glow emitting from his diving light in the totality of darkness can bring the diver some form of peaceful solace and comfort deep within the forbidden realm of the foreboding ice water mansion.
The psychological strain of this form of working diving is almost beyond the range of verbal description. That is why I had to learn the details of Spence’s amazing achievement when I heard him tell me about the dive. The man that can tolerate this form of mental strain in the underwater world is less than one in ten million. Spence was the man for the job, and miraculously he got the job done!
Not only was this dive the first dive Spence had ever made in the diving industry, he was the only diver present that day. The other divers had been dismissed for multiple bends injuries. Spence was not even afforded the traditional standby diver safety feature of most industrial diving jobs. How can you standby to dive 230 feet deep into total blackness, when your likelihood of surviving the experience was very slim at best? It was all crazy, and that is why Bill Harris needed a crazy Scotsman diver in the form of Spence Campbell. In this case, crazy worked and crazy was the answer!
Spence was suited up by his two diver tenders in the MK 5 Deep Sea diving contraption. An antiquated, 194 pounds of brass, leather and lead, wrapped over a heavy canvas-rubber diver’s underwater dress suit, and topped off with and encased in a large bubble helmet and breastplate, complete with 25-pound each lead-soled diving boots. Now go to work boy, and hurry every chance you get because the clock is running and your bottom time accumulates very fast.
Spence jumped over the side into a river surface filled with floating wood debris. He grabbed ahold of the descending line, checked his tool bag loaded with the necessary nuts, washers and wrenches to get the job done, and began his long and laborious descent into the pits of sub-aquatic hell. He pushed his upper lip down on the face plate brass flange shelf inside the hard hat helmet and compressed it downward to cover his nostrils and perform the Valsalva maneuver of pressure equalization in his ears, blowing out hard through his covered nostrils and creating the necessary back pressure to pop his ears every ten feet of the descent. Are you having fun yet! Diving the MK 5 is always pure fun, especially if you are crazy. Crazy really helps working divers. “If we weren’t crazy, we’d all go insane!”
Spence recalled the long descent on the almost never-ending descending line to the river bottom. He said that once he passed the 170-foot depth mark, everything was wonderful. The Nitrogen Narcosis had set in on him and he was feeling no pain, kinda like the patient in the dental chair under the influence of Nitrous Oxide. “Drill to your heart’s content, Doc, ‘cause I’m feeling no pain!” You try three dry Martinis on an empty stomach and see how you feel, and he had one more Martini to go to get to 230 feet. Now that you’re drunk out of your mind, totally incoherent and blottoed, go to work diver!
Spence finally reached the bottom matrix of underwater terrafirma and began the process of playing blind man’s bluff, groping and feeling his way around to find the 10-inch-long protruding, threaded stud shafts on the vertical steel fixture that he had to fit the flat plate washers over and thread the large nuts onto for installation, six total for the job.
His Narcosis factor was so developed, that he had more than a little difficulty in determining which way to thread the nuts onto the threaded stud bolt shafts. Clockwise to tighten under 230 feet of total darkness black water isn’t easy. He resorted to using one hand at the backside of the nut to ascertain if he was threading the nut in the proper direction. If the nut moved against his hand on the shaft, then he was tightening in the right direction. It sounds crazy, but the reality of deep-water diving breathing compressed air and not the Narcosis-preventing Helium-Oxygen gas mixture is that your mental faculties will be dramatically impaired.
Some divers tend to downplay the adverse effects of Nitrogen Narcosis, but Spence freely admits that he was totally ‘Narked’ on this deep-water pilgrimage plunge into total darkness.
I remember making Narcosis runs in the hyperbaric recompression chambers onboard the salvage ships I was assigned to in the U.S. Navy. The chambers were 54-inch diameter twin-lock chambers, which allowed room for six men cramped into the inner lock of the chambers for the quick descend run to 190 feet salt water depth equivalent in 30 seconds. The faster the descent time, the more bottom time afforded for Nitrogen Narcosis familiarization.
At that depth, the air is thick and dense, making everyone’s voice sound much higher and lighter, as in the “Hair-Lip” type joke fashion. Telling jokes at the quick dive time of five minutes was never a problem and the entire group of men was always in jovial spirits, thanks to the Nitrogen Narcosis. You can get accustomed to the influence of the Nitrogen intoxication, but it takes tremendous mental concentration, determination and tenacity to overcome the effects and stay on task to complete your underwater work.
Spence endeavored to persevere, and finally completed his work some 35 minutes later. The extreme exposure decompression from this dive required several in-water decompression stops before regaining the surface. A fast undress of the helmet, diving weight belt and diver’s weighted boots in three and a half minutes and back to the first stop-depth in the chamber for surface decompression required coordinated diver tenders and a savvy recompression chamber operator. After completing this heroic dive job, Spence was not interested in developing a case of the bends from omitted decompression.
The Surface Decompression Tables were newly acquired from the U.S. Navy and afforded working divers the tremendous benefit of decompressing onboard, out of the water, inside the vessel’s recompression chamber, as opposed to doing all of your tedious decompression in the water, where the constant threat of dreaded hypothermia and other potential marine hazards were always present. The Bill Harris Diving Company was one of the first to incorporate the Surface Decompression Tables in the private sector.
Spence was happy to soak out inside the chamber and allow his body time to release the accumulated nitrogen from his super-pressurized body tissues, compressed deep by the extreme depth exposure.
The U.S. Navy Diving Manual Diving Tables for Compressed Air Diving specifically called for the decompression schedule of 156:50 Total ascent time (min:sec) for a dive to 230 feet for 40 minutes.
The deepest surface decompression tables profile I could locate in the SEPTEMBER 1973 U.S. Navy Diving Manual outlined a decompression schedule for a 190-foot air dive for 60 minutes bottom time, utilizing the SURFACE DECOMPRESSION TABLE USING AIR, with time at water stops on ascent 50’-10min; 40’-17min; 30’-19min; 20’-50min; TOTAL TIME FROM LAST WATER STOP TO FIRST CHAMBER STOP NOT TO EXCEED FIVE MINUTES; Chamber Stops 20’-50min; 10’-84min; Total ascent time(min:sec) 237:20.
Clearly, Spence had definitely acquired a very lengthy decompression requirement for his heroic 230-foot-deep dive in total darkness for 40 minutes.
I wonder how much money Spence got paid for that dive? Whatever old Bill Harris had to pay out to Spence for his risking life and limb for the construction project cause, it was not enough. Bill quickly realized that he had found an extraordinary diver in Spence Campbell, who made his break-in dive in the Deep-Sea Diving industry a superlative and completed Mission: Impossible dive.
However, Spence’s break-in dive into the Deep-Sea Diving Industry was by far his deepest dive and most dangerous dive. Every other dive Spence made in his Hard Hat Diving Career from that point forward would be all downhill and surplus in comparison to the Mission: Impossible Deep Dive! Well done, Spence, and you are indeed one crazy Scotsman.
Written by Tory van Dyke for the NORTHWEST DIVING HISTORY ASSOCIATION, as recollected to him by Spence Campbell. www.divinghistory.org © 2022. All Rights Reserved.
Caveat Lector: Working divers must avoid the pitfalls of puffed arrogance and the boastful pride of life, which may result from their successful achievements in the dangerous realm of underwater diving work. Almighty God grants to each man according to his deeds. In all you find to do, do it with all your might and do it to the best of your ability, while always giving God the glory for it, because apart from Him we are as nothing. Never let too much, “CAN DO!” do you in. Remember first and always your Creator. To Him be the dominion and the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen, for the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think on these things.”