had to drag it back to overlap this blind spot.) The OBSS could work as deep as 20,000 feet, but in Spain it generally operated with a cable about 3,000 feet long.
A problem immediately emerged: the OBSS often got snagged on the rugged seafloor contours.
When the OBSS sensed an undersea outcrop ahead, operators could winch it in or ask the minesweeper to speed up, either of which would raise the fish and hopefully spare it from harm. But both these tactics had a lag time, and by the time a minesweeper tried to raise the OBSS, it could be snagged, trapped, or lost. The Westinghouse technical representative in charge of the system decreed that operators could not tow the fish closer than 100 feet from the sea floor. Unfortunately, the device worked best at 20 to 30 feet off the bottom. The Navy eventually obtained three OBSS devices, so operators had some choices: they could tow low and accept a certain number of casualties, or they could tow higher and accept that the OBSS wasn’t going to work very well. Or they could attempt to fix a high-speed winch to the back of a minesweeper. They needed to figure out something, because the OBSS was the only deep water unmanned system the task force had.
The Washington group also sent Guest a handful of manned submersibles. The first to arrive was Deep Jeep, a two-man Navy sub that could dive to 2,000 feet but had dim underwater lights and insufficient power to fight the currents. After a few days, one of its electric motors failed.
Another sub, called Cubmarine, was twenty-two feet long, six feet high, and painted a bright banana yellow. It looked almost cartoonish, resembling the Beatles’ vessel in Yellow Submarine, but was reliable and maneuvered well. The little sub held two people and could stay underwater for up to eight hours. But it could dive to only 600 feet, putting the fisherman’s tantalizing search area out of its reach.
The Navy’s hope therefore rested on the only deep-diving submersibles cleared for classified work and immediately available: Alvin and Aluminaut. Both vehicles were odd ducks. “Alvin was decidedly mongrel,” wrote Victoria Kaharl in her book Water Baby, “a cross between aircraft, spacecraft and submarine.” With its white, bulbous body, it reminded people of a fishing lure, a pregnant guppy, a washing machine, or a bottle of Clorox bleach. “When people see it for the first time, they’re sort of let down,” said the longtime Alvin mechanic George Broderson. “They have this feeling it should be a long black sleek thing. Instead they see what looks like a big white toilet.” At Alvin’s core sat the personnel sphere, 6 feet, 10 inches in diameter, just big enough to squish three people inside and built of a new steel alloy that made the sphere thin and light enough to float on its own. The sphere rested in a metal frame that held batteries, ballast tanks, electric motors, and hydraulics. To make the contraption float, engineers designed a streamlined fiberglass hull and packed every nook and cranny with syntactic foam, a buoyant material made of microscopic glass bubbles embedded in an epoxy resin. Altogether, Alvin measured twenty-two feet long from nose to tail, its body only eight feet wide at the waist. Alvin’s batteries drove one big forty-eight-inch propeller on its tail and two fourteen-inch props on its back. The big prop could turn 50 degrees to either side, and the little ones could turn a full 360 degrees, allowing pilots to “fly” the sub like a helicopter. Alvin could glide along at about 2.5 knots or sprint at 6 knots in short bursts. She could stay underwater for ten hours, maybe twenty-four if the pilots conserved power, and swim down to 6,000 feet.
The only other sub in Spain that could dive that deep was Aluminaut, owned and operated by Reynolds Metal Company. (Company Vice President J. Louis Reynolds was a submarine buff and deep- ocean enthusiast.) Aluminaut was much bigger than Alvin, 50 feet, 11 inches long, and had greater endurance. Builders had assembled it from a series of huge aluminum doughnuts, shaped from the largest ingots of aluminum ever cast. Each massive doughnut stood eight feet tall; the builders had aligned them into a cylinder and bolted them together, capping each end with a bowl to create what looked like a giant aluminum Tylenol capsule. They had then painted the outside a bright orangey red. With three propellers the sub could cruise underwater at 3.8 knots, but its large size made it difficult to maneuver. If Alvin was a guppy, Aluminaut was a whale.
The sub could carry up to nine people, depending on the amount of gear they brought along. This is not to say that the sub was roomy. Rather, the inside felt like a subway car that had been shrunk to one-quarter scale and stacked high with luggage along the walls. The sub held two bunks that the crew usually pressed into service as work-tables. There was also a toilet, which the crew tried to use judiciously. With five to nine men in a cramped space for up to seventy-two hours with no fresh air, the sub already smelled like a sweaty locker room. No one wanted to add another smell to the already heavy air.
At the front end of the ship, a semicircular bench, padded and covered with green imitation leather, fit snugly to the inside of the hull. Sitting on the bench allowed one to see out of three of Aluminaut’s four viewports. The fourth viewport was under the bench, facing down toward the seafloor. If Aluminaut turned on its underwater lights, 1,500 candlepower of brightness would push into the gloom, allowing visibility of 100 feet.
Promotional artwork of the sub showed an otherworldly creature, armed with two grasping claws like a praying mantis, using high-powered lights to illuminate the ocean depths. Future applications for the new sub were enormous, according to press releases. It could cultivate undersea fish farms, dredge manganese modules from the seafloor, carry vacationers to underwater cities. “The Old Testament promises man ‘dominion over the sea,’” said one slick brochure. “The Aluminaut is the first step toward the realization of that prediction.”
Despite the heady propaganda, Aluminaut had limited prospects. During 1965, it completed diving trials and made demonstrations for scientists at the University of Miami and the Department of the Interior. Eventually it received a contract from the Navy Special Projects Office to test Doppler navigation equipment for submarine rescue. But with no other work on the horizon, the Aluminaut crew was eager to prove their worth, perhaps even more so than the Alvin group.
Despite his initial high hopes for Alvin and Aluminaut, Guest was quickly disillusioned. The admiral came from a different world than the submersibles. On his aircraft carriers, crack teams of young pilots flew the best equipment in the world. Guest expected both men and machines to perform at the top of their games. One can only imagine his thoughts when this odd-looking band of untested submersibles, bobbing in the waves like a pack of oversized bathtub toys, arrived off the coast of Spain. The subs were nothing like the high-performance jets streaking over Vietnam. They were delicate and temperamental. Even worse, each sub came with a ragtag crew of civilian operators and — in the case of Alvin — research scientists. Though many of the submersibles’ crew members had served in the military, they had left that spit-and-polish world behind them. And the scientists had no use whatsoever for barking authority figures. Earl Hays wrote that Guest was “no great shakes.” The feeling was mutual.
When the subs finally arrived, Guest planned to have them investigate promising sonar contacts, but their limited navigation made that impossible, at least at first. Alvin used a crude and rather unreliable method to navigate, sending pings and voice messages to a surface ship via underwater telephone. On a good day, the system could direct Alvin to within 400 yards of a desired point.
When Alvin first arrived on scene, however, not even that primitive system was operating. The sub’s underwater telephone worked erratically. Even worse, none of the surface ships on the scene could vector Alvin (or Aluminaut) below 2,000 feet. This situation would improve once the scientific support ship USNS Mizar arrived, housing gear that could navigate the submersibles with more accuracy. But all Guest knew at this stage of the game was that Alvin was basically blind. In addition, Alvin’s mechanical arm had not yet arrived. Even if the sub somehow stumbled upon the missing bomb, she would have no way to attach a line, a transponder, or anything else.
In short, Admiral Guest had no idea what to do with the subs. At one point, he suggested they drop a large concrete clump in the center of the search area, tether Alvin to the clump with nylon line, and let the sub swim around in circles like a dog chained to a tree. The plan would have left Alvin hopelessly tangled, but Guest didn’t understand the subs or the deep sea. “What did he ever have to do with deep-ocean technology? Almost nothing,” said John Craven of the Technical Advisory Group in Washington. “He expects another unit of the Navy to come in with bright, shining uniforms.” Guest got nothing of the sort. “He
