The Helldivers' Rodeo: A Deadly, X-Treme, Scuba-Diving, Spearfishing, Adventure Amid the Off Shore Oil Platforms in the Murky Waters of the Gulf of Mexico Read online

  HUMBERTO FONTOVA

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7

  INTRODUCTION 9

  I DOWN AND TANGLED 17

  2. HEADING OUT 34

  3. SHARKBAIT 55

  4. THE DOG AND PONY SHOW 80

  5. TO THE BOTTOM 97

  6. HAULIN' 'EM UP 113

  7. BRETON ISLAND INTERLUDE 124

  8. CHUNKS OF FLESH 147

  9. BRETON ISLAND BLAST 162

  10. INTO THE BLUE 186

  Without my wife this book would not have happened. This book is dedicated to her. The feeding, maintenance, and disciplining of three teenagers (who skew father-ward in temperament) was a gruesome ordeal with the "head" of the family constantly holed up in his office seeking inspiration. That was bad enough. I also relied heavily on Shirley's (full-time) accountant's mind for the technical details so crucial to a book that deals with scuba diving to immense depths, computers and assorted gadgets, and when trying to remember the words to "Disco Inferno". Somehow we made it. And not just through this book. The contract for this book was signed on our twentieth anniversary. Maybe that means something. You'll have to ask her, she's better at finding the hidden significance in such things.

  Hearty kudos to my editor, Marc Bailer, who somehow assembled the jigsaw puzzle that became this book.

  Special thanks also to the guys who shared their rig-diving stories. Book or no book, sharing lunch or beers with this crew was a kick, a good antidote to listening to the whiny males on Seinfeld or Friends-Terry "Poppa Smurf" Migaud especially. "Mr. Helldiver" himself, he opened his house, his mind, his closets, his records-everything to me.

  The roll call also includes Terry's fellow Helldivers, Stan "The Man" Smith and Louis Rossignol, Sea Tigers Darren Bourgeois and father Gerry, their long-time dive mates, Val Rudolfich, Mitch Cancienne, and Allen "King Spear Fisherman" Walker.

  Bob Larche and Randy Evans merit special thanks for opening up about dive incidents not exactly pleasant to recall-the loss of buddies. Charlie Romano added a little Sicilian spice.

  From over in Baton Rouge, Clay Coleman, Max Smiley, Bobby Geanelloni, Terry Brousseau, Nancy Cohagen, Mary Beth Isaacs all helped immensely. Frank "The Knife" Olah, kept me in stitches with his stories.

  The history of this sport came not from some musty newspaper clippings but from the musty mind of Johnny Bonck. Musty? I jest of course. May we all be as lucid, spry and downright exuberant as septuagenarians.

  Again, a lot of people contributed to this thing. But it would have come to naught without a supportive family.

  The area off the coast of Cojimar, just east of Havana, is known by some for the best marlin fishing on Earth. About five miles from shore, the bottom of the ocean drops to 3,000 feet. Geologists call this the "continental slope." Among its admirers was "Papa" Ernest Hemingway. Here he made his longest residence, at Finca Vigia, fishing daily. Here his "Old Man" fought his epic battle with the monster marlin. And here, right off the beach in 1961, my cousin Pelayo and I prowled the shallow reefs with goggles and straightened coat hangers, impaling fish.

  The coat hangers were flattened and sharpened on one end. The other end went through a hole drilled through a six-inch section of broomstick, which had a sliver of old inner tube looped and nailed to the back; bow and arrow style. You held the broomstick section with one hand, gripped the coat hanger and inner tube with the other, pulled back ... aimed, and-FLINK!

  All the while, stern milicianos stood watch on the sand, glaring and fingering their Czech machine guns, like any teenaged boys with their first guns, actually. They had orders to shoot any boat that entered the water. Already people were going "fishing" and turning up in Key West.

  We were seven at the time. We'd have loved a marlin but settled for yellow grunts (ronquitos), ten-inches long, twirling in a flurry of sand on the coat hanger. Then we carried them tri umphantly to our parents on the beach. That night Tata, my nanny, fried them up whole, Cuban style, the skin salty, garlicky, limey, and crispy. The meat underneath: white, juicy, and flavorful. The head: on.

  Tata looked nothing like Mami in Gone With The Wind. She looked more like Condaleeza Rice or Whitney Houston-a young elegant mulatress. She would put out stale bread in the backyard for the pigeons and sparrows every afternoon, then watch them from the back window. Pelayo and I knew the routine. So we'd sneak through the banana trees with our Daisy BB guns, get in range, and pop them (the BB's bounced off their wings). Tata hated that. She'd fuss at us every time. "Malditos!" (roughly, "punks!") she'd screech, chasing us with a switch.

  This was 1961, early in the Revolution. Stale bread was still expendable. Later it became a delicacy, along with sparrows and pigeons. Also, the Reds hadn't gotten around to confiscating BB guns just yet. In due time.

  Those Czech machine guns were all over 1961 Cuba. Pelayo and I saw them again up close two months later, when they came for his father. We were in his backyard with our BB guns, annoying the pigeons, but safe from Tata, who was deep into her siesta that day.

  Some milicianos came from behind a wall, scowling as always, but nervous, jerky. The pigeons scattered and the Reds looked over-"Ah!" their faces brightened. "Munchkin counter-revolutionaries!" And they threw up the checkas and slammed the bolts, the little holes at the end of the barrels pointed straight at us.

  We froze. It's been almost forty years but I still remember those little holes. Then-"ahhh!" Their faces softened-slightly. "Just BB guns." One came over and yanked our prized Daisys (we'd just gotten them for Christmas) from our trembling hands. "Para la Revolucion!" he exclaimed as they made for the house's back entrance. Other milicianos had come around the front.

  That was a famous phrase back then. Every time the Reds stole something, confiscated something, every time they abolished another right, it was: "Para la Revolucion!"

  Pelayo's father looked doomed. An official of the ancien regime--a military rnan, in fact. As colonel in the Cuban navy he'd been naval attache in Washington during World War II. Didn't look good. He looked paredon (the wall opposite the firing squad) bound, if anyone did. Everyone had advised him to flee north. But he refused. "I have nothing to be ashamed of," he countered. "I've done nothing wrong! And this is our homeland, carajo!" As if that mattered to the communists.

  Well, they finally came for him. Now, we assumed there would be a show trial, a volley at the wall, and a hidden grave. It was happening all over Cuba.

  Tata saved his life. Yes, she went to the prison herself. "This man is a santo!" she shouted at the Reds. "Muv lronrado! He's never mistreated me or any others." Here was a humble mullatress speaking, the kind of person the Revolution was supposedly all about. "Why him? You are a bunch of sin-verguenzas [shameless ones, scoundrels]! Release him!"

  Amazingly, it worked. He was released to exile-for him, still an agonizing punishment.

  Hell, those milicianos took our BB guns home for their kids. And that raid was odd, actually. They usually came at dawn.

  I saw the checkas up close again a month later, the very day we left Cuba. Four were pointing at my dad on the very tarmac of the airport. We'd been walking to the plane that would take us to the United States and freedom. At last! Out of that hellhole!

  "Senor Fontova!" What the? He looked around. We all looked around. "Senor Fontova-gusano!" ("worm", what the Reds called their opponents). Four milicianos, scowling, bearded, armed, grabbed Dad from each side by
the arms. They'd gotten a full-grown counter=revolutionary this time.

  "Go ahead," he told my mom, who found herself in the whiteknuckle clutches of six little hands; my brother, my sister, and me. "Whatever happens to me, I don't want ya'll growing up here."

  Tears, hysteria ... but we left. Next day, from a cousin's house in Miami, Mom called Cuba and fainted while on the phone, fell on the floor. People rushed over. My aunt grabbed the phone. "Avy, NO!" she shrieked. Dad was in La Cabana.

  Yes, La Cabana, firing-squad central. They went off every dawn. The gallant Che Guevara took over the old Spanish fortress in 1959, crammed its dungeons with "counter-revolutionaries" jerked from their homes in dawn raids, and started signing death warrants-three hundred a week-for two years. The men (and boys) were yanked from their cells every dawn, bound and blindfolded ...

  ... "Fuego!" and the bodies collapsed against the blood-spattered paredon. A soldier walks over with a pistol for the coup de grace--pow! This one's still twitching over here-POW! Families shrieking and wailing outside the walls of the fortress to no avail, the bodies were bulldozed into mass, unmarked graves. No, folks, this wasn't Eastern Europe sixty years ago. This was the fate of 21,000 men (and boys) ninety miles off our coast, with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, with Ozzie Nelson and Beaver Cleaver on our TVs, and with the New York Times rhapsodizing about the Cuban Revolution.

  Armando Valladares listened from his cell. In Against All Hope, he wrote that the cries of "long live Christ the King!" and "Viva Cuba libre!" would make the pits of that centennial fortress tremble, right before the shots rang out.

  Che was hell on smiting his enemies, all right. But only when these enemies were bound, gagged, and blindfolded. His academic groupies and Beltway press agents beat the drum about some valiant guerilla fighter, but any actual battles in his "war" against Batista escapes the memory of those who lived in Cuba, especially those who supposedly fought against him. When he finally did find himself in bona-fide battles, finally up against men who could shoot back in the Congo and Bolivia (Cuban exiles working for the CIA, as it turned out), Che was outfoxed, outfought, routed, and got a taste of his own medicine.

  "Don't shoot!" yelled the gallant Che, when they finally cornered him in Bolivia. "I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!"

  Dad had heard the "Viva Cuba libre", too, from his very cellmates. He says that some of them even gave the "fuego" order themselves. He'd been in La Cabana for three months after his aiport arrest. Then he caught up with us here in New Orleans. They released him-don't ask us (or him) why.

  That was thirty years ago. Now Pelayo and I find ourselves a few hundred miles north of Cuba and speaking a different language. We're brushing that "continental slope" again, diving again, spearing fish again. We arrived a gaggle of penniless and terrified Cuban refugees-didn't even speak the language. But our terror was short-lived. Louisiana has always embraced immigrants and even visitors. She greets them joyfully at the gangplank or tarmac like a lost grandmother, beaming and waving frantically. She rushes out, lifts and twirls them. She mashes them into her ample bosom and riddles their head and face with kisses, her stubbled chin poking them and her garlicky breath suffocating them. But no matter, she makes her point: "Welcome! You're family now!"

  If you are American, maybe some corporation transfers you or your partner down from the East Coast or Midwest. You get here with your fly rods, your goofy hats and vests, your dinky little creels, your granola bars and mineral water in cute little squirtbottles. You arrive with trim bodies, clean minds, restrained appetites, dormant libidos, and a canoe on neat little racks atop a shiny SUV with a PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS bumper-sticker. You always ask me where you can go "canoeing"-whatever that means.

  Six months later an outboard flecked with dried shrimp-heads and fish scales juts out of your garage. Empty beercans rattle in your SUV Empty wine bottles cram your garbage cans. Those Jimmy Carter smiles have vanished, replaced by the lecherous smirks of Groucho Marx or Mae West. High fiber and fitness have given way to hot fudge and fun. No more grim faces and drudgery at the health club. Now it's radiant faces and revelry at the carnival club. Your conversation, once curt, to the point, and meant to convey actual facts or uplifting advice has become a free-wheeling and spicy ramble, wonderfully free of sanctimony and utterly devoid of facts. Its purpose is now the proper one: to provide a backbeat and exercise the jaw muscles between gulps of beer, sips of wine, the sucking of heads or the slurping of gumbo.

  An old Cajun who ran a roadside seafood and poultry dispensary near Galliano put it a little more bluntly one day. We'd pulled over to buy some shrimp after a dive trip and were shootin' the shit with him. "Lemme told you why," he said, point ing a gnarled finger at my cousin Pelayo. "If you can't eat 'em or fuck 'em, they're worthless."

  We'd asked him why he'd gotten rid of some peacocks that had been parading around in front of his stand.

  Same as the area off the coast of the Cojimar river, the mouth of the Mississippi River lies near the very edge of the continental shelf. Here, northward-flowing Caribbean currents clash with westward-flowing Gulf currents and the southward flow of the Mississippi itself. Gulf water meets river water here. Even without the river nutrients such an undersea precipice and vortex of clashing currents would pack in schools of big pelagics.

  Maps show how Louisiana juts out into the Gulf below the coasts of Texas and Mississippi. A little sliver of a peninsula bordering the river below New Orleans juts out even further. That was the river's doing-at least until the levees shackled it. For ten thousand years this "father of all waters," as the Indians called it, whipped back and forth across the landscape like a huge (but somewhat lethargic) water wiggle, depositing its fertile cargo of sediment. Most of Louisiana below Interstate 12 thus sprouted in the open gulf. In geological terms something "sprouts" in ten thousand years.

  That's why we're so close to the continental shelf yet only twelve miles offshore. We trailer the boat halfway to it, on a four-lane highway. Those one hundred miles of road south of New Orleans would be a hundred miles of open water off the Texas, Mississippi, or Florida coasts. The river robs Peter to pay Paul in a sense. Iowa's loss is our gain-until the levees went up, that is.

  Clamped down by the levees, running fast, the river now dumps Iowa's loss into the deep Gulf. The silt doesn't spread out and build land nowadays. It's channeled through the constantlydredged river passes into the deep open water, eventually building huge mud cliffs that keep toppling over-massive undersea mudslides, avalanches of sunken silt that keep lurching towards the shelf. Too bad you can't see down there. Geologists tell me it probably looks like southern Utah; deep brown gorges, towering cliffs, plunging buttes-the whole "Badlands" bit.

  It's a weird place. Mud on the bottom and mud on the top. But in between, cobalt blue Gulf water, just like Belize. And you talk about fish. In this respect it's nothing like Belize, or Cayman, or Cozumel. Mud is much better for growing things than sand, ask any farmer. Well, it's the same in the sea.

  This nutrient-rich, organic crud jumpstarts the food chain. It starts at the bottom of the chain with phytoplankton, "the base of the sun-driven food web" according to marine biologists. The little buggers swarm in these waters. The book The Oceans shows an infrared photo of the world's oceans, showing the relative densities of phytoplankton by color. Yellow and orange denote the areas richest in this microscopic fish-chow. And damned if the waters off the Louisiana coast don't beam like a bonfire on that map. That phytoplankton blooms at the base, then everything on top moves in for the feast-all the way up to the "apex predators:" the sharks, tuna, amberjack, cobia ... or in this case, us.

  Add the adjacent estuaries-a huge marine incubator and nursery that comprises 40 percent of America's coastal wetlands-throw in deep water and a vortex of clashing currents, drop in thousands of massive steel reefs-any one of these ingredients produce abundant fisheries. Combine them and you get marine habitat unparalleled on the globe.

  "I'
d never seen anything like it." That's dive instructor Brad Barouse of Seven Seas Dive Shop in Baton Rouge. And he's in a good position to judge. "I traveled around the world while in the Navy, diving everyplace we stopped: the Red Sea, Truk Lagoon, Indonesia, Micronesia, all over the Caribbean ... and I'll tell ya, there's no place that'll even approach the numbers and size of fish around these oil platforms."

  Indeed. That's why we go out there. But there's that murk ... the Mississippi drains 40 percent of the United States, and it seems like every grain of the fertile cargo that took the voyage swirls through the waters around us when we jerk against the rig hook at Main Pass 191.

  In 1952, a National Marine Fisheries Service trawler, seeking to promote U.S. commercial fisheries, dropped a small test longline in this area off the mouth of the Mississippi. They started cranking it up and immediately realized the ship's hold would never suffice for the number of huge tuna, billfish, and sharks that jerked around on the other end. Word got out, quick.

  Trawlers and longliners from Taiwan and Japan started fishing these waters thirty years ago. The Jap longlines were held afloat by big glass orbs that local big-game fishermen took only as irresistible targets. We'd always pack pistols or shotguns on fishing trips to this area anyway. Sharks swarm in these waters and often hit the bait before a tuna, wahoo, or marlin. One blast with a .38 slug through the head has a wonderful calming effect on these brutes. Twelve-gauge buckshot pellets work even better. But these weapons served poorly for long-range shots at longline floats.

  Soon we were packing the scoped hunting rifles on every offshore fishing trip. The floats bob in the waves and the shooter rocks on the deck or bridge, even with a rest on the railing. So it was keen sport to shatter one from anything over 100 yards ... Did I say shatter? More like explode. A 150-grain soft-point traveling at 2,500 feet per second makes an exhilarating impact when it smacks thick glass on the water. Wagers were often placed and whoops erupted as the "pe-TAAOWW!" echoed over the waves and the floats were blown to smithereens, one after the other in fine sequence. Like I said: it was irresistible, especially on a slow fishing day and midway through the gin.