The Grey NATO – 285 – A Chat With Richie Kohler: Diving Legend, Shipwreck Explorer, Historian, and Author
Published on Thu, 23 May 2024 06:00:00 -0400
Synopsis
The hosts James and Jason discuss their plans for the upcoming Wind Up Chicago event, as well as Jason's recent experience driving a vintage Citroen 2CV. They then interview legendary wreck diver Richie Kohler, who recounts his early days of diving and the pivotal experience that sparked his fascination with shipwrecks. Kohler shares stories about his famous explorations of wrecks like the Andrea Doria, U-869 submarine (covered in his book Shadow Divers), and the HMAS Britannic. He discusses the ethics of recovering artifacts, developing new diving techniques, and the watches he has worn over his decades of wreck diving. The interview provides a captivating look into Kohler's obsession with unlocking the mysteries of historic wrecks.
Links
Transcript
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| James Stacy | Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Graynado. It's a loose discussion of travel, adventure, diving, driving gear, and most certainly watches. This is episode 285, and it's proudly brought to you by the always growing TGN supporter crew. We thank you all so much for your continued support. And if you'd like to support the show, please visit thegraynado.com for more details. My name is James Stacy. I'm joined as ever by my friend and co-host Jason Heaton. Jason, we got quite an episode today. Anyone who's listening has seen the title, so it's not going to be a surprise. We've got a real OG on. |
| Jason Heaton | Seriously. I mean, this, this feels like we've, I don't know about come full circle. I'm not sure if that's the right terminology, but it does feel like we've, we've reached a certain peak in our kind of long TGN history now. And I'm super excited about it. I just feel like, I don't know. It's like, uh, you know, summer's coming, gardens blooming. We've got, you went to the cottage. We've just got like, it feels like things are bubbling up now. I feel like we've, we've kind of come out of, we're like blooming as well. And this episode is, is definitely a sign of that. Really exciting. |
| James Stacy | Man, Richie Kohler, crazy, super excited about this, have been pumped for it since you kind of set this up with Richie. And normally we record what we call the bumpers, the front and end of, of the episode that you chat in the final notes. Normally you record that after we chat with a guest. Yeah. but this morning we're chatting, we're doing that first. So this is actually just like legitimate excitement. I've not spoken to, like we've not done the phone call. Right. I'm so, I'm so excited. It's going to be one of those ones where like I had to go over your notes for the talk several times because it would just be super easy for me to ramble and ask really dumb questions and just get too excited. Like a, you know, a kid meeting, meeting a, you know, like a celebrity or something. Right. It's great. So I'm, I'm super pumped for that. Stay tuned, obviously. |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| James Stacy | I guess the other thing that we've been talking about starting with last week's episode is there's a slight change to the wind up plan for wind up Chicago. So we will certainly still be there, but the dive trip is happening Saturday afternoon evening, so we won't be doing the beer hangout we did last year. We're actually gonna do a breakfast hangout on Sunday morning that is also going to include a private preview of the show. So you'll actually get to walk around with just other TGN folks and not the whole crowd on a busy day in Chicago. Yeah. So that's the current plan. We're gonna shore up times and RSVPs and the Saturday plan and the rest of it. We'll get all the details together, but just to keep in mind, if you were planning to coming just for Saturday or if you're planning to leave fairly early on Sunday, maybe if you can, shift that back a bit, because we'll be doing something morning. I think the show starts at 11, 11 or 12. And we'll probably start a couple hours before that and get a chance to do a little bit of a hangout with Citizen, have some breakfast, see the show. And then if you're parting ways midday, early afternoon, you'll be okay. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah, we'll probably be... You'll be tired of us talking about this for the next couple of months before the show. But we just do want to make sure that everybody's aware of our slightly tweaked plans here. And yeah, exciting. It'll be here before we know it. I mean, it's less than two months now. |
| James Stacy | Exactly. Yeah. We're getting later, later into May here, which is a, which is great. It's starting to get nice and warm. I had a lovely weekend up at the cottage, uh, just hanging out. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. It looked like a calm day. The lake looked like glass. |
| James Stacy | Yeah, no, it was, it was really beautiful. It was warm and, uh, and sunny. The mornings were kind of cool with some smoke, like some fog on the water, which I always really like, but it was burning off early and, and, you know, got up there and cut a bunch of grass. It was great. Good weekend. |
| Jason Heaton | How about you? Yeah, we, uh, we took advantage of, of good weather here as well. Uh, we, we, uh, went in with a neighbor and borrowed a small trailer and hauled several cubic yards of soil for raised garden beds and a lot of mulch. And we, we kind of, kind of banged out all the, all the garden chores for the year. You know, we feel like we're ahead of the game. I think usually we're kind of just getting started planting stuff, but now everything's pretty well in the ground. some flowers on the strawberry plants and the tomato plants and the flowers are coming up and whatever. So yeah, it's, uh, it's always satisfying. And now we can, now we can actually enjoy summer evenings sitting out on the patio and not having to look and cringe at the undone tasks that, that, that await. So that's always fun. |
| James Stacy | Yeah. Sarah surprised me with, uh, with a pair of Serrano pepper plants. |
| Unknown | Oh wow. I'm very excited. |
| James Stacy | Oh yeah. Oh nice. I love a Serrano. Yeah. And, uh, and so we're growing our own. They're already in, they're in the planters. They're looking good. It rained here yesterday. So I, of course I watered it and it rained an hour later, but, uh, yeah, it was good. Um, and you, you, you had some other fun this weekend too, that I saw on your, on your Instagram, right? |
| Jason Heaton | I sure did. Yeah. I kind of went crazy on my Instagram stories. Cause I went to the first of what is usually several kind of vintage car shows here, cars and coffee events here, uh, in just across the river in St. Paul. And, um, it's, it's a fun, really relaxed crowd. kind of a smaller show, but, but it's always brings, you know, 20, 25 cars, mostly imports. And there were some, some really cool stuff there. There was like some, some eighties and nineties BMWs. There was an M six there and M three, um, like an E 36 M three. And like, uh, I'm not sure what the, the code name was for the, the seven 40, uh, from like the nineties, it would like the James Bond era when he was driving a seven series, that car was there and then some lovely Mercedes. And then. Lots of British cars, uh, my own Land Rover included. Um, and, uh, there's always a good French contingent here and the local Citroen club, uh, always brings out some fun stuff. They usually bring a couple of DS cars and two CVS. And I got to chatting with the guy who I believe he's the president of the Minnesota Citroen club. And, uh, he happens to be a host of, uh, on the local classical radio station here. Uh, he's got, he's got just a wonderful voice for it. And, um, And he brought, uh, he and his wife came and brought both a DS 21 and then a two CV. And I just got to talking to him and asking him about how he got into it and kind of some quirks of the car of which there are many. And, uh, suddenly he just said, yeah, hop in and see if you fit. So I jump in the driver's seat, I'm sitting there kind of looking around and, uh, the keys in the ignition and he says, all right, let's go for a ride. So off we went and, you know, look, I mean, I drive a weird old you know, right-hand drive Land Rover. And, and so I think maybe he'd noticed that and thought I could be trusted in his quirky old French car. Um, but it is, it was a little intimidating, you know, somebody else's pride and joy. There's vintage cars. It was a little, that's a, that's a big, big trust to let somebody just go for a spin. And, uh, and the, the two CV, you know, if you're not familiar, you got to look them up and we'll, we'll put a link in the show notes to, to what these cars are like, but you know, it's, it's kind of the classic, I suppose the French version of the beetle, you know, the sort of a quirky rounded shape, like a turtle. |
| James Stacy | It was designed as a French car for French farmers. And the goal was you could use it in the field Monday to Saturday. And then on Sunday you could take your wife to church. I believe that was the original like plan. |
| Jason Heaton | So funny you say that because he told me what the design brief was and it was almost exactly what you said, except he added the note that you could drive across a farm field with a dozen eggs and not break an egg. |
| James Stacy | Did he show you the rear seat? Yeah. Oh yeah. It comes out like a bench to have a picnic. Yeah. Yeah. And they're so cool. |
| Jason Heaton | These are such cool cars. They're really cool cars. And, um, uh, it w it was a kind of a pioneering car in its day. It was built from like the fifties right up through the late eighties and it had independent suspension, which was kind of pioneering at the time and incredible ride quality. We, when, when I went for a spin in it, for one thing, it's got this weird, shifter, um, that comes straight out of the dash and you kind of pull and push and move from side to side. Um, but other than that, it's, you know, easy to drive. And, but the, the suspension was, was incredible. Like we went over some train tracks at a fair amount of speed. Yeah. I hardly felt it. Like the car is really comfortable, got up to 60 miles an hour on kind of a, you know, bigger kind of city road. And, uh, did just fine. So, you know, hats off. I mean, thanks, thanks to, uh, Michael Barone. If you're listening, I doubt he is, but you know, who knows, um, for, for letting me drive your, your Citroen two CV. It was a, it was a real highlight of my weekend actually. So that was a, that was a good time. And, and it's funny because when we get to the final notes, your final note, um, with a certain somebody, um, seems equally intimidating, but in a very, very different sense, we'll, we'll get to that later. But, uh, yeah, it was a fun, it was a fun time. |
| James Stacy | This also means that you, this is another bond car. Cross off your list. Oh yeah. True. Right. Yeah. For your eyes only, uh, opening sequence of for your eyes only in the hilarious yellow, uh, uh, two CV six, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. |
| Jason Heaton | That's great. Yeah. It was fun. Yeah. And then, um, just briefly, I mean, last week I went to, uh, got to meet up with our buddy, uh, Matt Ludvigson and, uh, and Tony who runs the illustrated watch. He's a good member of our Slack group and longtime subscriber. And that was a good time. And, And, uh, Tony encouraged me to wear the watch that I'll have mentioned in my wrist check today. So thanks. Thanks to those guys for, for meeting up last week. Good times. Nice. Yeah, that's great. And you're, you were back, I mean, last week, I mean, we recorded from Switzerland. I kind of forgot about that, but then, then you came home and then went straight to the cottage. |
| James Stacy | I did. Yeah, exactly that. I was home for about six, six hours or an evening and then went up the next morning with my girls. But, uh, the, the one thing that we didn't talk about because of the timing, we recorded the last episode the day before I went on the press trip with Victorinox. Oh yeah, right. And I wanted to give some sort of a download. I don't know if it's enough for a whole episode, so maybe this will just be a little bit of a longer one. But like I said on a previous episode, I've been fascinated by Victorinox and the Swiss Army Knife product for a really long time. Since I was a kid, it was a high quality thing that was still an accessible price point, but I did not know the half of it. It's a fascinating company. It really reminds me of a Patagonia or a Rolex. these companies that like operate on very long time schedules. So fourth generation ownership, they're all they all have the same name, a great grandfather, the Ellsner yeah, Carl Ellsner. We're now on the fourth Carl Ellsner to run the company. Oh wow, we met him. The guy just loves making Swiss army knives. Like his passion for it and for their people, they're like one of the best employers in Switzerland. |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| James Stacy | And he had so many different stories about how they made it easier to work here, they changed this process or that sort of thing. And just like a really genuinely fascinating company and walking into the... I've been lucky enough to go to a handful of places where they make high end product, watches, cameras. Man, the knife, it was like a mix that you could see from like modern Swiss production facility sort of things. Yeah. But it was all within this guise of like making a product that hasn't really changed in a hundred years. So it felt like stepping back into the fifties. Oh sure. Yeah. The factory is entirely heated by the shavings from grinding metal. Oh my gosh. And then they heat another hundred and twenty units. Wow. So they use almost no oil. Wow. To warm the factory. They keep over a year of steel on hand. And you'd think, well, that's not that crazy. They make 130,000 knives a day. Oh my gosh. Wow. And then on top of that, so they keep a year's worth of steel. The thing I didn't know, and you'd think this is something I should have known, me being me, I didn't realize that within one knife, I have a standard... I got to build my own, a climber is what it's called. And it's like the kind of core three inch 14 tool knife. Yeah. Each tool in here uses its own steel. Why is that? So the knife has to be capable of holding an edge, so it's a harder, more brittle steel. But if you use that same steel for the screwdriver tip, it would shatter the minute you tried to put torque into it. So they use a more elastic steel for that. It's just super cool, man. Got to put my own together, got to pick my own scales. I went with a camo on one side and a classic green on the other. I like that. A product like that where It's a company that can make decisions based mostly for its people and for its product, and there's no shareholders. It's a privately held company. Originally, the company had been dispersed to all of the children, but then, as you can imagine, Victorinox's sales tanked in 2001 because of 9-11. Suddenly, nobody was traveling and you definitely couldn't carry a knife anymore, and so they lost 30% immediately. and it was like challenging the company so that they actually convinced the family. I think it's eleven kids. Maybe it's Carl and nine siblings. I don't remember, but a huge group of kids that owned essentially owned all the shares for this company to give all the shares back as a trust, as like a foundation. Yeah, and the only goal of the foundation is to perpetuate Victorinox. So it has no, you don't have to have a profit. You just have to keep doing what Victorinox does. Sure, A fascinating company. I've got a whole other story coming out that's going to link up with a watch. So pay attention on Hodinkee in the next couple of weeks. I'll get that up. But just to go to the birthplace of something I've had in my pocket since I was five or six is really cool. |
| Jason Heaton | Just such a blast. And it is a fascinating company. And I think we talked about it briefly when you were in Switzerland last week about how they're kind of a quieter company. We don't talk about them a lot. We've mentioned their watches because we're both fans. when I look at the way that they've diversified and that name has spread out to, well, from knives to watches and cutlery and then clothing and luggage. And now I don't know how all that ties together, but still, I mean, if, if, if the company is run the way you say it is and, and kind of family run and very worker centric, like it's an interesting model. I can't think of another company that has such a diversified, like product offering, maybe something like Porsche design, but that's a very different animal, a totally different. |
| James Stacy | Yeah. And that's like a lot of what Porsche design does is licensing and like collabs and things like that. It is interesting because they're making a very high quality product that doesn't have a luxury price tag. Yeah. Like you can get a, I think, I think this one that I made, which they gave me to be fair, that I didn't like buy it and then they let me make it. It was part of this whole press trip. I got to make one. I think it was worth like 35 Swiss francs? Oh, sure. Something like that? Yeah, yeah. Just super impressed, wall to wall. I bought a bunch for gifts, like stuff that was only available in Europe and brought it back, and that's really great. And I may or may not have gotten connected with the person who can do special corporate orders. So if there might be a cool TGN colorway, that sort of thing, maybe we should talk about that. Maybe we can get a thread going on the Slack. But like I said, I'll have more on this in more of a story that'll tie into a hands on with their new dive pro in titanium. And then we got to see some of the stuff that's coming out like in the next year. And yeah, it's it's stuff that makes sense. I think they're doing they're doing nice work. So the watches represent 10% of the brand. Oh, everything that they seem to do, they seem to do in the same sort of way. Like you can tell that when they approach watches, it's because they as a company as a company and as you know, a long standing history, they know how to work with metal and that's what they're kind of best at. So like their dials are made elsewhere, like from a supplier, but they are making the cases. I got to see them actually, like there's a lot. I've been to a lot of watch factories and you go, but where does the case actually made? And they go like, oh, down the road and we'll show to find, you know, like a supplier, right? No, they're making cases there and that includes they've now gotten to the point where they have a supplier for carbon but it's for the materials. They are actually doing the injection molding of the carbon on site, which is kind of remarkable. There's a lot of watch brands that would cost more than what a Victorinox costs, where they're not... Nobody's hand brushing the case commonly on a thousand dollar watch, right? really cool stuff. I'll have more on that soon. But I did want to at least get a little, because it's been bubbling over in my mind. I guess we can get into something a little bit more watch derived with some risk check, if you like. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. You know, so I mentioned that last week I got together with Matt and Tony and one of the conversations that came up was around vintage watches and kind of our own collections. And I had mentioned that I was thinking about selling off a few of my pieces that I'm not wearing much. And one of those was my Seiko 6105-8110, which was, it was, you know, famously known as the, the captain Willard, the one that kind of the second generation 6105 made in the largely in the seventies. And it's a, it's a watch that I've always loved. I think this is the third one I've owned and that they never stick. I sell them. There's something about them I love, but I just, when I have them, I just don't wear them much. And, and Tony's like, well, you know, you should pull it out and wear it. Like, um, I mentioned that I'm wearing my garment a lot cause I've been training a lot. And, and, and then like, it kind of frees up when I do take it off to like just throw on something vintage, something less practical, et cetera. And so, uh, since I met those guys last week, I just started wearing my 6105 a little bit more and I put it on an old vintage, big hole, Tropic kind of rally style, Tropic rubber strap. Um, and it's a really beat up watch, but it's, it's just so lovely. So I've just been enjoying it and it's, it's from 1976. So right around, you know, kind of apocalypse now timeframe, very, of the era. Loom is long gone, bezel is extremely scratched up, but it's got a replacement crystal. And when I first got it, I actually did a pressure test. I took the movement out and I put the stem and crown back in and then put it in my little, you know, inexpensive pressure tester. And I got it up to five bar, you know, 50 meters or thereabouts and pumped it up and tested it and it held. So, you know, it's a reasonably practical watch other than not being able to read it after dark. But, you know, so I kind of wear it without much fear of it getting moist or anything like that. So. That's great. Yeah. That's what I've got. |
| James Stacy | Look, if you ever, if you change your mind and you do want to sell it, I've never owned a 6105. Let's talk. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Lord knows all I need. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. More, more dive watches. Yeah. |
| Unknown | Right. |
| Jason Heaton | Right. Yeah. And you have something special on. I do. |
| James Stacy | Yes. I'm really fun. It's been all over my Instagram. It's been all over the Slack and all that kind of thing, but I got a Seiko Orange Monster, so a Gen 1, 781 via our fearless super moderator, Chris Soul. A little while ago, we had, through another buddy, Michael, had done a little bit of like a sort of a group buy of monsters, and I got a black one at the time, and that was more like a return to form. My first automatic Seiko was a black monster, and I had kind of missed it from my collection for a while. It had been like a decade since I had had one, and so I got it back in black, and it was good. I was enjoying it. It was fine. I just casually mentioned to Chris that I had some interest in an orange one. He had an orange one but had a case back on it that he wanted to keep the case back, so I just sent him the watch. He just swapped the case backs and sent the orange one back to me, Dude, if I tell you like obviously I went to Switzerland and I wore the new Dive Pro from Victorinox, but outside of that, this is all I'm wearing. This thing is so much fun. Bright orange. Good summer watch. I've got it on the bracelet. I'm now fully used to the weight. I actually like slept in it the last couple nights and the loom on this is like it's exactly what you want. It's just in the orange is so much fun. Like I'm at that point where I'll walk through my house and walk past like my closets have mirrors on them, like the Foyer closet has like a mirror on it, and I'll see the orange, I'm like, ooh, that looks cool, all right, I like this. Yeah. Like I did that twice today, coming up from my office, so you walk right towards the mirror, and I was like, oh, that looks good on my wrist. So yeah, I've got a 781 with some Chris Soul Provenance, which I really like. This watch is so much fun, it is not keeping great time. It's okay, it's not great. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, I mean, I, I think I've said this before. This is one watch. I just do not get, I think we should do an episode on watches. We just don't get. And sure. And the monster is just, it's never resonated with me. It's got such a massive following that I know that I'm in the minority because. |
| James Stacy | It's so weird. And then you put it on and it's so good. |
| Jason Heaton | You know what? Maybe my trouble is, is I, did they make one? Did they ever make one with a black bezel? I feel like I've seen one. |
| James Stacy | Uh, later generations. Yeah. Like as you get into the 300 series stuff, you there was and there's I mean at this point you can go back and watch that first watches in the wild with coal where he meets that the monster collector that has like the super rare yellow one and all that yeah there's tons out there, but for me I've owned a gen three. I guess a vampire, which was a gen two or gen three. I don't remember, but it was a black dial with red outlined markers. I had one of those years ago, and I really loved the idea, and then in person it was just too much. It almost felt like a modded Seiko, where the person didn't have that much self-control. It was a lot of being a lot with the red markings. I think I did a story for a blog to watch on that, so you could probably find that there. I don't remember the reference number, a 313, a 331, something like that. The Vampire, I think, was its nickname. and um i had one of those so yeah the later ones are slick and then they made baby monsters which were like kind of had elements of that case design or that bezel design but it was an even cheaper sort of less expensive option yeah i had one of those way back in the watch report days yeah orange monster man it's doing it day and date nice to have as well 10 out of 10 no notes love it |
| Jason Heaton | Very cool. We probably should have worn a Rolex given who our guest is today. I think Richie's probably should have a bit of a Rolex guy and certainly a sea dweller himself. But anyway, I guess we've, we've gone on long enough here. We're over half an hour in our opening remarks, but let's, let's horrible pun. Let's dive in with, with Richie Kohler. We're so excited about this. It's just going to be incredible. All right, well, for those of you who don't know him, I'm going to read this right from Richie Kohler's biography on his website, www.richiekohler.com. Richie Kohler is a filmmaker, author, and explorer whose diving experiences began in the water surrounding Brooklyn, New York, but whose passion for diving and exploring shipwrecks has taken him to all corners of the globe. As a founding member of the New York-based group, the Atlantic Wreck Divers, Kohler has spent the last 40 years exploring and identifying lost shipwrecks. Those exploits have been documented in newspapers, magazines, documentary films, and numerous books. Kohler holds nearly every diving qualification, certified scores of technical divers and advanced diving techniques, and continues to lead shipwreck and technical diving expeditions internationally. Richie, how does that sound to you? You wrote it probably. |
| Richie Kohler | I couldn't have said it better myself. As a matter of fact, I think I did. |
| Jason Heaton | Now is that, I don't want to, uh, I don't want to put you on the spot when it comes to your age, but is, is the 40 years still, is that accurate or is it longer than that? |
| Richie Kohler | Well, I turned 62 this year and I started diving at 15. So you do the math. Yeah. |
| Jason Heaton | Wow. Wow. Cool. That's cool. This is such a thrill for us to have you on. We, um, you know, we have been doing this show since 2016 and, you know, one of the earliest episodes we ever did, you know, we, we were telling people go read shadow divers. It's one of our favorite books and, We kind of introduced our listeners to, to you and to John and, and to kind of the whole story. And we've, we've just got a real strong kind of diving contingent in our audience. So we're thrilled to have you on. Um, I guess, you know, before we kick this off, I, we, I have to throw out a thanks to our mutual friend, David Concanon, who, um, is a past gray NATO alum. He was on the show, you know, a year or two ago. And David connected us. Uh, so quick shout out to David. |
| Richie Kohler | Yeah. David is not only, uh, an adventurer and a bon vivant in his own right. Uh, but he is, he's a great friend and, uh, he's the guy who actually got me to go to Titanic. So there's a story right there. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. Titanic. I mean, I think I wanted to kind of add this onto that bio that I read because the, a short list of your famous wrecks that you've explored, they've included the big names, you know, the Andrea Doria, the Titanic, as you mentioned, Of course, the U869, the topic of the book Shadow Divers. But more recently, and I think one thing I'd love to get into in a little bit here is the HMAS Britannic, which is such a huge project and something I know you're very proud of. But before we get into that, let's go back to 15 years old. How did that all start? How did you get into diving? |
| Richie Kohler | Every story has got a beginning, right? Yeah. It actually, it begins a lot earlier than 15. It starts actually around eight years old when, uh, like almost every young person on the planet, I wanted to be an astronaut. I mean, literally when I was eight years old, the Apollo space program was in, you know, full bore. Um, like I think every other red blooded American, and I'm sure many people around the world when Neil Armstrong took those first steps, we were glued to our black and white television. And, you know, I, you know, I had GI Joe's, I dressed them up as astronauts, I wanted to be an explorer. And that same summer, my father took scuba diving lessons. And he brought me with him. And he allowed me before I even go into that my father always has been the type of dad that allowed his children to do things that other people, especially in today's mindset, they wouldn't allow them to do. I mean, when I was eight years old, he taught me how to use a skill saw. When I was nine years old, I was allowed to fire handguns and then shotguns. When I was 10 years old, he bought me a dirt bike, which is saying something living in Brooklyn, New York. But that's my point is that he's always encouraged us to try to push. And so when I watched him in the pool in Brooklyn, New York, disappeared below the surface with that double hose regulator and, and, and, you know, a cacophony of bubbles come up and then I can't see him, you know, below the bubbles. I was enthralled. A little later on, once he was certified, he brought his gear home and he would take me behind our boat, our family boat, and, you know, knee deep water, put the gear on me. and allow me to swim around literally in the shallows at first, but then later on he would tie a rope around my waist and allow me to go from the back of the boat as far as the rope would allow me to go. And, and pretty much that was the extent of my diving until I became certified. And once I was at 15, once I became a qualified certified diver, the rope was off and I've never looked back. I mean, I've just been going further and further afield. Those early years of diving in the waters surrounding New York was filled with amazement. I mean, I don't know if you guys are divers, but first off, just the feeling of weightlessness, okay? And then, of course, the alien nature of the underwater environment being so different than anything else you see terrestrially just was so enamoring to me. There's a part of my diving career that was fueled even at an early age by testosterone, and that was spearfishing. My father was a fisherman, and it was just a normal transition, I believe, for me to become a spearfisher. And so spearfishing would probably predominate my diving career from 15 to about 20 years old. And then something would happen, which would You know, it's funny in our lives how we can look backwards and clearly see the fork, you know, the paths that we choose. But at the time we don't even, sometimes we don't even realize we veered left or right. It just seems like the path. |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | But there was true. It was truly an event that occurred during a spearfishing trip that literally changed the course of my life. And you know, you're going to hear that. As we continue going on, and I think it could be said about anybody, we've all had moments, events, things that happen that dictate the next chapter, the course of your life. And I've been so fortunate to have so many of these different events. And I've also been fortunate that I've had the ability, the introspective ability to look back and clearly see those moments and The one that I'm about to share with you was I had speared a fish on a wreck off of North Carolina and it had gone underneath a steel plate. And as I was reaching under the steel plate to pull out the grouper on the end, still wriggling on the end of my spear, I noticed something sticking out of the sand, a round shape and it caught my eye. And so I kind of grabbed it and I wiggled it and it came loose, it came out. And to my uninitiated eye, it looked like a pulley, a brown, round, brass pulley. I didn't even have a bag. I had to like stick it under my arm and swim around, you know, with a fish foot on a stringer, a spear gun on the other hand. But I was so curious about this thing. I didn't want to let it go. At the end of the dive, I got back up on the boat and one of the older, more experienced divers, who was a wreck diver, Uh, looked at it and he goes, Hey kid, that pretty cool. You looks like you got yourself a gauge. And I'm like a gauge. I'm like, what do you mean a gauge? He says, come here. Gave it to him. And he took his big knife back, back in those days, back in the seventies, everybody had like, like a Roman sword for a knife. There was no little knives, you know, had these battle axes. |
| James Stacy | Rambo dive knives only. |
| Richie Kohler | Yep. Yep, exactly. So he, he pulls this, you know, meter long knife out of his sheath and he takes it. flips it around so he's holding it by the blade, and with the rubber handle, he starts tapping on my brass pulley, and all the encrustation falls away. And it wasn't a gauge or a pulley, it was actually a clock. Oh man. And on, I still have the clock to this day, on the face of the clock was the name of the ship. Oh man. And then more, I think the thing that really captured my attention was although the hands had rusted away, the imprint of where they were was still in the brass face. So it was actually telling me the name of the ship and the time of day that it died. |
| Unknown | Wow. |
| Richie Kohler | And you know, we, it was just like, I was transported into that moment. And then of course, on the whole boat ride back, I'm thinking about this clock being on a wall. And you know, as it hits the water stopping and what was going on and I became fascinated with some of the history of these sites. And so I quickly down the spear gun and started getting back into more academic approaches to diving so that I could understand the history of the ships and also find artifacts. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I mean, that's, that's incredible. And how old were you at that time? Do you remember under 20? I was about 20, 21 years old. |
| Richie Kohler | Wow. |
| Jason Heaton | I'm just curious, uh, were you able to do much diving with your father? |
| Richie Kohler | Um, given kind of the history of it or, well, I did do a number of dives with my dad, but they were all. Uh, relatively shallow. Um, and what I mean by that is like 60 feet, which yeah, back in 1970, it wasn't considered shallow, you know, going underwater was, it was, was deep in itself. Right. Uh, but they were not on shipwrecks. They were usually on, uh, rock jetties and reefs. Yeah. And for the purpose of getting a lobster. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. Huh. Oh, that's great that you're able to share that with him. So, so then like we fast forward, you know, a number of years and, and you had developed a bit of a renown as a member of, of kind of the, the burgeoning East coast and wreck diving crowd. Tell us about those early days. Cause there, there's a bit of, at least when you read something like, um, like shadow divers or the last dive or some of these books about that scene. Um, the, the image that's projected as the sort of, you know, bad boy, almost motorcycle gang scene. |
| James Stacy | And it was like, it's like reading a great segment of like a music documentary about a punk rock band. |
| Richie Kohler | Yeah. It's, it's actually not far from the truth. Although, uh, at the time, uh, and, and even now some people look back and see it slightly differently. The reality is that, uh, we were, um, outsiders. And what I mean by that is even today, with technical diving being a very popular aspect of sport diving. And I'll get into those differences, technical diving being very deep, requiring highly technical equipment. You're going to go not only deep, but you can go into caves, just a variety of different environments that the normal holiday sport diver going to the Caribbean isn't going to encounter. So in the 70s, most people, the majority of them, were only diving to about 100 feet. They were diving with a single tank. And the group that I became affiliated with, believe it or not, that story I told you about the clock, the fellow who brought me into this sport, wound up becoming the emperor for life of the Atlantic wreck divers, Pete Guglieri. That was the guy who said, hey kid, you know, all of the members of the Atlantic wreck divers except one were at least 10 years my senior, all of them. So I was 20, they were 30. They had houses, they had kids, they had careers or jobs or owned their own businesses. The majority of them were blue collar workers, although we did have a couple of guys that worked for Grumman, which were bona fide rocket scientists, no kidding. But the majority of them were like me, worked in construction in the New York area, got together on the weekends for the sole purpose of going offshore to explore shipwrecks. And the reason why we got this reputation as bikers and bad boys was because we were operating outside the known and accepted limits for sport dive. Most sport diving was done 130 feet or less. In order for us to become successful, to find artifacts, we had to go further afield, meaning further offshore. And of course, deeper into the ocean. So a lot of the wrecks we started exploring were 150, 180 down to 200 feet. And as many of your listeners probably are aware, if they're divers, the deeper you go, uh, exponentially, a bunch of things occur that make it more dangerous. And that's why most sport divers stay shallow, 130 feet being the maximum depth. Well, to go deeper. And go further, we also had to start changing the way we were equipped. We started borrowing technology from commercial divers. We were wearing dry suits instead of wet suits, which allowed us to stay down in deeper water longer and not suffer from hypothermia. We started wearing double tanks, sometimes triple tanks or carrying another tank under our arm because one tank was not going to provide us with enough gas or air to do these deep dives. So we were kind of scary looking to the weekend holiday makers that were going out on the dive boats to such a point that some dive shops did not want us on the boat with them because we intimidated their customers. |
| Unknown | Sure. |
| Richie Kohler | And this, this kind of forced us as a group, um, to adopt, uh, a team outlook and say, Hey, look, all of us guys got to dive together so we could charter the whole boat. and then dictate where the boat's going to go. And so at the same time that we're doing the things we want to do, uh, we were looked upon by the rest of the dive community as thugs. That was one of the nicknames they had for us. The crazies was another, and it's kind of funny because, um, the things we were doing in late 1970s and through the eighties and into the nineties are now pretty much accepted And it's, it's the, the new name for that type of diving is called technical dive. |
| Unknown | Sure. |
| Richie Kohler | But at the time there was no training for this diving. You were trained to dive to 130 feet. No one was teaching anyone how to do decompression diving. There were no classes in wreck diving. There was no such thing as mixed gases or rebreathers. There were no dive computers. As a matter of fact, when I started diving. There were no BCDs, which is a buoyancy device that helps people, um, basically, uh, change their buoyancy, whether they're heavier or lighter underwater. Um, there were, there were, uh, only the most rudimentary timekeeping devices. And so it was kind of like, uh, the early age of flight where you, you know, you were, you, you were flying by wire and you had a compass and a fuel gauge that was there, you know, we pretty much had. gauge that told us how much air was in our tanks and a watch, sometimes two or three of them because they often would flood and fail. And you know, underwater, the two most important things in this order are number one, something to breathe. Number one, you've got to have air. And number two, to know how deep you are and how long you've been down there so you can calculate your decompression. |
| Jason Heaton | I'm curious, you know, our listeners will love to hear your history of diving watches. I see you're wearing a Rolex today and we can talk about watches in more detail later, but, but everyone's going to want to know, like when they hear you say you wore a watch or a couple, do you remember what some of your early watches were? I mean, were you wearing like Seiko's or Citizen Aqualands or what, you know, what, what did you have? |
| Richie Kohler | My first was the one I could afford, which is a Tag Heuer. |
| Unknown | Oh yeah. Okay. |
| Richie Kohler | That was my first one. Then I had a Doxa and I still have a Doxa. |
| Unknown | Nice. Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | But believe it or not, um, as we got, um, I think into the, mid eighties Casio came out with these G shock watches and they were waterproof down to like 300 feet. Yeah. And we're like, wow. Well, you know, where, you know, obviously a wonderful chronometer, you know, a really a chronograph, nice watch is expensive, but these Casio's were relatively inexpensive. So believe it or not, we would tape or fix three or four of them. to our console that we had our pressure gauge on, a bottom timer in some cases, and a compass. And then you'd see two or three time pieces on it. And one would have the time, the other one you would use as a stopwatch, and the third one was a backup if everything else went to pot. One of the things that's most important in the level of diving that I was doing then and do today is redundancy, the ability to have a backup, and in many cases, a backup for the backup. |
| Jason Heaton | I don't want to get too, too nerdy here, but I'm curious, like I'm assuming in those days you were, um, you were doing a lot of even the deep stuff, diving air. Um, and also without the benefit of a dive computer, how were you calculating your, your profiles and your decompression stops? Was that done through like Navy tables and stuff like that? |
| Richie Kohler | You hit it right on the head. When we were diving pretty much from the day I was certified until the first truly reliable dive computer. We were diving tables. So the first sets, the first set of tables, air tables with the U S Navy tables gave you repetitive groups down to, I believe, 180 foot deeper than 180 feet. There were no repetitive groups. You could not do another dive. So what we did, and as I mentioned earlier, one of the Atlantic wreck divers was, uh, worked for Grumman and he actually was like a rocket engineer. He, took the Grumman computers and took the Navy tables and then just extrapolated them out down to 250 feet, you know, using an algorithm, which understood what, what was going on. And he just did it, you know, and we call them the thug tables. Cause we would call the thugs. This was before we had the more respectable name, the Atlantic wreck divers. And I still have those tables today. Now, from 30 feet down to 180 feet, they're pure U.S. Navy tables, but then from 180 feet down to 250 feet, he created these repetitive groups so that we would know how much we would have to penalize ourselves on our second dive and then extrapolate that for surface intervals. So when you think about it, it was pretty advanced stuff. For a bunch of guys that, you know, one of us had an auto body shop, I fixed windows, we had a tile setter, we had a knife grinder, we had a painter. Most of us never went to the college and all of us went to the school of hard knocks. So my point is that our passion truly forced us to think outside the box and go further. At that time, if you said to me, what is it for? Why are you going deeper? We loved it. I mean, I loved finding stuff like this, like this, this old cup that I'm showing you guys, you know, it's just, it's just a 200 year old tankard. But you know, the reality is that. Um, I just loved going down number one, knowing with absolute certainty, in many cases, I was the first person to ever see what I'm seeing, going into a compartment, knowing that the last people that were in that compartment either died in it or ran away. And so the pathos, the excitement, the drama of all of these shipwrecks comes alive in my mind's eye when I'm inside a shipwreck. So that's part of the real passion, the adventure of going in. And then there was the physicality of seeing something, recognizing it for what it is, half buried in the silt, or even better yet, not seeing it, but thinking about it, putting the shipwreck back in your mind it back to the way it was and then deconstructing it and then digging in the mud or the sand and finding what you were looking for because you were able to do that. That was incredibly rewarding as well. |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | So, um, going down, going further offshore, fighting narcosis, fighting CO2, fighting deep water blackout, all of these, uh, physiological problems that, uh, we were, burden with because of the technology, the, you know, just diving air. Uh, we never had a diving fatality in the Atlantic wreck divers. We never even had a near miss. And, you know, uh, I, I have to give credit to the older guys who were as much as you would say, and other people would say we were crazy and we took chances. We always dove as team. We always dove in pairs. We always looked out for each other. we, if, if you were doing something that was outside the realm of access, uh, acceptability, um, they would rein you back in. They would be like, Hey, look, you can't do that. And if you wanted to, you know, one of the things about being part of a group and wanting to stay in the group is don't piss off the group, you know, that, that had an effect. And, and, you know, we were highly successful not only in finding shipwrecks and finding artifacts, but of course the track record of never having any of us have to be evacuated or worse die diving a shipwreck. |
| Jason Heaton | All right. So you showed us the tankard on your desk there. And that leads me to a topic that I really wanted to discuss with you because we've had this kind of lively debate among a few of us in our group about, I guess, I don't know if this was the right term that you guys use back in the day, but a China fever, you know, where you'd go down in Iraq and you know, let's talk like the Andrea Doria or something where, you know, you have actual, you know, China with the, the, the logo of the, of the ships, you know, owners and whatever on it and whatever. And people would collect artifacts and bring them back. And there are kind of these schools of thought of, of do you, do you bring them up and keep them? Do you turn them into over to a museum or are they better left on the rec site, pristine, you don't touch anything, you don't remove anything. And I, I, I have a feeling that the ethos around that has changed over the years. And I'm curious what your thoughts are and have they changed over the years? |
| Richie Kohler | You're right on all points. First off, There are shipwrecks that like the Great Lakes of the United States, uh, truck lagoon in Micronesia, uh, certain wrecks in the Baltic. There are areas around the world that the environment is such that the shipwrecks are somewhat preserved. And so what I mean by that is they're not being destroyed either by commercial fishing or the, the constant battering of storms in, in the tidal zone area where waves and the action of the sea contribute to the ripping apart, breaking up and burying of shipwrecks. There's a belief that some people have in their mind that if you leave a shipwreck alone, nothing will happen. Nothing's further from the truth. Even in the benign environment of the Great Lakes, the shipwrecks eventually will deteriorate, fall apart. They just do it a lot slower in cold, fresh water. And so because of the legality of the confined waters around the lakes, those shipwrecks are protected by law. The shipwrecks of Truk Lagoon in Micronesia are protected by law. Same thing with some of the wrecks in the Baltic because of their proximity to shore, they are protected by the country that dictates what goes on in their littoral zone of the water. That being said, there are many shipwrecks that exist outside of any country or economic zone. These are abandoned shipwrecks in international water. Okay. Nobody, you know, as, as much as we like to think nobody owns the ocean, pretty much the, once you get outside of the, the, the literal zone or, you know, and an economic zone, whatever a country wants to call it, there's a zone now where if you find an abandoned shipwreck, you have the right to claim that shipwreck. And if you really want, if it's filled with gold doubloons, you can arrest that shipwreck and then lawfully recover. But many of these shipwrecks are not the Atocha. They're not filled with gold. They're not filled with artwork and riches. They're really nothing more than the dilapidated remains of an old Kenworth. They were either transport vessels that were moving cargo oil, they were passenger liners. And in the case of warships, they have their own special protection. So a country's warship is protected by law as a sailor's greater. There's many laws that have to be obeyed as a shipwreck dive. You have to know where you're going, you have to know what the law is where you're going. But There's plenty of areas, and I'll give you a perfect example because you mentioned it, the Andrea Doria. The Andrea Doria is 50 miles offshore on the Nantucket Shoals. It's in international waters. The owners of the shipwreck, the Italia Line, officially abandoned it. The insurance companies paid out on the hull and fittings and on any of the cargo inside. A couple of years ago, a gentleman purchased the rights to the shipwreck and has allowed divers to go there and take anything they want. He wanted a couple of pieces of artwork. He wanted other things from the shipwreck at which he recovered and now has let it become a diver's plate. So if we talk about the Andrea Doria, if you guys wanted and had the requisite training, you wanted to go, it is totally within your rights. It is lawful for you to recover. Now we come to the problem where some people go, well, if you take that, I can't see it. The Andrea Doria, when I was diving it in the events that you've read about in Shadow Divers, is no longer that same shipwreck. All of those areas that we went into have now collapsed. The shipwreck has literally fallen apart and collapsed upon itself. It looks more like the back half of the Titanic than the front here, where the front half of the Titanic is upright and intact, and it looks like a ship. The back half is just a mess. It has just collapsed and destroyed upon itself. Well, that's what the Andrea Doria looks like now. And guess what? All of the artifacts inside those dining rooms, those bars, those compartments are now inaccessible to divers. They're crushed. You can no longer get inside the Andrea Doria to those places. It looks more like a ground zero at nine 11. And that's what happens as shipwrecks age now is, is the Andrea Doria as important as let's say the Titanic. It depends on who you're talking to. There is an emotional attachment to the Titanic because of the 1500 people who died there. And although at the time it was found, and then the French went out with Nautilus, and then RMST, Titanic went out there the company to salvage objects, it was within their rights to do so. But many people were up in arms over it because of the emotional attachment. |
| Unknown | Sure. |
| Richie Kohler | So, so when it comes to the recovery of artifacts from shipwrecks. There's many layers we've got to go through. With me, when you think about the story of the You Who, we had a conundrum. We had a big problem. The problem was this was a submarine that no government, no expert, no historian could answer the simple question, what submarine is this? And who are these men? Who are these bones inside? |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | And, you know, when, when you confront the American, uh, Navy historical center, when you confront the federal German government and say, Hey, we found one of your summaries from world war two, nobody cared. I, I originally thought, Hey, somebody is going to show up and go, Hey, get out of the way, kids. We're got this, but nobody did. So, so it, it, it irked me. It, it, uh, it chafed at me. It consumed me. that people could lay on the bottom of the ocean and no one cared. And if John and I didn't find a way to figure it out, they'd still be anonymous. They would still be unknown. And so we had to figure out a way, knowing that it's a warship, knowing that it's a war grave, to operate recovering objects, which pretty much was against the law. Yeah. But we did it for a higher purpose. We didn't do it because we were selling them on eBay, but all of a sudden, you know, something changed. There was, uh, a problem with the morality of what I was doing. And so it, for me, it changed the way I operated on that submarine and it changed the way I perceived the value of an artifact. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. And it's, it's, it strikes me that that was a, such a pivotal, you talk about forks in the road in your life. And it strikes me that, you know, finding. you know, solving that mystery. You, I'm totally speaking for you and you can correct me if I'm wrong. It feels like you evolved into a different sort of diver after that you became, you know, with all the new diving techniques that you were developing while you were working this, isn't that around the time you were starting to experiment or start use mixed gas because it was at a certain depth and then all the historic historical research you had to do in the travel. And did that kind of take you in a new direction would you say? |
| Richie Kohler | You know, there were so many things going on in the, in the late nineties in my diving, that, that all surrounded this mystery submarine, that it's hard to pick them apart. But I can tell you from my own personal aspect, I know that prior to diving that submarine, I had dove a number of shipwrecks that had had loss of life. As a matter of fact, the Andrea Doria had over 50 people die. in the collision with the Stockholm that that are still on board. They they are twisted remains are somewhere inside that that steel coffin, if you will, just like the submarine. The difference is you never see them. You never see human remains. Many of them are absorbed, either buried in the silt or absorbed by salt water. But in the anaerobic environment of this German U-boat, the men are where they fell in many cases, you could see the bone sticking through the remains of tattered clothing uniforms. And I think for me, the biggest pivotal moment was when I had, uh, it was, it was, and still is a very dangerous dive. You had to steal yourself with your, your head humming narcosis and kind of weave yourself into this broken ship. Because all of the harnesses and plumbing that had been on the top of the compartment had fallen down and crisscrossed electrical wires, crisscrossed the compartment. So, you know, it's like a spider's web of things waiting to get caught on. Yeah. And when you go in, you have some good visibility, but the minute you go in, you've disturbed it. So now all of those, those line traps and wires and pipes are now invisible in the disturbed visibility in the chocolate milk you've created behind you. So I'm moving like a church mouse, I see something in the silt, I see a rounded edge, and it's got a white hue to it. And I, I get excited, my heart starts beating, I'm thinking that I found a bowl, and I put my hand on it, I pull it out. And it's a human skull. I mean, I'm literally looking at the eye sockets and the silt was pouring out of the eye sockets and there was like one or two teeth left in the upper part of the jaw. And I'm like, it was, I wanted to scream. I wanted to, I wanted to throw it. I wanted to like scream and throw it at the same time. But again, everything I had learned, everything that the Atlantic wreck divers had instilled in me about deep diving was panic is, you know, I It sounds like, you know, I'm quoting Dune here, but it is the mind killer. I swear to God, because panic just grows. Once you let panic go, it's a fire and it becomes all consuming. And so I closed my eyes. I didn't throw the skull. I didn't run away. I closed my eyes and I held the skull and I got my breathing back. And that's one of the things that, that has always helped. And still to this day, it helps arrest panic was focused on what's right. And anytime I've ever been in trouble, I thought I was in trouble underwater. As long as I'm breathing, you're not in real trouble. The minute you're, the minute you're sucking salt water, you need to do something different really fast. But if you're breathing, you close your eyes, you focus on what the problem is and you fix that. Well, my problem was I'm holding a human skull and what do I do? So I kind of said, I'm sorry. I literally like through my regulator, apologized. And I took that skull and I put it up on, uh, I wouldn't say a shelf, but like on a ledge in the compartment, I didn't want to put it back in the salt. I know that that sounds weird, but it seemed wrong to do that. I kind of put up, put them up on the thing and I kind of looked at it and I, I just kept saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I had totally lost my cool. I just backed out of the wreck and, and call the dive. And, and, you know, I probably could have stayed down another 10 minutes, but I had lost it. And that was the, for me, one of those, you know, watershed moments where I came to grips with, I'm not a grave robber. I don't want to be a grave robber. I don't want to be that guy. There's nothing down there that's worth doing that to disturbing these people. And that's, that's when John and I had, um, a real big discussion about how we need to, to work, how we need to try and figure this out. What is, the ultimate goal, the ultimate goal is identify them. Well, how do we do that? And, you know, that that took us six years, you know, and and when we met the author of the book, Shadow Divers, Rob Carson, for the first time, one of the biggest questions he had for us, before we even agreed to write a book with him, was, he couldn't understand why we didn't dig amongst the human remains, because we had told them, yeah, there was the possibility we would have found a cigarette lighter or a cigarette case, a watch, something with a person's name on it. And many times we found out that during the war, German sailors would usually have their U-boat flotilla or their U-boat number on a cigarette case or on a lighter. So these are things that we could have found had we been digging around. The gruesome aspect of digging around human remains wasn't as damning as the fact that in my case, I wanted to be able to go to Germany one day and tell people that we had found their loved ones and that we had identified them and we had treated them with respect. And I just couldn't see myself, you know, digging amongst vertebrae and ribs and moving skulls for the soul. There had to be a better way. |
| Unknown | Yeah. Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | And so that did really change my sensibility about what I'm doing and how I do it. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah, I think what strikes me about your work has been a focus on, and I think you even mentioned it on your website, kind of the human element, the stories behind these shipwrecks, as opposed to just something to take a picture of or, you know, recover an artifact. And I feel like discovering the, the, the U eight, six, nine, it was, it was kind of that, that sort of turning point. And I think diving technical diving especially is this, it has this reputation as this very kind of macho swagger sort of sport. But I think as you just mentioned, I mean, the best divers are probably those that have an L a strong helping of humility, right? |
| Richie Kohler | You know, it's funny you say that because, uh, when, when I was, uh, young and brash, uh, I, I, I always thought that when accidents happened, diving accidents, hey, that can never happen to me. I'm smart. That guy was stupid. And then the older you get, you realize, oh no, they weren't stupid. They were human beings. And the most poignant way to explain that to anyone is how many people have ever misplaced their keys? It's that momentary lapse of memory, of just you don't know. And if you have that momentary lapse in diving, it can ultimately result in your death. And it often happens, you know, somebody forgetting to do something, forgetting to switch gases, forgetting to mix gases, forgetting anything at this level of diving. It does not suffer fools and it does not allow even the most smallest mistakes. |
| James Stacy | Yeah. I think that it's one of the more fascinating ways that Kirsten put that book together, like actually stacked out the story, because it reads as being purely linear. But I think you follow the development of this philosophy from the Atlantic wreck divers being seen as a certain type of menace or thugs or whatever, and then slowly becoming something that was clearly much more thoughtful than was visible from across a dive boat or in a newspaper clipping or something like that. And I think it's interesting to hear that culminate with you and John having a chat about, well, we need to actually figure out what we want the end result to be and then work towards that rather than just kind of kicking around in, in, you know, a place that technically maybe there's some people could make the claim, nobody should be there at least until once it's identified. I think the tone probably changed, uh, about all of that because it came a little bit more academic. |
| Richie Kohler | It's funny. You mentioned that that is something that I've had to contend with in certain circles where There are certain people that say, even though we did identify the wreck positively, we still should not have entered the wreck. We still should not. There, there is a segment of society. Some of them are veterans and I respect, I respect that. But, uh, you know, when, when John and I met with the Naval attache attached to the, uh, German embassy in New York city. And basically told them everything we knew. We told them the location. We told them our suspicion about type of submarine it was. Um, we narrowed the field down and by the way, recovering the crockery, one of the things that was unusual about German crockery was that it had a year on the back. So you find a dish that says 1936, then you find another dish that says 1938, then you find another one that says 1944. Well, that tells you that the ship didn't sink in 43, did it? And it probably didn't sink in 44 either. So it makes it a late war loss. So, and, and, you know, so finding, you know, there was only so much data that we could get outside. So we decided as, as I'm sure you, and maybe many of your listeners know, to approach the wreck forensically, but from an equipment standpoint, not not a human artifact type of, in other words, we left the crew and their possessions alone. And we looked at the, the, the, the machine, if you will, and said, what is it about this machine that can help us? And so things like the, the escape lung, which we were told some of the men would have written their name on, that was an inanimate object that didn't have any human connection. There's nobody attached to it. And of course, when it blew up in John's garage, It gave us yet another clue. It had a hydrostatic date, which again was a November of 1944, which implies this submarine was still in Germany as of November. So all of these objects that we recovered helped narrow the field. And even with that, we still were stuck at the, at the end of the road with three possible submarines. It could have been all three of them. built at the same yard, all three of them left late war out of Norway, all three of them, nearly identical, except, except for the number, except for the name, all three of them have been lost. |
| Unknown | Oh, wow. |
| Richie Kohler | The other two have still not been found. They're somewhere off North America. So so when we spoke with the German naval attache and said to him, what can you to help us? He says, know, he was the first person to go, you know, there were, you know, there's, there's something like 400 missing U boats. It's like 70 of them. We don't even know what happened. They just, they're just MIA with no causation. We don't know where they are. This is probably one of those 70 U boats. And he says, but I can't give you permission. We never give permission to dive our U boats. They're war graves. You're not allowed to go in them. And we're like, you know, I wouldn't say we're crestfallen. We're like, Oh, but how do you know what's yours? So then John is like, well, how do you know it's your U-boat? He goes, well, you told us, you know, you got to China. And he goes, well, yeah, but you, you know, do you know where it is? He goes, yeah, it's where you found it. So we, we, we were implying that, well, you don't know what U-boat it is. So is it really your U-boat? And he goes, look, you guys seem like nice guys. If you figure out which one it is, let us know. He never gave us permission. but he clearly wanted to know. Everybody wanted to know. There wasn't an expert. There wasn't a historian, an archivist, every single person that we ran into and told this story to wanted to help us to the best of their ability. And every one of them stayed in touch with us right up until the end and until we finally identified it. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. The story is amazing. And I think it's, it not only is a snapshot of, of a piece of history in terms of world war two, but also of the state of diving. at the time you guys were diving this. And I wonder what, what if you had the technology, the diving technology that's available now, back when you were exploring that, like a rebreather, for instance, you know, would it have changed things dramatically for you? I mean, I'm sure it would have, right? |
| Richie Kohler | You know, a re a rebreather and the use of trimix or helium in our breathing mixture exponentially increased our bottom time threefold. So if you think about it, when we first found the U boat, we were only able to do about 15 maximum 20 minutes of bottom crazy. |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | My last time diving the U boat, I did an hour. Oh my gosh. Bottom time. I spent an hour. So how much more work could we have gotten done? Also, you know, one of the things about narcosis, uh, you know, many, many of your listeners understand what narcosis is, but For those who don't, when you go deep and you breathe air, it has a narcotic effect. And, uh, Cousteau very eloquently called it martinis law for, for every 30 feet you go underwater, it's like drinking a martini. So figure how many martinis you had. If you're at 200 feet, you know, it's like seven martinis on an empty stomach. It's a big night for anybody, but you know, um, much like people who drink quite often and which we did in the Atlantic wreck divers. Uh, you, you develop a skillset to operate in an altered fashion, meaning you, you look at your gauges, you're down there, you're looking at your gauges, you're looking at them every 30 seconds. Sometimes you remember what you read. Other times you're like, uh, that didn't, that didn't stick. I got to look again. And, and sometimes you're looking at it and you're trying to remember, why am I looking at this? |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | And then, then you get scared and you're like, Oh yeah, I got, I got to remember how much time. And that is what narcosis means. So imagine how the curtain was pulled back when we introduced helium and got rid of that narcosis. Now our peripheral vision, which was narrow and tunnel like wind up and we could see, you know, 180 degrees and, and literally things that we had been diving in a compartment all of a sudden you see things you hadn't ever seen. We've been diving in that compartment maybe a half dozen times, but it's like somebody turned the lights on, not only figuratively, but literally in your head, somebody turned the lights on. And so we became more efficient. So to answer your question, if we had had the technology in the early nineties, when the wreck was found, it would have made a huge difference. It would have, uh, I don't know if we would have figured out where the answer was, meaning that we would have had to get into a compartment that was not accessible to us. But we certainly would have made a lot quicker work of narrowing the field. It took us almost two years to narrow the field down to the type of U-boat and how many of those U-boats had come to America. And then it took us another three years to really hone that down and ultimately come to one U-boat. |
| Jason Heaton | And I want to get to Britannic here, but before we leave Shadow Divers, I have to ask the question, will there be a movie of Shadow Divers? As far as you know, I mean, it just begs to have a movie made. |
| Richie Kohler | Well, I can tell you that right now a very prominent producer has the rights. I was just out in L.A., so was John Chatterton and Rob Curson. I'm not at liberty to tell you who that producer is, but we are in contract with them. I'm hoping that they're going to make this happen, but I got to tell you, it's been over 20 years. Fox had it for 10 years. Universal had it. Paramount had it, you know, we, we keep signing contracts. They give us checks and nobody makes the movie. I mean, I'm happy with the money, but I, you know, I'll, I'll tell you the same thing. I tell that everybody it's like when I'm sitting with a bucket of popcorn and you know, the lights dim, I'll be the first one clap. |
| Jason Heaton | Who's going to play you. |
| Richie Kohler | That's what I was going to ask. Who would you like to play? If I don't know, John and I, John and I have already decided who we want to play each of us. So when we were, uh, when we got contracted by a 20th century Fox, at that time, the head of Fox was a guy named Tom Rothman. And, and I won't get into, uh, we almost got thrown out of his office. Cause when we, uh, went in, in a glass case was Wilson from Castaway, you know, the volleyball. And John and I were like lifting the glass. We wanted to get pictures with the people like, Oh, you can't touch that. Cursing was like freaking out. Anyway, Tom Rothman yells at us, tells us to get into his office. And he says, sit down. I'm, I know you're crazy. I read the book and you know, he had, he had cut the legs off of this couch and all three of us are sitting on the couch and so that his desk was high. We had to look up at him. And so he starts explaining to us, uh, you know, guys making movies is very difficult business. And so, you know, I raised my hand and you could see that, um, he was like, not used to people like interrupting him. So, you know, John raises his hand and finally he's like, what, what, what is it? John goes, well, we've decided, uh, we know who we want in the film. And you can, this is, this guy is like, flabbergasted and then I add, and we're quite firm on this. And he goes, so John says meatloaf for him and Danny DeVito for me. But I think Danny DeVito might be a little old. I think, you know, meatloaf could probably pull it off with John. |
| James Stacy | How flattering. Meatloaf, he was great. He was great in Fight Club. |
| Richie Kohler | Yeah, he was great. Oh man. All right. All right. So they're threatening to make a, make some kind of film. So fingers crossed. |
| Jason Heaton | I hope so. I hope so. All right. So we're going to talk about Britannic because, um, yeah, yeah. It's, it's such a big project. And of course it was a sister ship and you can correct me anytime to the Titanic, but what was repurposed as a, as a hospital ship sunk near Greece and in waters over, I believe in the Aegean, you can correct me if I'm wrong. Cousteau first dove it, which was pretty amazing back then. Um, you've done several expeditions there. Tell us, well, first of all, how deep is it? How many times have you been there? And just why that one? Yeah. Yeah. Why that one? Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | Well, you know, I could be an obsessive personality. I don't know if you picked up on that maybe from reading the book or anything, but, um, the same obsession that I had with the Yuba with figuring that mystery out. In 2005, and we never really touched on a little bit of a career that John and I had after Shadow Divers where we worked for television. Yeah, Deep Sea Detectives. That's correct. We hosted a television show for the History Channel called Deep Sea Detectives, and we did 56 hours of television for them. We also did a bunch of standalone independent documentaries that we produced ourselves, or we co-produced, excuse me. And so one of those was Titanic. In 2005, none other than David Kincannon sure contacted John and I, and that's how I met David. Okay. And he said, Hey guys, I've got this great idea. You know, we can go out to Titanic and we can, you know, go, go look for, uh, these missing pieces and long story short. We go out, we, we get the shot as they say in filmmaking and we make this program called missing pieces about what we had discovered on Titanic. And it did really good. It did so good that we then wanted to do a follow-up show about her sister ship, Britannic, but we also wanted to answer questions, design questions about Titanic. And as you mentioned, Britannic is a perfect sister ship. So there were three of these ships. They were called the Olympians because the first one was called Olympic. The second was Titanic and the third was Britannic. Olympic actually served for almost 40 years. She was in world war one and world war two, and then broken for scrap after the war. Um, she, she worked, uh, uh, hard as a passenger liner. She carried troops in world war one from, from America to, uh, to England. Uh, she even sank a U boat in world war one by ramming it. We know the tragic story of Titanic sunk on our maiden voyage with the loss of 1500 people. But nobody really knows the story of Britannic. And the reason for that is Britannic was still under construction when the Titanic disaster occurred. And it's not like they were going to give up on the idea. It's just that the white star line had their hands full. And so work had slowed and Britannic didn't, they didn't stop work, but they didn't hurry it up and finish it. Cause I guess there was a lot going on in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster. Well, what are the things that happened? Obviously Titanic sank in 1912 and all of a sudden, uh, just a few years later, world war one is upon him. And the British admiralty is looking for ships that it can use. And one of the deals that it had with the white star line was that in a time of war, their Royal mail ships, RMS could be conscripted by the Royal Navy. They could be used as, uh, uh, gunships that could be used as troop transports. Um, they could use be used as armed cruisers, or they could be used as a hospital ship. So because Britannic was still under construction, it was perfect for them to take over the construction. And instead of putting in all the opulent fittings that you would have found on Titanic, they put in hospital wards, surgical wards, an X-ray machine, if you can believe it or not, of course, the sad thing of a morgue on the back. And Britannic was now painted a beautiful white color with a green stripe and these huge red crosses and went to war. She was on a mission of mercy during World War I. She operated on six of these cruises at times carrying upwards of 3,000 wounded soldiers, bringing them back from the Dardanelles back to the UK and then turning around and going back and getting more. It was on one of these return trips, thankfully, meaning that only a thousand people were on board. I want that number to stay in your head. Only a thousand. That thousand were doctors, nurses, and 300 of them were the crew to run the ship. So there basically were 700 medical crew and then 300 ships crew. And on the morning of November 16th, there was a massive explosion as she was passing this Island of Kia. And she sank three times faster than Titanic. And now that's where there's a mystery because in light of the Titanic disaster, there were design changes on Britannic. There were an additional watertight compartment. All of the watertight compartments were raised up higher because if you recall from, I think most people know the story of Titanic, thanks to James Cameron's film, that the compartments were being flooded and the water would come over the top of them and flood one compartment right after another. And that's why Titanic sank. So now by raising those compartments up, it was thought that if one or two or three or four compartments were flooded, the ship could remain afloat. But somehow with only three known compartments flooded to the sea, Britannic sank three times faster than Titanic. And so that was a mystery into itself. And then of course, we wanted to know if there were other design changes that indicated possibly that maybe the British knew that they had designed, quote unquote, a weak ship, that they had designed something that broke apart on the surface. So when I went to Britannic the first time in 2006, my mission was to answer questions first about Titanic and was there design changes on Britannic? And the second was about Britannic itself. Why did she sink so quickly? |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | Well, on that first trip, we were able to answer the first question. We were able to find out that indeed there were design changes, but it wasn't as ominous as some people would think. When you go back to the turn of the century and you think about, you know, the industrial revolution and you think about how things were being built, they were learning as they go. It wasn't about them designing something cheaper because they were trying to save money at the cost of lives. They just didn't know what they didn't know. And when they found something that was wrong or weak, they strengthened it or changed it. And so that was the reason why we found design changes on Britannic that weren't on Titanic. But the answer to the question, why did Britannic sink as quickly as she did, really got to me. And to this date, I have been on seven expeditions. I can't tell you how many literal dives It's got to be over 50 dives. Um, scuba dives, rebreather dives on the wreck. |
| Jason Heaton | And to, to, just to clarify this, this wreck is a 400 feet or even deeper, 400 feet, 120 meters to the bottom. |
| Richie Kohler | And she is intact. Well, unlike Titanic and unlike the injury at Doria, for some reason, this wrought iron ship, cause she wasn't steel, she's iron and she's riveted hull. There's a theory that because of how deep she is, and because there's no heavy duty commercial fishing, and because she's so close to the island of Kia, the waves can never get so big as to impact the ship and rip it apart by storm surge. And because of where she is in this warm water environment, she is festooned, or should I say, cocooned in these mollusks, which are like a salt, a deep water oyster that have in effect mummified the ship. They cover all of the steel. So they've kind of arrested the deterioration from the exterior. And because she's intact, the inside, much like the submarine that I was on, is anaerobic. So although she is rusting, she's not rusting at a rate that we would see in other places in the world. So she sank in a place that's actually protecting her. So she's over 100 years underwater, and yet all of her decks are still there. All of the interior fittings are still there. I've been given, with the team that I've been working on, unprecedented access by the Greek effort or the Ministry of Antiquities to go inside the wreck. That's something that no one is allowed to do. And we're allowed to go inside and document historical artifacts hopefully for future recovery, because eventually the ship will collapse. It is a matter of time and it's a matter of fact, she will collapse. And so some of these artifacts that not only tell Titanic story, but more importantly, they tell Britannic story. They tell her mission of mercy that, you know, the fact that, you know, this was a ship filled with nurses and doctors and, and, you know, so there's objects inside that we've imaged. Um, that both hint at her more opulent pedigree. And then of course, for more, um, heartfelt mission of mercy. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. I mean, it, and you know, 50 plus dives on, on this wreck over all these years, like you've probably barely scratched the surface. I mean, a ship that size, you could spend the rest of your life just chipping away and you'd never see half of it. |
| Richie Kohler | Well, like, you know, the problem, the problem is, you know, we, I'm 62 and I honestly believe that I could probably do that level of diving probably another five or six years, but before I'm 70, I'm not going to want to dive to 400 feet anymore for a couple of reasons. My physiology is changing as I get older and my ability for my body to handle that kind of decompression. I don't need to take, I know it sounds crazy, but There's risks I'll take, and then there's risks I don't want to take. But I have to tell you something. Having been to both Titanic, I made two dives on Titanic, and obviously I've made a number of dives. Where Titanic is surrounded in tragedy and she's in black water, there's absolutely no light. It is a static and dead environment. when you're down there, the cold of 36 degree water outside your submersible pierces the six inches of nickel steel and pierces your soul. You are cold to the bone, not only because of the physical temperature, but understanding what you're looking at. This is a mass grave. And you know, when, when we were in the debris field and you saw a pair of shoes laced side by side, you knew that that's where somebody fell and that every bit of them has been absorbed except the leather shoes that they wore and a pair of spectacles. And one of the most amazing things I saw in the silt was a life jacket. And it's like, well, how did the life jackets float? How did it get to two and a half miles? But when you realize the dynamics of the sinking, as the ship came down, some people may have been wearing their life vest and been inside the ship And then as the ship imploded and exploded, their bodies were thrown out. Yeah. But now they were so deep that the Cape Hawk in there was compressed and unable to float them up. But yeah, I mean, it was like eerie and horrible. And you know, I was, while I was down there, one of our team members, a Jewish fellow, believe it or not, he was a member of the, not the Senate, he was a House of Representatives, I believe. He was a Jewish fellow, he was reading the Kiddush down there, a Jewish prayer for the dead. It was really a sobering event for me. And so coming from that environment, and then going to Britannic, which is in beautiful gin clear, warm water, blue, such a cobalt blue on the surface, And as you descend to the wreck, you get to about 200 feet, you're still 100 feet above the side, and you can see the ship coming into focus. And there's shoals of fish swimming all around. And as you get closer and your lights illuminate the hull, instead of the blue grays, colors of orange and red and yellow of the sponges and just pop out at you. And in my mind, she's alive, Britannica. has, you know, she, she's left the land of the living, so to speak, and now has taken on a new life and is, is a, now a reef filled with fish and filled with life. And so it's, it's like a happy dive for me. And I'm always so excited. And every single dive, when I leave that rack and I'm coming up the line slowly doing, I watch it. I keep looking at it. I keep peering at it until it just fades back into the blue. |
| Unknown | Yeah. Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | And then I just can't wait to go back again. The last three years, we've gone three years in a row. |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | And my wife and I are going again this year. |
| James Stacy | Oh, good. |
| Richie Kohler | Nice. |
| James Stacy | Very good. Oh, that's great. That is like a singular experience in wreck diving is coming down over a wreck and not being able to see it, not being able to see it, checking your gauges, not being able to see it. And then finally having some element of the wreck kind of come out of the out of the haze or the color that I can't imagine what that'd be like at 400 feet on such a huge boat. You know, I'm lucky enough to have dove a few wrecks and I just can't imagine what it's like when you, when you get to that scale, it's gotta be pretty special. |
| Richie Kohler | Well, she is a hundred feet in a beam. So because she's laying on her side, that means she stands 10 stories off the sea floor on her side. Wow. |
| James Stacy | It's so hard to understand that scale. Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | Well, that's why I use stories. If you say a hundred feet people, so imagine looking at a 10 story building, right? That goes 900 feet long. |
| Unknown | Yeah. Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | That's the wreck. |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | That is the wreck. You know, um, I, uh, I had an opportunity in 2015 and 2016 to work with a team doing a documentary film called mystery of the Britannic, uh, which I hosted for them and they had, um, They had submersibles that they were using. Um, these were Triton, not the Titan. These were Triton submersibles, uh, that are incredible, uh, workhorses. Now they're, they're the most prolific, uh, personal submersible and, and, and you would tell utilitarian submersibles in the world today. And I made one dive with my partner, Evan Kovacs in that submersible, and we spent. more time in that submarine than we had our entire bottom time of every scuba dive we had ever done on Britannia in one submersible dive. We went around. It was awesome. |
| Jason Heaton | There's technology. I mean, there, there we go. |
| Richie Kohler | That's pretty cool. But the submarine can't go where we can't go inside. And so, yeah, it's, uh, it's an incredible, I felt, um, that I had a story to tell, you know, a lot of these shipwrecks, unfortunately, um, have had tragic events even after their sinking. And unfortunately, in 2009, a good friend of mine, Carl Spencer, lost his life diving the Britannic. And so when Evan and I went back in 2015, I felt compelled that I would write a book because it was going to be the 100-year anniversary in 2016. And I wanted to tell pretty much not only Britannic story, but also Carl's story. You know, um, Carl was our, our leader in 2009 of that expedition. You know, I don't want to get into too much of the details, but basically he made a mistake. He made, he made a human error that unfortunately cost him his life. And, uh, you know, that's the sobering fact that this is as much as we're having fun and we're doing it. There is always an inherent risk the minute that we put our heads underwater. |
| James Stacy | Yeah, for sure. All right, Richie, that's fascinating to get this kind of background on these incredible wrecks that you've been able to dive. Obviously, we want to be respectful of your time tonight, but also time does bring us to a major topic of the show, which is watches. Let's do two, three, four, five minutes, something like that. about some, you know, we've got some great highlights of a remarkable career underwater and a remarkable fascination with all things to do with the water. It sounds like from spearfishing all the way up to, you know, you essentially became a U-boat historian because nobody else could fill in these blanks for you. I have to assume that a lot of your obsessive tendencies do translate to your gear, to a sense of preservation. We talked about the G-shocks and that kind of thing. you know, looking back over this, are there a few watches that stand out or watch moments maybe that stand out? |
| Richie Kohler | You know, some people think of watches, you know, as an accessory. Um, and in my world in diving, it is a necessary part of life support, uh, watches obviously as a timekeeper. And, uh, when, when you're, when you're thinking about the type of diving we're doing time is, right there right after breathing. First is something to breathe. And then the second thing is time. Yeah, how time time relates to the depression time relates to your gas supply. So from a very early age, you know, my first real dive watch was a Tag Heuer. And I still have it. You know, I don't wear it. It's kind of beat up, it's kind of scratched, but you know, I've never gotten rid of a watch unless I blew it up, which a couple of them actually have. Um, I would say my, my, my next really significant watch was a big one for me. Um, because I, I probably right up until 97, I was happy with the Casio's. They were relatively inexpensive time keepers for underwater, but I also had, um, gosh, I can't remember. Uh, what my work watch was right now. It'll dawn on me in a minute, but it was just a workhorse. And then I decided I owed it to myself and I got a Sea-Dweller, a Rolex Sea-Dweller. So that was my first substantial watch. Oh, I'm sorry. The other watch I had, it was a Doxa, which is a beautiful dive watch. Of course, with the orange face, The funny thing is that if you were dressing up and you're going out on the town, you're wearing a tuxedo or something, it takes a certain kind of guy to pull off wearing an orange face watch. You know what I mean? So I found that the Rolex became my all around go-to watch. I could go diving with it. I can wear it with a tuxedo and I wear it when I go to work. |
| Jason Heaton | Did you happen to have the back engraved? |
| Richie Kohler | No, I did not. Okay. I did not. I'm surprised. No, I did not. I thought you might do that. Nope. No, but this watch does have special meaning to me cause it's been to Titanic twice. |
| Jason Heaton | Amazing. Yeah. |
| Richie Kohler | So yeah, I wore this to Titanic. Yeah. Um, I also, besides my Doxa, the other watch that I have, which I really love is a U-boat watch. |
| Jason Heaton | Oh yeah. For obvious reasons. |
| Richie Kohler | No, it's just, it's a, it's a beautiful watch. Um, and again, it has a special meaning to me. Um, believe it or not, it was a gift from my, from friends in Malta. I also have another doc. So that was a gift that was given to me by, um, the authors of diving with legends. Oh, Pete Miller. Yeah. So I, I was one of the recipients because I was in the book. I received a second boxer. Nice. So that, that's my dress stocks. I've got a dress stocks also with an orange face, but my diving docs is a kind of beat up as you can imagine. You know, you know, diving, the kind of diving I do is kind of full in full on impact, especially if I'm working, working dive and, um, having a time piece that I can literally rely on. Can mean the difference between life and death. |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| James Stacy | Yeah. That's totally that simple. Yeah. Also, it's like the Doxa thing I love. We're big Doxa nerds. You know, it's such a cool watch, such an incredible history, but Richie Kohler should have a Sea-Dweller. |
| Jason Heaton | That is perfect. That really works for me. |
| Richie Kohler | You know, I was looking at, my wife was looking at a Yachtmaster. We were in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. We went into a Rolex dealer and I don't think I could pull off wearing Cameron's watch because that's just like... It's a monster. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh no, I'd look like Popeye, but only on one arm. Yeah, right. I think you'd have to alternate. You'd have to alternate. |
| James Stacy | You have a structural asymmetry thing around one wrist for too long. |
| Richie Kohler | Yeah. But it would be a cool watch. |
| James Stacy | Yeah, that's great. It's so much fun to get a little bit of a background on the watches for sure. And to see you wearing a Sea-Dweller is just really fun. |
| Jason Heaton | Richie, I mean, look, I think this is probably the longest interview we've done on the show and I'm I couldn't be more thrilled. |
| James Stacy | I mean, I've got two more hours of questions just kicking around. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. This was, uh, this was amazing. And we, we really appreciate your, your generosity with your time and your stories. I mean, it's just, it's just been tremendous. Really, really a fun chat. |
| Richie Kohler | Thank you guys. Thank you very much. I'm, I'm flattered that you guys wanted to talk to me and, um, I really enjoyed it. Great. I hope that, you know, my enthusiasm comes across because in, in closing, I'll tell you one thing when I started diving, I was excited to get wet. I was excited to go diving. I'm still that eight year old boy. My wife and I went scallop diving literally this weekend and I was just as excited loading my dive. And some people say to me, you know, after you go to Titanic and Britannic and all of these, you know, historic shipwrecks and big dives, I'm still happy diving in a local river for old bottles or going out and getting scallops you know, it is I literally will dive until I can't dive anymore. And that'll be because they're putting me in a pine box. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. Well, I think we couldn't leave it in any better spot than that. So appreciate your time. Have a great evening. And thank you so much. This was really great. |
| James Stacy | Thank you so much. A real treat. |
| Richie Kohler | Thanks, guys. |
| James Stacy | Cheers. All right, man. I don't even know what to say. Richie Kohler. That was him. for well over an hour. I'm actually going to present that as almost unedited. There's almost nothing there that I don't think will work. He speaks beautifully. It was such a thrill to have him on and to see him talk about these things that we like. We've been talking about Shadow Divers for a long time. I mean, if you haven't read it, but you did just listen to an hour and a half of Richie Kohler talking about it, give it a read. If you haven't, it's one we've talked about a billion times. The other one, which I'm going to add and read ASAP, is Richie has a book from 2016 that I've never read called The Mystery of the Last Olympian, Titanic's Tragic Sister, Britannic. They've got it on Kindle, so I'll be reading that probably this coming weekend. But that would be, I don't know, like we'll go back to the normal show, but we just have Richie Kohler on. Like, let's just take a quick moment to enjoy this. That's like the Michael Jordan of rec dives. Yeah, I think. Or at least in the argument. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah, totally. And just such a. What a nice dude. And such a pleasant, pleasant guy. I mean, I think we've had some great guests and nothing Taking nothing away from everybody else. I mean, but, but I think he's, he's top five for sure. I mean, that was just, uh, such a highlight for me. I mean, I, I do feel like we've reached a moment here with TGN simply because, I mean, we've talked about how shadow divers has informed our own backgrounds and desires and interests in diving, et cetera, for so long that to have, you know, one of the heroes of that book. on the show was just what a highlight. What a great time. |
| James Stacy | And look, like you said a couple times in the episode, I will reiterate a huge thank you to David Concanon, who himself was an incredible guest, but of course brought us the now late Don Walsh and has now brought us Richie Kohler. Pretty special connections from David. So we don't take that lightly. It's genuinely appreciated. And I don't really even know. I guess like We recorded the part you're about to hear, like final notes earlier, so I think we'll just jump into it. I wouldn't say I'm speechless, I just feel like I don't have that much more to say. I'm happy with how this has gone. I agree. So maybe we just jump into some final notes and keep it going, but check out Richie's book, read Shadow Divers if you haven't, go back onto YouTube and track... Hit the show notes, I'll include all of this, but go back on and dig into all the other stuff that he spoke about and some of the great television programs that he's worked on. And if we play our cards right, we will do a Richie Kohler two sometime in the next year or so. And we can chat more about some of the other diving and maybe some of the more recent stuff he's been working on. |
| Jason Heaton | But yeah, that was great. I'm not going to I'm not going to add anything else to it. Just just such a great evening. |
| James Stacy | All right. Well, this is a heck of an episode. I'm having a blast, but it is time for final notes. You want to jump into it? |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah, let's do it. You have two and a couple of good ones, especially the one in particular that I mentioned in the beginning. But why don't you go first? |
| James Stacy | Absolutely. Yeah. So following up on last week's, which I believe we talked about, my final note was a great video with the new Aston Martin Vantage from Henry Catchpole and his series for Hagerty, the driver's seat. This week, I think he maybe has outdone almost any other video he's ever done, or at least we've got a top 10 from Henry here. And this is a two-sided review of the new GMA T50, which is the Gordon Murray. We've definitely talked about it Top Gear had that incredible video with Ollie Marriage a couple months ago, which was in a final note. But the difference here is there's also a McLaren F1. So kind of the poster car for Gordon Murray design originally was the F1 and then the T50. So you kind of get both in one review and it is 30 minutes of just... It's perfection. The cinematography is incredible. Henry's amazing, as always. The car's jaw-dropping. Goodness sakes, man, that T 50, what a thing, what a sound, what a sound. |
| Unknown | Yeah. |
| James Stacy | Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm really like obviously a huge F one nerd, uh, was the first thing I wrote for hoodie magazine was a story that they used about 50% of, I think what I handed in was about 8,000 words. And I got, I, at that point I got to go to Virginia to actually see one. I got to sit in one and start it. We got driven around a little bit by the caretaker for the car. Just something really special that I've always loved. Right up there, like with an SR-71 and that sort of thing, just these engineering marvels that outlasted and predated and did everything first and all these sorts of things. And now we've got the T-50. And to have the context of having them both right next to each other, as Henry's explaining differences in the design language and the execution and it's just, it's awesome. It's a great video. Yeah, it really is. Kudos, Henry. I texted you this morning, but big kudos. To you and the entire team, you guys are killing it. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah, and leave it to him to outdo my Citroen 2CV driving with a T50. |
| James Stacy | I know for a fact that I bet you he's a Citroen 2CV fan. I meet so many hardcore car guys, especially English and European, that either have or just adore those 2CVs. I'll include another great video from Chris Harris, because he has a 2CV, of him racing a buddy in a field because one of them has a slightly hotter carb or something like that. Yeah. I'll include that in the show notes, but please check out this. It's called GMAT 50 Finally Meets McLaren F1. Henry Catchpole in the driver's seat. |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah, it's so good. I didn't even get a chance to finish it because I just saw your note just about 20 minutes before we started. And it's long. It's great. |
| James Stacy | You watched it in a couple of chunks. All right. Well, what have you got for yours? |
| Jason Heaton | Yeah. Well, apropos of today's episode on our chat with Richie Kohler, coincidentally, last week I was made known about an interview with Richie's old cohort from shadow divers days, uh, John Chatterton. Um, he was interviewed by Ashley Dasher of a Dasher watch company. And, um, it's, uh, it's not an audio interview. It's actually, you know, something you actually have to sit and read, uh, and scroll through and there's some photos and whatnot, but, uh, it's a very long form, uh, back and forth interview with, with Chatterton and, uh, and some, some good insights and interesting stuff. And I just thought, you know, given, I thought it'd be interesting to look at what, uh, what, what Chatterton has to say, given kind of their, their past connections and work together on the, uh, on the U869 project. So yeah, check it out. It's a, it's a good interview. So very cool. Yeah. |
| James Stacy | Yeah. That's a good one. And you have a second one. Yeah, I have a second one. Uh, I've become a, you know, I, I think I'm on record in a past episode is having a huge fondness for, for the Australian media house, uh, triple J they have a, it's a, I believe it's a radio station, but it's also a YouTube channel. and one of the things they do, and we've definitely talked about this before, are these great covers. They call it like a version. So when somebody comes to the studio to perform, they might do one or two of their own songs and then do cover a cover of some sort. And I just get obsessed with these covers. They're beautifully recorded. The audio quality is great, all this kind of stuff, and they're really fun. And I actually have a double header from a performer named Meg Mac. This woman has an incredible voice and it started because I've been going down. This must be because I'm the exact right age to suddenly decide I love Tame Impala, a band that I've largely ignored for a decade or more, but I'm getting pretty deep into Tame Impala sort of stuff lately when I'm kind of sitting and wanted to listen to something. And one of their biggest songs is this one called Let It Happen. Most people know Let It Happen, even if they don't know that it's by Tame Impala. So Meg Mac has this incredible cover of Let It Happen, so I'll include that While I was going through that cover and various other things from Triple J, I came across Meg Mac doing No Time to Die, the theme by Billie Eilish, and I think this is the double header that'll take up, I don't know, maybe ten or eleven minutes of your life. It's awesome. They're both so good. She's got an insane voice. Both are pretty much down the middle as far as covers go. There's not like any wild changes to the core, but her voice tied with the way that they they bring in some backup singers to both performances. Incredible. And you gotta have a little bit of bond in every couple episodes. I think we have a legal concern for TGN. We have to have some bond every two or three episodes. So this is your Billie Eilish, no time to die cover, but that's a Meg Mac, double header, triple J, great stuff. |
| Jason Heaton | Very cool. Yeah. I did listen to, I kind of caught the beginning beginnings of both of those. And, and, you know, I was a little skeptical about the, the no time to die cover. Cause I think Billie Eilish did such an amazing job with that song. So good. |
| James Stacy | But yeah, this is good. Yeah. Good stuff. I think, I do think that we need to do a show where we design the next bond. Yeah. Everything. |
| Unknown | Actors, cars, music. |
| James Stacy | Before, before they announce any of the actors when it's still free, like, let's go, I'll go back and make a little rubric. Like, you know, every bond movie has these seven or eight roles. Yeah, good idea. Who does the theme song? All right, that's a fun idea. Let's get to that in the next couple episodes. But yeah, those are my two final notes and those sandwich in a huge interview with Chatterton. Man, I started scrolling through that and I was like, where do I get to the play button? And I was like, oh no, this is all the text from the interview. This is great. |
| Jason Heaton | Very cool. This felt like a packed episode. We had a lot going on here. Really good stuff. |
| James Stacy | Yeah, we did. We definitely got a lot because we have yet to record the main chat and we're at at least 40 minutes right now. So I think it'll come out to be a nice long episode, which is which is super. |
| Jason Heaton | Well, there we go. As always, thanks so much for listening. If you want to subscribe to the show notes, get into the comments for each episode or consider supporting the show directly and maybe even grab a new TGN signed NATO, please visit TheGreyNATO.com. Music throughout is Siesta by Jazzar via the Free Music Archive. |
| James Stacy | And we leave you with this quote from Epictetus, who said, Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them. |