The alarm buzzed at 4:30 a.m. Christmas Eve, 1983. I got up with the usual eagerness, fixed bacon and eggs and coffee, ate and suited up in three wetsuits: a full-cover thin skin, a 3-millimeter spring suit over that, and a quarter-inch, two-piece diver’s suit over the other two. I poured heated water into a Thermos, the use for which would come later.
Subscribe to keep reading
This story is from our archive. Get your SandPaper Annual Pass for access to our digital archive, plus everything else a pass includes. Details below.
Annual Pass — $18 Details
365-day access to:
- The complete SandPaper digital archive (stories date back to 2012).
- Full photo galleries from our photographers.
- The entire catalog of SandPaper games, puzzles and quizzes.
How it works
- Enter your email below and click to pay the one-time $18. Card details are entered on Stripe’s secure page.
- You’re in straight away — no password to create, and nothing to set up or manage.
- You stay signed in. If you’re ever signed out, or you read on a new phone or computer, we’ll email you a code to get you back in.
- Never auto-renews. Your pass is good for one year. We will email you when it expires so you can renew if you’d like.
See our site policies for more information.
or sign in
Already a subscriber? We’ll email a code to get you back in.
