Not too many people know their office equipment as well as Terry Kerby knows his. He spends five months every year taking his apart and then putting it back together, piece by piece. Then again, not too many people rely on their gear to survive at more than 6,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.
Kerby is chief pilot at the University of Hawaii’s Hawai‘i Undersea Research Laboratory, commanding its two submersible vehicles, the Pisces IV and the Pisces V, to explore the depths of the ocean. It’s a position that gives him "a big rush, like it’s the first time," every time he dives, yet the danger involved is enough to generate chills as well.
"There’s 32 places where water can get in," said Kerby, referring to the various valves and seals on the subs’ spherical crew compartments. "At 2,000 meters deep the pressure is at 3,000 psi, and the water would slice right through the steel if there was any kind of leak."
In 2013 he was exploring Oahu’s southwest coast, piloting Pisces V with two archaeologists, looking for an unusually shaped object — "an anomaly" in the scientific jargon that Kerby commonly uses — that appeared on sonar maps of the region. It turned out to be the I-400, a Japanese supersubmarine that was scuttled in 1946. It was the latest, and one of the greatest, discoveries of sunken vessels that Kerby and his team have made in Hawaii waters.
"We’ve found about 140 so far, including landing craft and so forth, but a lot of those are really significant historic sites," Kerby said.
Among those finds are the USS Bennington of President Teddy Roosevelt’s "Great White Fleet," which circumnavigated the globe from 1907 to 1909 and later served as a barge for Matson, and "Ward’s Midget," a small Japanese submarine sunk by the USS Ward outside Pearl Harbor early on Dec. 7, 1941, about an hour before the air assault began.
There can be some nervous moments exploring the ocean depths. In 2005, Kerby was investigating another anomaly in the Pisces IV with fellow pilot Max Cremer in the Pisces V. As was standard procedure, they hopscotched along the ocean floor, one sub nesting in safe, clear water, the other searching downcurrent, alternating as they moved.
"We could tell it was a big ship, a big vessel of some kind," Kerby said of the anomaly. "There were these big (sonar) contacts coming up off the bottom, and one of them was coming up way off the bottom. We were maybe five meters away from it trying to identify what this thing was, coming up 30 feet off the bottom, and all of a sudden Pisces V’s silt cloud drifted down with the current and we were totally obscured, with no visibility. So all we had was our sonar and our little map to know where to get to safe water."
The looming object turned out to be the aircraft hangar of the I-401, the sister sub of the I-400.
Such discoveries are essentially freebies from the Hawai‘i Undersea Research Laboratory to history, because they are conducted while Kerby and his team are testing the submersibles after their annual maintenance checkups. "There’s no funding for dedicated targeting of specific targets," Kerby said. "These historic wreck site dives are what we’ve been doing on our own nickel on our test dives."
While such discoveries tend to generate funding — the Ward’s Midget find generated eight documentaries — the submersibles program is chiefly funded by science. The research lab gets grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, universities and institutions worldwide to transport scientists to the Pacific floor for two to three months every year to gather samples and film sea life.
"We may be out there doing coral dives, and that group (of scientists) goes away, and then we’re doing fisheries dives, and that group goes away, and then we’re going to Loihi (an active submarine volcano off Hawaii island) and we’re doing hydrothermal vents," he said.
The lab’s longest scientific expedition was in 2005, when the crew spent five months diving in the southwestern Pacific.
"We dove on 13 active submarine volcanoes between Samoa and New Zealand," Kerby said. "In my 33 years, that was the highlight. Every dive was pure exploration. We found some unbelievable stuff on those volcanoes."
Kerby grew up in California’s Sierra Nevadas, but, inspired by "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau" television specials, he developed an early fascination for the sea.
"I grew up in a small town (Bass Lake) with a big lake in it, and that was my ocean," said Kerby, who as a college student studied geology and art and now paints enchanting "underwaterscapes" inspired by his voyages.
As a young man, he served in the Coast Guard for five years, earning a commendation for a nighttime rescue of two people trapped under an overturned boat. He later attended a dive school in California, and came to Hawaii in 1976 to work collecting coral and other materials for Maui Divers Jewelry, which trained him in piloting submersibles.
After the company ended its sub program, Kerby’s diving skills enabled him to get jobs working in film and television, including the "Mysteries of the Sea" specials with famed oceanographer Sylvia Earle and feature films such as the "The Abyss" and the James Bond film "For Your Eyes Only."
"I was wrangling tiger sharks," he said of the Bond film. "They would go catch tiger sharks at night, and the four of us were shark handlers, so we would launch the tiger sharks into the sea and then swim after them and bring them back. Nowadays they just do it all digitally, but back then you had to go catch them and use them until they got away."
That was nothing compared with his first experience with a shark, a great white named Sandy who was being held at Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco. Sandy wasn’t doing well, and it was decided to release her into the wild off the Farallon Islands. Kerby was supposed to guide the listless creature into view of the television news cameras before the release.
"That shark paused for just a second, and it just exploded into life," Kerby said. "And that shark gave me the ride of my life. It went down first and then up, and then it did this arched twist and just bucked me off."
Kerby got his job with the Hawai‘i Undersea Research Laboratory in 1981. He was driving past the lab’s pier in Makapuu when a small sub was being pulled out of the water. "That had been my passion, submersibles," he said. "I drove down on the pier just to check it out, and they hired me."
Now a trim 64-year-old who swims two miles a day during his lunch break, Kerby leads a team of five engineers — himself, pilot Cremer, support tech Douglas Bloedorn, chief of maintenance Steven Price and electronics technician Colin Wollerman — and two graduate students. Last year he trained the team in the use of an old launch and recovery transport, a platform that can be towed behind a tugboat and submerged to launch and collect the submersibles, like an aircraft carrier serving as a runway for airplanes. Using the transports reduces the cost of a dive to about $15,000 a day — a savings of $60,000.
"It was brutal," he said. "We were going seven days a weeks for two months, nonstop. So we’d dive a day, service a day, nonstop," Kerby said, adding that a typical day, from pre-dive preparation to post-dive servicing of the submersible, can last 12 to 14 hours.
"I feel like with the crew I have now, I can do anything."
For all the intriguing scientific and historical expeditions Kerby has been involved in, he has experienced sentimental journeys as well.
"One of the most rewarding things for us is the veterans we’ve met and the closure it has brought," he said. After his team found Ward’s Midget, they made another dive filmed by a Japanese television crew to gather sediment from the area to give to the families of the lost seamen.
"That’s all they have left, and that little bit of sediment scoop got parceled out to all these different families and went into a temple," he said.
He’s also taken a crew member of the USS Ward down to the site, and when the Ward’s accomplishment was honored in 2005 at a special Pearl Harbor memorial — the sinking was little noticed by Navy Command leaders when it happened and almost forgotten over time — Kerby’s team was invited.
"They called and said, ‘You guys gotta be here, because without you this wouldn’t be happening.’ That was a special treat," he said.
KERBY and his team keep the two Pisces subs — the last two still operating out of the original 10 — spotlessly clean and looking brand new, though they are 40 years old. Obtained at a total cost of about $550,000 — replacing the two now would cost millions — they are, as manned vehicles, "an endangered species," Kerby said. "Little by little they’re being replaced by automated vehicles."
The research laboratory, in fact, recently acquired an automated submersible, and his team is testing it, but Kerby thinks there’s still a need for manned vehicles. A case in point is a mission planned for this fall targeting one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century: Amelia Earhart’s final destination.
The team will travel to Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands, an archipelago that lies roughly midway between Hawaii and Australia, to search for Earhart’s airplane. She was last heard on radio in July 1937, searching in vain for Howland Island 400 miles north of Nikumaroro, but some photographic and other evidence suggests she might have reached Nikumaroro.
Last year, a search there using two robots had to be called off after five days. The robots couldn’t negotiate the rugged seafloor, Kerby said.
"On those atolls (the terrain) goes straight out on a reef about knee deep, and then it goes straight down," Kerby said. "The Pisceses are perfect for that kind of terrain, and we can see things with the human eye down there that you can’t see (on camera)."
The Earhart mission is one of two that has Kerby particularly excited. The other is closer to home but, like the discovery of the I-400, will likely come by chance. That would be the I-23, a 356-foot Japanese submarine whose discovery would shed light on a little-known bit of history, "the second attack on Pearl Harbor," Kerby said.
With a crew of 96, the I-23 was positioned 10 miles outside of Pearl Harbor to provide reconnaissance for a mission to destroy the port’s repair shipyard, which was still functioning after the Dec. 7 attack. According to Japanese records, the sub sent several communiques in February 1942 but then suddenly stopped. Kerby suspects some kind of failure doomed the vessel.
"Can you imagine finding that and what that would do to open up this whole bit of history?" Kerby said. "It’s our ultimate target, and probably the ultimate needle in the haystack."
