MARBLEHEAD — Michael Lafayette is drawn to the ocean, its living and its dead.
Take the Andrea Doria. The Italian luxury liner sank off Nantucket following a collision with another passenger ship in 1956. The vessel went down slowly, her death agony captured on camera. Most aboard got off before she rolled on her side and dipped below the surface.
The death toll could have been in the hundreds except for swift action by surrounding vessels. Even so, it's believed 46 perished.
On the bottom, attacked by ocean organisms and swept by cross currents, the Andrea Doria hasn't done well. Still on her side, the superstructure has dropped to the sandy bottom, leaving a thing resembling a faceless corpse.
Not that anyone has seen it. It's too dark to see much of anything at 240 feet. "You really want to have your wits about you," Lafayette says. "There's very little light."
The Andrea Doria is a favorite wreck for divers like Lafayette, 44, who made his first visit earlier this summer. The first sign of the wreck that came into view was the rail where passengers would have gathered to board the lifeboats. Then the massive hull.
"It took my breath away," he says.
He stopped and took it in — visibility was about 20 feet. "It seems like it's talking to you."
A siren's song. As if cheated by the rescue, the Andrea Doria has been jealously compensating since 1981, drawing as many as 15 divers to their deaths.
Lafayette knew that, which is why he prepared so carefully, training two years. He carried five tanks, with a different gas for different depths.
"Oxygen becomes toxic at certain depths," he explains. "Nitrogen becomes a narcotic."
He teamed with other veteran divers. It's a small fraternity of those with the interest and money to pursue that interest. Training and equipment cost roughly $15,000.
Once, on a deep dive off Gloucester, Lafayette saw a partner entangled in netting. "You get stuck in the stuff, it's not good news. Like a fish, you get more and more stuck." He reached for a knife — one of his four cutting tools. "I just worked my way around his equipment cutting him free."
Keeping calm is key. Training stresses "overcoming fear" and "problem solving" over diving technology. None of which puts wife Heather Cairns at ease.
"She hates it," he admits. "I know I'm putting her through some emotional distress. ... My entire family doesn't understand why I do it."
Asked about it, Cairns makes no effort to hide her displeasure. On his Andrea Doria dive, Lafayette was out of touch for 31âÑ2 days, leaving Heather to wonder and to worry.
Newcomers to the Neck
At their newly built home on Marblehead Neck, anyone might wonder why they'd leave at all. It's a bright, airy house. Cairns designed it herself, and it looks down the rocks and across a narrow beach to the Atlantic. Cairns grew up on West Shore Drive and later moved to California.
Both she and her husband have been fabulously successful.
Born in Maine, son of a salesman and a nurse, Lafayette worked in marketing for Monster, the online job search company, and Cairns was among online giant Google's first half-dozen employees.
They met while volunteering at the New England Aquarium and married on the lawn of their dream house last year. Looking out to the ocean, Lafayette notes that he'll sometimes suit up and dive in, catching dinner for guests.
The garage has been transformed into a diving shop he calls the Orca Lounge. Wet suits hang on one side; tanks are lined up on the other. In Antarctica, he accompanied filmmaker Jonathan Bird.
"The water is crystal-clear," Lafayette says, but animals are rare.
He remembers the underside of massive glacial bergs, the haze of fresh water dissolving into the ocean around them creating the illusion of "a beautiful blue light bulb" suspended in water.
It was cold — 32 degrees — but so is deep water everywhere. Lips and eyebrows are the only bit of flesh exposed during a dive.
"It hurts," Lafayette says, touching his eyebrow. "It burns." Then it goes numb.
You know it's time to come out when your hands, encased in thick mittens, are numb, too.
Cairns also dives, but only in warm water.
The pair explored a cave in Hawaii, for example.
At one point, a white shark appeared at the mouth of the cave. Lafayette turned protectively.
Cairns signaled urgently — she wanted her husband to take a picture.
Next, Lafayette is considering a job that would have him retrieving environmental monitors from deep below Massachusetts Bay. In the meantime, both are relieved that the stress of the Andrea Doria is behind them.
"We both celebrated the dive," he says. "And now we can enjoy the summer with no worries."
