Lure of lost ships leads to lifelong obsession
Star of 'Deep Sea Detectives' and 'Shadow Divers' reflects on two decades of wreck diving
BY PATRICIA A. MILLER Staff Writer
At first it was all about the loot. Loot from shipwrecks. Famous shipwrecks like the Andrea Doria. Young Richie Kohler couldn't scoop up enough goodies at the beginning of his professional wreck-diving career.

ERIC SUCAR staff Richard Kohler leafs through one of the many books he has on German U-boats in his Brick home last Thursday. Kohler, one of the cohosts of the History Channel show "Deep Sea Detectives," was also profiled in the 2004 best seller "Shadow Divers." He is standing next to a replica of U-869, a sub he and John Chatterton identified back in the late 1990s off the New Jersey coast.

"In the beginning, getting trinkets was important," said Kohler, now 46, during an interview in his Brick Township home. "But once you fill your cabinets up with a bunch of crap, after a while you realize it's just stuff."

His fascination with loot changed with U-869, a German submarine that sank 60 miles off the New Jersey coast in February 1945. Identifying the doomed sub became an obsession for both Kohler and John Chatterton, his friend and diving partner of many years.

Kohler wanted some loot from the sub, too. He wanted it until he saw the bones and skulls of the sailors who had died in it.

"The men lay where they fell," he said quietly. "Some in the tattered remnants of their uniforms."

These days Kohler focuses more on the history of a wreck and the men who perished on her than he does on artifacts. But he has plenty of trinkets carefully displayed in his Brick home. Dishes and cups from the Andrea Doria, a metal tag that definitively identified U-869, a small rectangular plastic box with two pea-sized pieces of rusted metal, from the Titanic.

"You have a piece of the Titanic in your hands," he said to a recent visitor.

Kohler and Chatterton co-hosted the History Channel's popular series "Deep Sea Detectives," which aired from 2003 through 2006. They are also the subjects of the bestselling book "Shadow Divers," and are featured in the new book "Titanic's Final Secrets."

Boats and the water have been a part of Kohler's life since he was a boy in Brooklyn. His father taught him how to steer and crew on their sport fishing boats. He began scuba diving and spear fishing as a teenager in Florida.

His obsession with deep wreck diving began the day Kohler, who was working in his father's glass business, made a repair call to a scuba shop on Long Island. A photo of the Andrea Doria was on the wall. Kohler couldn't take his eyes off it. The owner later introduced Kohler to the members of the Atlantic Wreck Divers, a rowdy but top-notch group of deep shipwreck divers. He was hooked. The group members taught him well.

Technical wreck diving in the treacherous North Atlantic is not a sport. The water is cold and dark. People dive, and sometimes they don't come back.

"It's not sport diving," Kohler said. "All of a sudden, someone you just had a sandwich with two hours ago, their dead body is in a bag in the back of the boat. Some people don't react well to that and give up diving. Those fatalities all serve to whittle away at the percentage of people who will go to shipwrecks."

Like all divers who live to tell about it, Kohler has had his share of panic in the ocean depths. "I've been in trouble quite a few times," he said. "If you're inside a shipwreck, you've stirred up the visibility. You have to feel your way back out. Sometimes things happen."

He doesn't forget the men who have died. Men like Chris and Chrissy Rouse, a father-and-son team who panicked on a dive to U-869 in October 1992.

"Every dive I've made ever since then, that's in the back of my mind," Kohler said on the PBS documentary "Hitler's Lost Sub," a two-hour piece on U-869.

Chrissy Rouse had become trapped in a section of the battered sub. By the time his father was able to free him, both men were dangerously short of air and victims of nitrogen

narcosis. Their judgment was impaired. Instead of swimming toward the anchor line, where they could safely decompress, they swam away from it, then shot toward the surface. Surfacing without decompression is fatal.

"You're signing your own death warrant," Kohler said.

Chris Rouse died on the back of the Seeker, despite Chatterton's lengthy efforts to revive him. Chrissy Rouse died in a decompression chamber in a hospital several hours later.

It wasn't the first time Kohler had witnessed fellow divers die on board. And chances are, it won't be the last.

Divers die because they failed their equipment, not the other way around, Kohler says adamantly.

"It's always the diver failing the equipment," he said. "We carry redundant systems. That didn't need to happen. The reason they died is because of panic. You give up control. Panic killed the Rouses. Panic is the diver's enemy.

"Panic usually starts in the groin or abdomen," Kohler said. "It's visceral. Panic is like fire. It will jump from person to person."

When panic starts, a diver should close his or her eyes, he said.

"I close my eyes until I focus," Kohler said. "As long as you are breathing and as long as you can take your two hands and grab your ass, you're not lost. When you think you are lost, it's probably one of the most frightening things for a person. You have to slow down, almost as if you are moving through syrup."

Kohler said he was shocked by the success of "Shadow Divers," which chronicles their race to identify U-869. The book also delves into Kohler's and Chatterton's private lives, which Kohler was not happy about.

"That's not what he sold us when he showed up," he said, waving Robert Kurson's book at a visitor. "I think it's a great book. I cringed a little at the bumps and warts. But he wrote a book that really speaks to people that have never been diving. He wrote a 'Perfect Storm' for diving. It's a true-life adventure story."

Kohler and Chatterton met back in the early 1990s, on the charter boat "The Seeker."

The two men didn't like each other at first. Chatterton didn't care for the raucous Atlantic Wreck Divers.

"I came from New York, he came from New Jersey," Kohler said, shaking his head. "John thinks diving should be a lot more serious."

But their work on U-869 cemented their friendship. Chatterton, who used to live in Mantoloking, now lives in Maine with his wife Carla. The two men talk on the phone nearly every day.

"We have lots of business deals we are working on," Kohler said.

The two men teamed up again in 2005, when they pooled their resources to fund an expedition to the "Titanic."

The peripatetic Kohler has a dizzying schedule slated for late winter and early spring, including diving workshops, a Bonne Terre Mine Dive in Missouri, a wreck expedition in Thailand, and a diving conference in Australia.

"My life's a wreck," he says with a smile. For more information, go to the Web sites www.richiekohler.com or www.U-869.com.