Glutton for Punishment

The inexplicable lure of discomfort

Enduring discomfort to get the shot is nothing new. (photo: Louis Marie Auguste Boutan, c. 1899)

Underwater, no one can hear you scream. Well, that’s not entirely true. But I had little sense that my dive chum, Chris, was in any sort of discomfort, that he’d lost feeling in his fingers, or that his drysuit had become an unintended (and undesired) wetsuit in the 42°F water (5°C). I was hovering at 110 feet, below the bow of the sunken car ferry Milwaukee, aiming my dive torch artfully at the wrecked ship, posing for a photo as Chris composed the shot on the lake bed. He’d dragged an ancient, heavy tripod down to serve as a stable platform for a slow shutter speed photo he’d been envisioning in his head all winter. As it turns out, it wasn’t exactly the shot he wanted. This early in the Great Lakes dive season, only one marker buoy bobbed above the wreck and it was over the bow. We’d been aiming for the more dramatic tangle of destruction at the stern, but to swim hundreds of feet to get there, towing the tripod, at that depth, would not be pleasant, much less safe. So now that we were here, might as well make the most of it.