Tivo caught an old episode of the History Channel’s Deep Sea Detectives for me this week. This is one of my favorite shows (I seem to have alot of these don’t I?) so I have a longstanding season pass for it. I surprised to see it was actually an episodeI hadn’t seen before. On, Deep Sea Detectives the hosts, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, investigate unidentified or mysterious ship wrecks through a combination of diving and historical research.

As a scuba diver and maritime history buff this show was custom made for me! Not that the kind of diving these guys do has any relation to diving done by regular divers likeme. They’re technical divers, meaning they use mixed gases to go deeper, to scarier, darker places than those of us who like to look a pretty reef fish. Its the difference between day hikers and the guys who climb Everest. Chatterton and Kohler became famous after Robert Kurson published a book called Shadow Divers about their efforts to successfully identify the wreck of a German U-Boat off the coast of NJ which all of the available records said shouldn’t be there (great book, I’ve reread it three times already): Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

In this episode, they were exploring Loch Ness, for Nessie. Every season they do about one episode on a non-shipwreck underwater mystery like Nessie or the underwater Mayan temples in Mexico. After talking to a host of scientists, eye-witnesses, and locals they did do a couple of dives in Loch Ness to look for caves in which a large predator might live. No, they weren’t attacked or eaten, nor did they find any caves. They determined that while it was scientifically possible for a creature of that size to live in the loch, they couldn’t prove or disprove its existence. What a shock. Pretty much the same thing every other documentary on Nessie concluded. I would have written this episode off except for the diving in the loch. These two seasoned pros said that this lake was the scariest diving they had ever done. Because of the peat in the water, it is extremely dark underwater. They had problems with their communication systems, lights, and handheld sonar. And I’ll tell you as a diver, seeing the scenes they shot underwater, I’m know I would have been freaked out. Even though this wasn’t one of their best episodes, Deep Sea Detectives is still a great show. I really enjoyed coming across one that I hadn’t seen before.