Meeting Legendary Shipwreck Explorers Richie & Katy Kohler – Part 1 of 2

Hey everyone, guess who I got to meet?!

I visited Richie and Katy Kohler (@KatyKuhls & @11th.Hour_imaging), who are famous shipwreck explorers and underwater archaeologists. Richie got famous for figuring out a sunken submarine off the coast of New Jersey as the German U-boat 869 that sank during World War II. There’s a book about his adventure doing this with John Chatterton as they worked to figure out the U-boat mystery. It’s called Shadow Divers if you want to check it out.

Richie has also discovered a bunch of shipwrecks since then, got to go to the Titanic in a submersible, and explores the sister ship of the Titanic called the Britannic. He also co-hosted a show on the History Channel called Deep Sea Detectives where they solved underwater mysteries all over the world!

And Katy Kohler is amazing too. She is his wife. She explores deep shipwrecks with Richie and a team. But guess what? Aside from being a technical diver she is also a helicopter pilot, EMT, firefighter, and photographer!

It was a lot of fun meeting them and learning about all of their cool adventures and work. I got to go to their house and interview them together and see a bunch of amazing artifacts. We spent a lot of time talking, and Richie is such a great storyteller I wanted to listen to his stories all day long. Their house is amazing and the artifacts they have collected from the deep sea are the coolest.

We were at their house for a few hours while I did my interview with them and also got to watch video footage and look at artifacts, so there’s a lot to write about. I did research before we went to their house and made a list of interview questions. Here are some things that I learned:

Question: Describe what you thought when you first saw the Titanic.
Richie knew that he was going to see the Titanic for 8 months, so he had a lot of time to prepare for it. They wanted to contribute to knowledge instead of just doing a TV show of the Titanic. He said that they were going there to film and find something that was never seen before. When Richie climbed into the submersible to head down to the Titanic, he was also with other people: a guy controlling the submarine and a photographer. They were all crammed in a small diameter, waiting two and a half hours before they could see the Titanic because they were just sinking down slowly in the dark.

Richie said it was the most exciting moment in his life when they finally got to see the Titanic. He had to look through a really small port window to see it. He said all he could say was “unbelievable” over and over. He said there are not any human remains anymore, but when the Titanic sank it dragged people down with it that had life vests on who had already escaped the ship and were in the water. There were creepy human shoes and jackets that were still down there where people’s bodies just disintegrated. The diving team looked for parts of the ship that would explain why it sank so quickly. Richie executive produced Titanic’s Final Moments – Missing Pieces about what they found out that day and has a great story to tell.

I asked him if he was scared and he had great advice. He said he was nervous but not scared, same kind of feeling like going on a rollercoaster. It can make someone nervous, but people go on rollercoasters all the time and come off them alive. He explained to me that’s part of being an explorer, and I loved what he said: “Your exploration is pushing yourself into a place where no one else has ever gone. No one else has ever been there and you don’t know what hazards there are, but that’s the heartbeat of exploration and you’re amped up on the adrenaline of knowing you’re the first.”

Question: Tell me a little bit about discovering the U-boat.
Richie was part of a group called Atlantic Wreck Divers who were his mentors for deep diving. They didn’t have anything like nitrox, so they just dove with air and had to deal with narcosis all the time. There was also no such thing as tech diving or dive computers, so the divers going that deep had to use charts for decompression times and figure it all out over practice and time.

Later on, when he was in his 20s, his friend Kevin called him and told him that he should come with him to dive a new wreck that they thought was a German U-boat. Richie didn’t believe him because Kevin was diving with narcosis and said that he was hearing the theme music from the movie Das Boot. Richie went to dive the U-boat with Kevin when a spot opened up for him on the boat. He could then see it was definitely a submarine. Because of narcosis they couldn’t remember much, so they couldn’t trust their brains to remember everything they saw. But they were determined to figure out if the submarine was from the war.

On their fourth dive another diver, John Chatterton, brought up a bowl that had the German symbol on it, so they knew for sure the boat was from World War II. They did a bunch of research and it was not in any reports that anything sank in that spot during the war, so now they wanted to see what submarine it was, and Richie also wanted to bring up a bowl too.

The visibility was so bad that they had to memorize the path they took on their way in because on the way out they had to feel for the exit after kicking everything up with their fins on the way in. The submarine is in the shape of a tube, so even really great divers would kick stuff up on their way through. And they could only spend about 15 minutes down there each time because the decompression stops took hours.

When Richie went inside the U-boat he saw remains of the men, which was so creepy, and with narcosis, so he decided he needed to get out of there. After a couple more dives on the wreck he got used to the fact that he was going to see human remains. He did a lot of studying on the wreck and found countless amounts of artifacts. He said it became really important to them that they find out who was on the submarine so that they could tell the families what happened to their relatives.

They made a rule for themselves that they could not disrupt the remains to get any proof of the name of the boat, and then they spent 6 years trying to figure out the big mystery. You can read Shadow Divers for the whole story—it’s amazing and I got to hear about it right from Richie while I sat in his kitchen and ate grapes! This was one of my most favorite days ever.

Ok. We visited them for a while and I want to make sure to tell you as much as I can, so I just decided that I’m going to post this as a blog series. This is Part 1 of 2. Watch for Part 2 coming at you soon! Thank you for reading my blog, sea you later!

If you didn’t know already, on my 12th birthday I became the youngest female PADI Master Scuba Diver in the USA. I love diving and everything about the sea. Please continue to read my blog and you can also follow me on Instagram @underwaterwithmia.