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133 Joe and the Alligator We were on the Strawberry Wreck with a group of students in our underwater archaeology field training course when Joe Beatty had his first encounter with an alligator. The students had learned the proper methods of recording a shipwreck—measuring and drawing the frames, keel, keelson, planking, and fasteners—during classroom and pool training sessions and were now practicing these new skills “in the field.” The Strawberry Wreck lies under about twenty feet of dark water in the west branch of the Cooper River. It is out of the main channel of the river, near the remains of the old Strawberry Ferry landing. Evidence found on the wreck suggests the wooden sailing vessel was a British gunboat of the Revolutionary War period. For the FTC students, this wreck was the real thing. Lynn Harris and I were monitoring the student’s activities from our twenty-eight-foot pontoon boat. Mostly this meant just watching the divers’ bubbles. Joe Beatty had gone down with the students to act as guide. His task was to keep the students from wandering off the wreck and getting lost in the featureless river bottom around the vessel site, a surprisingly easy thing to do even though the diver might get no more than four or five feet away. Joe’s dive partner was Furman Dabbs of Sumter, a volunteer helping us with the class. The students were on the remains of the hull, doing all that measuring and drawing, when Joe exploded to the surface and began waving his arms. Once he had our attention (monitoring students’ bubbles can be distracting), he pointed down and shouted unintelligibly. Realizing he still had his regulator mouthpiece firmly between his teeth, he spit it out and shouted, “Big alligator.” The strange looks on our faces must have surprised him. Before he removed his regulator, we thought he was shouting something about a figure skater. 134 The Day the Johnboat Went up the Mountain I never saw Joe swim so fast. Back at the dive boat, he told us he was cruising around the wreck, making sure the students stayed put, when he spotted what he thought was a palm frond at the edge of his vision. In the Cooper River, the edge of vision is seldom more than a few feet. Wanting to get it out of the way, in case the students mistook it for a timber to measure, he grabbed the frond and discovered it was the tail of an alligator. He said he froze, still holding onto the creature’s tail, not knowing whether he should gently let go of the tail and slowly move away or snatch his hand back and make a hasty getaway. Before he could react, the alligator turned toward him until they were face to face mask, eyeball to bulging eyeball. He was this close, Joe said, holding his hands no more than a foot apart. The gesture reminded me of an angler showing his friends how big the fish was that got away, only exaggerated in reverse. Joe had no idea how long the encounter lasted, but when he finally let go of the alligator’s tail, he said it turned and swiftly swam away, flicking its knobby tail at him as it disappeared into the murk. Joe said the creature looked mean and nasty and had a grin like a used-car salesman. He finished his story by saying it was the biggest alligator he had ever seen. We quickly convened a conference to discuss recalling the divers in light of the figure skater, er, big alligator being in the area. We knew that alligators are not aggressive (most of the time). We knew they generally leave divers alone (unless they perceive some threat to their young). We also knew that Joe is not prone to exaggeration (most of the time), and we knew that divers generally leave underwater creatures alone (unless they perceive some threat to their young). Ultimately since the incident happened some distance from the wreck and the alligator showed no real hostile intent toward Joe, we decided to continue with the training. Nevertheless we scanned the area around the boat for the alligator, knowing it had to come up for air eventually. Sure enough a minute later the great beast surfaced. It slowly swam toward shore, no doubt exhausted by its close encounter with Joe, hauled itself onto the riverbank and into the warm rays of the sun. Joe...

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