Sea Hunt

Mike Nelson:
By this time, my lungs were aching for air...

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] Getting through that vortex and into the cave would take all the strength and skill I had - plus a lot of luck. It turned out that a lot of it was bad luck.

Mike Nelson:
I wanted a starfish to pose with, and it was sitting on a live wire - bionically speaking.

Kathryn Drayton:
He invented a device that measures electrical current underwater... and it killed him.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] There she was - the cave. Like a big craggy jaw, waiting to snap at anything that came along.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
The sun wasn't fully up, yet. The plane couldn't be seen from ashore. The only other man aboard was the pilot. He was the man who persuaded me to come along. 'Persuaded' did I say? I really didn't have any choice.

[final line]

Mike Nelson:
Crazy, man - crazy.

Todd Webster:
You don't win in court on hearsay - you need evidence. Miss Nicholson, forgive me, but if this is murder, we don't even have a body to prove it.

Mike Nelson:
What if I can find the body?

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] I was careful entering the grotto but not careful enough. The current became a furious rapids. I lost control, and I didn't dare think what must have happened to Sherry. I was losing hope of ever finding her. In fact, I was wondering if I would ever get back, myself.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] The fish looked like good eating, but it made a deadly breakfast. It was to have a weird effect on these two friends of mine. I thought that I had no part in their affairs that morning, yet within a few hours, because of that fish, they both tried to kill me.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] I had to find Dr. Singh within the next ten minutes. After that, when and if I found him, about the only thing that I'd be able to do for him would be to bury him. As close as I could figure, he had less than ten minutes of air left in his tank.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] He looked like Mike Nelson. He acted like Mike Nelson. The trouble was - he was not Mike Nelson.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
A Coast Guard cutter had set me adrift on a rubber raft a few miles from shore. When I got in close enough, I had sunk the raft with its equipment and supplies. That way, if I ran into any questions on this supposedly deserted island, I might be able to get by with a shipwreck story. My name's Mike Nelson: professional diver. This trip, I was working for the government. If somebody was setting up a base here, they wanted to know it.

Mike Nelson:
If the Count of Monte-Cristo could do it, there's no reason why I can't do it.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] It was almost impossible to believe. My hard hat diving partner, Mack, had vanished completely in no time at all. One minute he'd been trudging along behind me - the next he was gone. He just couldn't move that fast in lead diving boots - only he had.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
I was minding my own business underwater when the police chief of a coastal city came looking for me.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] I was pinned to the ocean bottom with 6,000 pounds of metal across my legs.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
I was in tropical waters off the coast of a small Latin American country, minding what I thought was my own business. This was purely a pleasure dive, and I was having fun poking through an interesting wreck. It was one that I hadn't seen before. [another skin diver ambushes Mike] Suddenly, it looked as though it might be the last wreck that I would ever see. I thought I had the situation under control, but when I got to the surface with my attacker, I found that my troubles were only beginning.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] I didn't know that before the day ended I'd be fighting for my life over a woman - and a buried treasure.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
I was on my way deep into the jungle areas of a small Latin-American country at the request of a U.S. Government agency. For a professional diver, this was going a long way away from water, but just the same, water was my objective - a pool of water - a sacred pool filled with ancient terrors and strange dangers, and holding secrets which had been undisturbed for centuries.

[first lines]

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] I was diving in the Red Sea with my friend, Jim Barry, an archiologist. I was helping him on one of his projects. We were searching underwater for the remains of an ancient temple, which Jim felt was more than a legend. Suddenly Jim's wife, Anne, tossed our slate overboard. The slate said, "Come up". That could mean only one thing - trouble.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] I took off in search of the missing 3rd mate, not even suspecting that he was deliberately on his way to what might be murder.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] Jerry Blaine and I were packed like sardines in a submarine's escape trunk. Our bodies - under a pressure of nearly 100 pounds per square inch. Our minds - under even greater pressure. Facing endless hours in these cramped quarters 165 feet below the surface, this man, who had won the Medal of Honor for bravery in the stratosphere, was now in the icy irrational grip of claustrophobia.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
We had beached our boat on an uninhabited island off the coast of Mexico. There were three of us: Liz Brenner, whom I had known for a long time, - Stan Brenner, her husband, whom I hardly knew, - and myself, Mike Nelson. The Brenners had invited me to join them on their expedition. It was to explore an Aztec ceremonial pool on the island.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] I was right. We weren't the only form of life in that pool.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
Outside an underwater cave off the California coast, two divers unfurled a tough wirey net. A few moments later, a third diver emerged from the cave. Before he knew what was going on, he was deliberately emmeshed in the net. He wasn't released from it 'til he was dead. I didn't know the divers, and nobody knew what had happened, but I was on active duty with the Coast Guard at that time. I'm a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and the death resulted in my being summoned to a handsome beach house a few days later. As I walked to the house, I had no idea that I was, even then, inviting my own murder.

[first lines]

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] Corrine Baker was one of the nicest people I had ever known, and one of the best divers I'd ever trained. But she had one bad habit - that of diving alone, in spite of my repeated warnings. She was the wife of Dr. Dick Baker, and being a doctor's wife, she thought she could handle just about anything that came along. But the girl who could handle just about anything was about to meet something that she couldn't handle.

Mike Nelson:
The bullets were above me, and the sharks were below me.

[last lines]

Ann Prescott:
I don't know how to thank you, Mike. Mike, have you ever been kissed by a paleontologist?

Mike Nelson:
[about to be kissed] By a paleontologist? No - I don't think I even know how to spell the word.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] Dean's blood went cold. The octopus was moving forward to attack.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
Underwater: That's where I do my work. But one of the most harrowing jobs in my entire experience started fifty feet above the water, when I found myself in a helicopter circling over a sunken ship, which was loaded with deadly explosives. I had to get to that ship the hard way. [jumps into ocean from helicopter] Getting away from it later was to prove even harder.

Mike Nelson:
[underwater narration with great excitement] I was being attacked - by something unseen! Weird! Evil! Like a swarm of gnats - millions of them - stabbing into my ears - my eyes - my nose! Deep into the marrow of my bones! Where did they come from? The grotto, maybe. I had to find out.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
Kelp is a beautiful underwater growth. It forms underwater gardens, dense jungles, but sometimes graveyards. To swim through a kelp forest, a diver needs a good knife and plenty of experience, or he may end up like Dan Morgan.

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] In my anxiety to locate Morgan, I didn't notice that I had lost Mrs. Morgan.

[first lines]

Mike Nelson:
Unfortunately, just a few skindivers of the wrong kind can give diving a bad name. That's why when Pete Bates hauled up his lobster pots one day in June and found them empty, he was plenty angry - figured that he had run into some skindiver trouble. But what he didn't know was that it was soon to become the worst trouble of his life.

[opening narration]

Mike Nelson:
This device is an experimental underwater radio. I was transmitting a voice signal to my friend, Chuck Barron, the inventor of it. He was a member of my underwater flotilla and the Coast Guard Auxiliary. We were making some tests on the tranmitter receiver, hoping to present it to the Navy. I had left Chuck a few hundred feet away. He was going to home in on my signal. It was taking too long. I was beginning to worry. Something was wrong. I didn't have much air left, and that meant that Chuck didn't, either. If he didn't surface soon, he never would.

[opening lines]

Mike Nelson:
[narrating] I had been hired as the saftey man for a new stunt in a water ski show. It was to be performed by the star, Hal Peters. The stunt would be a thriller, if he could live through it. It was a deliberate fall from a kite 100 feet in the air.