Lessons From Sea Hunt

There is a regular program on a nostalgia channel. It is Sea Hunt. Sea Hunt was around from about 1958 to the early 60s sometime. It featured Lloyd Bridges as Mike Nelson, the show’s main character. He was a scuba diver for hire. Every week he had some great undersea adventure. I tuned into an episode earlier today. Wow, did I learn some stuff, stuff such as; I can still think like a kid, even at 62.

The episode’s plot featured Lloyd’s own son, Jeff Bridges, as the mischievous skin-diving kid, Kelley, who along with a scuba-equipped pal, Joey, swiped some loose dynamite out of a box that was sitting unattended along a rocky shore. Attached to the TNT was an ordinary mechanical timer. High explosives and a timer; how much luck can two boys have?

Anyway, like any two lads, Kelley dared Joey to turn the dial on the timer. Naturally Joey took the dare and turned on the timer. Who wouldn’t? I mean; it was a dare, right? The timer immediately began ticking. Then the two boys put on their air tanks and dove down into the ocean depths with dynamite in hand, its timer running. Joey decided to explore an underwater cave while holding the dynamite. Why not? It was a really neat cave. Unfortunately Joey promptly got his leg stuck under a fallen rock there inside the cave.

Aside from the problem with the rock, the boys had not done anything that I would not have done at that age, assuming I had skin-diving equipment. I mean, there isn’t a boy alive who doesn’t want to get his hands on some dynamite. Generally the best a kid can do is score some fireworks, and even then the lad might well get yelled at by an over-protective parent or some needlessly concerned adult. When it comes to that type of destructive fare, I think the only thing I would have wanted more than a half dozen sticks of dynamite would have been a bazooka and the accompanying ammo, that is; if I were a kid. I was going to say that I would have wanted a fully equipped army tank but at age 11 I would not have been tall enough to reach the pedals. And as for the skin-diving; the undersea world would be like a boy-heaven.

Anyhow, it took the heroics of the adult Mike Nelson to defuse the dynamite and then rescue the pinned kid from his underwater predicament. Afterwards, up on the boat, for some reason Mike felt compelled to give the two kids a lecture on the dangers of explosives, as well as the hazards of scuba-diving without adult supervision. I can just imagine myself in the place of Joey during those torturous moments, I’d be looking at Mike as he yapped away, and be thinking to myself; How long are you going to keep talking, you old fuddy-duddy? I’ve got a Pee Wee football game in an hour and the field is a half hour away by bicycle.

Anyway, just to shut Mike up, the guys politely answered, “Yes sir” at the end of the boring lecture when asked if they understood their mistake… yeah, as if there were a mistake. Kelley and Joey probably had their fingers crossed anyway. Everyone knows that’s how a kid can say something untruthful without it counting as a lie.

Obviously the show was not particularly realistic. I mean, how many kids are going to be lucky enough to find a box of forgotten dynamite?