At the time, it was also a catastrophe of sorts. I was a freshman in high school, and I desperately wanted to wrestle and play baseball. No dice. I spent my ninth-grade year with casts on my legs. As soon as they were off, so was I — off getting into trouble again.
Without athletics to absorb my time and energy, my mother hit on a new tack: getting me a job. Soon before my 13th birthday, she introduced me to a man named Bill Magee, who owned the Peace a charter dive boat in Ventura Harbor. Bill offered to let me work on his boat.
I worked on the Peace all summer, every summer, for the next few years. Everything about being on that dive boat, with the tantalizing possibility of adventure outside the harbor and west to the Channel Islands, completely captivated me. It’s no exaggeration to say that going to work on the Peace changed the course of my life.
Bill Magee was one of the nicest men I’ve ever known. He and the boat’s captain, Michael Roach, were like fathers to me. They watched out for me and entrusted me with a lot of responsibility. I had not really had that experience before. They showed me a whole new side to the concept of respect. They instilled in me the belief that I could be somebody and do something special with my life.
Bill had made some money in construction. He eventually sold a successful roofing company up in the Bay Area, which allowed him to fulfill a dream I expect he’d held on to for some time. Sport diving was his hobby, and he had put a chunk of the proceeds from the company’s sale into the Peace — cashed in his chips and taken to the sea.
Captain Roach was the perfect complement to Bill, the classic salty Irish sea captain. He taught me how to give a firm handshake and look a man straight in the eye when you are talking to him.
Bill Magee was also pretty wild — the Hugh Hefner of the high seas. Bill had a new girlfriend every week, usually about half his age, and he was always throwing hot tub parties (I believe the Peace was the first boat to feature a hot tub) with lots of women, alcohol, and God knows what else. Strictly speaking, the Peace was a dive boat, which meant that people were paying to be taken out scuba diving. Unofficially, it was also a hell of a party boat. We’d take our passengers on tours of the Channel Islands off Ventura. We’d take out groups of divers four at a time — and in between dives, when we were anchored up for the night, we would party. Bill would front me a few hundred dollars so I could sit down and join the interminable poker games. Here I was, at 13, drinking Scotch and playing poker with the guys.
At the same time, diving was no joke. When you weren’t on an anchor watch, it was fine to whoop it up and party, but when you were on, you had to be on. You had to know your limits and capacities. I didn’t know it at the time, but that proved to be great preparation for the Navy SEALs.
As the low man on the totem pole, I often got the chores on the Peace that nobody else wanted to do. One of these was diving down, whenever the anchor got stuck, to get in there and free it. This often happened in the middle of the night. Many were the times I was rousted out of deep sleep to hear, “Wake up, Brandon! We have to move and the anchor is stuck. Get your wet suit on— you’re going in.”
I’d dive down there with a flashlight, scared shitless. It was a hell of a way to get over one’s fear of sharks, let alone fear of the dark.
Sometimes I would get to depth only to find the anchor wedged under a one-ton ledge that was being rocked off the ocean floor by the boat’s weight and the pull of sea swell on the surface. With a blast of air, I would signal the guy pulling the anchor to let out some slack in the chain. I would then go to work untangling the mess. A second blast of air to the surface would signal that my work was done. At that point, the crew would haul the anchor up while I stayed below, watching to make sure it had come fully clear of the bottom. Often it would get stuck again, and I’d have to repeat the entire routine. When it was finally clear, I would blast a final jet of air to signal where I was and alert them to my position and ascent. Once back on board, I would run through a fast hot shower and try to get in some hurried shut-eye before the break of the new day. It was terrifying, and I loved it.
This is Part I of a series. Stay tuned for Part II.
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