Cindy lee van dover biography of mahatma

Cindy Lee Van Dover holds membership in a most exclusive boys’ club: Of 42 gearheads, engineers, and former Navy commanders who have piloted the submersible Alvin—the stubby, three-crew midget research sub that explored the Titanic—she is the only woman.

Cindy lee van dover biography of mahatma

“The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Van Dover says, “was to become an Alvin pilot.”

To earn pilot certification takes months of training, memorizing the language of check valves, autoclaves, ballast systems, oxygen monitors, electrical systems, and a Rube-Goldberg system of mechanical levers and knobs.

You must master and execute it all 2 miles underwater, where there’s no other way up or out. Since Van Dover’s first piloted dive in 1990, she has descended into the ocean 235 times, discovering dozens of exotic invertebrates living off hydrothermal vents.

Even as a kid who spent summers flipping horseshoe crabs and inspecting snail eggs on the beach, all she wanted, she says