Zale Perry

            For the last few days my right foot has bothered me while walking as if something was bruised in my lateral plantar, although there was nothing on the surface. On Thursday it didn’t bother me as much.

In the morning I think I finished my story “Infidelity and the Fiddler”. At least I couldn’t think of any more edits.

I found out that the wrench that I sent to my daughter helped her to remove her freewheel, so that made my day.

            I looked at the video of the songs I’d recorded on July 28, 2017 but there was only one song that came out okay. I think I said “elle” once when I should have said “il” though. For August 2 there wasn't much to keep.

            I practiced my song “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” three times.

            It rained in the afternoon and so I didn’t take a bike ride.

            I did some translations of Les Enfants du Paradis and Les Ramparts du Sud.

            I boiled a carrot and a potato, heated a chicken breast and the last of my gravy and watched two episodes of Sea Hunt.

            In the first story Mike is hired to help a scientist locate a sunken Nazi submarine off the coast of Latin America. They find the sub and Mike is about to very carefully try to penetrate the vessel. He calculates that gasses may have accumulated in the sub over the years since the war and so he knows not to use a torch for fear of an explosion. He figures where the watermark is inside the hull and so he begins to drill below it. Suddenly though two old style deep sea divers in heavy suits with hoses that extend to the surface show up and try to stop Mike. As a skin diver can move better than a hardhat diver, Mike escapes. On the surface, next to his employer’s boat is a military boat and Mike is placed under arrest for salvaging without a permit. The two divers try to get into the sub but one of them uses a torch and causes an explosion. One of the men is able to surface but Mike has to go don to save the other, who’s been stunned by the explosion. After sending him up to the surface, Mike explores the sub. He brings up a safe but we never see what’s inside.

            The second story begins with Mike working underwater with a Miss Evans from Marineland when they surface and find a man named Hale on Mike’s boat. Hale has swum all the way out to Mike's boat to ask him to become his partner in the recovery of lost barges full of gold. He says that he has a computer that can make allowance for continental drift enough to calculate the exact location of the sunken treasure. Mike gives him the test of finding a well-known wreck based on its original coordinates to prove his machine works. Hale finds the ship and so Mike agrees to become his partner. Hale brings his computer aboard, which is about the size of a three-drawer dresser. Hale refuses to let Mike look inside the crate that carries the computer and he becomes suspicious. While Hale is finding the barge, Mike looks inside the crate to discover that the machine is not a computer at all but rather a magnetic metal detector that has been stolen from the navy. Mike calls the authorities. When Hale finds that he’s been discovered they fight. Hale is much stronger than Mike but not in the water and so Mike defeats him by pulling him overboard.

            Miss Edwards was not played by an actor but by a famous skin-diver named Zale Perry. She was an instructor, the first female president of the Underwater Photographers Society, an organizer of the first Underwater Film Festival, she set a woman’s depth record in 1954, she was one of the first in North America to use a diving lung, she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated in May 1955 and she experimented with LSD in the 1950s. She was married to Parry Bivens who was the technical advisor for Sea Hunt. Zale appeared many times as an underwater stunt double on Sea Hunt and a few times as an actor. She helped to teach Lloyd Bridges how to skin dive. She also appeared on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.