A FATHER
AND SON’S
FATAL DESCENT
INTO THE
OCEAN’S
DEPTHS
THE
LAST DIVE
BERNIE CHOWDHURY
Dedication
For my wife, Diana, and our son, Gil
Also in memory of Chris and Chrissy Rouse and Tony Smith
Part of the proceeds of this book go to the Rouse Memorial Fund to benefit
divers worldwide through safety initiatives, research, diving site preservation,
and expedition funding.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Homer Hickam
1 Deadly Secrets
2 Prevent Your Death!
3 Pretzel Logic
4 Artifact Fever
5 Team Doria ’91
6 The Steel Cave
7 Triple Vision
8 Voice from the Deep
9 Iron Coffins
10 The Last Dive
11 Eulogy
12 Ever Deeper
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise For Bernie Chowdhury’s
Photographic Inserts
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
I FIND MYSELF HAUNTED by the Rouse family and very impressed and touched by the sensitive manner in which Bernie Chowdhury tells their story. The Last Dive is a fascinating and mesmerizing read, hard to put down. Like The Perfect Storm, it’s a deceptively simple tale about very ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations.
As an avid scuba diver, instructor, and wreck diver for more than thirty years, I know the Rouses—not personally, perhaps, but as a type of person who often gets involved with our sport. In fact, all of the divers in this story are familiar to me, although I’ve actually met only one of them. Since I was among the first divers to get aboard the U-352 and the first to research the full history of the U-85, I can fully understand the lure that the U-869 must have held for the Rouses. A sunken ship, no matter what type it is, is filled with mystery, but a sunken German U-boat seems to capture our imagination like none other. How and why did it sink? Who and what was aboard it? Why was it even there? Some divers become obsessed with trying to discover the answers, even to the point of risking their lives. They become engaged, often without fully realizing it, in a deadly competition with other divers in a game with rules they may never understand.
Although I retired from serious wreck diving before technical diving got a foothold in our sport, I, too, suffered a serious bout of decompression sickness. Oddly enough, mine—an “undeserved hit,” if there is such a thing—took place during a placid dive off the island of Guanaja in Honduras. For years, I had skirted the edges of decompression theory and occasionally crossed into uncharted theoretical territory and gotten away with it. Then, during an easy, relatively shallow dive, well within the safety limits of the decompression tables, a bubble chose to appear in my spinal cord, triggering a desperate series of events that could have left me paralyzed. Fortunately that did not happen, but there were consequences, as there always are when the nervous system is compromised. Despite the fact the damaged connective nerve tissues have since rerouted themselves, sometimes, especially when I get tired, the destruction caused by that singular bubble becomes evident to me in subtle but undeniable ways. Mr. Chowdhury knows what I mean. Like him, I still dive, though not so deep nor so long.
The Rouses’ story is a tragedy not because they died but because they died so unfulfilled. Even had they ultimately brought back an artifact that could have precisely identified the U-boat, this prize would not have satisfied them or brought them the recognition they seemed to crave so desperately. The Rouses, despite their social and personal shortcomings, were great men, fully capable of doing great things. Their fate, however, was to live in a country and an age in which such greatness is often shunned, even seen as antisocial. Although I believe they would have thrived in an era of celebrated exploration, it was their unfortunate fate to be stuck in the drab present. The only way they could fulfill their hungry spirit was to become part of a small, select, adventurous, and potentially deadly society.
The diving community, for all its references to the gentle contemplation of the beauty of the undersea world, is actually a very harsh group. From all those who dare to enter it, we demand near perfection in skill and form, including the method and style of our dying. To die while diving is one thing, but to die poorly is to wipe clean all the tributes and laurels we might have gathered during our diving careers. All divers know this, and so it is somewhere in our minds on every dive—the need, if it comes to that, to die cleanly and bravely, if not wisely. We are a band of brothers and sisters who admire the lost cave diver who stubbornly clings to life to the end, breathing down his tank to the nubs, but we disdain the diver who panics and dies with a tank still half-filled with gas. Both divers are just as dead, just as foolish, but one is allowed to ascend into our version of Valhalla while the other is sent to diving Purgatory for all eternity.
Readers, even those who are not divers, will love this book. Whether they will fully grasp the character of the Rouses and the other divers that Bernie Chowdhury has so skillfully captured, without knowing firsthand the lure of the depths and the competitiveness of those of us who want to go there, I don’t know. All I know for sure is that they, like me, are going to find the Rouse boys often in their minds. I can only hope that they will also appreciate the Rouses for whom they wanted to be, even if they didn’t quite make it there.
Bernie Chowdhury has written a book that seems to explore diving and the deep, cruel sea; in reality he has written a book about exploring a place even deeper and far crueler, the human psyche and our often unfulfilled souls. We should thank him for the illumination.
—HOMER HICKAM,
number one New York Times bestselling author of
October Sky and The Coalwood Way.
He can be reached at www.homerhickam.com.
1
Deadly Secrets
OCTOBER 12, 1992. NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN,
approximately 60 miles offshore,
equidistant from the New Jersey and New York coastlines.
THE WIND MOUNTED STEADILY throughout the night as Chris Rouse, cocooned in his sleeping bag, braced himself against the side of his bunk. He felt a bit uneasy, his stomach tossed by the dark waves that slammed against the 60-foot length of the dive charter boat Seeker. He was not that far from the New Jersey coast, but he might as well have been in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Chris peered out from between his sleeping bag and the bunk. In the dawn’s soot-gray light, all he could see through the boat’s windows was a blanket of sky and dark-blue waves with white spray blowing off their crests. Somewhere in the distance lay the horizon, but he couldn’t tell where; the sea and sky were seamless. He judged the waves to be five feet high, with occasional rollers over eight feet. Not a good day to continue the exploration of the most technically challenging dive site he had faced in more than seven hundred logged dives.
Only yesterday, the thirty-nine-year-old Rouse and his twenty-two-year-old son, Chrissy, had conducted two dives to the unidentified submarine 230 feet below them. The wreck lay in three pieces, like a cigar with its middle torn out and angled between the ends. The middle section included the conning tower, the large tubular structure perpendicular to the vessel’s body. The tower, though still intact, had been torn from its mount and thrown aside by whatever unknown force had sunk this submarine, probably back in the Second World War. Underneath the conning tower was the control room, the submarine’s brain. Nothing was left of this nerve center but a
jumble of jagged, sharp-edged steel plates and debris, the result of some violent explosion. Yesterday, Chrissy Rouse had crawled under and between the steel plates, wriggling his way inside while his father hovered outside the wreck. Somewhere in those razor-edged ruins lay something that would identify this sub, and father and son were determined to find it. Maybe the captain’s logbook—it had to be nestled amid the wreckage just inside the opening. Chrissy hadn’t found it yesterday, but the Rouses knew they were close. All that stood in their way was time, effort, and eight-foot waves.
The Seeker bobbed and tugged at its anchor line, like a trapped animal seeking to break its tether. It had fought the ocean incessantly throughout the night, and its wooden beams and planking let out creaks of protest at the restraint. The passengers and off-duty crew had tried to sleep in their bunks while wedged in such a way as to prevent being thrown to the heaving deck. John Chatterton, a commercial diver, sport-diving instructor, highly respected wreck diver, and one of the Seeker’s two captains (required by Coast Guard regulations during an overnight boat charter), burst into the main cabin and threw the light switch. “It’s six o’clock,” he announced. “If any of you want to do two dives today you need to hit the water early. Weather report’s calling for steadily increasing seas, and you can see”—he nodded toward the window—“it’s snotty already. If you wanna dive, get in the water fast. We’d like to pull the hook and get out of here soon, before we really get slammed. I’m gonna blow off my personal dive, and I’ll just go down to pull the hook.”
The blond Chatterton looked as if he’d fit in more readily on a college campus than on a dive boat, with his wire-rim glasses and boyish face. Unlike many hard-bitten sea captains, Chatterton had a receptive mind; he was happy to discuss diving techniques and gear configuration with his customers, even as he remained soft-spoken when talking about his own expertise and accomplishments. Chatterton never made others feel stupid or inadequate. His demeanor, combined with the depth of his experience, lent his advice more weight, and divers sought it out.
Chatterton was on intimate terms with the wreck that Chris and Chrissy Rouse aimed to conquer. The captain was credited with having been the first diver to identify the mysterious object as a submarine. On Labor Day, 1991, Chatterton had headed out on the Seeker with a group of divers to check out a potential wreck site that the boat’s owner, Captain Bill Nagel, had heard about from a fisherman during one of Nagel’s frequent drinking bouts. The captain’s alcohol-sodden memory had been accurate. On a follow-up dive, Chatterton had recovered a single dinner plate bearing the German eagle and swastika, with the date 1942 stamped on it. The wreck was a World War II submarine, which the Germans called an Unterseeboot—“under-sea boat,” shortened to U-boat. The first U-boat was U-1; the highest-numbered German vessel to see service was U-4712. Because the Germans did not number the U-boats consecutively, 1,152 German U-boats were actually commissioned and put into service during the Second World War. For lack of an official name or number, Chatterton and other divers had dubbed the discovery U-Who.
Every year along America’s East Coast divers find new wrecks—victims of storm, collision, fire, and war—but the U-Who was an unusual find. U.S., German, and British naval archives listed the location of every U-boat that lay on the ocean bottom worldwide, but they had no reference to anything even close to the U-Who’s location, a half day’s mission from the entrance to New York Harbor. The wreck seemed to have been sunk by an explosion, but if it did not go down in a battle recorded in the archives, how did it end up in such a sorry state? Chatterton’s discovery made headlines. His underwater video was aired on television. Why was this U-boat not listed with the other German submarine wrecks? What had its mission been? Could it have been sabotaged while on a secret foray? Had it been carrying spies? Or Nazi party members fleeing the fall of the Thousand-Year Reich? The search was on. Divers like Chris and Chrissy Rouse were attracted to the wreck—and a mystery.
In September 1991, I had passed up the opportunity to join Bill Nagel and John Chatterton on the trip when they discovered the U-Who. I had already been on a few expeditions on Nagel’s boat, and one day he told me, “I’ve got a new site to check out, if you’re interested. I’d like to put together a special trip and see if there’s anything down there. It’s deep, Bernie, and it may just be a hunk of rocks. But you never know. It could be something good.” Nagel and Chatterton were extending this invitation only to experienced divers. It was a very unusual opportunity.
The invitation taunted me like buried treasure. Ever since I had learned to scuba-dive in 1984, I had gotten increasingly more involved in wreck diving off the New York and New Jersey coasts. In 1988 I became a diving instructor and taught with a dive shop in Manhattan in the evenings and weekends, in addition to my full-time job working with computer networks as a data communications technician. I loved to teach people about the rich historical heritage of shipwrecks. When I taught the introductory first scuba lesson, I gave a slide show depicting various underwater environments. My students expected to see slides only of the bright, colorful coral reefs of the Caribbean, the main destination most of the divers in the class sought to experience. When I showed historical slides of ships that had gone down off the northeastern coast of the United States, and then slides of the underwater shipwreck environment, most students were shocked that there was anything at all to see off their own, heavily populated coastline.
Cold-water wreck diving had intrigued me ever since my first wreck dives, in 1985, just off the coast of Brooklyn. On good days, at a depth of 50 or 60 feet the visibility was a murky 10 or 15 feet. Completely disintegrated, the wrecks I encountered resembled nothing more than underwater junkyards, the damage done by a combination of forces: the ships’ sinking; the Coast Guard’s efforts to destroy the sunken ships because they jutted too close to the surface, posing a hazard to navigation; and the ravages of storms that further scattered the wrecks’ remains. The murky water obscured the extent of the ruin, yet no matter how far I swam it seemed there was always more to see. Steel beams crossed at odd angles, bent into weird forms through which fish swam and in which reddish-brown lobsters made their homes. The beams themselves were covered by life forms that looked like brown sponges with white-stranded tips waving in the water. Green eels poked their heads out from various crevices and gaped at me. I encountered odd-looking gray fish with big mouths bordered by fat lips, their large eyes following my movements. Brown fish hovered just above the bottom, long white feelers protruding from their undersides to probe the areas around them in search of food. When I approached them, they moved effortlessly away with a slight wag of their tails and thrust of their fins, disappearing into the murky curtain of greenish-brown water. The world I discovered down there was surreal, yet possessed of an immediacy and purity of survival that I could not find on the surface at my full-time job. It was a far more intriguing world down there.
And it got more engaging. With deeper-lying wrecks, farther offshore, there was greater visibility, but as I became more experienced, that was not what really attracted me to the deep. These wrecks were more intact. The better underwater visibility—anywhere from 30 to 100 feet, depending on the ship, the time of year, and the luck of the dive—allowed me to explore far more of a wreck than I could off the Brooklyn coast. On the deep, offshore wrecks, I could actually identify the hulks and their various parts. And there were large lobsters to be caught by hand and put into a mesh “goodie bag,” thence to the pot of boiling water that awaited them onshore. Not only that, I could retrieve artifacts from the wrecks: china dishes, glassware, silverware, brass portholes, cage lights, and a host of other collectibles still left unclaimed.
To descend to an undived, virgin wreck was the dream of every enthusiastic wreck diver, and I was no exception. Nagel and Chatterton’s invitation to dive a possible new site was something I had eagerly awaited while honing my skills and deepening my appreciation of the sport. Yet the week before the scheduled exploratory trip,
I had a difficult choice to make.
Although I was now working full-time as a systems analyst on Wall Street, I had also gotten a contract from a Japanese trading company, Inabata, as a consultant for the development and marketing of a new line of wrist-mounted diving computers. Earlier in the year, I had presented to Japanese representatives a market overview of the diving industry, the trends I saw, and the opportunities these trends promised to open up. The company decided to go ahead with the development of at least one of the three types of computer I proposed. An engineer from Inabata’s partner in the venture, Seiko, who was also a certified diver was flying over from Japan to survey both how Americans dived and the various diving environments they regularly explored. I was supposed to take the engineer to several diving locations in the United States during a single week; as an instructor, I could take the engineer as my student on some dives where he would not otherwise be allowed. At first, I did not think that I could get the time off from my Wall Street job, but at the last moment, my manager generously gave me a week off. Now I had the time either to pay a good deal of money to be part of Bill Nagel’s exploratory trip to what might possibly be a rock pile, or go on an expense-paid diving trip around the United States with a client. I chose the latter. When I returned from my routine journey with the Japanese diver, I found out that Bill Nagel and John Chatterton had found a U-boat; I had missed the chance to fulfill a dream—a chance that might not arrive again in my lifetime.
In 1992, diving to the depth of the U-Who at 230 feet was considered by training agencies to be well beyond what amateur divers should or even could undertake. As a U.S.-based recreational diving instructor, I was limited to teaching people to dive to a maximum depth of 130 feet, and then only briefly—the time limit to stay at 130 feet was ten minutes, including the time it took to descend. Some non-U.S.-based diver-training agencies set the limit for sport-diving depths down to 165 feet. Knowledgeable divers like Chris and Chrissy Rouse and me found those varying limits both arbitrary and unrealistic. The water did not stop abruptly at a depth of 130 feet, or 165 feet, and neither would we.
The Last Dive Page 1
