The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  I had my own theories about the body and its ability to decompress efficiently, as well as its tolerance for cold water. These theories were not couched in scientific or theoretical terms. Instead, they were practical because they had to be: My life and well-being were on the line every time I dived. What worked worked, regardless of the exact physiological mechanisms in play. Essentially, I believed that the body trained itself to eliminate the inert gas by repeated exposures. Cold water changed the body’s circulatory characteristics, reducing blood flow to the extremities and closing off blood flow to the skin, reducing the body’s heat loss. This changed the way a diver absorbed excess inert gas and—more important—eliminated it. Yet I believed that cold water was more of a mental obstacle than a physical one: Only by repeatedly exposing the body and mind to long cold-water dives could a diver keep his body and mind conditioned for cold-water decompression. A recreational diver, a diver who by definition avoided decompression diving, was limited to ten minutes at 130 feet. Typically, an experienced wreck diver planning a decompression dive to 130 feet would plan to stay on the bottom for no more than twenty minutes, and then decompress for four minutes if he or she followed the U.S. Navy decompression schedules, which were based on the work done by Haldane. Diver-carried decompression computers were a bit more conservative than the tables based on Haldane’s work and, depending on the computer being used, indicated decompression of about half an hour after an exposure of twenty minutes at 130 feet.

  For divers contemplating diving deep wrecks, like the Andrea Doria, the mental and physical conditioning they needed to tolerate longer inwater times meant that they had to gradually dive deeper and deeper. With each dive they had to extend their times so that they would be prepared to endure potentially long decompressions. I had gradually extended my in-water exposures so that I was diving as deep as 238 feet, breathing air for various times on the bottom, and then regularly enduring two-or three-hour decompressions with the Bühlmann-based algorithms in the computers I used. To safeguard against computer failure, I carried two identical computers on each dive, as did every serious diver, including the Rouses. The time I was spending on the bottom at 130 feet—a depth I now considered shallow—was up to fifty-three minutes. To minimize the number of scuba tanks I would need to carry for these long dives, I exercised diligently as I had throughout my life, participating in sports ranging from track to street hockey, ice hockey, boxing, karate, and rugby. My physical regimen on land combined with my lifelong sporting interest resulted in a strong body and efficient lungs that allowed me to conduct long dives with only three scuba tanks, which surprised fellow divers on dive boats, who thought that I would require several more tanks.

  The Rouses agreed with my decompression theory, although they did not believe in my training regimen. They thought that the best way to condition themselves and avoid the bends was by diving. Chris and Chrissy had extended their dive times and decompressions in much the same way I had. Further, when we used oxygen to decompress, we could reduce the duration of our actual decompression stops because oxygen allowed the body to eliminate inert gas more efficiently. But instead of reducing our in-water time, we used the oxygen to add a greater margin of safety to our dives, staying in the water as long as recommended by our computers, which calculated only air. After long, deep air dives, we breathed oxygen during decompression, and noticed how much more energy we had than after dives in which we used only air during decompression. We could feel the effects of eliminating more inert gas during decompression. Though the Rouses and I could not explain definitively what happened inside the body during a dive, which is what scientists were seeking to do, our bodies could feel that our methods worked. Theories were fine, but what we knew was that we didn’t get bent after our long, deep dives.

  As the Wahoo struggled against an unrelenting assault of waves and a fierce crosscurrent, we edged our way closer to the Andrea Doria, hugging Long Island’s south shore on our way to Nantucket to avoid the punishing sea conditions farther out. The boat was packed with twelve Team Doria members, two researchers, a reporter, a crew of eleven, and so much equipment it was difficult to move about on the deck. With everyone gathered in the main cabin trying to stay warm, I handed each of the Team Doria members the most recent team list, including everybody’s contact information and a brief biography of each diver. Not everybody on board knew one another: I had recruited team members from around the United States, Canada, and even Switzerland. I handed out polo shirts and sweatshirts, the TEAM DORIA ’91 logo embroidered on them, to all divers, including crew members. Hank Garvin accepted his shirts and then pointed to the list. “What’s that?” When I handed it to him, Hank looked it over and asked, annoyed, “Where’s my name? Why aren’t any of the crew listed?”

  “Ask Bielenda,” I replied. “He wouldn’t tell me who was going to be crew even after I asked him a bunch of times, so I couldn’t include that info.”

  “Yeah, Bernie,” someone chimed in, “Bielenda didn’t want you to know how many crew members he was stuffing the boat with!” A number of people laughed, and others grunted in agreement. Then, some of the bigger Team Doria divers complained that their bunks were far too small—and didn’t all these crew members have such spacious bunks?

  I had to clamp down on the carping right now. “Yes, we’re a bit crowded. We are on a boat and that means there’s limited space. Also Bielenda told us to bring all of the tanks and gases we’d need for all of the dives because he’s not guaranteeing air fills from his compressor, so it’s even more crowded than usual. Plus we’ve got extra guys on board to do research and report what’s going on. Let’s deal with it.”

  Hank took the list I had given him and waved it at Sally Warhman, another crew member, who had just wandered in. “Hey, check this out. We don’t even rate on the great diver list.” Hank shook his head and walked away.

  Though she stood only five feet five inches, Sally’s body was built on a bigger plan, just like Janet Bieser, who at the moment was putting her three-hundred-pound-plus form to use to steer the vessel; Janet’s massive frame was matched by her extensive boat-handling experience. Everyone respected Janet’s diving ability, and her strength was legendary: She could easily pull a fully suited diver who was in trouble back onto the Wahoo with one hand. The large size of these crew members had long prompted mutterings in the diving community about “the women of the Wahoo.” But what mattered to the Wahoo’s owner, Steve Bielenda, when he chose his crew members was not the size of their bodies, but the size of their hearts and the depth of their experience, both of which Sally and Janet proved to have in abundance. Sally looked over the team list and grunted. She looked around, and then leaned over to me. “You know, a friend of mine hangs out at the quarry in Pennsylvania. She tells me the Rouses are there all the time. These guys are quarry divers!”

  To call someone a quarry diver was a huge insult. It meant that they did not have the skills or the courage to dive in the ever-changing open ocean, and that they preferred the safe, protected environment a quarry afforded. The Rouses were outside, making sure their equipment was safely stored. I couldn’t let this insult to my friends go unanswered. “The Rouses dive everywhere,” I told her. “They always want to be diving, whether it’s a quarry, a cave, or a wreck. I think more divers would be better off if they spent time practicing at a quarry once in a while.”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard, that’s all,” Sally said curtly and put the list down on the counter.

  Unfortunately, the team list that I had created as a useful tool had further separated the team from the crew members, creating an us-versus-them situation. As it was, Hank’s talk with me before we had left the dock had emphasized the differences between team and crew: We were the new guys on the block, with newfangled ways of doing things. Steve Bielenda had put many of the most experienced northeast-wreck divers on the boat as his crew, adding to the usual number of crew he carried. And many of those divers, including Bielenda himself, gave
the impression that the Doria was their wreck. Who were we to come along and dive their wreck using new methods? I wondered if Steve Bielenda and his crew were waiting for our team-based deep penetration to fail. Or was I just being a paranoid expedition leader?

  The mounting tension made me even more nervous with anticipation than I would have been otherwise. This was by far the most ambitious diving project I had yet undertaken, a huge step up from leading the occasional Caribbean trip for the Manhattan dive shop for which I worked part-time as an instructor, or from running independent wreck-diving day trips or long-weekend diving excursions.

  I had been lucky thus far; I’d never been on either a day trip or an expedition during which a diver was lost, though many of the veteran divers on board the Wahoo had not been so fortunate. I hoped my luck would hold for the sake of us all.

  I knew enough to worry in a particularly informed way. My research with the National Underwater Accident Data Center at the University of Rhode Island made me very familiar with the details of every wreck-diving tragedy involving an American diver. The accident tales that divers told and retold showed me how the loss of a diver at sea affected those on board: profoundly, yet differently, depending on the exact circumstances, the mental toughness of the survivors, and how well the victim was liked by his fellow divers, among other things. One dead diver who had displayed arrogance before a dive and who in the process of killing himself nearly killed one of the crew members underwater when he collided into her in his rushed descent—sending her spiraling 60 feet down to the bottom at 240 feet—was subjected to a postmortem beating by the crew member: She kicked his body repeatedly, spat on it, and issued a torrent of curses at the recklessness that had taken his life and nearly her own. In another incident, a victim’s buddy collapsed in hysterics on the dive boat immediately after enduring a decompression he had spent haunted by the image of his friend, drifting lifeless along the ocean bottom, whom he had not been able to bring back with him to the surface. When he was back on the dive boat, the surviving diver was reduced to shrieking, crying hysteria as the crew—which included at least one war-hardened former soldier—questioned him and tried to ascertain what had happened. Veteran divers looked on the buddy’s behavior as poor form: Going into hysterics is fine after you tell the crew where the body can be found.

  Sometimes during an expedition to the Andrea Doria, diving is more important than death, especially when prized underwater trophies are on the line. For example, a rumor circulated among hardcore wreck divers about a diver who was not very well liked and who died on his very first descent. Rather than call the Coast Guard immediately to report the fatality, everyone on the dive boat pressed the captain to wait until the scheduled expedition was over, in three days’ time. They had each paid the captain over $800 to go on this trip and they were enjoying optimal diving conditions. The death, if reported, would end the expedition because the Coast Guard would demand that the boat captain return to shore immediately with the body. No one wanted to head back to shore, lose their opportunities to gather trophies and rack up bragging rights, and lose their trip fees. The captain supposedly agreed to the diver’s demands. The victim’s body was placed in the sleeping bag he had occupied in life. The bag was then filled with ice from everyone’s coolers, to slow down the body’s decomposition, and placed back on his bunk.

  Chris Rouse had manufactured some of the equipment cluttering the Wahoo. He had gone ahead and started the diving company he had fantasized about when his excavation business kept sputtering under financial strain. John Reekie had suggested the name of the company, Black Cloud Scuba, because it seemed to John that a black cloud was always hanging over the Rouses. Reekie especially noticed this when it came to equipment: The Rouses’ gear, although meticulously maintained, was always breaking down. During dives with the Rouses, Reekie realized that their gear—and even his gear—would uncannily malfunction with amazing regularity. I had to agree—the Rouses had a black cloud hovering right above their tousled heads. Their company logo depicted a single black cloud releasing rain. More ominously, the cloud was simultaneously releasing three black lightning bolts.

  In spite of their uncertain financial footing, the Rouses poured generosity on their friends, freely sharing anything they had. Even as Chris struggled with his new diving business—repairing diver propulsion vehicles and manufacturing diving reels himself, using the lathe and drill press in the workshop he had previously used exclusively to maintain his excavation machinery—he would give samples of his self-made diving equipment to his friends. On board the Wahoo, Steve Berman, John Reekie, and I each had the upline reels that Chris had given us. We would carry the three-foot-long reel wound with three hundred feet of sisal rope, along with a lift bag for use in an emergency. If we could not find the anchor line during the dive—either because of disorientation or because the line had come free from the wreck—we would deploy the upline reel and a device called a lift bag to create a line to the surface and a floating buoy. The lift bag was filled with air from one of the tanks, and the bag with the upline attached rose to the surface like a helium balloon. When the line no longer spooled from the reel, we would know that the bag had hit the surface, and we would cut the line from the reel and tie the end to a piece of the wreck. Making a controlled ascent on the upline, we would be assured of not drifting away from the wreck in a current and getting lost at sea.

  As we made our way out to the Andrea Doria, the two researchers Huggins and Emmerman were busy at work in the cabin of the Wahoo. They carefully marked audio cassette tapes with each diver’s name. Working quietly but efficiently, they started the process of using the Doppler ultrasonic device to take baseline measurements of each diver’s blood flow, which they would compare with postdive measurements to see if they could detect any bubbles in our bloodstreams. I stripped off my sweat jacket and shirt so that they could apply the Doppler’s transducer, which was like a small microphone, first over my heart, then over the area where my left shoulder joined my torso. Listening to my blood flow through headphones, they shook their heads, and then made small adjustments to the transducer’s location. When they were satisfied that they had the transducer positioned where they could get the strongest blood-flow soundings, they marked it with a circle, using a pen. I did a few deep knee bends while they recorded my blood flow.

  When I looked down at my body with one circle drawn over my heart and another drawn at the shoulder, I thought I looked strangely like a target that decompression sickness could aim at. Just before a dive I didn’t pay much attention to the potential danger. If I had trained, eaten, and slept properly, my body should function as I wanted it to, and I would be able to eliminate the excess gas accumulated during the dive without problems. But what if I was wrong? What if I did everything right and still got bent? I had heard about divers who had been permanently crippled even though they had supposedly done everything correctly during their dive. Like everybody else, I wanted to believe it couldn’t happen to me. But what if it did?

  While I put my shirt back on, the diver Wings Stocks went through the same testing procedure. Although it was no nickname, Wings was a fitting moniker for the beefy, muscular man who looked like a Hell’s Angel, complete with long, flowing beard and tattooed forearms like tree trunks. Yet he always wore a disarming smile, which, combined with his round, wire-framed eyeglasses, vibrant personality, and soft voice, made others relax and trust him. Pushing aside Wings’s beard, the researchers marked his body as they had done mine. Soon, all our bodies were marked with the two targets.

  Moving outside the cabin, I braced myself against the doorway to survey the rolling waves and the overcast sky. Everything beyond the Wahoo was a dull gray that contrasted sharply with the colorful scuba tanks crowding the deck. Billy Deans was bent over his torpedolike scooter, tightening the rope holding it fast along the inside of the gunwale. Billy Deans had come after all, as a crew member. Many of the Wahoo’s regular crew didn’t think he would return to the wreck
that had claimed his friend John Ormsby in 1985. Yet Billy’s friendship with Steve Bielenda and the chance to be part of a technical-diving expedition had brought him up from Key West. Michael Menduno had accompanied Billy on the long ride up the coast. Menduno wanted to cover this expedition for his magazine, AquaCorps, and he was busy gathering information from Captain Steve Bielenda.

  Catching Bielenda’s eye, I said, “Remember, we want to anchor into the stern section.”

  “We’ll do our best, but I can’t guarantee anything,” Bielenda told me.

  His reply disturbed me. I had made plans based on diving the stern section of the Doria, because this area had numerous large doorways and windows that would allow access to any of several deck levels. The plans called for each two-person dive team to run permanent guidelines along the long horizontal passageways on several decks, at 202 and 238 feet. Vertical lines could be run along the smaller passageways that connected the horizontal passageways, and the lines would be connected. If a dive team came across an area with a lot of artifacts, that team would indicate the way out by attaching a line arrow to the guideline at the spot where the artifacts lay. The other dive teams could then work in shifts to retrieve the artifacts. But if Bielenda did not anchor into the stern section, our plans would be far more difficult to carry out because of the way the wreck lay on the bottom and the access it provided to various deck levels.

  Anchoring is a tricky business. First, the captain has to navigate to the wreck. In 1991 that involved using Loran-C, a radio positioning system that employed a receiver to mathematically triangulate radio signals sent from a series of installations along the U.S. coast. The receiver produced two sets of numbers that corresponded to nautical charts’ longitude and latitude. If you had the Loran-C numbers for a wreck, you could key in that data and use it to steer to that location in a way similar to—but more precise than—using a compass. Loran-C is accurate to about fifty feet of a precise location. (Today, most boating professionals prefer the greater accuracy of GPS—the global positioning system, which uses signals from satellites and can get you to within three feet of your desired location.)