The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  I wasn’t very happy as I walked away from the Rouses. Their wild underwater antics gave me one more thing to worry about. The weather was miserable, and if it was not for the fact that everyone on board was very experienced, Steve Bielenda would not have even considered coming to the site once he had seen the water conditions offshore. As it was, he and I conferred regularly about the weather. With his many years as a sea captain, I trusted him to avoid unnecessary risk. Even then, we were both pushing it in our shared eagerness to have this expedition work out for the best. The boat was being violently rocked from side to side, and that afternoon, as I tried to eat the meal Sally had prepared, I was frustrated that my sweet peas rolled off my plate and onto the cabin’s floor like scattered marbles. Although all of the Team Doria divers had a good laugh that Sally would serve peas in this sort of weather, the rolling food underscored the sea’s roughness. I looked away from the peas and out the cabin window. When we were in the trough of a previous wave and the larger waves bore down on us, all I could see was a wall of water towering over the boat. I was reminded of the scene in the movie The Poseidon Adventure where a giant ocean liner is hit broadside by a massive, rogue wave and capsizes.

  As the Rouses joked that the peas could always be eaten by our seasick researchers, Bielenda related that the weather report indicated that the sea would not get worse and would probably calm down. We elected to stay above the wreck that night. The crew would take turns watching the radar to make sure no other ships would collide with us. The area of the ocean we were in was known as the separation zone because it separated the sea lanes into and out of New York Harbor. They are marked on navigational charts as light-brown lanes; resembling highways cutting across the dark blue of the ocean south of Long Island, the northern light-brown lane is the route designated for ships of all sizes and descriptions from around the world to take when coming into U.S. territorial waters from the east; the southern lane is for ships outbound to Europe from the United States. Even though large freighters and tankers were not supposed to be in the separation zone, we often saw these behemoths steaming close to our relatively puny dive boat during the day.

  The crew’s vigilance at the radar was vital. Nobody wanted the Wahoo to end up on the ocean floor next to the Doria. On one night watch, Janet Bieser repeatedly called over the radio to a freighter on a collision course with the anchored Wahoo. While we divers slept in our bunks, unaware of the oncoming danger, the freighter continued on its course, until Janet angrily snapped commands into the radio microphone while simultaneously shining a spotlight toward the oncoming vessel. When the freighter was only a quarter mile away Janet saw on the Wahoo’s radar that the massive vessel had begun to make its course change. She breathed a sigh of relief and knew that if the rapidly moving freighter had not begun its course correction at that time, she would have had to cut the Wahoo’s anchor line to avoid being rammed and sunk. If the men on the freighter’s bridge were asleep, the ensuing collision would not disturb them because it would be an unnoticeable bump, like a great white shark crashing into plankton.

  I had slept undisturbed in my sleeping bag on one of the large, double-wide bunks below the main cabin, where the crew also slept. Steve Bielenda always reserved these spacious bunks for his crew and assigned me a bunk here because I had put the expedition together. I usually slept in the stern sleeping quarters that were accessed via a hatchway resembling a doghouse and a set of steep wooden stairs. Although the forward bunkhouse was more spacious, I was superstitious and preferred the small wooden bunk in the stern that everyone dubbed “the wine rack” because it was so narrow and enclosed. The wine rack had been my bunk when I’d dived the Doria with Berman in 1990, and we had good luck on those dives.

  When I awoke after Janet’s battle with the freighter, the sea was still rocking the Wahoo with the same intensity as the day before. Although the waves had not gotten smaller, they had not gotten larger either. I chose to look on things optimistically. Even then, I was concerned. These were not good conditions to be diving in. I did not want anyone getting hurt or killed because I pushed things and allowed the dives to continue. I knew that some divers, even though they might not feel totally at ease with the sea conditions, would not want to lose face; they would dive if given the chance. The least experienced diver among us was the one that I was concerned about. He had not been able to conduct all of the planned, necessary preparatory dives for this expedition and that left him woefully unprepared for anything but the best diving conditions. Sally told me that during his dive yesterday, he had problems with the rough surface conditions; when he descended to 20 feet, he realized how difficult his decompression would be, and aborted the dive without descending to the Doria. When he told me about his dive, I felt bad that he had not been able to see the wreck, but was also relieved that he had made the right decision and was back safely on board the Wahoo. Now I spoke to him, asking if he planned on diving today.

  “Are you going to go in?” he asked, his voice a little tremulous, the brave little boy ready to emulate whatever his big brother would do. I didn’t want him diving, but couldn’t really expect him not to if I planned to go in. “No, I think it’s too marginal today,” I said. “I’ll play it safe and stay on board.”

  “I guess I will too,” he said. I could tell by his face how relieved he was. I was relieved too. However disappointed I was to give up my own opportunity at more artifacts, I didn’t want this green diver to dive in these conditions, which he had never before experienced, and risk killing himself because he followed my lead.

  The Rouses went about gearing up, the rolling boat forcing them to concentrate extra hard on moving cautiously among the cluttered deck to get all of their equipment together. They would stop what they were doing occasionally and one would ask the other how much longer he estimated it would take to finish suiting up. At least the weather was good for something: It prevented the Rouses from bickering before their dive. I helped Chris with his equipment, wished them both a good dive, and watched them jump into the water. When the Rouses were underwater, I again conferred with Steve Bielenda about the weather. He fixed his ice-blue eyes on me and said, “It’s right on the border. We could be in for a rough night if we stay out here. It’s your call.”

  I looked out over the waves, and then back at the white-haired sea captain who now sported several days of stubble on his chin. If it was going to be any rougher than it had been last night, I wanted no part of it. But if we left, the decompression research data would definitely not get recorded. Huggins and Emmerman, now pale and exhausted after a solid two days of nausea, would never get their sea legs and test out the targets they had marked on my body. I wouldn’t get any trophies beyond the few bottles I had picked up yesterday. And as leader of this shortened expedition, I might get a good reputation for caution and sense, but I would not return home waving my guideline and trophies in triumph, with useful research in hand on the worth of mixed-gas-diving techniques on wrecks. On the other hand, the conditions were so severe that we were not anchored into the area of the wreck where we had planned to dive, which left us diving in teams of two and not coordinating our efforts overall to lay guidelines in the major passageways as we had planned.

  Although it was a difficult decision, there was really only one thing to do. I turned to Bielenda and declared, “Okay, that’s it. Let’s wait for our guys to come up and then head to Block Island.”

  “Okay. But if we do that, we won’t be coming back to the Doria tomorrow. There won’t be enough time or fuel. We can go to another wreck, closer to shore, if conditions are better there.”

  I agreed.

  As I walked away from the salty-faced sea captain, I breathed a sigh of nervous disappointment. I had done only one dive, and most of the other guys were just finishing their second. Yet aborting the expedition was the right thing to do. I hoped.

  The Rouses surfaced an hour and a half after they had descended—a relatively short dive for them. During that time, the se
a had gotten calm, and even the sun was shining. I feared that I’d made a bad decision to leave. There was only one more diver in the water. When the crew member Jon Hulburt surfaced, the other crew members told him we were leaving. Through his mask, I saw his eyes register shock. As the veteran diver climbed the ladder to get into the boat, he looked right at me and said, “What? We’re leaving now? Great timing, just when it gets calm. Who made that smart decision?”

  I didn’t say anything. I hoped that time would vindicate my decision to leave.

  As the Rouses took off their gear I heard them arguing, just as they had done after their last dive. “Now what happened?” I asked, though with the sun cheerily warming the back of my neck, I was in no mood to hear.

  Chris turned to look at me. “We were having a nice dive. We penetrated about ninety feet. When we came out and swam on the outside of the wreck, Junior here decided to drop the reel and it fell to the bottom.”

  Chrissy rolled his head and his long, wet hair flopped up and down. “I didn’t decide to do anything! It was an accident.”

  Chris shot his son a disgusted look. “Yeah, well, you could have found a better spot for the accident. You dropped that reel into the wreck right next to a nasty fishing net. And then you got tangled in it when you went to get the reel.”

  Chrissy apparently didn’t want to be outdone by his father, who had gotten entangled during their previous dive. This time, instead of the elder Rouse getting tangled, it was the son who needed help to be pulled free.

  Cave divers to the core, the Rouses knew the guideline reel helped preserve their lives underwater. With a more than sentimental attachment to the reel, instead of ascending and abandoning it, they would risk their lives to retrieve the reel. I was alarmed. “You got tangled in netting?”

  Chrissy answered casually, “Yeah, it sucked. I had to cut myself free from the netting, and when I did that, I got caught in the line from our reel, and had to cut that too.”

  “Why didn’t you just leave the reel? It’s only a piece of equipment. And you make those things anyway for the business. How much can they cost? Five or ten bucks? And what’s your life worth?”

  “Every piece of equipment counts,” answered Chris somberly.

  The sun didn’t feel so warm anymore. When I heard the Rouses’ story, I was glad to be leaving the wreck before anything more serious happened.

  That night, after six hours traveling from the Andrea Doria site to the nearest landfall, Steve Bielenda tied the Wahoo securely at the dock in Block Island as a wind blew so fiercely it threatened to rip flags from their poles. I was glad we were not at sea; I knew I had made the right decision.

  During the expedition, Michael Menduno had been busy on board the Wahoo taking photographs and notes for AquaCorps. He knew Team Doria was the first real convergence of the cave-and wreck-diving communities, which made it a landmark expedition. That meeting had turned out to be rougher in more ways than the waves tossing the Wahoo around above the Doria. Menduno knew that those on board included many of the most advanced amateur practitioners of the complicated sport that he had dubbed technical diving. These divers’ use of technology as a tool to overcome the limitations and dangers of the deep—including their development of mixed gases and other techniques to dive into shipwrecks and caves—set them apart from the rest.

  The diving certification agencies were still adamantly opposed to sport divers’ engaging in deep diving, and they were aghast that sport divers even contemplated undertaking complex dives involving mixed gases, or even air dives involving decompression. The agencies reasoned that if professional and military divers encountered difficulties even with their elaborate support network, then sport divers would surely encounter problems that would translate into more diving deaths, bad publicity for the sport, and a drop in business. Ever the optimist, Men-duno believed that technological advancement was the natural order of things. It seemed logical to Menduno that sport divers should embrace mixed-gas technology and extend the depths they could dive. He also had a vested commercial interest in greater numbers of divers becoming enthusiastic about technical diving because that was what his magazine was all about. Menduno mused, “Bill Stone’s Wakulla project was the Big Bang of technical diving. Team Doria was a collision of some of the forces set in motion by the Big Bang, before those forces merged in harmony.”

  Overall, I felt that the expedition had been disappointing. There was nothing that could be done about the bad weather; the uncertain elements, I knew, were part of diving. But the initial tension between the wreck divers and cave divers had deeply discomfited me. The discord existed beyond what my limited experience allowed me to effectively moderate. Gradually, over the course of the trip, the tension had eased, and some divers, like John Reekie, had impressed the older wreck divers with the application of cave-diving techniques to recover artifacts. The decompression research, especially the comparison of air to mixed-gas diving, had been unfruitful. Huggins and Emmerman had done their best and that was all anyone could ask, yet their seasickness prevented them from carrying out the research they had intended. Even after thousands of years of technological innovation, the sea still posed a formidable obstacle for humans, whether they chose to work on top of or under the water.

  The artifacts I had recovered were nothing more exotic than a few soda bottles from the mid-fifties and the base of an ashtray. Even though Steve Berman and I had recovered some dishes from the Doria the previous year, quantities of the wreck’s prized artifacts had eluded me again. It left me feeling unfulfilled yet determined to try again.

  The Rouses had not recovered anything. Although they would be able to go back home secure in the knowledge that they had conquered the Mount Everest of scuba diving, they did not have the trophies that would really set them apart from the crowd. More than anything, they wanted some tangible proof of their outstanding diving skills. The challenge still loomed large, and they had not met it on this expedition.

  And they would not let sleeping trophies lie—as I would find out almost immediately. When the Wahoo got back to home port Chris Rouse said, “Bernie, we’ve decided to run our own expedition to the Doria, next year. We hope you’ll be part of it.” I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no—but I was amused, and a little perturbed, that after just two contentious and fruitless dives into the Doria, father and son saw themselves as ready to lead an expedition, when they had never before led any sort of diving trip.

  For the Rouses—as well as for me—the lure of the Andrea Doria’s artifacts propelled us to push our diving limits even further.

  7

  Triple Vision

  JULY 1991. HORSHAM, PENNSYLVANIA,

  Underwater World dive shop.

  WHEN THE ROUSES WENT to Underwater World, the shop where they had learned to dive and where Chrissy now worked repairing equipment, they held their fellow divers rapt with stories of their dives on the Andrea Doria. A dive that deep, that far out in the ocean, was well beyond the skills and aspirations of most of the shop’s customers and employees, which served to turn Chris and Chrissy into local heroes—the Horsham, Pennsylvania, equivalents of astronauts returning triumphant from the Moon. Then came the inevitable question: “What did you get?”

  The question was not intended to hurt, but still it cut like a knife. The Rouses both had wanted to return home with some artifacts, and they would have liked to come into the dive shop proudly displaying their trophies, the deep-sea equivalent of Moon rocks, tangible proof of an accomplishment shared by only a few hundred men and women around the world. Yet they were left with second best: They had dived the Mount Everest of scuba diving, but they wanted to be among those fewer still who returned home waving evidence of their dives. Trying to remain upbeat, Chris replied, “We didn’t get anything—this time.”

  “Not any dishes or anything?” a weekend diver remarked. “People get dishes from there, right?”

  “We’ll get something next time,” Chrissy said tersely. “We’re putt
ing together our own expedition for next year.”

  As the Rouses started planning their next foray to the Doria, they also kept up a steady pace of diving, returning each weekend to the quarry where they had completed their initial certification. After the challenge and excitement of diving a great ocean liner, this venue was a bathtub. Sure, it was nice to help out the instructors with their classes, and the Rouses could maintain their diving comfort and skills, but assisting during pool sessions was now as mundane as being a kindergarten teacher at nap times. Even if they were tethered to their jobs, to landlocked Pennsylvania and the need to make money, there had to be a way to get their pulses pumping and recover that adrenaline high they had known at the Doria—taking some risks, remaking the rules. And having something to show for it.

  One night, over dinner, Chrissy suggested to his parents, “Wouldn’t it be neat if we could find caves around here? There’s got to be some. Maybe we can even find new forms of life and stuff like that!”

  His father’s face lit up. His son was on to something. “Yeah, it sure would be nice to do some real exploration around here. I’m just sick of the driving to get to either a dive boat or the caves in Florida.”

  “Yeah. And caves have no waves. Man, that Doria expedition was nasty. My stomach didn’t feel so good.”

  “Mine either,” Chris Rouse agreed as he lifted another forkful of food to his mouth.

  At the end of July, only one month after they had dived the Andrea Doria, Chrissy called and said to me, “You can’t tell anyone about this, but we’ve found a cave near us! It’s on private land. You start the dive in a well house on the property, and you enter the water by taking out some loose floorboards. We had one-hundred-foot visibility and we even found some pottery on the bottom at sixty feet. Bernie, we’ll let you know if this thing really goes, and you can dive with us. Right now, it looks like it’s pinching out about a hundred feet in.”