The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  Having another diver close by was considered a way to ensure safety, so that if one diver encountered problems, the other could assist in overcoming them. This viewpoint was a direct result of the YMCA’s swimming program, which taught that people should always swim in the ocean or in lakes in pairs, so that if one swimmer got cramps, the buddy would be able to get the afflicted swimmer back to safety.

  At their most rational and sociable, which was most of the time, even very daring divers would agree that having a buddy could not only be useful but sometimes meant the difference between life and death. When Chrissy Rouse and his mother lost their visual reference to the guideline leading out of the Devil’s Cave System, the buddy system worked because Chrissy had the skills and confidence to conduct the lost-line search and find the guideline that led out of the cave. Although Sue could have undertaken the search herself, her fear was eased by knowing that her son and diving buddy was doing it for the team. She knew that Chrissy would be back for her. Chrissy’s dive to find the reel was essentially a solo dive because his mother had to wait while holding on to the side of the cave wall.

  The psychological effect of having another diver nearby was often extremely calming, especially to those new to cold-water, limited-visibility conditions, or when divers explored inside wrecks or caves. To be alone in an alien world could often be overwhelming, leading a diver to panic and death. Perhaps the effects of nitrogen narcosis enhanced the human mind’s primitive fear of the dark and of enclosed spaces, triggering the survival “fight-or-flight” response.

  The urge to flee when you are underwater usually leads to irrational behavior. A diver’s most common impulse is to swim rapidly to the perceived safety of the surface. Unfortunately, a panicked diver fleeing to the surface has a tendency to hold his breath. When this happens, the compressed air he has breathed from his scuba tank expands in his lungs as he ascends to a level where there is less surrounding pressure. The expanding air rips through his lungs’ walls in a process called air embolism. The released air bubbles may enter the bloodstream, where they continue to expand, eventually reaching the heart and causing it to stop pumping. Or the bubbles enter the brain. There, they cause death by damaging the sensitive brain tissue, and also by shutting off the supply of oxygen as the expanded air bubbles get so large they block blood from getting past. A diver with air embolism is extremely lucky if the bubbles do not enter his bloodstream and instead rip through the tissues and collect under his skin, usually around the shoulders and neck. Subcutaneous emphysema swells the skin and feels like pressure on the neck; the swollen skin crackles to the touch, like Rice Krispies soaked in milk. Although the fight-or-flight response may have helped primitive man survive, it is deadly to the diver. Underwater problems have to be solved underwater.

  Although the dive-training agencies officially believe that having a buddy would help in any situation, the primitive urge to flee is sometimes so great that a panicked diver endangers the diver who comes to help him. For example, if a diver runs out of air, and his buddy attempts to share his air, they can end up fighting for the regulator: The urge for self-survival can become so great that one diver irrationally refuses to give the life-giving regulator back to the other. Numerous double fatalities have occurred in this manner. In spite of the dangers that a panicked diver can pose to a buddy, recreational dive-training agencies still insist that divers dive in pairs.

  One of the ways that a diver can help his buddy avoid or overcome panic is with the use of voice communications. Even in a frightening, blackened, silted-out environment, hearing another person’s voice can be calming; it also can facilitate the formulation of a rational, coordinated plan to safely complete the dive. In an environment where all of your senses are muffled, shrouded, absent, or at risk, being able to speak can make a huge difference. Although commercial divers like Glenn Butler use voice communications as part of their standard equipment, sport divers for the most part have gone without this potentially life-saving apparatus. An exception was Jim Baden, an ex-marine, masterly diver, and pioneer technical-diving instructor.

  The Rouses and I had a chance to see Baden’s voice communications system at work during our Team Doria expedition. Baden had flown from California for this expedition, as had Wings Stocks. Baden, like Stocks, owned a dive shop in California and taught everything from recreational diving to mixed-gas technical diving. But that was where the similarities between the two men ended. In appearance and temperament, Baden and Stocks were opposites. The former U.S. marine sniper was as tall as Stocks, but his frame had the wiry musculature of a swimmer as opposed to Stocks’s bulky, football lineman build. And Baden’s angular face was always clean-shaven, his hair cut short, quite a contrast to Stocks’s bushy, Hell’s Angels look. Baden reveled in military precision, dispensing with smiles and chitchat. His no-small-talk philosophy and his teaching methods were more distant from Stocks’s gentle, mentoring training than his dive shop in the hills east of Los Angeles was from Stocks’s shop in a suburb of San Francisco. Of those dedicated—some would say masochistic—few students who had stuck with Baden’s rigid, militaristic training program, there was only one, Chuck Schmidt, whom Baden had deemed ready for the challenge of the Andrea Doria.

  Both Baden and Schmidt had trained together extensively using full-face masks, which cover the entire face, unlike conventional scuba masks—referred to as half-masks—which cover only the eyes and nose. The full-face mask has an oral-nasal piece built into it, the same type of device a dentist uses when administering gas to a patient. The single regulator was affixed at the base of the oral-nasal mask and did not require Baden and Schmidt to hold their regulators in their mouths. This feature afforded them the advantage of using communications gear so that they could talk to each other and to the surface. And the gear itself was a big technological advance, because, rather than use umbilical cables to hard-wire their communications system to the surface, as commercial divers had done for over a hundred years, Baden and Schmidt employed radio waves to transmit their voices.

  As a commercial diver, Glenn Butler approved of the fact that Baden and Schmidt used communications for sport diving: “I couldn’t imagine not using communications gear underwater,” he has told me. “It keeps you focused. It’s also invaluable if you encounter any problems down there.” Commercial divers frowned on the usual procedure of sport divers, which precluded communications capability between divers and topside personnel. If something went wrong underwater, commercial divers reasoned, it was so much easier to prevent a tragedy if everyone could speak with one another. The ability to communicate verbally makes it far easier to summon divers into the water to help search for a lost diver, or help bring up an unconscious diver. Their argument has plenty of merit. How many sport divers’ lives could have been saved if they had been able to call for help?

  One tragic father-son incident could have been avoided with the use of communications equipment. The dive pair planned to penetrate the wreck of the U.S.S. San Diego—the armored cruiser sunk off the south shore of New York’s Long Island during World War I—and look for artifacts. The son followed his father inside the wreck, but swam too close behind and got his mask knocked off his face by his father’s leg. Visibility was severely reduced by the father’s flutter kicking—the motion where the legs move alternately up and down and the force of the kick is directed downward, stirring up silt—and when the son got his mask back on, he could see nothing. With no visibility and no communications equipment, he could not locate his father. The seventeen-year-old boy swam back to the dive boat Wahoo and told the crew that he had gotten separated from his father. A search was initiated, and the boy’s father was found, inside the wreck, dead. Did the father expend all of the air in his single tank looking for his son? Or did he get disoriented and lose his way out?

  The boy was devastated. He told the Wahoo’s crew he believed he had caused his father’s death. The youth gave up diving permanently and still carries the psychological burden of the
responsibility he feels for his father’s death. No amount of consolation from the Wahoo’s crew could bring back the boy’s father, or the boy’s enthusiasm for the sport he had shared with his father.

  For the Rouses, communications equipment posed the drawback of letting them say too much underwater. They did not need to extend their verbal bickering capabilities any further. Underwater, the regulators in their mouths created a self-imposed bickering moratorium which made their dives more enjoyable. Though they thought Baden’s idea was innovative, the Rouses wondered about the safety of having only one regulator and were uncertain how they would efficiently switch breathing gases during a dive. Baden overcame these problems by wearing a backup half-mask around his neck with a separate regulator unattached to the full-face mask and within easy grasp. If he encountered a breathing problem with his unit, Baden would take off the full-face mask underwater, put the spare regulator in his mouth, and then don his backup mask. Baden also used this procedure when he needed to switch to decompression gases. The Rouses thought this cumbersome. Also, the full-face mask used more gas than the standard scuba setup.

  Not that this father-son team wasn’t laden already. The Rouses’ cave-diving training specified that they carry at least two of every piece of life-support apparatus during a dive. In a cave, when the only way to the surface was usually a long swim back in the direction they had come from, regulator failure or light failure could be deadly. Unlike divers who swim in open water, cave and wreck divers cannot swim straight up to the surface when they encounter equipment problems. The Rouses also took down with them copious quantities of breathing gas to allow for an emergency reserve; they knew that every breath of gas is a potential lifesaver. They did not welcome anything that limited their breathing capability, even if it could reduce the possibility of panic during an emergency. The Rouses preferred to rely on their training and the instinct for each other’s habits they had honed by diving together constantly. As Chrissy knew from his experience with his mother when they lost the guideline in the Devil’s Cave System and he successfully conducted the lost-line search, training and well-honed instinct were better than relying on technology.

  What the Rouses did not take into account—and what Baden instinctively knew—was that savvy and smarts could be combined with audio technology to take the sport of cave and wreck diving to new levels of safety. I was as guilty of this omission as the Rouses, and so were the majority of sport divers. Why? Not only was the new equipment unwieldy and expensive, but for sport divers it trespassed on our desire, even when we dived in teams, to go it alone—to be enterprising underwater and not to rely on technology we didn’t need and that seemed like a challenge to our trust in our skills, experience, and singular courage.

  Chrissy Rouse had impressed Billy Deans during the Team Doria expedition. Both Rouses paid attention to details such as dive planning and dived with a well-thought-out equipment configuration, and Deans liked that. In fact, he knew he could use it. Unlike his father, Chrissy was free to relocate because he had no commitments, like a wife, a house, and a business, and his obvious excitement about diving, knowledge of the sport, and impeccable skills made him a perfect candidate to be a trainer at Deans’s Key West Diver center.

  Deans saw how technical diving was growing. Demand from the uninitiated for his courses in mixed-gas diving was increasing. He was also fielding a rising stream of requests from experienced divers for charters to the cruiser Wilkes-Barre, the 250-foot-deep wreck that Deans and his buddy John Ormsby had dived in their spearfishing days, and the wreck that had pushed Deans to obtain Dr. Bill Hamilton’s new trimix dive tables so he could continue to explore it safely. Chrissy had mixed-gas experience, having been trained by the master, Sheck Exley, in a class that he had taken with his father and mother in October 1990. Chrissy’s cave-diving training also helped instill in him the right attitude about how critical it was to plan every aspect of a dive. The longer Billy pondered, the more he knew that Chrissy Rouse’s combination of knowledge, skills, and youth would be an asset to his business.

  Dive-shop owners were now paying Deans to come from Florida and teach mixed-gas diving in the Northeast. While conducting open-water dives with students on deep wrecks off New Jersey, Billy Deans encountered Chrissy Rouse aboard the Seeker and suggested that Chrissy consider working at Key West Diver.

  Chrissy was elated. He called me when he got back home. “Bernie, guess what? Billy asked me to come down and work for him! I can’t believe it! I mean, this famous guy is asking me to work for him.”

  “Great,” I replied. “Are you going to move down there?”

  My question stopped Chrissy’s excitement cold. He hadn’t, it seemed, gotten past the high of just being asked.

  “I don’t know. Nothing’s set yet,” he said, sounding abashed. “But I don’t like that it’s so far away from the great wrecks we have up here.”

  “Billy’s shop is closer to Florida’s caves,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, but now that my dad and I have found this cave up here, maybe I should stay up here and help him out diving it. If this cave doesn’t go anywhere, then maybe I’ll go down and work with Billy.”

  Chrissy’s life was so full of diving promise. I found myself wondering whether it made sense for his career or his feeling of his own adulthood to remain tethered to Pennsylvania and his father’s projects and temperament. I and other divers had noticed how Chrissy was always being berated by his father over the smallest thing, from the way Chrissy configured their equipment on a boat before a dive to his alleged lack of mechanical skills—even though Chrissy was far better at fixing diving equipment than most professionals. Although Chrissy always fell short of his father’s expectations, I admired Chrissy’s knowledge and skill with diving equipment. But Chrissy had time, and with the explosion of interest in diving, his opportunities would only bloom in the coming years. And maybe that cave would end up making the Rouses’ name, turn them into heroes of the sport.

  I wanted to include the Rouses on another charter I had planned. “Hey, Chrissy, why don’t you guys come out and dive the Northern Pacific?”

  “Naw. We’re broke.”

  “You’re broke? You can’t be!” I said. “Let me talk to Chris!”

  I heard Chrissy yell to his father to pick up the phone and when Chris came on the line, I asked, “Hey, Chris, come on—you can’t be so broke you can’t dive the Northern Pacific? I’ve got a charter to it. It’ll be great. We’ll bring back some portholes.”

  Chris sighed. “Chrissy’s not kidding, Bernie. We’re really broke. The excavation business is almost dead. And the dive-gear business, well, that’s just starting up. I even had to sell my plane and my life insurance!”

  I was shocked. “You sold your life insurance? What will Sue do if anything happens to you?”

  “Hey, I had to do it!” Chris protested. He didn’t like my question.

  “Did you sell your dive gear?”

  “No way! We need the dive gear! I’m hoping to make money selling the dive gear I make, and I’ve got to have my own dive stuff to get in the water and test out the stuff before I start making lots of ’em and sell ’em.”

  I understood what the man was saying—after all, his diving equipment represented both his love and his hopes. Yet I wondered that he had sold his plane and his life insurance but not any of his diving equipment, which he had in overabundance.

  Sue Rouse was supportive of her husband, as she had always been. If Chris had to sell his plane and even his life insurance, well, that was the way things were meant to be. Although she had enjoyed Chris’s success in the excavation business, she knew their good luck could not hold out forever. They had always been pessimistic, and even during their good fortune they braced themselves for what they felt was the inevitable string of bad luck that haunted them. It was as if they were living a dream from which they would awaken to face the dark reality of their lives.

  Now that the economic recession was taking firm root
in Bucks County, they again struggled to make ends meet. Chris handcrafted specialty equipment in his workshop next to their house, and he sold the gear to the dive-shop owners with whom he had developed a personal relationship. Some dive shops started carrying Chris’s equipment at their customers’ insistence. The most profitable aspect of Chris’s Black Cloud Scuba business was the repair of diver-propulsion vehicles, which help divers penetrate much farther into caves than they can by swimming, and allow wreck divers to blow away vast areas of sand to uncover buried artifacts. To enhance his repair capability, Chris had gone to the trouble and expense of having machine molds made to his specifications so that he could have propeller blades manufactured out of metal instead of replacing broken blades with the plastic ones currently on the market. The metal blades were far stronger than their plastic counterparts, and were nearly impossible to break.

  Word spread among the small, tight-knit community of divers who needed a proficient and reliable repairman when their vehicles broke down. Chris built his business primarily on word of mouth. It had worked for his excavation business, and he was sure it would work for his diving business. Chris Rouse rapidly gained the reputation of being the best in the country at repairing scooters. Vehicles were shipped to him for repair and overhaul from all over the country, and also from Canada. Yet he still wasn’t making enough money to support himself and his family.