Chrissy now switched to the scuba bottle that his father had clipped to him after they escaped the wreck. But instead of breathing air, only water came through the mouthpiece. Postdive analysis revealed a torn mouthpiece that would have allowed water to enter.
What happened next is another matter for conjecture; two different scenarios were reported by the divers on the scene. Some believe that Chrissy tried repeatedly to purge the regulator so that he could get air instead of water through the unit. Each time he pressed the purge button it would have released a large quantity of air from the tank. The postdive analysis of this tank revealed a 60 percent oxygen mixture and the tank slightly less than half full. If Chrissy had started out with this extra tank at full capacity, then the half-full tank can be explained by Chrissy’s repeatedly trying to purge the regulator of water. According to this theory, Chrissy headed for the surface after trying unsuccessfully several times to get breathing gas from his regulator, and his father followed him.
Others believe that Chris Rouse did not have much gas left and headed to the surface on his own, knowing that he had to get more gas for himself and his son so that they could complete their decompression. The analysis of his tanks revealed that he had almost no breathing gas left, perhaps enough for one or two breaths at seventy feet, though we have to take into account the consumption of breathing gas while Chris was swimming to the dive boat, and later while he waited in the water. In this scenario, Chrissy would have seen his father ascending, and then followed him to render assistance. The question this raises is whether the father tried saving the son until the very end, or whether the son sacrificed his decompression and tried to save his father. In either case, the diver who ascended second knew that he risked crippling decompression sickness by following the other to the surface.
If it had been any other dive team—say, even two very close friends—one diver would never have followed his buddy to the surface, neglecting several hours of necessary decompression. Using up your strength getting a stuck diver out of a wreck, at 230 feet, breathing only air, would have been considered more than doing your duty. Risking paralysis or even death in surfacing after the ordeal went beyond what could reasonably be expected of a dive buddy. But the Rouses were no ordinary dive buddies.
Regardless of which ascent scenario you choose to believe, the two divers surfaced. Steve McDougall, who was still decompressing on the anchor line at fifteen feet, did not see the Rouses underwater again after they descended past him on their way down to the wreck.
On the Seeker, preparations were already under way for departure as soon as McDougall and the Rouses were back on board. Captains Crowell and Chatterton had been listening carefully to the weather reports with some anxiety. Yesterday’s manageable two-to-three-foot seas had bulged up to six feet, with occasional waves as high as eight feet, which Chatterton knew was on the very edge of what any sane person wanted to be diving in. When he had awoken that morning, Chatterton had decided he would not do a pleasure dive, but would go down only to free the boat’s anchor line so that they could depart when the divers who had braved the weather were done.
As the two captains surveyed the worsening weather front from the bow of the boat, Chatterton saw the Rouses pop up one hundred feet in front of them. Chatterton had the impression that the Rouses both looked scared. He thought to himself, These guys fucked up.
Chatterton cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled into the wind at the divers, “Get down! We’ll drop more tanks to you and send in a safety diver.” Both captains instantly knew that the Rouses should be doing decompression, not surfacing. They had been down for only forty-something minutes.
But the Rouses weren’t getting ready to descend again; they were both pressing their power inflator buttons to put more air from their tanks into their back-mounted buoyancy compensators so that they could float on the surface with all of their heavy equipment.
Chrissy bobbed up and down in the waves, the current carrying him toward the Seeker. He had hit his limit: So much had happened on the dive, there had been so much chaos down below, he could handle no more. He looked at Chatterton and shouted back, “I can’t breathe off my regulator. I’m coming aboard.”
“Did you do any deco?” Chatterton shouted.
“No!” Chrissy replied.
Before Chatterton could respond, Chrissy stuck his face into the water and started swimming toward the Seeker’s stern, 160 feet away. Chris Rouse did the same. To Chatterton, it looked as though Chris Rouse was struggling to swim. When Chris got a little closer to the boat, Chatterton saw the elder Rouse roll to one side in the waves; Chatterton thought that Chris’s eyes already looked glassy, and knew that this was not a good sign.
Chatterton was stunned by what he saw. He knew that the Rouses had not conducted any decompression and that they were in deep trouble. He set the timer bezel on his watch and raced toward the stern as fast as the rocking Seeker would allow.
Steve Gatto was on the wheelhouse deck, above Chatterton and Crowell, and he had a commanding view of the two Rouses. Gatto raised his right hand over his head, bent his arm, and put his hand on his head to form a large O, one of the diving signs for “Are you okay?” A diver who is not in trouble would respond to the signal by putting his own hand on his head, which says, “I am okay.” If a diver is in trouble, he waves his outstretched hand and arm back and forth in a wide arc, which is the call for immediate assistance. The Rouses did not respond at all, which Gatto—a very experienced diver who often crewed on dive boats—at first thought was due to the heavy seas and the Rouses’ not wanting to waste time getting back on the boat. He knew that sometimes divers were so focused on getting back to the safety of the boat—especially in rough weather—that they often ignored hand signals. As the Rouses got closer, Gatto could see that they were not swimming normally, even given the high waves. He instinctively knew that something was wrong.
Gatto rushed to grab a throw line that Chris and Chrissy could hold on to so they could be dragged back to the boat. “Here,” Gatto called out against the wind as he tossed the line, “grab hold. We’ll tow you in!”
Inside the Seeker’s main cabin, one deck below where Gatto stood, Barb Lander looked out the windows and saw the line being tossed to the Rouses—by John Yurga, she thought. She rushed out to help pull the divers in. Things were moving fast now.
Chris and Chrissy Rouse floundered in the waves, but both managed to grab the line. The stocky, well-muscled Gatto strained to pull the two men toward the boat. He climbed down the wheelhouse ladder to the main deck, where Chatterton, Packer, Lander, Yurga, and Kohler helped pull the rope.
When Chris neared the Seeker’s stern, he let go of the rope and swam around the heaving boat to the ladder. He was breathing hard when he put his feet on the bucking ladder’s bottom rung and held on as if he were a cowboy trying to ride a wild bull. Chatterton was leaning over the rail, looking down the ladder in anticipation of Chris’s climbing up. Chatterton shouted, “Climb up the ladder!”
Chris replied, weakly, but without hesitation, “No. Take Chrissy first.”
At this point, the excess nitrogen that Chris had absorbed during the extended dive, and had not had a chance to release slowly through decompression, now bubbled in his system. His body probably hurt as if someone were trapped inside him, trying to punch and scratch his way out. His breathing was labored. In spite of his pain, Chris still thought first about his son.
Just then, the younger Rouse, still holding on to the throw line, was dragged around the Seeker’s stern. A large wave hit and the surface current pushed Chrissy toward the boat’s massive stern, which now hung in the air several feet above and perilously close to him.
Meanwhile, Chris Rouse stepped backward, off the ladder and into the waves, looking for the trailing line to grab onto. He found the nylon line floating on the surface, attached on one end to the stern of the boat and on the far end to a large, orange ball buoy. He swam backward, floating on the surface while
holding on to the trailing line so that his son would have room to get onto the ladder.
As the wave continued to carry Chrissy forward, the hull came down hard. It missed Chrissy’s head by inches. The manifold bar connecting his back-mounted tanks took the blow from the stern’s abrupt drop. The strong metal manifold cracked under the stern’s weight. In a loud, constant, high-pitched hissing, compressed air from the tanks was released through the crack, harmless but adding to the stressful situation.
The Seeker had no swim platform for the rescuers to climb down onto so that they could help get Chrissy away from the boat’s heaving stern. Instead, Gatto, Chatterton, Packer, Lander, Yurga, and Kohler all hung their bodies over the Seeker’s stern, trying desperately to grab hold of Chrissy and pull him away from the boat so that the next wave did not result in his being crushed.
Somehow, they managed to get Chrissy over to the ladder without his being struck. He started to climb the ladder, but the combination of more than 150 pounds of equipment, the wildly rocking boat, and the onset of decompression sickness robbed him of the ability to climb farther. Chatterton commanded, “Climb up the ladder, Chrissy.”
Chrissy replied faintly, “I can’t move my legs.”
The bends was wasting no time doing its devastation. Chrissy was already paralyzed from the waist down.
The Rouses were undergoing “explosive decompression,” just as I had suffered only one year earlier. Father and son could try to conduct in-water recompression, which would require them to descend immediately and conduct their missed decompression. Now it would have to be extended several hours because they had surfaced and allowed massive bubbles to form in their bodies. But with a storm moving in, Chatterton knew that an extended in-water decompression would put the dive boat and everyone on it at risk. The only real option now was a recompression chamber. Commercial and military divers dive from vessels equipped with chambers; if there are any complications of the bends, they are immediately treated in the chamber on board the vessel.
The Rouses would have to be evacuated. Once inside the recompression chamber, if all went well, they would recover, as I had. If it did not go well, they would end up crippled, even after multiple chamber treatments. There are no hard-and-fast rules about who will be lucky with the bends and who will not.
But Chatterton, fighting the truth and attempting to motivate Chrissy, barked, “This is no time for joking around. Get your ass up the ladder.”
“I’m not kidding,” Chrissy pleaded.
Everyone realized how dire the situation was. The Atlantic Ocean was kicking and rocking the 60-foot boat like a child’s toy in a bathtub. One of the most dangerous parts of a diving rescue at sea was now under way: getting the stricken diver safely aboard the boat during rough seas. Chatterton, Gatto, Packer, Lander, Yurga, and Kohler scrambled to hang over the stern to help get Chrissy on board. Six sets of hands grabbed at him, trying to get hold and pull him up the ladder.
Chrissy was dragged, powerless, into the boat. He fell headfirst to the Seeker’s deck. Chatterton was reminded of fishermen landing a tuna.
The hard fall stunned Chrissy. He blurted, “I’ve got to go back down and decompress, or I’m gonna die.”
But it was already too late to get Chrissy back underwater. Lander, Yurga, Kohler, and Packer all worked frantically to unclip his extra tank—the one his father had clipped to him underwater—his artifact goodie bag, and his lights, and then they unbuckled the harness that held his two back-mounted tanks in place. When they had stripped off his equipment, they picked up the partially paralyzed diver and carried him to a large wooden platform in the middle of the after deck. Here the Rouses had suited up before their dive. Now, the suiting-up platform had become a makeshift hospital bed, one that had nearly been my deathbed a year earlier.
Lander put a regulator in Chrissy’s mouth. “Here, breathe this—it’s oxygen,” she said.
Chrissy spit the regulator out. “Everything hurts so bad.”
“Of course it hurts! You’re bent. What did you expect?” Lander said as she put the regulator to Chrissy’s lips again. “The oxygen will help ease the pain. You’ll get better. Just breathe the oxygen!”
Lander was a registered nurse and could legally administer oxygen. Because she was a medical professional, she did not have to recite a legal statement about the perceived value of oxygen to an injured diver, or make sure that Chrissy put the oxygen regulator in his mouth himself as Dave Dannenburg had done with me. Chrissy knew the value of oxygen and he eagerly breathed from the regulator.
While Chrissy was being assisted up the ladder, Chris looked on from the water, where he was still hanging on to the trailing line, which prevented him from being swept away from the boat. When he saw that his son was on board, Chris swam to the Seeker’s ladder and stood on the bottom rung.
Chatterton and Gatto turned their attention to Chris. Behind them, Chrissy was shouting something, but Chatterton and Gatto knew that Chrissy was being attended to by the other divers, and they focused on getting Chris back on board.
Lying on the platform, Chrissy labored to produce words as he shouted to Barb Lander, who kneeled over him, “Couldn’t breathe … couldn’t … breathe. Only water … only water. Reg … broken … needed … air … had … to … surface.”
Even though she was right next to Chrissy, Lander struggled to hear exactly what he was saying. She lowered her head so that her ear was right next to Chrissy’s lips. In order to hear Chrissy, she had to filter out the background noises of the Seeker ’sdiesel engines and Chrissy’s tanks, which still emitted the high-pitched hissing of compressed air escaping from the cracked tank manifold.
Lander tried to calm the frightened diver. “Okay, Chrissy, we can hear you. You’re back on the Seeker now. What happened?”
Tom Packer handed Lander a large plastic cup filled with water. Lander cradled Chrissy’s head in her left arm, paying close attention to his breathing, which seemed to be labored and getting shallower. Lander noticed that Chrissy seemed to be relaxing. She knew that he would need not only oxygen but also water to keep his body properly hydrated so his blood could efficiently carry the nitrogen bubbles through his system to his lungs, where they would be expelled during exhalation. “Here, drink some water,” she said. As Lander held the cup to Chrissy’s lips with her right hand, he drank eagerly.
As soon as he finished the water, Chrissy started screaming, trying to say something. His face was ghostly white. Sounds came grunting out of the stricken diver.
Lander tried to determine what Chrissy was saying, and she tried to get information about what had happened to Chris and Chrissy underwater. Packer leaned closer, pencil and clipboard in hand so that he could write down what Chrissy said.
Steve McDougall had finished his decompression and now surfaced off the Seeker’s bow. He started swimming toward the stern so that he could climb back on board.
As Chrissy screamed out words, Chatterton was leaning over the stern, shouting to Chris, who had wrapped his arms around the ladder’s right rail. To Chatterton, it looked as though Chris had lost the ability to use his hands. Chatterton commanded, “Okay, Chrissy’s on board. Now you get up the ladder.”
Chatterton implored Chris to hurry, to get back on board. Chris’s response was weak. He knew his child was safely aboard the vessel, and he lost his ability to continue the fight.
Chris looked at Chatterton through glazed eyes. “I’m not gonna make it,” Chris said, his words barely audible, his body limply riding the ladder up and down with each wave motion.
Gatto, leaning over the stern next to Chatterton, thought that Chris was saying he was not going to be able to climb up the ladder by himself. Gatto leaned down and tied a rope securely around Chris’s tank manifold, then assured Chris, “Sure you’re gonna make it. I’ve got ya. I’m gonna haul your ass right on up the ladder.”
Chris Rouse went limp. The wave action that rocked the boat and the ladder threw him into the water. Gatto held o
n to the rope that he had attached to Chris’s tank manifold so that Chris’s body would not drift away.
McDougall rounded the stern of the vessel just after Chris went limp. McDougall backed off and held on to the trail line, just as Chris had. He could see that others were attending to Chris. It was protocol to stay away from someone who was either on a ladder or about to climb onto a ladder, so that if the climber fell, he would not injure anyone who was stupid enough to wait beneath. McDougall bobbed in the waves, the Seeker’s stern coming into his view as he rode the crest of a wave and then disappearing as he fell into the wave’s trough. He could tell that the diver at the ladder was Chris Rouse by his distinctive helmet and its attached array of dive lights. McDougall could see that Chris was in serious trouble. And where was Chrissy? he wondered. He didn’t know that Chrissy was now safely on board. McDougall’s heart thudded when he concluded that Chrissy was probably still underwater, dead from some accident that had caused Chris Rouse to come up early.
Chatterton was stunned when Chris went limp in the water. He instinctively jumped into the water, followed immediately by Richie Kohler. Both men wore only street clothes. The cold water shocked their systems, but adrenaline surged through them, combating the cold and galvanizing their actions. Chatterton immediately lifted Chris’s head out of the water.
“I’m dying,” said Chris weakly, and very calmly. “Tell Sue I’m sorry and that I love her.” Chris’s head fell to his right, his body relaxing completely. Life drained from him as the nitrogen bubbles overwhelmed his body and the sea continued its relentless pounding.
Chatterton and Kohler knew they had to get Chris out of his heavy diving equipment, but were bewildered by the array of hoses, lights, battery pack, the cave-diving harness, and all of the other equipment, including tanks and reels, bobbing up and down with the water’s motion. Spotting one of several knives that Chris wore, Chatterton grabbed the shoulder knife and tore it from its holder. The waves kept pushing the two men toward the stern of the boat. Kohler grabbed Chris’s tank valve, holding both Chris and Chatterton away from the boat. The large steel ladder swung dangerously toward the three men. They were being carried up and down the waves as if on a roller coaster.
The Last Dive Page 34
