The Last Dive
Page 44
Copyright © by Bradley Sheard
Steve Berman (left) and Bernie Chowdhury display dishes recovered during their second dive to the Andrea Doria.
Copyright © by Hank Garvin
The Seeker
Chrissy Rouse (right) jokes with his father immediately prior to a dive. Chrissy liked to refer to this boat as the Seeker of Death. In a tragic irony, father and son sit atop the platform where Chrissy would soon lie fighting for his life.
Courtesy of Sue Rouse
Seeker crewmember Steve Gatto prepares to dive to set the anchor on the Andrea Doria. Sue Rouse is on the left; Chrissy Rouse talks to Steve Berman (looking at camera). Note the equipment-laden deck space, typical of deep wreck diving.
Copyright © by John Harding
Chrissy and Sue on the Seeker above the Andrea Doria. Mom helps son pack up his trophies.
Courtesy of Sue Rouse
September 1992. Chris Rouse stands over his son, who is joking about how their dive drove him to exhaustion. The father and son’s interactions always livened up dive boats. Ironically, one month later Chris was pronounced dead on almost the exact spot where his son is lying here.
Copyright © by Steve Gatto
U-Boats
During World War II, German submarines, known as U-boats (Unterseeboote), ravished shipping off the U.S. coast, threatening to sever Britain’s lifeline of desperately needed war matériel and food. British prime minister Winston Churchill said that the out-come of the U-boat war in the North Atlantic was the only thing that truly worried him during the war.
Copyright © by UPI/Corbis-Bettmann Archive
Chris and Chrissy Rouse hoped to reveal the identity of the mysterious U-boat by retrieving the captain’s logbook from inside the wreck. The Rouses were motivated to take extreme risks by the glory of rewriting a few sentences in the history books, even though the wreck holds no real archaeological or treasure value. The illustration shows where the Rouses en-countered difficulties inside the wreck, as well as the evidence of their struggle found later by divers.
Copyright © by Captain Dan Crowell
Although U-boats sank a frightening number of Allied ships, they suffered a heavy toll themselves. There were some 40,000 German U-boat sailors, and approximately 30,000 lost their lives. Here, the U-352 at its final resting place in 115 feet of water off the North Carolina coast.
Copyright © by H. Keatts
John Chatterton was credited with the discovery of a mysterious German World War II U-boat. For lack of a better name, he dubbed it the U-Who. Though it lay within 70 miles of New York Harbor, its final resting place was not recorded in British, German, or U.S. naval archives.
Copyright © by Thomas A. Easop
A key piece of evidence. John Chatterton recovered this dinner knife from the U-Who with the name Horenburg inscribed in the wooden handle.
Copyright © by Thomas A. Easop
Sharon Kissling holds the wartime diary from the U-853. This was the captain’s official log of all activity on his wartime patrol. Chris and Chrissy Rouse hoped to find the wartime diary from the U-Who, which would prove the identity of the U-boat beyond a doubt. Ultimately it was John Chatterton who, after six years of obsessive research and diving, proved the identity of the U-Who.
Copyright © by Hank Garvin
The head of the torpedo that sank the U-Who. This artifact was found next to the severely damaged U-boat.
Copyright © by Thomas A. Easop
The serial number of the torpedo head. Chatterton’s meticulous research revealed that the topedo was German.
Copyright © by Thomas A. Easop
About the Author
BERNIE CHOWDHURY is the founder and publisher of immersed: the international technical diving magazine. A world-class diver, Explorers Club Fellow, and recognized expert on extreme sports diving, Bernie Chowdhury organized and led the first mixed-gas sport diving expedition on the wreck of the Andrea Doria in 1991. At the invitation of the British Army, he participated in the search for the HMS Pheasant, a missing WWI destroyer, which the expedition found in 280 feet of water off the Orkney Islands in Scotland. He organized and led the Icelandic Cave Diving Expedition, the first to map any of Iceland’s underwater caves. He also produces documentary films and is a frequent lecturer.
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Praise for Bernie Chowdhury’s
The Last Dive
“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.”
—Homer Hickam, Jr., author of the
No.1 New York Times bestseller Rocket Boys
“A suspenseful tale [that] amounts to one long nail-biter… [It] will leave even surface-dwellers gasping for air.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Superbly written and action-packed, The Last Dive ranks with such adventure classics as The Perfect Storm and Into Thin Air.”
—Tampa Tribune
“Going as deep as the most daring military divers, but without the military’s advanced technology or life-saving support, a father and son explore realms as alien as any in space. They swim for the sheer joy of exploration into a mesmerizing adventure undertaken at overwhelming cost.”
—Sherry Sontag, coauthor of the
New York Times bestseller Blind Man’s Bluff
“While reading The Last Dive I could feel myself hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface. I had dreams where I felt the pressure and floated in the beauty. The story is well told and once I started, I could barely come up for air.”
—Daniel Hays, coauthor of the
New York Times bestseller My Old Man and the Sea
“Meticulously detailed and dramatically paced, a tragic story told deftly and with the rare authority that comes only from personal experience.”
—Patrick Dillon, author of Lost at Sea
“This book gave me more palpitations than any dive I’ve done myself. Bernie Chowdhury is a true modern-day explorer who penetrates not just sunken ships but the minds of those who risk their lives to explore them. The climactic last fatal dive left me as out of breath as the divers he wrote about.”
—Kenneth Kamler, M.D., vice president, Explorers Club
“Earphone adventurers won’t want to miss [The Last Dive.]”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“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.”
—Homer Hickam, Jr., author of October Sky
“Excellently written and a real ‘grabber’ to read, the book includes much information about the history, equipment, and people who make up the world of extreme or ‘technical’ diving. This book should be read by any diver thinking of getting invovled in wreck, cave, deep, or mixed-gas diving.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL
“Superbly written and action-packed, The Last Dive ranks with such adventure classics as The Perfect Storm and Into Thin Air.”
—TAMPA TRIBUNE
Copyright
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by HarperCollins Publishers.
THE LAST DIVE. Copyright © 2000 by Bernie Chowdhury. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
F
irst Perennial edition published 2002.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Chowdhury, Bernie.
The last dive: a father and son’s fatal descent into the ocean’s
depths/Bernie Chowdhury.
p. cm.
1. Scuba diving—Accidents—Atlantic Coast (U.S.). 2. Shipwrecks—Atlantic Coast (U.S.). 3. Rouse, Chris. 4. Rouse, Chrissy. 5. Scuba divers—United States. 6. Fathers and sons—United States. I. Title.
GV838.673.A75 C46 2000
363.14—dc21
00-033426
ISBN: 9780060932596
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN 9780062196828
02 03 04 05 06 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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