The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  Menduno’s AquaCorps was aimed at helping sport divers around the world share the information they needed, accelerating the development of underwater exploration. When he ventured to Florida from his base in California, where he dived with a group of marine biologists, Menduno was surprised at the level of diving sophistication he found in the cave-diving community. A trip to Key West, the last island in the chain stretching from the Florida mainland into the northern Caribbean, opened his eyes to the work of his fellow pioneer, Billy Deans, one of the world’s leaders in teaching amateurs to dive ever deeper.

  Like Glenn Butler, Billy Deans had inherited a passion for diving from his father, who dived recreationally in Florida, where Billy was born and raised. In 1965, the ten-year-old Billy took a scuba-diving course and was certified. He and his father enjoyed exploring the coral reef environment off the Florida Keys. Billy was fascinated by the brilliant colors of the reef and the fish that hustled for food and survival in a constant effort at life maintenance. Existence was elemental under the waves: It was either eat or be eaten, live or die—not so different from how divers themselves had to function in the alien world they visited.

  In 1977, Billy started teaching others how to dive. As he became ever more familiar with the reef and its denizens, Billy took his place among them, spear gun in hand, and supplemented his living as an underwater hunter. He soon realized that the larger, more lucrative fish like grouper and yellowfin tuna were to be found in deeper waters, especially around shipwrecks. After diving to 200 feet using air, and then enduring long decompression, Billy and his friend John Ormsby noticed how tired they got as a result of the excess nitrogen remaining in their bodies even after they surfaced. There had to be a better way. They read the two available manuals—both published by the U.S. government—and found that they could make their deep dives safer by breathing pure oxygen at their 20-and 10-foot decompression stops. They religiously followed the U.S. Navy recommendations for in-water oxygen use to prevent toxicity. The oxygen made them feel much less tired after dives. Deans and Ormsby had uncovered intuitive evidence that their dives were safer because excessive nitrogen had been eliminated from their bodies much faster than when they breathed only compressed air during decompression.

  Billy Deans read what little he could find, cultivated friendships with the military special warfare divers in the Keys, and learned some of the secrets of mixed-gas diving, which most sport divers knew nothing about. After finding out that Dr. Bill Hamilton and his colleagues at Ocean Systems, Dr. Heinz Schreiner and Dave Kenyon, had developed a computer program for calculating dive times and depths—which divers call dive profiles—using various gas mixtures, the soft-spoken Deans called Hamilton, explained what he was doing underwater, and asked to purchase a set of the proprietary mixed-gas diving tables for use on the U.S.S. Wilkes-Barre, a light cruiser that had been taken out of service and intentionally sunk off Key West in 250 feet of water to make an artificial reef. The idea was that it would attract big game fish and would benefit the local economy by providing sport charter boats with another fishing site. Hamilton was skeptical, worried that Deans’s ambition had outstripped his sense of what could be safely accomplished. “Well, Billy, you know that deep diving is real dangerous, don’t you?” asked Hamilton.

  “Yes, I do,” Billy replied respectfully, the polite southern boy his father had taught him to be. “We’re diving wrecks in the two-hundred-to-two-fifty-foot range on air and we’ve learned how to make those dives much safer using oxygen during our decompression. We really need the mental clarity helium provides for greater safety at depth. And to do that, sir, we need your diving tables.”

  “I’ve been involved with research and commercial oil field diving for, well,” Hamilton said with a chuckle, “… well, too long, really. And you know what? Those guys have all sorts of safety divers and safety protocols, which is far beyond what you guys are doing in recreational diving, and accidents still happen. Why do you think you can do it any better than the pros? And for what? Anything like teaching or catching fish you’re getting paid to do, you can do at shallower depths, where it’s much safer.”

  Deans expected to meet some resistance. Commercial divers always scoffed at sport divers, and even thought they were crazy and irresponsible for ever trying to go deep without surface-supplied gas and communications systems. Researchers—and Hamilton definitely fell into that category—were even more incredulous that sport divers would attempt deep diving, which they viewed as suicidal without the elaborate support network that commercial divers like Glenn Butler worked within.

  Billy explained that he and Ormsby had developed a good safety system to use on the deep wrecks. Deans and his colleagues would dive in teams, which included in-water safety divers, who would monitor the divers and the dive times. If someone did not surface when he was supposed to, Deans would initiate a search right away. If a diver went low on gas during decompression, the safety divers would give him extra tanks to breathe from. All divers would have oxygen available underwater, supplied from the massive cylinders on the dive boat. From the cylinders, custom-made 50-foot regulator hoses, known as whips, would lead into the water, where they would be secured with clips onto a trapezelike decompression station constructed of ropes, which clearly marked the critical 20-and 10-foot depth stops.

  Hamilton always tried to dissuade sport divers from deep diving. Once he was convinced either that the diver knew what he was talking about, or that the diver would go ahead and deep-dive even without his diving tables, Hamilton would give his support. But not without a fair monetary return for his effort. In the late eighties, there were very few people who had decompression tables for trimix (the oxygen-helium-nitrogen mix) diving, and of the tables available to the sport diver, the DECAP computer program was written by the men—Bill Hamilton, Heinz Schreiner, and Dave Kenyon—who had by far the most experience in deep-diving research. “I guess you’ve persuaded me,” Hamilton told Deans. “Just don’t be an idiot and get yourself killed. Prove me wrong and show that you sport divers can do it as good as the pros!”

  Hamilton’s trimix diving tables in hand, Billy Deans explored the Wilkes-Barre with the advantage of clarity that helium gases provided. No more five-martini dives for him and his crew. Slowly, over the course of the 1980s, he developed his own training program to teach other divers how to dive deep safely. Using a rigorous set of checklists and approaching the sport like a military commander—to the point of using phrases like “mission objective” instead of “dive plan” and “after-action review” instead of “postdive review”—Deans put his advanced students through a series of progressively more challenging tasks, first in shallow water, and then deeper. Borrowing a page from the military, Billy had students in one phase of their training black out their masks, stand up on the dock fully geared, and go through emergency procedures by feel alone: turn off the gas to a malfunctioning regulator, spit out the bad regulator and put another one in the mouth without using the hands or arms, turn on the gas supply for a scuba tank that had been accidentally shut off, unclip the extra scuba tanks slung under the arm to free them of entanglement, then clip them back on again. During one exercise, the instructors would shut off a student’s gas supply, and the student would have to turn it back on. During these simulations on the dock, students usually found themselves “dying” several times. If they could not manage the task, the students would drop the breathing regulator from their mouths and gasp for air. On the safety of the dock, the students were spared the agony of breathing water as they groped for the right equipment knobs before their lungful of air was depleted. Designed to help students react instinctively during an emergency, Deans’s tasks also had the added benefit of humbling them as they came to realize just how easy it is to die underwater.

  Deans had learned about death. In 1985, while he was still perfecting his deep-diving techniques, he had helped cut the body of his friend John Ormsby out of a shipwreck after Ormsby, at 210 feet, had rashly changed t
he dive plan (which had been that they would stay together and would not enter the wreck) and left Deans. Ormsby swam inside the wreck, where he got entangled in cables and drowned. It took several teams of divers two days to free the corpse and bring it to the surface. The sight of Ormsby’s pale, death-stiffened body saddened and hardened Billy Deans, who now saw firsthand that survival underwater meant more than just eat or be eaten. Some people thought that Billy was too fanatic in his teaching style and that at five feet five inches tall, the man had a Napoleon complex. But those people hadn’t seen John Ormsby’s helplessly entangled body wrapped in thick cables, an image that would appear in the instructor’s dreams if he fudged attention to any detail in teaching, no matter how small. Billy Deans had to struggle constantly to keep John Ormsby’s ghostly image at bay.

  Only after a student had demonstrated proficiency in the water and the right attitude did Deans have the confidence to take the diver down to the deck of the U.S.S. Wilkes-Barre, at 200 feet, or 50 feet farther, to the ocean floor, where the cruiser’s steel carcass loomed surreally above them, bristling with underwater life.

  Menduno was fascinated by the procedures and methodology used by elite sport divers like Billy Deans. It was what he needed to fill the pages of his magazine. He moved to Key West, where he relied heavily on Billy Deans and the knowledge he gained watching Billy at work. Ironically, although Menduno was not a sport-diving instructor, he delivered lectures about the art of what was coming to be known as technical diving. Tech divers used gas mixtures to go deeper safer, and they employed new equipment, sometimes inventing their own where standard off-the-shelf gear was deemed inadequate. Menduno duly reported the sport’s evolution, and hastened it.

  What tech divers were learning still came at the price of divers’ lives, both within the sport-diving community and among professionals. Certainly the knowledge propounded by AquaCorps might have saved some lives, but the inevitable diving deaths—and the accounts of those deaths being published in AquaCorps—led many in the diving world to denounce the more extreme of technical dives as suicidal. It was no coincidence that the ones bad-mouthing these pioneering efforts had a vested economic interest in promulgating a public perception of diving as so safe that even your grandmother could participate—along with the rest of the family. To be sure, a dive to 30 feet in warm, clear water was relatively safe, and was far less demanding than exploring the depths of a cave or a U-boat lying at 200 feet, but even a warm-water social dive meant going into an alien environment using life-support equipment, which meant that even in those relatively benign waters divers occasionally died. Thanks to the loud voice of AquaCorps these facts did not drift under the seaweed to be lost in obscurity.

  Chris and Chrissy Rouse were fascinated to hear veteran divers talk about the various wrecks they’d explored the way sailors would compare their ports of call. It reminded Chrissy of his friends talking about their favorite bars.

  Chrissy started working at Underwater World, the dive shop in Horsham, Pennsylvania, where he and his father had taken their first diving course together. Mike Gucken, the store’s owner, liked the confident, efficient way Chrissy repaired and maintained the store’s equipment and the regulators brought in by the customers. Chrissy’s skill and enthusiasm did not carry over to his work for his father. Although he had taken two years of vocational training to become a diesel-engine mechanic, Chrissy could not operate basic testing devices when his father asked him to trouble-shoot faulty equipment for their excavating business. This drove Chris crazy. Chrissy maintained that he couldn’t tune up his own car and always asked his dad to do it, but the son effortlessly performed tune-ups of breathing regulators that had to perform flawlessly to keep their owners alive, and he repaired the buoyancy compensators that prevented divers from plunging into the seabed under the weight of their equipment. It seemed as though Chrissy wanted to be dependent on his father.

  When they had returned home from Ginnie Springs in 1989 as full-cave-certified divers (which meant they could penetrate thousands of feet into an underwater cave and even explore new caves and passages), Chris and Chrissy Rouse brought with them new equipment configured in a way that made most divers at the quarry raise their eyebrows in bewilderment and disdain. As the Rouses continued to dive the quarry each weekend for the simple pleasure of diving and to maintain their skills, and as more instructors came with their students for the drudgery of final training, the Rouses stuck out like fresh carrots in a pickle jar. When divers surfaced after seeing the Rouses swimming underwater—Chris and Chrissy moving their legs and fins out and together behind them like frogs as they swam, in perfect cave-diving style—there would inevitably be remarks. “Did you see those guys with the double-tank setups? They must have really bad air consumption! What was that weird way they were swimming?” The instructors were at a loss to explain the Rouses to their students.

  The swimming techniques the Rouses had learned in their cave training included the frog kick, which they now used exclusively; it was completely different from moving the legs alternately straight up and down in the flutter kick every basic diver is taught. When they frog-kicked, the Rouses moved horizontally under the water with their heads slightly down, and their legs bent at the knees so that their fins were actually above their heads. The traditional flutter kick encourages a diver to swim with his legs and feet hanging below his torso because it is a person’s natural position on land to have his feet beneath him, and he has the same urge underwater. The force of the flutter kick is directed straight down, which stirs massive amounts of silt. So strong is the force of each flutter kick that from above it looks like an aerial view of a bombing run, with silt exploding in expanding circles at regular intervals behind each kicking diver, who leaves small kick craters in the silt. A properly executed frog kick directs the force of the kick up and away from the bottom, preventing silt disturbance and the curtain of blackness it causes.

  Chrissy in particular was acutely aware of the differences between his techniques and equipment and those of open-water divers at the quarry, including the instructors: It made him different, just like the time he had to take special classes in school and the other kids teased him. The Rouses’ cave-diving training had put them in the forefront of modern sport diving, but they were the only ones at the quarry who seemed able to comprehend that. As father and son swam comfortably about the quarry, refining their skills, they felt like Homo sapiens in a landscape populated with Neanderthals. “Hey, Dad,” Chrissy once remarked when he surfaced, “did you notice how even the instructors have such terrible technique?”

  Looking over at an instructor about to descend with his students, Chris replied, “Yeah, they make it look like a coal mine down there. No wonder we can’t see anything underwater.”

  Just then, an instructor swam up and called out, “Gee, guys, think you’ve got enough gear on?”

  Chrissy got instantly steamed. He and his father had seen the instructor underwater. With his clumsy and dated technique, the guy would be laughed out of Ginnie Springs. Chrissy let out a disgusted groan.

  Chris Rouse was proud he’d given his son the best possible diving training and equipment in the sport, and disappointed that other divers—especially instructors—treated them like space aliens. It seemed that in this crowd, unlike at Ginnie Springs, they would always be oddballs. It was a shame, really. Chris liked coming here with his family. The quarry was a great place to keep their diving skills honed when they couldn’t go elsewhere. And it provided a convenient, controlled environment to test their equipment, whether new, modified, or recently tuned up. Chris turned to his son and said quietly, “C’mon, Junior, let’s go get something to eat. Mom’ll have the grill ready.” Avoiding the crowds of students and instructors gathered on the floating docks, the two men swam back to shore.

  Back in 1987, before Michael Menduno launched AquaCorps and a year before the Rouses took their first diving class, what was then the world’s most ambitious sport-diving expedition to da
te occurred at Wakulla Springs in northern Florida. The clear water gushing from the springs had long attracted tourists in glass-bottom boats that glided across the Wakulla Springs mouth, a black hole, looming below them, 300 feet in diameter and 200 feet deep.

  Divers had ventured briefly into Wakulla Springs as early as the 1930s, but even as they discovered Pleistocene-era bones and a complete mastodon skeleton, their cumbersome hard-hat suits and their surface-supplied compressed air thwarted any serious exploration of the cave system. In the 1950s, a group of Florida State University students used Jacques Cousteau’s newly available scuba apparatus to continue where the hard-hat divers had left off, but soon they too reached their safe diving limits. It was not until the late eighties that Dr. Bill Stone, a former astronaut candidate, fixed his sights on mapping the vast tunnel complex that lay beyond the black hole entrance to Wakulla.

  Stone recruited a team of elite cave divers to undertake a concerted effort to reveal the spring’s mysteries. In the fall of 1987, a small army of support personnel assembled a base camp on ground, near the water leading to the spring. They hauled in truckloads of huge supply cylinders of breathing gases, which Stone and his team mixed for the deep explorations that would take divers to 300 feet, and perhaps deeper. To help the divers make efficient headway, Stone’s team would use diver-propulsion vehicles that resembled torpedoes. These scooters would also transport the multiple scuba tanks the divers required in addition to the many tanks—up to seven—that each one would carry on his person.

  After such deep dives, the Wakulla exploration teams would have to endure up to thirty hours of decompression. This fact posed massive problems. Even though the water was 69 degrees Fahrenheit, divers exposed for such long times risked life-threatening hypothermia. Also, research by experts such as Dr. Bill Hamilton had revealed that divers could suffer decompression sickness when they did not maintain proper hydration and nutrition levels. Drinking fluids and eating during decompression was essential to allowing the body to function like a well-tuned machine, pumping out inert gas before painful, debilitating bubbles could form. Stone’s solution was a vast, circular, gas-filled inwater habitat that looked like a science-fiction spaceship. Divers would enter the habitat from the open bottom during their decompression and sit on benches, eating, drinking, and making jokes with their colleagues to pass the time. Stone even installed two telephones so that divers could contact the surface support team. The habitat was designed so that the divers would enter at 60 feet and then it was gradually raised from within as they went through their decompression stops.