The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  Cathie could only laugh. As she opened the car door she remarked, “I’ve got to go, silly. Alone. See you soon.”

  Chrissy had told his friend Tim Stumpf about his desire for an older woman while they were hanging out at a local bar, drinking beer and telling stories about women, as young men do. Chrissy was spending more and more of his spare time at Stumpf’s house, partying with his somewhat older friend, enjoying a newfound freedom and identity that he lacked at his parents’ house, where his father had an opinion about everything, from the flavor of Chrissy’s bagel to the length of his hair and his lack of any life ambition. The one thing that Chrissy needed more than anything was something that his parents could not easily give: independence. It was something he had to take when he could grab it, and earn long term.

  Chrissy told Tim over a beer how things had gone with Cathie Cush. “I really like Cathie, you know? She’s fun to be around, she likes diving—”

  “And she’s an older woman,” Tim interrupted. “So, cut the shit. Did you get down, or what?”

  “She did come on to me,” Chrissy lied. “But you know, she’s like my mom’s age, and they’re friends and all. I mean, what would my mom think?”

  Tim made a disbelieving face. “You’re kidding, right? Like you said, ‘No.’ Sure!”

  “No, man, really. No kidding!” Chrissy insisted.

  Better for Tim Stumpf and his drinking buddies to think Chrissy Rouse lied about turning Cathie down than to know that she had considered his advances a youthful prank.

  Chris and Chrissy were bored. They were both eager to teach more advanced subjects and not just help out with the basic diving class. Sue still enjoyed assisting students, and she found that the people who faced the greatest challenges during the pool sessions were the ones most rewarding to help. Sue remembered her own difficulties during training, and the discomfort she had felt when she went to the quarry for her final training, the checkout dives to get her certification. She was determined to help others avoid discomfort—and possible injury. Sue was also there during checkout dives, assisting with the class and at the same time keeping her diving skills up-to-date. This was important if she was to dive the Andrea Doria next summer on the expedition her husband and son were planning.

  Meanwhile, I returned to the Doria six weeks after our disappointing expedition. The few dishes I had recovered with Steve Berman in 1990 and the soda bottles I retrieved on the Team Doria expedition served only as an appetizer: I hungered to recover a large pile of dishes, like experienced Doria divers such as Hank Garvin and the crew of the Wahoo.

  This time, I dived with John Griffith, who had been a member of Team Doria. Griffith had short hair and thick glasses and confided the details of his projects as if relating vital state secrets. “Bernie,” he would say, leaning closer while looking quickly over both shoulders to make sure nobody was listening, “I’m going to tell you something, but only if you promise not to tell! Promise?” I’d consent, and then John would unveil his latest engineering masterpiece to create some sort of better diving equipment. He would always punctuate his revelations with “Bernie, I swear I’ll never talk to you again if you mention this to anyone!” One of his secrets was his plan to start his own specialty diving business, just as the Rouses had done. Griffith would do things a bit differently than the Rouses, who had plunged into their diving business not just out of love of the sport but out of financial desperation. Griffith was doing well financially as an industrial lighting salesman, and he lived comfortably with his wife and their two children in a New York City suburb. With his finances on solid footing, Griffith had the time to meticulously set up manufacturing and importing contacts for the gear he would sell, with his company logo affixed to it. Griffith was still in the planning stages, and I kept his secret, as I had promised.

  The thick prescription lenses built into Griffith’s diving mask made his eyes look bug-huge and gave him a cartoonish apperance. It was hard for me not to laugh whenever I looked at him underwater, but if I did laugh, water flooded my mask and I had to go through the simple but annoying procedure of tilting my head back, holding the top of the mask, and blowing air out of my nose to displace the water, which was usually enough to stop my laughter, until Griffith would swim up to me and stare into my mask with a concerned look on his face, which distorted his eyes even more. Nevertheless, Griffith’s methodical, serious approach to diving seemed sensible to me, and he was a very willing team player. He was also easy to get along with and I liked diving with him.

  Also spurring me to ally with him as a diving partner was our shared hunger for trophies. Together we could make a killing on the Doria. Griffith had a plan to recover numerous artifacts from a dish closet inside the Andrea Doria. He knew where the room was because he had dived there recently with Steve McDougall, who earned his living as a New Jersey state trooper, with special duties on the bomb squad. The powerfully built policeman shaved his head, and looked very much like Mr. Clean. McDougall’s diving skills were impeccable; he and Griffith had worked as a team, with McDougall going inside the small closet, filling up a goodie bag with dishes, then relaying the bag out of the room to Griffith, who then handed him a second bag to fill. When McDougall was done filling the second bag, the two divers dragged their heavy haul out of the wreck and rose triumphant to the surface. It was a proven plan, and other skilled wreck divers, including Hank Garvin and the crew of the Wahoo, had successfully carried it out after Gary Gentile—the diver who wrote the book on diving the Andrea Doria—discovered the closet.

  “Bernie, can you dig?” Griffith asked. “Because I really don’t like the idea of going into a tiny room at over two-hundred-foot depth and stirring up all that silt.” My heart raced with anticipation. Yes, yes, I could—and would—dig while Griffith waited outside the dish closet holding the guideline leading out of the wreck. Although other wreck divers, particularly the older veterans, felt a guideline was unnecessary, Griffith shared my belief that we could too easily get disoriented in the silt-out and end up losing our lives for a place setting. To complicate matters, the closet was next to a stairwell, which itself was at a ninety-degree angle because the wreck lay on its side. Without a guideline, disorientation, combined with a four-martini nitrogen buzz, would probably cause us to change deck levels when we made our retreat from the silted passageway.

  After we descended, Griffith led the way into the gaping hole, letting the guideline spool out from his tie-off near the anchor line, which was only 20 feet away from the opening. I admired the still intact teak decking, now covered with a thin film of silt. The wreck’s rusted steel frame was overgrown with anemones, the plantlike animals whose tentacles catch nutrients floating past in the current. The anemones thinned as we penetrated farther into the wreck, where water did not flow freely. Griffith swam to his left, around a steel wall, and disappeared completely, as if the wreck had swallowed him. I followed his guideline, rounded the steel wall, and caught a glimpse of his swim fins as they disappeared into another hole, to our right. I followed and noticed the stairway to our left as we swam to the closet. Griffith waited, hovering in the water next to the wall on our right, looking at me through his mask and large eyes. He pointed to an opening in the wall. It was the closet. I nodded, swam past him into the opening, and found myself in a tiny room. I dropped a few feet to the bottom of the room, my heart pounding with excitement. I made sure to keep my fins up as I stuck my arm into the silt, which felt fluffy and offered no resistance until my arm was in up to the elbow. With my buried hand I could feel the solid bottom of the room. I craned my neck upward to prevent my mask and regulator from being enveloped by the silt. If that happened, my regulator might clog and malfunction. I moved my hand slowly around the bottom and felt a cup, which I grabbed and pulled out of the silt. The room was now pitch black and I could not see Griffith’s light, which I knew was only a few feet away. I put the cup into my goodie bag and then plunged my hand into the silt again. The room was littered with artifacts, whi
ch made a muffled clinking sound when I dropped them into my rapidly filling bag. I swam toward Griffith, holding the goodie bag in one hand and waving my free hand in front of me as I had done inside the U.S.S. San Diego, when I was lost and had to search for the opening of the dish room. Griffith saw my hand come out of the black curtain of silt that billowed from the closet, and he grabbed my arm to let me know he was there. I thrust the goodie bag in his direction. He took the bag and pressed a second bag into my hand. I turned around, dropped back down to the room’s floor, and continued to gather artifacts.

  Griffith and I worked well as a team and in three dives gathered over 120 artifacts, including hand-painted flower vases, dishes, saucers, and various-size cups. The china sported a deep-blue band and a separate band of gold running around the inside of the rim of the dishes, or on the outside of the cups. They also carried a distinct deep-blue logo depicting a crown over the word ITALIA, the name of the company that had owned the Andrea Doria. I was elated. Finally, I had achieved a significant haul of the Doria’s prized artifacts.

  The artifacts themselves weren’t so important to me that I needed to hoard them, the way many other divers did, and I eventually gave most of my share away as gifts to friends. What was important to me was the satisfaction of carrying out the dive plan in one of the most challenging wrecks in the world. I now felt that I had “arrived” in wreck diving. The Rouses had not been able to make it on this expedition and I knew they would groan in disappointment and envy when they heard about my success.

  The weather was outstanding on our expedition, the water calm, and the visibility underwater good. The only drawback was a stiff current during decompression, but I managed this easily with the jonline tied to the anchor line and then clipped to my harness, which allowed a hands-free decompression where I was free to relax and admire the marine life that was propelled swiftly past me in the current.

  There was time for a fourth dive during the expedition. Griffith urged me on. “Come on, Bernie, let’s go to the room again and really clean it out!” he exclaimed as we celebrated our hoard. Even without his mask, his eyes were huge with excitement.

  I was amazed. How many artifacts did we need? I wanted a new challenge, and looked forward to a long swim through a new area of the wreck. Maybe I could even cut through the second-class area where we were anchored and probe the third-class passageway. I wanted to recover the goodie bag, reel, and light that I had abandoned during my overly exciting third dive with Steve Berman in 1990. They lay next to a pile of artifacts, and were abandoned when I got snagged in the guideline while recovering artifacts and Berman untangled me so that we could both swim out.

  Griffith contemplated my plan, then shook his head. “Bernie, two hundred and forty feet is too deep for me. I can’t safely do that kind of dive with only one set of tanks. I know you’re comfortable with it, but I’d just get us both in trouble. You go alone, if you want.” I appreciated my friend’s honesty. And now I could look forward to the heady freedom of a solo dive.

  When I entered the Doria at the now-familiar opening that led to the dish closet, I swam the 20 feet to the stairwell that lay beside the closet. Instead of making a right turn into the stairwell, I swam to my left, down a corridor that passengers and crew once traversed to get to other parts of the ship. I tied off my guideline here, away from the entrance leading into this area, and away from the stairwell. It was far enough away that somebody else diving from our boat would not accidentally follow the line, thinking that it led to the dish closet. I had been in this area enough to know my way out from here without a guideline. My technique was a combination of the old-time wreck diver’s method of progressive penetration and the cave diver’s guideline method.

  The once horizontal passageway now lay vertical, its path still leading to the opposite side of the Andrea Doria, but now it was a drop straight down to the bottom instead of parallel to the ocean surface. I followed it, looking for another connecting passageway to my right, one that would take me into the third-class area of the ship. Behind me, the green-tinted sunlight, which had filtered down to the wreck and into the opening I had entered, was now fading, and soon I had no ambient light at all. In the pitch blackness, only my powerful dive light could reveal the interior’s secrets. The water felt noticeably colder, perhaps because of my exposed lips, but the low temperature actually seemed to penetrate my drysuit and thick underwear. My narcosis-clouded mind registered only cold. I neither cared where it came from nor paid much attention to any discomfort it was causing me.

  Now, I was warmed and caressed by my solitary experience inside the wreck. Nobody else was here to disturb this moment for me, to interrupt whatever I felt like doing on this dive, or to dictate what I should or should not be doing at any given moment. On this dive, I did not have the responsibility of watching out for my buddy, nor was I a burden on anyone else. It was a situation as liberated from daily existence as any I had ever experienced, and I lapped up the peaceful pleasure of a solitude that had sometimes been a curse for me growing up an only child.

  As I descended the corridor headfirst, my exhaled bubbles ran along my body and then up the path I had come down. Sometimes the bubbles from a diver’s mouth would end up trapped inside the wreck, converging to form air pockets inside an enclosed room or passageway. The oxygen in the expired air bubbles would react with the wreck’s steel, creating rust and eating away at the metal, weakening it, making it easier for the water current and storms to act over time as a sledgehammer pulverizing the Doria into the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, no trace at all would remain on the ocean floor of the floating art palace.

  I could not find the passageway into third class. When the vertical passageway ended, I could make only a left-hand turn, toward the bow of the vessel, deeper into second class and heading toward first class. I checked my depth gauge, although I did not need to: I knew my depth was 238 feet and the gauge only confirmed it. My pressure gauges indicated a comfortable margin of life-giving air in both tanks. I switched regulators so that I would breathe the tanks down evenly. With this necessary dive maintenance taken care of, I swam along the horizontal passageway, my guideline spooling easily off the reel, my light revealing dishes and glassware buried to varying depths by fine silt. I frog-kicked down the passageway so I would not disturb the silt, and passed up the dishes. I could get these on my return, if I did not come across something better.

  Ahead of me, the passageway came to an abrupt end in a mound of silt from which protruded pipes and cables. It looked like a landslide. I turned around and swam back, slowly inspecting the dishes I had previously disregarded, as if I were shopping. I knew that as soon as I touched something, the visibility would very quickly be reduced to nothing, so I wanted to make sure that what I did grab was worthwhile; I already had plenty of artifacts on this trip and I had the luxury of being picky. I plucked up a dish and put it inside my goodie bag, silt billowing around me. I kicked twice to propel myself farther along the corridor in the direction I had come, slipping out of the silt cloud. As I moved along the passageway, I wound in my guideline reel while inspecting the bottom for more trophies. The ITALIA crest was distinguishable on a second plate, and I put the dish in my bag, then proceeded on my way. I came to an interesting, delicately shaped white ceramic creamer. I had never seen one of these before. I carefully picked it off the bottom. As I lifted the creamer up to the small goodie bag I carried especially for delicate items, a plume of silt trailed from it like a jet engine’s exhaust. The artifact looked intact and I was pleased with it.

  After I had safely put the creamer into the bag and made sure it was securely closed, I checked my dive computer, which indicated that I had already been underwater for twenty-two minutes. It was time to go. I swam quickly along the corridor while reeling in the line, then propelled myself rapidly up the vertical passageway. My computers beeped with warnings that I was ascending too fast, which could cause decompression sickness. I ignored the warnings; I felt that a
fast ascent from 238 feet to 200 feet was justified, because each minute I stayed at depth added dramatically to my required decompression, which now would clock in at over two hours. I slowed my ascent when I got to 200 feet, and I came to my guideline tie-off point. I unclipped the line, reeled it all the way in, twisted the knob that prevented the line from unraveling, then put the guideline reel into my all-purpose bag, which contained some tools, backup printed dive tables in case my two computers failed, a lift bag, my jonline, and extra knives in case I needed to cut myself free from an entanglement and either lost or could not reach the two knives I wore.

  I swam out of the wreck, shut off my dive light and clipped it off on my harness, and kicked toward the anchor line, where I had tied off my oxygen decompression tank and another decompression tank that contained air. I found these tanks and clipped them onto my harness shoulder rings. As I slowly ascended the anchor line, I grabbed each tank’s bottom clips and attached them at my harness hip rings, so that the tanks lay under my arms and did not swing about dangerously, which could injure me or other divers on the anchor line, especially during the long decompression.

  After three and a half hours underwater—most of which was spent decompressing, during which time I examined my artifacts, relived the dive, and allowed myself the luxury of thinking how lucky I was to be able to explore underwater—I surfaced and climbed aboard the Seeker, elated with my three finds. And I had done it all on my own. The winner of trophies, the entrepreneur of the deep, I felt like a lone cowboy on the planet’s last frontier.

  Solo diving had become one of the more controversial aspects of the sport. Only recently had the subject been openly discussed in the community, spurred on by Michael Menduno’s magazine AquaCorps, whose first issue, in 1989, was titled “Solo.” The recreational training agencies held as their motto “Always dive with a buddy,” yet many divers have chosen to dive alone on occasion. Both Chris and Chrissy Rouse had conducted many solo dives in caves, and most divers, especially cave explorers, had the skills and guts to dive solo all the time, just as northeast-wreck divers had shown themselves to have years earlier. Cave and wreck divers knew that self-sufficiency and self-reliance were the best methods to prevent an accident. If you knew what you were doing you could learn to go it alone. The confidence that came from successfully conducting solo dives was a tremendous asset. But there were drawbacks also.