Sue could only think back wistfully on their early success in the excavation business, which seemed so distant and the details of which she struggled to remember. Sue would stick with her man in sickness and health, for richer and for poorer, until death parted them. And right now it was poorer.
Sue’s vow was not just an idle promise: It was something she lived by. She knew that Chris lived by it also. Over twenty years they had developed total trust in each other, and neither had given the other any reason not to have and maintain that faith. If anything, Chris’s earlier business success—which had seemed like so improbable a wish at the beginning—had bolstered Sue’s confidence that her husband’s plans would always come out well in the end, including this scheme to have a specialty diving equipment and repair business.
While Sue stood by her husband once again, some of their friends wondered whether the Rouses’ relationship wasn’t stuck in their high school years. Chris criticized not only his son at every turn, which led to their incessant bickering, but also his wife: The food she prepared wasn’t perfect, both the house and their clothes were not clean enough, and her diving was not sufficiently aggressive to suit her husband. Perhaps the family contentiousness was just a continuing adolescent struggle among all three of them, to establish the kind of pecking order that high school sophomores seek. At the very least, all of the Rouses were stubborn, it seemed, and none of them would give way.
While I was preparing to leave for a three-day trip to the wreck of the Northern Pacific, an ocean liner that had been converted to a troop transport and in 1922 had sunk off the coast of Delaware in 150 feet of water after a mysterious fire, my three-year-old son watched me pack my dive bags. He had watched me many times before. Unlike all of the other times, though, this time he asked, “Are you coming back, Daddy?”
He said it in such a strange way that I stopped what I was doing and looked at him, wondering whether he knew something I didn’t. “Of course I’m coming back, Gil. Daddy always comes back.” Gil just looked away, as if he needed more convincing, and that afternoon, I hugged him extra hard before he and my wife saw me off as I drove to the Seeker’s home port in Brielle, New Jersey.
I had contracted with Bill Nagel to charter his boat Seeker for this expedition. Although Nagel had cautioned me against making a trip this far from the Seeker’s home dock in October—late for the northeast dive season—I persisted and put the charter together. Although I could have left the charter to the Northern Pacific for the next diving season, with greater odds for good weather, I was determined to complete my best diving year to date with at least one brass porthole, many of which were known to remain on the ocean liner, underneath steel hull plates that lay on the sandy ocean bottom. Bolstered by my success on the Andrea Doria, I was obsessed with adding another unique prize to my rapidly growing artifact collection.
We chugged to Delaware, just south of New Jersey. We had excellent weather, which was a pleasant surprise after a week of storms. I hoped that the storms had shifted the sand around the Northern Pacific to reveal artifacts, especially the portholes we craved. Among the people who had signed on for the charter was Peter Thompson, who had been one of my students, and who had brought me into the diving computer project as a consultant for the Japanese trading company he worked for, Inabata. Kevin O’Brien and Cliff Herbst had also both been my students. Dennis Anacker and John Harding aspired to dive the Andrea Doria; they were friends from the New York City Sea Gypsies, the dive club I had joined in 1987. Ed Dady, an avid and experienced diver who had gotten in touch with me through Steve Berman, would be my dive buddy. We would all work as a team, laying guidelines on the outside along each side of the upside-down wreck and searching for artifacts. I missed the Rouses, even though their bickering could get crazy and distracting at times; I knew they would have loved this weather and this wreck.
On my first dive I found an area of the ship where the sand formed an unnatural shape, as if covering something, and I dug into the sand, recovering shards of dishes and two intact eating utensils. When I came up after two and a half hours underwater, one of the dive teams reported having seen several portholes lying underneath a massive steel hull plate. After assessing the situation, I decided to take down a jack with two-ton lifting capability and see if I could raise the hull plate to allow us to retrieve the portholes. I dived again that night and followed the guideline that led to the portholes, where I deployed the heavy jack under the hull plate. When I cranked the handle, the hull plate didn’t move. I tried to find out what the problem was.
My vision was limited not by silt but by countless tiny creatures that swarmed all around me, like an aquatic version of Hitchcock’s The Birds. They were so numerous and so small that I couldn’t make out exactly what they were and decided that they were either lobster or shrimp hatchlings. They were attracted to my diving light, which I needed in the pitch blackness of the nighttime dive. When I exchanged my regulators to switch between my two primary air tanks, I swallowed countless hatchlings. I enjoy seafood as much as the next person, but this was a little too fresh for my taste. When I moved my dive light farther away and then placed it on the sand, the hatchlings followed it. The mass of creatures actually reduced the bright beam from my light, and their forms cast eerie, rapidly shifting shadows on the hull plate I was trying to move.
I looked under the hull plate and saw that the jack could not exert upward pressure because the sand was so soft that the jack became buried ever deeper in it the more I cranked the handle. It was as if the wreck itself had taken on a will to deny me the portholes that lay maddeningly—tantalizingly—close.
I continued with my task in spite of the hatchlings and went searching for a piece of wreckage to put underneath the jack to give it purchase. Although the Northern Pacific is largely intact, I saw wreckage scattered all around the massive hull rising 40 feet off the sand, and I quickly found some metal to complete my task. After situating the jack on top of the metal, and tensioning it against the hull plate, I ran out of dive time and groaned in disappointment. I swam back to the anchor line for the long decompression.
It was after midnight when I climbed back onto the Seeker. My muscles ached, I felt weak, and my throat was sore. I’d had a frustrating dive and now I was coming down with the flu.
My sleeping area on the Seeker was damp and cramped and I did not sleep well. I decided not to dive again and took two ibuprofen pills to ease the muscle aches. I knew that if I was feeling ill enough to take medication, I should not be diving, but as I lay there achy and fitful I kept visualizing those portholes. They seemed almost close enough for me to grab from my bunk, and I imagined the polished brass artifacts on display in my Manhattan apartment.
When I got up that morning, my dive buddy, Ed Dady, wanted to get into the water. I told him I did not feel well, but he persisted. I took some more medication, including pills to clear my sinuses, and lay down again as the boat pitched gently beneath me. Strange, I mused, that Ed was so insistent on being in the water with a buddy when he was an experienced solo diver. Besides, when we went into the water together, we usually split up, and then would see each other again only on the anchor line during decompression. This method of diving was jokingly referred to as “same-ocean buddy diving,” and many experienced divers engaged in it, if only to placate the captains of the dive boats they dived from.
After resting for several more hours, I felt better from the combination of medication and food. I decided to go in for a twenty-minute dive, letting Ed and others know I didn’t feel so great and that if I felt uncomfortable underwater I would abort the dive early. If that happened, I told Ed, I didn’t expect him to end his dive. It was only a 150-foot dive, I reasoned; the weather was great and I had already made two dives to the wreck in the past day, so I knew what I was dealing with.
When I descended, I felt new energy, the lure of the portholes and the pleasant buzz of nitrogen flooding me with fresh adrenaline. I tied off my oxygen decompression tank on th
e anchor line and then swam to scout for other portholes—the other divers had encountered no better success raising the hull plate, even with the metal I had placed underneath the jack—and we had given up on those particular artifacts. I swam to the area just to see the tempting prizes anyway, and to try and figure out another way to get at them. After twenty minutes, I still felt great, had ample breathing gas, and decided to continue the dive and make it a standard long dive. My previous two dives had each lasted forty-three minutes at 150 feet, plus decompression, and I could do that easy, I thought.
I swam toward the bow of the 500-foot-long wreck, even though we were anchored high at the very stern of the ocean liner where I was planning on descending. When the vessel sank, its massive weight caused it to plummet bow first and upside down into the sand; the abrupt arrest of the 8,200-ton ship’s forward momentum had caused tremendous stress on the steel hull, and it cracked in two, leaving a 10-foot gap between the bow section and the rest of the ship. I was fascinated to be able to see every deck level clearly defined as I ascended from the sand to the top of the hull. It was like looking at a cutaway drawing, only this was real.
I dropped down to the sand again and penetrated the bow section, looking for lobsters. If I couldn’t get a porthole, at least I could get something huge and edible as a prize. As I was bagging the second of my crustaceans, I saw Ed’s dive light at the large crack leading into the bow, where I had entered. I finished putting the lobster into the bag and swam toward Ed. When I got close to him and swam out of the bow section, Ed signaled that we should ascend the upline, a secondary line tied to the split in the hull left by a Seeker crew member, Dan Crowell. I returned the signal, agreeing.
As we ascended, I checked my gauges, noting the time required for decompression. Then I remembered that I had left my oxygen decompression tank tied to the anchor line at the wreck’s stern. I would need the oxygen to add safety to my decompression after my third long dive within twenty-four hours to 150 feet.
We had ascended only 10 feet above the wreck, to 100 feet. I signaled to Ed that I wanted to descend, swim to the other line, and ascend there. He looked at me quizzically. I turned away from him, making my way back down, and started swimming on top of the wreck’s keel, at 110 feet, toward the anchor line at the stern. The current had picked up and I started breathing hard as I kicked vigorously to make headway. I knew that time was important, and I was eager to get to my oxygen bottle and start my decompression as quickly as possible. With no handholds on the bare keel, I had to use my leg muscles to propel myself rather than using the pull-’n’-glide, which would have required far less breathing gas because the arm muscles are smaller than the leg muscles and don’t need as much oxygen to fuel them.
I looked down at my gauges as I swam, breathing hard. At this level of exertion, carbon dioxide was rapidly building up in my system and caused me to breathe even more rapidly. If I kept breathing this hard, I would pass out well before I reached the stern, which was about 350 feet from where I had begun my swim. I realized I had to come up with another, less physically demanding way to get to my oxygen bottle.
I dropped over the wreck’s side and down to the sand. Although my decompression time would accumulate more rapidly the longer I spent at 150 feet than if I were at 110 feet, I was now out of the current, and I could pull-’n’-glide using the wreckage strewn about the bottom to hang on to. But my exertions had already taken a toll.
According to our interpretation of the Martini Law, 150 feet is the equivalent of three alcoholic drinks. The carbon dioxide buildup and my weakened state from what I thought were flu symptoms were increasing the narcotic effect of the air I breathed. I felt as if I had instantly gulped another martini. My head spun when I turned to look for Ed. I saw him following me, but he seemed some distance away. I stopped long enough to catch my breath, and then proceeded to pull-’n’-glide toward the stern.
The closer I got to the stern, the murkier the water became and the harder it was for me to see the hull, even though it was only 20 feet away. Or was the murkiness the result of my exertion, the carbon dioxide buildup, my weakened state, the medication, and the increased narcosis?
My heart thumped as I searched for the anchor line in the area where I knew it should be. It was suddenly so black I had difficulty distinguishing things. I swam toward the wreck’s massive hull, away from the wreckage strewn on the bottom, and waved my light up and down as if it were a paintbrush and I were painting the hull. The anchor line should be here, yet I could not see it. I also could not see Ed. If I had had communications gear, I could have asked him where he was, and he could have guided me to the anchor line, which it turned out he had found, not far above where I was searching.
Although the communications equipment would have helped, better judgment on my behalf would have been even more effective: I should not have changed my decision not to dive after I started getting ill. In my obsession for more artifacts I had pushed my body too far and had not respected either the ocean or the difficulties of diving deep. I realize that now. After numerous dives conducted at over 200 feet, I had regarded the 150-foot depth as shallow and had taken the danger of depth for granted. I was now in serious trouble.
I swam on and continued to search. Why could I not find the anchor line? This was an easy wreck to navigate and I had not encountered problems on my previous dives. Maybe I should have run a guideline after all?
Time was becoming critical as I swam harder to get to the anchor line faster. I was swimming near the wreck and did not have any wreckage to grab on to for pull-’n’-glides. I was breathing hard again. I swam past familiar-looking landmarks, but could only wonder why they looked familiar without putting any connections together. When I swam past a huge crack in the hull, I marveled that there were two of these on the wreck. I swam up to 110 feet and swam on top of the wreck, expecting to find the anchor line that had been attached at this depth at the stern. Then I came to the bow of the wreck, unmistakable by the arrowlike point that the hull formed here.
And then I realized what had happened, like a drunken man whose thoughts were suddenly focused by a splash of freezing water to the face: I had swum underneath the anchor line and gone around the stern, then proceeded back toward the bow on the opposite side of the wreck. I had swum 1,500 feet, most of it at a depth of 150 feet.
I was now not only physically but also mentally exhausted. I could swim back to the secondary line that I had started to ascend with Ed, before I fixated on my oxygen decompression bottle and headed for the anchor line. But how far away was that? Eighty feet? Or maybe 150 feet? And what if I missed that the way I had the anchor line? The thought of swimming against the current again wore me out further. I had enough breathing gas in my tanks to make the swim to the secondary upline, but I would not have enough to complete my required decompression. My computer indicated ninety-nine minutes, but that was merely the maximum amount of time it could show on the external display. The time required for decompression was probably closer to two hours, the total time tracked on the computer’s internal register.
If I kept swimming around underwater searching for the upline, I would drown. The upline reel that Chris Rouse had given to me as a gift was attached to my tank. I could deploy the line by attaching a lift bag and sending it to the surface, then tie the line off on the wreck, swim up the line as I would have the anchor line, and decompress without drifting away from the wreck and the dive boat. But deploying the upline would take me a few minutes, and the current was pushing me away from the wreck. And without my oxygen bottle I did not have gas to complete decompression.
I stopped swimming, breathing hard, and concentrated on taking several long, deep inhalations to steady my breathing rate. I looked toward the stern and saw the wreck’s grayish-black keel merge with the color of the water 30 feet away. I looked upward and started ascending, using my exhaled bubbles as a guide to my ascent rate; I stayed underneath the bubbles.
I breathed normally, making sure not
to hold my breath so that I would not get an air embolism. I knew that too fast an ascent rate could cause the bends on a regular dive, but I was going to get bent anyway. Even so, I did not want to ascend too fast and make matters worse. I would go to the boat and they would get me onto a Coast Guard chopper, and then I would be fine once I got into a recompression chamber. I really screwed up this time. But at least I would be alive.
As I ascended, I waited for the pain that I knew was sure to hit. Where would it start? I did not even consider that I might become paralyzed and not be able to swim back to the boat. I knew that everything would work out fine. It had to.
When I broke the surface, I was relieved that the weather was flat calm. I was surprised that I did not feel any pain. I turned toward the Seeker, which was several hundred feet away, and waved my arm in the diver’s distress signal.
Nobody was on deck to see me. I shouted out, “Hey! Hey! Seeker!” Captain Bill Nagel walked out from the main cabin. I shouted again and waved my arm. Nagel looked around the deck, then casually out to sea, toward the yellow lift bag attached to the crew’s secondary upline. It turned out that he could not hear my shouts, but my arm, waving in my reddish-orange drysuit, caught his eye.
Dan Crowell was starting to climb the Seeker’s ladder after completing his dive. I saw Bill say something to Dan, who was just stepping over the stern of the boat, onto the deck. Bill helped Dan off with his tanks and soon he was swimming out to me, holding a line attached to the boat that could be used to haul me back. I pulled my snorkel out of my goodie bag, put it in my mouth, and started swimming slowly toward him. Crowell stopped when he reached the end of the rope, waiting for me to get to him.
“What happened?” Crowell asked as he grabbed on to the webbing of my tank harness to prevent me from drifting away.
“I fucked up. Pull me in.” My chest had started to hurt and I wanted to get back on board the Seeker and then into a recompression chamber as quickly as possible.
The Last Dive Page 23