The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  Chrissy would not be talked into changing his dive plan or his diving techniques, even if those techniques involved cutting corners: He was obsessed with getting inside the wreck and starting the search. As he had told others before the dive, he assumed his dad would tie off, as he’d done on previous dives, saving Chrissy valuable search time. His father grabbed the clip affixed to the guideline Chrissy tossed to him, wrapped the line several times around some wreckage, and then used the clip to secure the line to itself.

  Chrissy had to crawl his way into the wreck. Cables hung everywhere, torn loose by the explosion that had ripped off the conning tower. Metal fragments, pieces of instruments, and rusted machinery marked the jaws of the U-boat. Chrissy later ranted that he felt he was swimming down a monster’s gullet, into its stomach, a sure sign of nitrogen narcosis. When he entered the wreck, his exhaled bubbles would have loosened fine particles of silt from the ceiling almost immediately. Rust flakes would start their slow fall. Unlike a snowstorm that brightens the sky and landscape, the rust storm makes everything darker: The flakes themselves are dark red, and when they hit the bottom, they send up swirls of silt that curl upward slowly, like smoke from smoldering embers. With a narcosis-dulled mind, the swirling silt would seem like inflamed tissues of the U-boat’s throat closing, further narrowing the already tight tunnel.

  One of the frustrations Chrissy later expressed was that no matter how carefully he tried to move through the U-boat, he inevitably came into contact with some part of the wreckage. If he moved a leg, his fin would touch something, maybe a dangling cable or a slab of torn metal, he could never quite tell. When he turned from one side to the other, he would rub his shoulder or the hose to his breathing apparatus against some piece of debris. Every movement, every exhalation, caused silt to billow from the bottom and rust particles to flake from the ceiling.

  Chrissy would have stopped kicking to reduce the silt he stirred up and instead would have pulled himself along the wreckage with his hands, using the technique called the pull-’n’-glide. As he reached out and grabbed indistinguishable objects, some would shift, and crumble, causing dark-red rust to mix with dark-brown silt from the sand and organic debris.

  At this point, the adrenaline rush of exploration that divers feel would have made Chrissy’s heart start beating faster, causing him to breathe more quickly. When he turned in the course of working his way into the captain’s quarters, his tanks would have struck something, producing a dull, metallic twang that echoed in varying pitches inside his head. His powerful dive light would be useless, serving only to fix a fuzzy circle in the dark brown-red blanket surrounding him. As he felt his way farther into the wreck, past the silt he had stirred, he would have been able to see a few feet ahead.

  In order to get into the compartment where he planned to dig for artifacts, Chrissy had to wiggle through a round hatchway that separated the damaged control room from the captain’s quarters. He would have entered by crawling over the bottom of the hatchway so his tanks could clear the opening. Some of his equipment no doubt caught on the hatchway, but he’d made it this far before and would have known for a fact that he could make it in. His struggles to maneuver his various attached accessory equipment over the lip of the hatchway would have increased his frustration, and further enhanced his narcosis as he pulled himself all the way through.

  Once inside the hatchway, he could dig into the silt, hoping to find the trophy that would identify this U-boat. His plan was to probe the area underneath some shelving, where, he had told friends, he was sure to find more objects. Ideally one of them would tell a more complete story about the U-Who, maybe settle all the unanswered questions once and for all. Everyone would praise Chrissy Rouse, intrepid diver, and celebrate his find. The discovery would put him in another league, he thought, alongside other legendary divers like his hero, Sheck Exley. Settling on the bottom, Chrissy would have started digging with his right hand while his left maintained a firm grasp on his guideline reel, which led to the outside of the wreck, and to his father.

  The silt inside the warship meant that Chrissy had to dig up to his elbow in order to retrieve any artifacts that lay on the bottom of the wreck. Neither Chrissy nor anyone else realized that the shelving was no longer attached to the hull, but was held upright only by the sand and a few metal objects at its base. Pressed for time, Chrissy probably dug feverishly, feeling for anything that he might put into his bag to examine later. Brown silt and sand would have risen, mixing with the red rust particles knocked loose by his exhalation bubbles. His labor would have caused him to breathe harder and his exhaled bubbles’ force would have further agitated the silt, sand, and rust mixture that surrounded Chrissy like a tornado. The digging would have quickly occluded all visibility, leaving him to rely on feel alone.

  At this point in the dive, we imagine, eleven minutes had passed since he had left the surface with his father. The water here was reported to be only 41 degrees Fahrenheit, which a diver feels even through his thick drysuit and the ski-suit-like layer of underwear. But Chrissy’s artifact fixation and the adrenaline rush of getting into the cramped U-boat would have helped his mind adhere to the task, even as his body felt fuzzy, drunken. Because of the zero visibility Chrissy now encountered, he could not even have noticed the tunnel vision brought on by the nitrogen narcosis.

  Later, Chrissy told divers that his hands bumped into an object, and although he could see nothing through the silt tornado, he knew what he held was large. Chrissy’s heart would have jumped at this point, as he would have fantasized that this was the box where the captain kept his logbook. The thought would have made Chrissy struggle and pull hard at the box with both hands.

  When Chrissy managed to move the object from the resting place where it was tightly wedged, the shelf unit to his left started to fall slowly. Chrissy could not see it tumble, but he later reported suddenly feeling a crushing weight, which pinned him to the bottom. Getting trapped underwater is a terrifying situation, and the sudden scare would have increased his narcosis as if he had swallowed a huge drink of hard alcohol in one gulp. The level of his narcosis at this point would have put his mind into a hallucinatory state. This was completely unlike an earlier dive Chrissy had told me about, where he and his father dived to 300 feet depth breathing air in a warm, clear-water cave. Although Chrissy told me he had experienced heavy—even hallucinogenic—narcosis on that 300-foot dive, he did not have the many problems to deal with that he now faced inside the U-boat. Chrissy’s narcosis inside the cramped, silted-out quarters of the U-boat must have been enhanced by the cold water, and his situation would not have been manageable had he been alone.

  Their dive plan was for Chris to wait outside the wreck, keeping his eyes on Chrissy’s guideline. The line had once been white, but had dirtied in places from their many wreck dives, where silt had infested the nylon. There was no need to replace the line because the divers could still see it. Suddenly, silt would have come billowing out of the wreck, as expected, when Chrissy started digging for artifacts. But Chris would have realized after a few breaths that something was wrong; the rush of silt would have been accompanied by a banging noise. Chris knew that, underwater, noise is muted and heavier, and vibrations are felt more dramatically. Holding on to the side of the opening where Chrissy had entered, Chris would have held his breath so that he could hear something other than his own exhaled bubbles.

  He definitely would have been able to hear Chrissy screaming, but would have checked himself to make sure it was not an auditory hallucination brought about by his own narcosis. Chris’s heart probably raced as he suddenly realized that it was Chrissy screaming.

  Inside the wreck, Chrissy was in trouble. The narcosis would have quickly escalated as Chrissy’s panic started winning its battle over rational thought, yet rational thought is especially necessary in this increasingly dangerous circumstance.

  Chrissy later asserted that he tried to steady himself, tried to focus. He attempted to do a push-up and lift hi
mself off the ground and out from under whatever was trapping him. These efforts would have made him breathe even faster and harder and use up more of the rapidly diminishing precious air in his back-mounted tanks. He would have heard what sounded like heavy drumming, and perhaps he would have known at some level that the sound was his own heart. But maybe he thought that the sound was the monster’s heart beating, as his postdive, pain-induced ranting suggests. Chrissy was probably well beyond holding back the hallucinations at this point.

  Acting on instinct alone, he likely reached out with his left hand to start banging the metal guideline reel against the steel hull, as a signal to his father that he was in trouble.

  Outside the wreck, the banging would have gotten louder, more frequent, more urgent as Chrissy’s desperation escalated. Chris took off his extra scuba tank and left it at the entrance to the sub, and then moved into the wreckage. He grabbed the line and followed it, and probably found that there was far too much movement on it. He might have thought that Chrissy had gotten himself entangled in the line, which he knew from previous experience he could get his son out of.

  The crumpled interior was only five feet high, and less than ten feet across, because of all the protruding machinery in the way. Chris didn’t really need the line to find his son: All he had to do was follow the deafening noise. He would have been able to hear Chrissy screaming into his regulator, in addition to the banging against the wreckage. But instead of letting go of the line, Chris would have wisely chosen to utilize his training and follow the guideline handgrip by handgrip, at the end of which he was sure to discover his boy. Brownish-red silt would have continuously billowed out of the hatchway like smoke from a raging fire. When Chris moved through the hatchway he would have bumped into Chrissy, struggling and screaming. Though he could not see his son, Chris was able to reach out and grab him.

  One imagines that Chrissy felt the hand on his shoulder, felt his father’s firm grip, and closed his eyes. He tried to calm himself. Between breaths he probably screamed through the regulator, “Dad, I’m stuck! Get me out, Dad!”

  His father likely moved his head closer, and probably answered through his regulator, “Stop moving! I’ll get you out. Get your shit together.”

  Chrissy’s heavy breathing and screaming would have further heightened the hallucinatory narcosis, and as we know from his later ranting, he thought he was under attack by a monster. He would have tried to get away and probably flailed wildly.

  Although Chris would also have been laboring under the weight of narcosis, his head was probably much clearer than his son’s, and he would have moved slowly, because he had to rely on feel alone to determine what was trapping his son. He might have grabbed Chrissy and pulled him forward, as if he were a lifeguard wrestling a panicked swimmer into safety. Chrissy would have kept struggling to free himself, grunting into his mouthpiece with his anguished effort and screaming for his dad to help him. The elder Rouse would have known that he had to calm his son down if they were to get out alive, so he would have tried to calm the boy down by talking through his regulator with reassurances. This probably made Chrissy stop struggling only until the boy’s hallucinations again got the better of him, and the procedure started all over again. Chris would have needed to move behind his son to find the shelves that had fallen on Chrissy. With an adrenaline-fueled fury, he would have grabbed the shelving and heaved, bracing himself on the floor for leverage.

  A week after the Rouses’ dive, John Chatterton, Steve Gatto, and other divers were the first to enter this compartment since the Rouses had been in it. Chatterton and Gatto reported seeing shredded, rubberized canvas from one of the warship’s life rafts throughout the area; the shredded remains had not been seen by other divers before the Rouses entered. The life raft might have self-inflated on top of the shelves, further jamming Chrissy in place beneath them. This is not as hard to believe as it might seem: A life raft had previously been recovered from U-853, which also rests in U.S. waters; its automatic inflation system worked on the surface even after more than forty years underwater. Chrissy himself later screamed incoherently about a life raft. If the life raft had inflated on top of the shelves, Chris Rouse’s efforts to free his son would have proved useless until he took out his knife and shredded the material. If that was not the case and he was able to lift the shelves, then perhaps the pair came across the life raft and shredded it like two knights in armor battling a dragon.

  As if the two divers did not have enough to contend with, a post-dive analysis of their equipment revealed that bits of rusted metal had lodged in Chrissy’s primary regulator, which would have caused water to enter along with air during each breath. Chrissy would have had to spit the malfunctioning unit out of his mouth and replace it with his secondary regulator. Whatever level of narcosis Chrissy was experiencing, he still managed to focus on his life-giving equipment to make the regulator exchange.

  When Chrissy was freed, the two divers faced yet another problem: They had to exit the compartment in which they were now both trapped and then make their way out of the wreck. Chrissy apparently tried to use his cave-diving training and follow his guideline, which should have led them straight out of the wreck. But the guideline was later found strung back and forth across the debris littering the bottom of the U-boat’s compartment, and parts of it were buried, indicating that the two had difficulty finding the way out. The line leads out of the wreck through a different opening than the one they had entered, which provides further confirmation that they had difficulty getting out of the steel coffin that had entombed its complement of German sailors.

  Once the two got out of the wreck, they must have been grateful that their way to the surface was now unhindered. Their minds must have relaxed a little as they realized they were now out of immediate danger. But what had been planned as a twenty-minute dive had now taken over thirty minutes and time was racing.

  Chrissy would not have wanted to go back into the wreck to retrieve his line, which was attached to the metal reel he held in his hand. He dropped the reel. His father probably watched it plummet and land in the debris of the control room, where it was later found by Chatterton. The elder Rouse would not have made an attempt to retrieve the reel, unlike his reaction on their first dives on the Andrea Doria. They had to do something far more pressing now: retrieve the scuba tanks they had left on the U-boat’s deck at the beginning of the dive. They would need them to surface safely. Without the extra tanks, they did not have enough breathing gas for their decompression.

  Chrissy Rouse later told divers that he and his father searched along the U-boat’s deck for eleven minutes, trying desperately to find their extra tanks. Though the U-boat is easy to navigate, the narcosis both divers must have been feeling probably disoriented them. They never found the cache of three scuba tanks that lay on the deck. Because they had exited from a different hole than the one they had entered, they were inadvertently on the opposite side of the U-boat. When Chris found the one scuba tank he had dropped off just outside the opening he had swum through to rescue his son, he clipped the bottle to his son and signaled for them to ascend. Chris must have known they did not have enough gas for both of them to decompress, and he would have sacrificed his own chance to decompress in order to save his son. Chris probably thought that he could surface and direct other divers from the Seeker to bring them more gas so that they could complete their decompression.

  Somewhere, 230 feet above them, floated the dive boat and an end to this ordeal.

  When they started their ascent, they had not found the anchor line, but they had no more time to spend looking for anything. Their decompression obligation was about three hours, which meant that they should slowly ascend, stopping at various depths during their stage decompression. If they did not decompress, their bodies would be like soda cans that are shaken, then opened in one brutal motion, their blood vessels blasting bubbles of nitrogen. If they could not find the anchor line during their ascent, they would drift underwater with
the current while decompressing, and would most likely be lost at sea. Even in calm waters, it was a challenge to find people floating on the surface. But with the wind mounting and waves five to six feet high—the conditions an age ago when father and son had last been on board the Seeker—they would have to be extremely lucky to be found by Captains Crowell and Chatterton.

  As the needles on their pressure gauges rapidly dropped toward zero, the Rouses ascended. They would have kept looking up, as they had been taught, to avoid the possibility of hitting their heads against floating debris. They would have turned slowly, looking for the anchor line, knowing it couldn’t be far away. It is not clear whether the Rouses found it or not. If they did, it was their first turn of good luck. Ascending the anchor line would allow them to come up off the bow of the boat.

  As they slowly ascended, they would have automatically checked their pressure and depth gauges, and then their forearm-mounted diving computers. Chrissy later said that the computers indicated they had been underwater for forty minutes.

  Steve McDougall was still decompressing on the anchor line, and he had now ascended to a depth of 15 feet. He wondered where the Rouses were and knew that he should have seen them already. Although he did not know it, the Rouses were below McDougall’s visibility in the murky green water. If he had seen the Rouses and they had signaled to him, he might have been able to help by providing them some of his breathing gas. Unlike commercial or military divers, sport divers do not routinely use underwater verbal communication equipment. Without that, the divers could not talk to one another, and the Rouses had no way of letting others know how desperate their situation was. McDougall, though he wasn’t far from the Rouses, had no idea where they were, and as a consequence he could not help them.