The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  Wolfgang clipped his small oxygen decompression tank onto my harness. I gratefully accepted the oxygen and breathed from it, hoping that it would speed up my decompression enough so that the excess helium in my body did not form bubbles and bend me when I surfaced. I signaled that I was not going to continue my 40-foot decompression stop: Breathing more of Wolfgang’s bottom mix, which I knew contained only 17 percent oxygen and about 35 percent helium, would not help my body decompress. I did not want to remain on oxygen at 40 feet and risk drowning from an oxygen-induced seizure. Into my head swam the dead face of the Rouses’ friend Ed Sollner, who, shunning the U.S. Navy recommendations, had breathed a high-oxygen-content gas at too great a depth, had had a seizure, and had died. Breathing from Wolfgang’s oxygen tank, I swam to the dive boat’s in-water oxygen station and switched to the boat’s oxygen. I would save the oxygen in Wolfgang’s tank to breathe while swimming back to the boat’s ladder. For now, breathing from the dive boat’s plentiful oxygen supply, I would stay here and decompress as long as I could.

  When Wolfgang finished his decompression, he swam over to me and asked in gestures if I felt okay. He put his hand to his chest and then pointed toward the glinting light above us. Was I willing to let him ascend? I signaled “OK.” Wolfgang swam away and disappeared into the clouds of sunlight above. Soon a set of double tanks filled with air dropped down to me on a rope and hit my back-mounted tanks. Apparently, the guys above wanted to make sure that I got the message that they wanted me to breathe from the tanks they lowered. I breathed from the tanks periodically because air breaks were necessary to prevent the oxygen from building to a toxic level in my body.

  My planned decompression schedule had long since been invalidated by my use of unplanned gas mixtures, including bottom mix at all of my stops from 70 feet to 40 feet: I’d also broken my 40-and 30-foot stops when I went straight to the pure oxygen at 20 feet. Other divers sometimes ran into problems requiring unplanned and unorthodox gas switches. When that happened the diver had to resort to what Steve Berman and John Reekie jokingly referred to as the “modified Yugoslavian method,” which meant basically that you assembled your own order out of chaos. You did what you intuitively felt was the right amount of decompression at a particular stop, then ascended to the next stop; if you felt any pain develop, you went down one or two stops and spent more time decompressing there before moving up again. As I inventoried my body, I did not feel the pain I had felt so many years ago when I had gotten horrifically bent. After several hours of decompression, I ascended and climbed into the dive boat. My friends’ worried faces broke into tentative smiles. I was relieved when bends symptoms did not appear.

  When I returned home and crawled into bed at three in the morning, my wife sleepily told me that she’d heard that evening that Tony Smith, a friend of mine, had died diving while I was away on the Doria. He was diving in the warm, clear water of North Carolina, his intended destination a wreck at 130 feet. It was an easy dive for the experienced diver and New York dive-boat crew member, who had just returned from the Truk Island lagoon in the Pacific, the Mecca of wreck diving. His self-confidence combined forces with his urge to get into the water and start exploring for artifacts, and he forgot to turn on any of the three tanks he carried. He also neglected to make any of several pre-dive checks that would have alerted him to his imminent danger, and he failed to reconfigure his belt to carry less weight than he had to use in cold New York waters. When he jumped in, he plummeted to the bottom, was unable to breathe from his regulators, and drowned.

  As exhausted and drained as I was, I didn’t sleep much that night—or the next night either, for that matter. I kept imagining my friend’s fatal accident and reliving my own uncertain breaths during my Doria ascent. My problems had been the direct result of changing my equipment configuration and not testing it in a shallow, safer environment like a quarry before venturing into deep water. I realized that work commitments now distracted me from fully preparing for dives like the Doria. What if I had died instead of being able to manage the situation as I had? Where would my family have been then? Gil was almost eleven now and entering a period in his life when having a father around was more important than ever. My death would be a blow to him that he would perceive on some level as abandonment. My own plans for my career and my family’s security were entering a period of great promise and challenge. With so many obligations to people I loved, did I have the right to risk my life and livelihood by diving? As the sun came up that morning, I said goodbye to the Doria and to any kind of diving. I resolved I would not venture into the deep until I’d safeguarded my family’s well-being.

  The Rouses had been extremely active during a time of tremendous change and controversy in sport diving. In spite of their deaths, sport diving continued on its path toward what some considered radical, even dangerous, change. The use of mixed gases, penetrations into shipwrecks and caves, and the general employment of technology as a tool for sport divers to overcome the limitations and dangers of the deep now had a new name, technical diving, a term generally credited to Michael Menduno in 1991. Even though his magazine, AquaCorps, appeared only sporadically for a few years after the Rouses’ deaths, it remained an important voice for divers who engaged in what recreational divers—those who stayed shallower than 130 feet and did not conduct decompression dives or penetrate into wrecks or caves—considered lunatic diving.

  Recreational divers cited the deaths of the Rouses and of their friend Ed Sollner as examples of just how fatally foolhardy technical diving was. Despite protests from divers and diving organizations and even the soul-searching of technical divers themselves, the new techniques grew into the standard for an established sport, its risks matched by its rewards. A combination of AquaCorps’s macho “You’re not a real diver unless you’re diving deep and on mixed gas” attitude and divers’ craving for more adventure has led to revolutionary changes. “Technical diving is being driven by the consumer, not the big training agencies who want to dictate what type of diving you can do and how that diving is done,” Menduno has said. “It’s the same as the personal computer revolution, which was fueled on a grassroots level.”

  The diver-inspired movement toward technical diving was helped along by both AquaCorps and two new organizations created to certify divers in the use of mixed gases. But at the time of the Rouses’ deaths in late 1992, these organizations were still minuscule compared to the established diving-training agencies that had branches worldwide; many people in the diving business world did not recognize the new, small organizations, nor their certifications. They argued that sport divers could not successfully use mixed gases because the process was too complex: Special equipment was required to mix the gases safely and had to be specially cleaned periodically to prevent a fire or explosion, and the gases had to be analyzed after they were mixed. All this demanded too much planning and precision of execution for the average diver, or so the argument went. But the naysayers underestimated the kind of single-minded commitment that the heirs of Chris and Chrissy Rouse would bring to the urge to go ever deeper.

  Ultimately, economics would play the driving role in altering the dynamics of the endeavor as it had throughout diving history, when men risked life itself—ignoring those who said that the underwater environment was a forbidden realm—in order to salvage treasure lost beneath the waves. In its winter 1991 issue AquaCorps published simple but persuasive pie charts showing the results of its own study on the huge amount of money technical divers spent on training, equipment, and travel compared to recreational divers. According to Aqua-Corps, the technical divers shelling out the cash required to get trained, go diving, and keep diving were the economic mainstay of the diving industry: Although technical divers made up only 8 to 10 percent of all the active amateur divers, their annual spending accounted for a third of the market, and their equipment investment accounted for over 40 percent of the money divers spent on gear.

  In spite of the admonishments of large training
organizations against sport divers’ using mixed gases, many dive-shop owners and instructors did not want to be left out of the boom; they invested in training in mixed-gas diving to get themselves educated in mixing gases, and bought the very expensive equipment needed to safely concoct and analyze the gas. All this helped further fuel the expansion of technical diving. It was now possible to go into many dive shops, show proof of mixed-gas training, drop off your empty scuba tanks, and announce what percentages of gases you wanted in your refills. Trusting your dive shop to do the job was far easier than having to mix your own gases from large supply cylinders that you rented from a commercial gas supply company and stored in your garage, workshop, or apartment living room, the way Chris and Chrissy had done when they had the money.

  Dive boats now started catering to technical divers, though some boats, like the Seeker and the Wahoo, had welcomed them even before the new practices became popular. Now, if you walked onto the average dive boat with a decompression tank clearly labeled OXYGEN, you would not be thrown off the boat, and old-timers would not mutter that you were an accident waiting to happen. At the same time that adventure travelers were lining up to climb Mount Everest, legions of divers were plunging into the water, their exotic gases opening up underwater expanses for more and more explorers. All it took was money, motivation, and a sense of mission.

  As more and more divers turned to mixed-gas diving, the traditional training organizations grew alarmed at the loss in potential revenue. In 1995, the world’s largest recreational diving training organization, the California-based Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI), and also Great Britain’s largest certifying organization, the British Sub-Aqua Club, known as BS-AC, announced that they would be offering courses in the use of the oxygen-enriched-air mixes called nitrox, which limited divers to a depth of 130 feet. In ensuing years, every recreational diving training agency in the world did likewise. Smaller organizations that trained divers in the use of trimix gases containing helium for diving well beyond 130 feet gained the credibility and respectability previously denied them.

  Divers went deeper and deeper. Sites once thought inaccessible were now viewed as realistic conquests. When the Andrea Doria came to rest at 240 feet below the sea’s surface in 1956, it represented the very extent of where sport divers could safely venture. Over nearly forty years, some divers like Sheck Exley would dive much deeper than 240 feet, but only to test how far a diver could go and make it back in one piece. Bill Stone’s 1987 Wakulla Springs cave-diving expedition proved that sport divers could use mixed gases to accomplish things underwater, as they mapped extensive tunnels at 360 feet. To organizations like BS-AC and PADI, however, this expedition was an aberration, because the average diver had nowhere near the level of skill and experience of Stone and his crew. In 1991, Team Doria showed how cave-diving techniques and equipment could be applied to the wildly changing conditions of open-ocean wreck diving. Over the next several years, cave-diving equipment configuration became de rigueur for technical divers. Divers exploring deep wrecks would clip extra tanks to their harnesses just as the cave-diving pioneers had a decade before.

  In 1994, John Chatterton, John Yurga, Barb Lander, and Gary Gentile made up the American contingent of divers invited on the British diver Polly Tapson’s expedition to the Lusitania, the Cunard liner that had fallen victim to an infamous World War I U-boat attack and was resting in 325 feet of water off southern Ireland. It was the first sport-diving expedition to the wreck—an expedition made possible by the use of mixed-gas diving and its availability to sport divers. It was a controversial and pioneering trip that Chris Rouse and his son would have second-mortgaged their house to go on—they would even have sprung for the trimix required.

  Amid legal controversy over who owned the Lusitania, and whether diving on it could be restricted, Tapson went ahead with her expedition, ignoring a lawsuit threatened by Gregg Bemis, an American who claimed ownership of the wreck (Bemis’s claim was later upheld in Irish and United States courts). The expedition was successful, establishing that a large team of sport divers could safely probe to over 300 feet in the open ocean. None of the divers were injured in spite of often-challenging sea conditions. The achievement was doubly remarkable because Tapson herself had been badly bent only one week beforehand. Doctors warned her against diving, especially so soon after her accident, but she dived to the wreck anyway. When Menduno interviewed Tapson for AquaCorps, she didn’t want to discuss her decision. “I don’t want to … be an example of someone who acted irresponsibly and got away with it. And then have someone else do the same thing who subsequently ends up in a wheelchair for life.” Psychotherapists like Dr. Jennifer Hunt, who has written a psychological and sociological study of bent divers and who has interviewed me extensively, called Tapson’s behavior an example of risk denial: Tapson was so focused on diving during the historic sport-diving expedition she had worked so hard to organize that she denied the very real possibility that she could be permanently crippled by another bout of the bends. Tapson herself felt good enough to dive and did so without incident. Her problem-free plunge into the cold North Atlantic indicates how little we really know about the bends and the effects of water pressure on the human body.

  The long-term effects of deep diving remain mysterious. Divers like me, who can hear through at least one ear and have blazed new neural pathways, continue to be informal test subjects in the study of adventure physiology. People like Emmerman and Huggins—the seasick researchers who participated in the Team Doria ’91 expedition to try to measure the degree of decompression stress on divers’ bodies—still lack conclusive data about what deep diving does to us across the decades. But some of the divers who had been at the sport for a long time found themselves suffering strange, unexplained maladies that might or might not be related to diving. A commercial diver like Glenn Butler, who had been exposed in a hyperbaric chamber to experimental dives down to 1,000 feet and who had worked for long time periods in the ocean at depths down to 700 feet, could be expected to exhibit some sort of long-term physical effects. Butler did develop brain lesions from deep diving, and one of them may have contributed to his aneurysm in 1992. His later neurological problems were unanticipated when he was engaged in the deep-diving experiments and in his work. Ocean Systems’ Dr. Bill Hamilton, the man Butler worked for in the beginning of his diving career, says an aneurysm completely explains Butler’s condition. Hamilton maintains that making any connection between that condition and diving is unfair to both Butler and diving. Although commercial divers could reasonably be expected to have some sort of residual effects from diving, it was not expected that sport divers could also exhibit severe impairment. Chris Rouse conducted 771 dives and Chrissy 636 in four years, but compared to pros like Butler, sport divers like them were landlubbers.

  Evie Dudas—who in 1967 was the first woman to dive the Andrea Doria, got severely bent in 1968, and participated in John Reekie’s 1992 Empress of Ireland expedition with the Rouses—is one of those divers whose physical maladies baffle doctors. Problems with her inner ears and neurological damage cause her balance to be impaired for weeks at a time, a syndrome she experiences every three or four years, despite every precaution she takes, short of not diving at all. She suffers from “skin bends”—decompression sickness symptoms that affect the skin, such as rashes, itchiness, tingling, and numbness—if she does not use high-oxygen-content gases or pure oxygen to decompress after every dive, regardless of whether or not her dive schedules call for decompression stops. And even when she does take precautions, she still occasionally suffers skin bends. All of this has placed an almost continuous decompression stress on her body, which perhaps is the cause of her numerous bone problems, including severe ankle maladies that led doctors to recommend fusing her ankle to her leg bone. She refused that treatment because it would have hampered her ability to swim underwater. As a result of the bends, Evie has no feeling down the right side of her body. Her maladies are permanent, and
doctors can offer no cure.

  She continues to dive. Her West Chester, Pennsylvania, dive shop, Dudas’ Diving Duds, and her diving-suit manufacturing business are both flourishing. The dive club she started in affiliation with her dive shop is also thriving as people are drawn to the underwater world by Evie’s charisma and youthful enthusiasm for diving. All of her children, now grown to adulthood, not only dive but earn at least part of their family income through diving-related businesses, through their own or their spouses’ work. Her life is diving. If you asked her, she would tell you she will dive until she can no longer swim or breathe.

  Like Evie Dudas, I had also suffered severe neurological decompression sickness and also experienced strange physical syndromes. After my training-wheels return to diving in 1992, nine months after my accident, my recovery progressed as Dr. Mendagurin said it should, so that I could walk normally again. I even went back to deep decompression diving, venturing to depths greater than 300 feet. But over the next several years I experienced drastic mood swings and a decline in mental capacity: I had trouble remembering things. My concentration fragmented. Even forming sentences became difficult, as I grasped at words that were somehow unavailable. Talking to Gil, now starting elementary school, I would struggle to explain the answers to his questions about science and the world, even though I knew the answers. And physically, I became tired quickly. I remained in touch with Dr. Hunt, and during conversations I simply could not remember details about diving that I knew very well; at one point, she remarked sadly, “Bernie, you used to have an acute memory.”