''The Last Dive: A Father and Son's Fatal Descent into the Ocean's Depths'' (2000) is a

non-fiction Nonfiction, or non-fiction, is any document or media content that attempts, in good faith, to provide information (and sometimes opinions) grounded only in facts and real life, rather than in imagination. Nonfiction is often associated with b ...

book written by diver Bernie Chowdhury and published by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News ...

. It documents the fatal dive of Chris Rouse, Sr. and Chris "Chrissy" Rouse, Jr., a father-son team who perished off the New Jersey coast in 1992. The author is a dive expert and was a friend of the Rouses. The divers were exploring a German U-boat in of water off the coast of New Jersey. Although experienced in using

technical diving Technical diving (also referred to as tec diving or tech diving) is scuba diving that exceeds the agency-specified limits of recreational diving for non-professional purposes. Technical diving may expose the diver to hazards beyond those normally ...

gas mixtures such as "trimix" (adding helium gas to the nitrogen and oxygen found in air), they were diving on just compressed air. The pair had set out to retrieve the

captain's log A logbook (or log book) is a record used to record states, events, or conditions applicable to complex machines or the personnel who operate them. Logbooks are commonly associated with the operation of aircraft, nuclear plants, particle accelera ...

book from the so-called ''U-Who'' to "fulfill their dream of diving into fame." Chowdhury is a technical diver who, according to writer Neal Matthews' review of

Robert Kurson Robert A. Kurson (born April 18, 1963) is an American author, best known for his 2004 bestselling book, '' Shadow Divers'', the true story of two Americans who discover a World War II German U-boat sunk 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. Care ...

's book ''

Shadow Divers ''Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II'' is a 2004 non-fiction book by Robert Kurson recounting of the discovery of a World War II German U-boat off the coast ...

'' (2004), "was among the first to adapt cave-diving principles to deep-water wrecks". Also according to Matthews, "His book documents how the clashes of equipment philosophy between cave divers and wreck divers mirrored the clash of diving subcultures."

References

External links

* Publisher's write-up on ''The Last Dive'' Underwater diving books 1992 in New Jersey Technical diving Underwater diving deaths Books about sportspeople {{sport-bio-book-stub