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

non-fiction Non-fiction (or nonfiction) is any document or content (media), media content that attempts, in good faith, to convey information only about the real life, real world, rather than being grounded in imagination. Non-fiction typically aims to pre ...

book written by diver Bernie Chowdhury and published by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is a British–American publishing company that is considered to be one of the "Big Five (publishers), Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group USA, Hachette, Macmi ...

. 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 List of diver certification organizations, agency-specified limits of recreational diving for non-Professional diver, professional purposes. Technica ...

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 book from the so-called ''U-Who'' to "fulfill their dream of diving into fame." The U-boat was subsequently identified as ''U-869''. Chowdhury is a technical diver who, according to writer Neal Matthews' review of Robert Kurson's book '' Shadow Divers'' (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."

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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