Be Cool

More often than not, we dove from the runabout. The Svetlana was not suited to the purpose. It was too tall, too big, too heavy, and could never get close enough to the reefs anyway. Now, if we were to be collected by a trailing net, that would be another thing altogether.

Runabouts are better. They come to you, especially if you slip the pilot a Twenty and butter him up, telling him that he’s the most important man on the boat, owing to I’d be relying on him to chase my ass down were I to be swept away by a current. It worked, too. Every time my head poked above water, there was Juan grinning down at me.

Dive vacations have a certain rhythm to them. You rise, you break fast, suit up and dive. You dive again before lunch, eat, then dive again. You dive before supper, eat, and then dive again if you’ve a mind to when the sun is slipping below the horizon.

That much diving can strip you of your heat, regardless whether the water is 85 degrees or not. The shortie gets set aside after a few days and an “arctic” top is donned in its place. And you still get cold after spending four to five hours a day in the water, an hour or so at a time. When you upgrade to an “artic” weight, you need to re-weight. Too much weight and you need to use your BC to control buoyancy, completely unnecessary in salt water; too little and you can’t get below the surface, left flapping and floundering like a whale stuck in the shallows. You never want that to happen. It doesn’t look cool, and if there was one really important take-away from Otta’s Blue Water dive training, it was “whatever you do, look cool.”

I did my utmost. I rolled off the runabout like a pro, I tucked and piked, plunging to depth like a weighted stone, rolled face-down and flat when I approached the bed, and inhaled deeply, instantly buoying myself and hanging weightless amid the fishes.

I conserved energy, I sipped my burps of air, rose and dropped by lung volume, and allowed currents to carry me to and fro. I looked cool.

Diving in the Sulu Sea was fantastic. I saw even more than I had in Australia. A cyclone had battered the Great Barrier Reef weeks before I’d arrived, tearing up corals, killing spots. Not so here. I tracked a lion fish, probably the most poisonous thing in the ocean, until it decided that it had enough of my scrutiny and waddled ever closer to me, forcing me to back off and give it the space it demanded. I poked at the edges of a moray eel’s hole with my knife until he too had enough, bursting forth in a wall of teeth. I hitched a ride on a white-tip when I jiggled his tail while he was sleeping under a shelf of reef. I’d have never done that in Australia. Not at first, anyways. When we’d pulled up to a reef sporting a few dorsal fins and Gordo said we were “good to go,” we all hung back, expecting to be the object of a feeding frenzy. Gordo just laughed at us, saying, “They’re just white-tips,” as though that cleared everything up. When we still hadn’t moved, he jumped in, scattering them. “See,” he said. “They’re not Tigers!” So, I had no issue with jiggling the shark’s tale and hanging on for a few feet. I repelled back up an anchor line, surrounded by a hundred parrotfish. I hopped from high reef to high reef, navigating by compass alone, slowing my drift by drifting fins first.

Like I said, I looked cool.

At least until my regulator began to leak air into my BC. I’d chosen a faulty one that day, and had no clue about it until I was at depth.

We rolled over the edge of the runabout and plunged to the protection of the reef. It was a simple dive insofar as all we planned to do was follow a reef ridge, spanning a gap, and then surfacing once we reached a far mound past a sandy span. It was mildly difficult insofar as we were to cross the current swept span. I found it difficult to keep my depth. I checked my BC and found it mildly inflated, so I purged it. And found myself rising up the ridge again. I purged again, thinking “What the hell!” I was not inflating my BC. But it WAS inflating. I unclasped the inflator hose, expecting to see bubbles rising from the open hole, but no bubbles bled from it. I reattached it, waited a moment. All seemed as it should be; so, I carried on.

Moments later, I was rising again. I kicked hard to find my depth, expecting easy response from my force fins, some of the most powerful fins you can buy, but even they struggled to keep me down. I felt my BC and it was inflating fast. For some time now I’d been angling down, my fins increasingly above my head. Soon, I was almost swimming head down. And still I felt myself rising!

I knew I was headed for surface, so I stopped fighting it, deciding to control my inevitable assent, instead. I tore the inflator free, began purging the BC again, and began exhaling furiously, trying and failing to check my now completely inverted and foot-ward rise, but the current had caught me, sweeping me off the protected reef, off and up. I grew dizzy with my sudden rising. The world spun. My mask flickered with the sunlight and the bubbles that ripped across my face. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell which way was up. I was surfacing faster than my bubbles, far faster than I should have, far faster than was safe. I began wondering about the bends. I’d done a lot of diving by then.

My legs broke the surface before any other part of me. I flopped and rolled, laying full out on my back. I spit out my regulator, set my mask on my forehead. Exhausted, I took a moment to catch my breath before looking around. I considered deploying my rescue buoy, sure I was on my way to Easter Island by then.

Then I heard the distant whine of an outboard and I saw the Juan and the runabout beating a path towards me, Jenny and Kim already aboard.

“Hey, boss,” Juan said when he pulled up alongside me.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see anyone’s face as I was to see his.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, slipping my fins off, tossing them into the boat.

I think he earned the promised second Twenty.