CHAPTER 1: THE DIVE
from The Wall: Chronicle of a Scuba Trial
By Lawrence Martin, M.D.
(Available in print and on Kindle. See links at end.)
***
The Caribbean water is shimmering and blue, transparent on this sunny day. The dive boat ties up at a preset mooring so no anchor will disturb the delicate coral beneath. One by one, nine scuba divers jump off the boat. Each diver has requisite air tank and regulator, face mask and fins, and most are clad in a brightly-colored, thin wet suit to protect from accidental abrasions.
A young woman, Charlene, is the leader or dive master, and she will be the underwater guide. The other eight are diving for pleasure and buddied up for safety, like kids at a summer camp swim. Four buddy pairs. The group treads water on the surface next to the boat until Charlene asks for the OK sign. Each diver forms an “O” with thumb and forefinger signaling “I’m OK.”
“Let’s go!” she says, and the dive commences.
~~~
The opaque surface gives way to another world below, one alive with fish and invertebrates of odd shapes and beautiful colors. It is a world that Jacques Cousteau brought to millions of television viewers in the 1950s and 1960s. In that era modern scuba gear — invented by Cousteau and Emile Gagnan in France during World War II — made underwater exploration possible for just about anyone with the desire. It took several decades of product development and marketing for SCUBA — Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus — to become a major recreational industry. As an industry, scuba shares features with downhill skiing: high-tech equipment; glossy magazines with colorful covers; air travel usually needed to reach the best sites; emphasis on safety; official acknowledgment that injuries can occur if one is not trained and careful.
Each year millions of divers travel to warm waters all over the globe. Especially popular in the Western Hemisphere, with a plethora of healthy coral reefs, are the Bahamas, several Caribbean islands, and the Yucatan coast of Mexico and Central America.
For people whose image of the sea comes only from the beach or the deck of a boat, the first underwater view of a coral reef is a mind-expanding New World. Three sites are famous for offering a far-surpassing experience when viewed in person, compared to just watching a video: Arizona’s Grand Canyon; earth from outer space; and the underwater view of a healthy coral reef.
~~~
It doesn’t take the divers long to reach a sandy bottom about forty-five feet below the boat. The sand is punctuated by ridges of high coral heads. Hundreds of yellow grunts and jack fish dart about, seemingly oblivious to their new mammalian neighbors.
The divers hover a few feet over the sand while the dive master counts heads and signs to each person for their OK signal. Then, with more sign language she indicates “follow me.” She is easy to follow as underwater visibility is almost 100 feet in any direction; the typical inland lake has visibility of only two to four feet. These are near-perfect dive conditions. The water is warm, visibility is excellent, sea life is abundant. Less than five minutes into the dive the group reaches the edge of an underwater cliff. Beyond the cliff edge is an empty blueness. Over the cliff and almost straight down is the wall, a 3000-foot descent to a new bottom.
The first few hundred feet of the wall is a natural collage of hard and soft coral, in which live some of the more interesting sea creatures: anemones, shrimps, crabs, eels, octopi, and a variety of tropical fish. Sometimes along the wall you will see pelagic species, such as sharks, barracudas, stingrays and giant turtles. These larger, free-swimming creatures don’t stay long before retreating to the open sea. Since scuba divers also cannot stay long before returning to the surface (perhaps twenty minutes or so at moderate depths), most attention is devoted to the wall itself.
The divers float over the cliff’s edge, eyes on the wall as they descend: fifty-sixty-seventy feet. Charlene has double duty, to make sure all her divers stay together, and at the same time scan the wall for interesting things to see. She has done this dive countless times, and has occasionally had divers who stray too far, or don’t stay close to their buddy. Then she has to focus on the people, not the undersea creatures. But this time the group seems cohesive, and she knows there will be plenty of interesting creatures to see on the wall.
Ten minutes into the dive they reach the designated maximum depth of 100 feet, easily determined on each diver’s depth gauge. The coral collage shows no sign of ending, but for safety they will go no deeper. Instead, the dive plan is to start a slow ascent, to let the accumulated nitrogen bubble out of tissues slowly. To go deeper would shorten the safe dive time considerably and risk the bends, a brutal pain that comes from nitrogen escaping too quickly and forming large gas bubbles that interfere with circulation. Another potential problem of going deeper is simply running out of air and drowning.
The beauty of scuba is that you are free of any connection to the surface, and can go where you will. The downside is that you carry your air supply with you, and there is no more to be had if that runs out (except possibly sharing an air hose with your dive buddy, always a risky proposition). So divers pace themselves and rarely run out of air. Strict guidelines mandate how deep to go, how long to stay and how quickly to ascend. As a result, thousands of dives have been made here, on this wall, with no fatality and only a few mishaps.
Every few minutes Charlene does a head count, each one lasting five-ten seconds. Otherwise she is busy searching for life that her less-experienced charges might not see. As long as the group stays together, her main job is to guide the dive and try to make it memorable, even exciting. Who knows what they might find? At a depth of eighty-two feet she spots a giant crab hiding in a coral crevice. She alerts the other divers, who stop to gawk at the crustacean, or what they can see of it. The crab is at least three feet across, but only the eyes and huge front claws are visible. The claws sweep back and forth, warning intruders to stay away. The crab cannot know these divers mean no harm, and sensibly refuses to come out of its recess. The divers move on.
Every square yard of the wall is alive. Brightly colored forms that look like plants or rocks or weeds are really coral, members of the animal kingdom and built up of millions of tiny polyps. Three foot-long orange basket corals, each with an opening two feet in diameter, jut out horizontally from the cliff. In between sway deep-purple gorgonians, corals that look like giant leafs with an intricate, lattice design. And in between them are the pencil thin, ultra-long ‘whip’ corals that seem to start nowhere in particular and go on forever.
Hugging the wall are rock-hard brain corals, so named because their serpiginous ridges — each an endless colony of tiny corals — are remindful of the human brain. Dotting the coral surface in random fashion are intriguing Christmas tree worms, about two-inches high and an inch wide. They don’t look like any kind of worm at all but instead suggest miniature pine trees growing out of a hollow and stationary stalk. A diver pokes his finger toward one of them; with shutter speed the threatened worm retracts into its stalk. (If you wait long enough, and at a distance, you can see it slowly emerge again.)
Colors are muted at depth, due to absorption of the sun’s rays by the water. Reds and yellows are the first to go, and beyond sixty feet or so everything tends to have a bluish-brownish tinge — until you shine your underwater light. Then the real colors are restored, and you see ocean life the way it looks just below the surface.
Along the wall are sea anemones, one of the more colorful sea creatures. A sedentary flower-like invertebrate, it sports dozens of bright-white, pink-tipped slender arms that sway gently back and forth, searching for nutrients. Somehow, the anemone manages to cull from the ocean all the food required, and bring it to a centrally-located (but hard to see) mouth. Even more interesting is what can usually be found, almost hidden, among the anemone’s arms: a bright red, diaphanous shrimp. The shrimp rests clinging to one arm, waiting. Perhaps to escape its enemies, or to share whatever dinner comes along.
The divers are entranced. None has dove this wall before, and they would stay all day if it was feasible, which of course it is not. Your air supply is limited, and even with more air, you risk the bends if you stay too long.
But there is so much to engage the senses! And the perspective changes depending on your distance and field of view. At a distance of, say, three feet from the wall you see large corals, hard and soft, and whatever fish swim by. At a distance of six inches you see worms, shrimps and other invertebrates, plus the tiny creatures that live in the myriad nooks and crannies found on any coral reef. And with a magnifying lens you would find still more to marvel at, such as the complex anatomy of the individual coral polyp.
In its abundance and variety of life the coral reef is not unlike a tropical rain forest. But imagine a rain forest where you can defy gravity, where you can place yourself at any level at will, from the ground to the tree tops. You do this effortlessly, and as a bonus you don’t have to worry about stepping on squiggly things or getting bitten by nasty creatures you can’t see. True, your time is limited in this underwater forest, but that seems a small price to pay for the experience. And you can always return for another visit.
At seventy feet depth the group comes upon a diver’s delight. Charlene has found a large green moray eel, its bulbous head poking out from a crevice in the coral. She gives the snapping hand signal that means “moray” and everyone crowds around the opening. She knows finding this creature alone will make the diver memorable, and keeps one hand pointing to the crevice where it resides, to make sure everyone can see it. The eel’s head is fully occupied by its mouth, a cavernous space that constantly opens and closes, which is nothing more than normal breathing, by forcing water over its gills. When open, you see sharp teeth by which the eel bites its prey. A fascination, this weird sea creature; it could grace the cover of any science fiction magazine as a visual teaser for stories about “strange life on other worlds.”
The moray’s vision is poor to the point of near blindness and it will bite anything that comes close. Divers keep their hands far away. The moray refuses to reveal more of its sinuous body, which judging by head size is at least five feet long. A minute or two passes and it is time to move on, to ascend some more.
Charlene glances back to once again count heads. One, two, three…seven. ONLY SEVEN! She scans the horizon frantically. No eighth diver. She started with eight.
Her head counting alerts others. The missing diver’s buddy then notices that his partner — a young woman — is no longer among the group. Everyone else looks around and counts: one-two-three-four — seven, plus the dive master. No mistake. Instinctively, everyone looks up; they can see to the surface: all clear. Then they look down and see, perhaps seventy-five feet below, a silver scuba tank on the back of a diver, moving away from them. Still descending!
The dive master signals the others to continue their slow ascent and get back to the boat. The buddy of the wayward diver instead begins to descend, intending to rescue his sinking partner. Charlene pulls on his arm and shakes her head. Unmistakably, with eyes and hands, she gestures “No! No!” He is to ascend and return to the boat with the others. He is not trained to go deeper, or to attempt any sort of rescue.
The seven divers obey and continue their ascent, while the dive master descends toward the sinking scuba tank. At 130 feet she realizes catching up is hopeless. The lost diver is now at a depth of at least 200 feet and continuing to fall. To follow the diver is to risk joining her in death. Beyond 200 feet Charlene would run out of air before returning to the surface and her quest — alive? dead already? — is still descending.
Seven minutes later the other divers surface, a hundred yards from their boat. They were not supposed to surface just yet, or this far away. The boat captain and an on-board spotter see them waving arms frantically, the sign of diver distress. But their distress is for the one lost; they themselves are in no physical danger. The surface is calm and they are now breathing earth’s bountiful atmosphere.
The captain releases the mooring line and brings the boat around. One by one the divers climb aboard. The spotter helps them remove their heavy tanks.
“What happened?” asks the spotter, not of any specific diver.
“We lost a diver!” offers one of the group. “A young woman.”
“How?”
“We don’t know!”
“Where’s Charlene?”
“She dove deeper to try to get her! We left Charlene at seventy feet.”
“The diver just vanished?”
Another diver responds. “We don’t know. It all happened so fast. We were at the wall, looking at a moray. When we turned around, one of us was missing. Just gone.”
“Who is she?”
Only the lost diver’s buddy knows her name, and he answers. “She’s Jennie Knowlton. My girlfriend.” He begins to cry and vomit mucus at the same time.
The captain is in a whirlwind. A scuba instructor himself, he must now act quickly as both captain and diver, and on limited information from his stunned passengers. First, secure their safety. That done, he brings the boat back to the mooring while making a distress call to the dive shop.
“This is Coral Cruiser at the North Wall,” he says. “We have two divers down at the North Wall, buoy 254-K. Repeat, buoy 254-K, North Wall. I need boat assistance and rescue divers immediately. Both divers may be at great depth. I am going down now and Johnnie Ebanks, my spotter, will stay on the boat.” There is more give and take on the radio, and it is clear that help will be coming quickly.
Ebanks secures the mooring while the Captain dons scuba gear with the speed of a professional. A minute later he is in the water, heading toward the wall. The divers on the boat watch him go under, then turn their gaze elsewhere, to the deck of the boat, or to the horizon. Everyone avoids staring at the victim’s dive buddy, who sits alone, eyes out to sea.
As the captain reaches the wall’s edge he sees Charlene coming up, alone. They rendezvous on the sandy bottom. She takes out her dive slate and writes: “Disapp. @ 200 ft & still sinking.” The message is sufficient. And final.
Charlene must remain under water for several more minutes to decompress, allowing the buildup of nitrogen that occurs with every dive to bubble off safely. The captain returns to his boat.
Ten minutes later Charlene surfaces and climbs aboard. The pressure marks from her face mask frame sad eyes, not filled with tears but with a mixture of terror and anger. There is no worse tragedy for a professional in the scuba business than losing a diver. Her first words are to the victim’s buddy, Jonathan Archer.
“What happened?” Her tone is accusatory.
“I don’t know,” he cries. He, too, is scared. It is not like some friend is lost in the woods, or in a cave, or on a boat at sea; in those situations, there is always hope. People lost for days or weeks in those circumstances can survive. But underwater you have only minutes because you run out of air. Now his girlfriend is lost at the bottom of the ocean, from which there can be no return.
Archer offers no explanation. He is intimidated by the dive master’s glare, by the silence of everyone about him, indeed by the silence of the sea itself. There is nothing to intrude on his answer. He mumbles something about looking at the moray eel, of not knowing his girlfriend was sinking, of everything happening so fast.
Charlene realizes further questioning will lead nowhere, at least not now. She confers with the boat captain and spotter at the front of the boat. Then she takes to the radio and speaks with the shop manager. The shop is located at the dock, from where the rescue boat Turtle Cove has just left, about three miles away. Dive master and captain are told to stay put, help is coming.
Charlene is too upset to query the other divers, who are getting out of wet suits and putting their gear away. The captain speaks to them.
“We have lost a diver,” he says. “We have another boat coming to look for her. I am sorry but I cannot take you back just yet. We will need to stay here awhile.” He does not say so outright, but everyone knows she is dead or soon will be, and there is no hope.
The divers have many questions, but also don’t want to make things worse by interrogating Archer. They want to know if his girlfriend was sick, if she had any history of seizures or asthma, medical problems that have felled other divers under water. They want to ask if he knew she was falling away; after all, buddies are supposed to keep track of each other under water. They want to ask him, quite simply, “What the hell happened?” But they ask nothing. There is silence, except for the sound of gentle wavelets slapping against the boat’s hull. For all aboard Coral Cruiser, on this gloriously sunny day, a beautiful dive has turned into a nightmare.
A few minutes later the Turtle Cove arrives and pulls up beside Coral Cruiser, close enough for Charlene to climb aboard. She confers with two male rescue divers on the second boat, each of whom has dual air tanks strapped on. They are planning a quick search. She knows it will be fruitless but is thankful for their assistance. Having just left the water at great depth, she cannot go back down the wall, but she can go to a shallower area and point out where the sinking took place.
The three divers jump in. Charlene stays at cliff’s edge, forty-five feet deep, while the other two go deeper. They reach a depth of about 150 feet and can see another 100 feet further down. No scuba tank, no human form is visible below them. They cannot go deeper without risking the bends. Having reached this depth they must now ascend, but because they went so deep they have to hover twenty feet below the surface for several minutes to decompress. Meanwhile, Charlene returns to Coral Cruiser, which waits until the rescue divers surface and get back on board Turtle Cove. Together, the two boats return to the dock. The search is over.
****
Continue Reading on either Print or Kindle
PRINT:
https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Chronicle-Scuba-Trial/dp/0997895977/
KINDLE:
