Dolphin Island

He had swum often enough in the shallow pools on the great coral plateau around the island, but to dive off the reefs outer edge was a much more awe-inspiring experience. The water was sometimes so clear that Johnny felt he was floating in mid-air, with no means of support. He could look down and see absolutely nothing between himself and a jagged coral landscape forty feet below, and he had to keep reminding himself that it was impossible to fall.

In some areas the great fringing reef around the island ended sharply in an almost vertical wall of coral. It was fascinating to sink slowly down the face of this wall, surprising the gorgeously colored fish that lived in its cracks and recesses. At the end of a dive, Johnny would try to identify the most striking of the reef butterflies in the Institute’s reference books, but he usually found that they had no popular names, only unpronounceable Latin ones. Almost everywhere one might run into isolated boulders and pinnacles, rising suddenly out of the sea bed and reaching almost to the surface. Mick called these “bommies,” and sometimes they reminded Johnny of the carved rock formations in the Grand Canyon. These, however, had not been shaped by the forces of erosion; they had grown into their present forms, for they were the accumulated skeletons of countless coral animals. Only the thin surface was now alive, over a massive core of dead limestone weighing many tons, and ten or twenty feet high. When the underwater visibility was poor, as was sometimes the case after a storm or rain shower, it was startling to come across one of these stone monsters looming suddenly out of the mist.

Many of them were riddled with caves, and these caves were always inhabited; it was not a good idea to enter them until you had discovered who was at home. It might be a moray eel, constantly snapping his hideous jaws; it might be a family of friendly but dangerous scorpion fish, waving their poison-tipped spines like a bundle of turkey feathers; and if the cave was a large one, it would usually be a rock cod, or grouper. Some of these were much bigger than Johnny, but they were quite harmless and backed nervously away when he approached them.

In a surprisingly short time he grew to recognize individual fish and to know where to find them. The groupers never strayed far from their own particular caves, and Johnny soon began to look on some of them as personal friends. One scarred veteran had a fishhook embedded in his lower lip, with a piece of line still hanging from it. Despite his unfortunate experience with mankind, he was not unfriendly and even allowed Johnny to come close enough to stroke him.

The groupers, the morays, the scorpion fish—these were the permanent residents of the submarine landscape that Johnny was beginning to know and love. But sometimes there would be unexpected and exciting visitors swimming in from deeper water. It was part of the reefs attraction that you never knew what you would meet on any given dive, even in an area that you had visited a dozen times before and knew like the proverbial back of your hand.

Sharks were, of course, the commonest prowlers of the reef. Johnny never forgot the first he met, one day when he and Mick had given their escorts the slip by going out an hour earlier than usual. He never saw it coming; it was suddenly there, a gray, superbly streamlined torpedo, moving slowly and effortlessly toward him. It was so beautiful and so graceful that it was impossible to think of it as dangerous. Not until it had approached to within twenty feet did Johnny look around anxiously for Mick. He was relieved to find his friend snorkling immediately above him, eying the situation calmly but with loaded spear gun at the ready.

The shark, like almost all sharks, was merely inquisitive. It looked Johnny over with its cold, staring eyes—so different from the friendly, intelligent eyes of the dolphins —and swerved off to the right when it was ten feet away. Johnny had a perfect view of the pilot fish swimming in front of its nose, and the remora, or sucker fish, clamped onto its back—an ocean-going hitchhiker, using his suction pad to give him a free ride through life.

There was nothing that a diver could do about sharks, except to watch out for them and to leave them alone, in the hope that they would do the same to him. If you faced up to them, they would always go away. But if you lost your nerve and tried to run—well, anyone who was stupid enough to run deserved little sympathy, for a shark could swim thirty miles per hour to a skin-diver’s three, without even exerting himself.