Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Things got off to an inauspicious start. The man from Maryland’s regulator was not working and he couldn’t breathe through it. Fortunately, he discovered the defect immediately, and he simply hoisted himself back onto the boat to sit out the dive. I was too preoccupied to be unnerved that the hotel staff had sent a guest on an open-water dive with malfunctioning equipment. Down I gamely went. The coral was pretty, though not remarkable, and the fish were colorful, but not nearly so numerous and various as what I’d seen snorkeling at the mouth of the Marovo Lagoon in the Solomons a dozen years earlier. The muscular current had stirred up sand and sediments, so visibility was impaired. The aquarium girl saw a squid and waved us over using the appropriate hand signals for “come look” and “squid,” but we were too late. The sudden dimming of light indicated that the sun had just slipped behind a cloud. Because I’m always nervous underwater, I breathe much more heavily than adept divers do, so my air gauge hit the red zone much faster than the others’. I showed my gauge to the divemaster, who asked in hand signs whether I was all right to go back up and reboard the boat on my own, and with an emphatic okay sign, I indicated that I was. Up I went, making a decompression stop along the way.

The usual diving protocol is that you surface and wave an arm in the air, then the dive boat comes and picks you up. When I bobbed to the surface, I saw that the current hadn’t carried us as far as it had seemed thirty or forty feet below. Cheerily, I waved my hand over my head. The youthful captain was looking vaguely in my direction, and I waited for him to motor over. But the boat just sat there. So I waved again, a bit more vigorously. Still the captain stared my way with a glassy expression, and still I continued waving, now using both arms. I raised my mask and took the regulator out of my mouth and tried to shout, but the wind was blowing straight into my face and I knew he couldn’t hear me over the wind and choppy water. I thought of that “whistle for attracting attention” that is always mentioned on airplane life jackets.

Now remember that a person normally feels exhausted after a dive, and that the Australian sun is fierce, and the waves were not insignificant, and the current was forceful. So I really needed to get out of the water. Channeling late-night television, I tried a Tarzan yell. The captain then walked around to the other side of the boat, which left me staring at a blank prospect.

When I faced into the wind toward the boat, the waves broke over my head. I’d not previously understood how anyone could drown while wearing a life jacket, but as I pumped up my BCD, I realized that I couldn’t keep myself oriented toward the boat without achieving unwanted hydration of my pulmonary and digestive systems. It was nature’s version of waterboarding. So I turned away from the boat, twisting my body every few minutes to check whether the captain had come back into my view, in which case I would be in his. I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and after about ten minutes, he finally came back and once more appeared to be looking right at me. By now, my waving was worthy of Cirque du Soleil—both arms oscillating rapidly over my head, back and forth and front and back and sideways. I even tried using my flippers to jump partway out of the water, like a sort of flying fish with arms. The captain gazed calmly in my direction for a few minutes, then resumed his little peregrination around the deck.

When you do scuba training—be it in Pennsylvania or in Zanzibar—you get a great deal of tutelage about what to do if your air fails, learn signs to alert your divemaster to what’s wrong, and memorize techniques to compensate for a wide variety of potential errors, failures, and dangers. But you don’t get any advice about what to do on the surface if you have somehow become invisible.