The Salmon of Doubt

It is, as I have said, shaped like the front half of a dolphin. The body of it is blue, and toward the front there are two small yellow fins, one on each side, that can rotate through a few degrees and direct the Sub Bug upward or downward. At the back are two large handles that you hold on to as the Sub Bug pulls you through the water. Within reach of your thumbs are buttons that make the thing go, and control its ascent and descent. Inside the Bug is a cylinder of compressed air—a normal scuba cylinder—and this provides power to spin the two propellers that push the Bug forward, and also supplies air down a flexible tube to a free-floating regulator. A regulator is the thing you stick in your mouth that gives you your air when you’re diving. The point of this arrangement is that you only need your mask and flippers; you don’t need to carry a scuba tank on your own back, because you’re getting your air direct from the Sub Bug. The Bug is designed in such a way that you can set a maximum depth beyond which it will not go. The very maximum anyway is thirty feet.

Ian had received a flurry of faxes from Martin Pemberton about setting up the machine, and was pretty confident about it “No worries at all,” he said, and asked me what I planned. I said it might be an idea to take it for a shallow local try out before taking it out into deep water.

“No worries,” he said.

I said that we could then take it with us on the proper diving expedition that was going out from the island the following morning.

“No worries,” he said.

“So I will then spend a little time trying it out, getting used to it, and putting it through its paces around the reef.”

“No worries,” he said.

“And then, er,” I said, “for the purposes of this article I have to write, which is by way of being a sort of comparative test drive, I want to try the same thing on a manta ray.”

“No chance,” he said. “No chance at all.”

I suppose I should have foreseen this.

The issue was very simple. As someone who has spent over two years working on ecological projects, the very first thing I should have realised was that you don’t disturb the animals. It might have been all right to try and mount a manta ray ten years ago when I first heard about it, but not now. No way. You don’t touch the reef. You don’t take anything. No shells, no coral. You don’t touch the fish, except maybe a few that it’s okay to feed. And you certainly don’t fuck about trying to ride manta rays.

“Hardly any chance you’d even be able to get near one anyway,” said Ian. “They’re very timid creatures. I guess some people have managed to get to ride on a ray in the past, but I would imagine it would be very difficult. But now we just can’t allow it.”

“No,” I said, rather shamefacedly. “I understand, believe me. I just hadn’t really thought it through, I guess.”

“But we can go and have some fun with the Sub Bug,” said Ian. “No worries. We can take some pictures too. That’s a hell of a camera you’ve got there.” We now come to another rather embarrassing part of the story about which I have so far been extremely silent. Some very nice people at Nikon in England had lent me for this trip brand-new Nikonos AF SR underwater autofocus camera, which is about .15,000 worth of the most sexy and desirable and fabulous camera equipment in the world. The camera is just wonderful, brilliant technology. Really. You want to take a photograph underwater, this is the perfect thing. It’s an astounding bit of kit. Why am I going on about it like this? Well, I spend a lot of time working on a computer, and because I am used to using a Macintosh, I hardly even bother to read manuals and so—I didn’t really bother to read the manual for this camera.

I realised that when I got the films back.

Please—I really don’t want to say any more, except to say thank you very much, Nikon. It really is an awesome camera and I hope very much that you will let me borrow it again one day. I won’t mention the camera again in this article. We took a small dinghy out to a tiny deserted island about ten minutes away.

Ian and I spent a happy hour or so pootling around with the Bug. We dealt with a couple of problems—a grain of sand in a valve, and so on. We worked out that the Bug didn’t work too well in very shallow water when it had to work against a tide. Well, we’d take it deeper tomorrow. Jane lay in the sun on the beach and read a book. After a while we got back in the dinghy and went back to Hayman. Not much of a story in all that, I suppose, but the reason I mention it is that I remember it very vividly, and one of the shortcomings, I sometimes feel, of somewhere like, for instance, Islington, is the lack of any immediately accessible tiny islands that you can spend the afternoon pootling around with Sub Bugs on.

Just a bit of a poignant thought, really. We don’t even have any decent bridges you can deface.