Summertime Sounds

My husband's entire extended family visited our place in Harbour Island several years ago. His brother and sister and their families stayed in the Seashell House, and my stepson and his fiancee stayed with us in the Jolly View cottage. The June weather was breezy and warm, with clear blue skies caressing our morning coffee and fresh-baked Bahama bread, freshly-sliced and swathed with Irish butter and homemade guava jam.

My stepson and nephew wanted to go scuba diving to do their checkout dives while they were on the island, and my brother-in-law offered to go along as well. Joe was a nice fellow, married to my husband's sister, but he had a macho streak that concerned me. Scuba diving in and of itself isn't very difficult ... but it's all about knowing what to do, calmly, in the face of anything going wrong. I wasn't so certain that Joe could get past his gung ho bluster, but I went ahead and signed him for the next morning's dive as my dive buddy.

Andy and Maxwell at Harbour Divers helped us load up our gear for one of my favourite dives, the Plateau off North Eleuthera. The Plateau is a gorgeous series of row reefs set in 90 feet of water, with a coral arch over the northeastern stretch that descends to 120 feet. Marvellously huge grouper and sand sharks and angelfish made the place their home, and I had been diving this spot with this very same dive shop for more than twenty-five years. Joe set his mask as Maxwell lifted the tanks onto his back, and helped him tighten the gear. He then floated out from the back of the boat while Andy got me ready to take to the water. I dove in, signaled to Joe, and we descended to the first furrow.

The water was lovely and clear, with 200-feet visibility in either direction, and I loved showing Sam the various lobsters and sea anemones that I spied along the way. We swam and ducked and minnowed over coral that was thousands of years old, and the silence of the undersea reefs was as always, deafening. Because of the depth of the dive, we were only going to stay at bottom depth for twenty minutes because of the decompression stops that we were going to need along the way to the boat.

I saw that Joe was swimming further and further away from our group, ignoring the basic dive rule to not be any further than a breath away from your buddy in case something went wrong. Andy signaled to me that he was keeping an eye on Joe, and asked me about my remaining supply. I responded with the hand signal that I still had 1800 pounds left. A few minutes later, I started to taste a little bit of water in my regulator, coming in with each breath. I looked around for Joe, and he was long gone and about fifty feet above me. I then signaled Andy that I was taking in water, but let him know that I was all right. I stayed at my first decompression stop for the necessary five minutes, and wasn't uncomfortable at that point, as the water I was taking in was minimal and besides which, I was ninety feet under the surface of the ocean. Had I breached to the top in a sudden panic, I would invite the bends or nitrogen narcosis or at the very least a massive nosebleed.

I came to the second decompression stop at fifty feet, and started taking in more water with each intake. I kept calm, and let Andy know via hand signal that I was taking in more water. He swam over and checked my gauges, and gave me a buddy breath from his regulator. So far, so good. The water was calm and cool and supportive, and I took care not to panic too much by doing yoga meditation exercises while keeping my eyes on the surface above my head. I stayed at the stop for the needed five minutes, and then started to ascend to the next stop. More water started coming in with each breath. Andy at this point was staring straight into my eyes to make sure that I was all right, and we handed odd breaths on his regulator while I breathed on mine in between.

At twenty feet below sea level, my air stopped completely. I signaled to Andy with a slash across my throat, as I struck out my gauge to try to figure out what was happening. I really had no more air, and I still had twenty feet to go before making the surface. Andy swam over to me to check the gauge as well, at which point I simply urinated all over him. I sped to the surface, taking a chance on a nosebleed but with very few other options. Andy popped up beside me, at which point I tried to woozily, groggily explain that I was fine, and that he should go back down to decompress else he get the bends as well.

Andy asked me what happened, and someone else's voice took over mine as I stammered nonsense about being stuck with a whale five hundred feet below surface. He shook me gently, made sure that I was really all right, and descended to take his decompression stop. After a moment, I swam over to the dive boat where Maxwell was wide-eyed with alarm. “Your asshole dive buddy's here," he said sarcastically. I told him what had happened.  “I know," he said.  "But you're fine. You're fine," he emphasized.  “First time in twenty-five years that h'anything bad happened to yuh, and that h'ain't a bad thing."

Andy surfaced a few minutes later and gave me a hug, and I took pains to not make a scene on the boat in front of my stepson, his fiancee and the other guests on the boat. The ride back to shore with my brother-in-law was very quiet.

Once we got off of the boat, we walked quietly to our golf cart, and made small talk about the dive all of the way back to our houses. I dropped Joe and his gear off at the Seashell House, and made my way up the hill to the Jolly View, where my husband was sitting out on the back patio, reading a book and smoking a Cuban cigar. I sat there in the golf cart, simply stunned at what had just almost happened. When I saw him, I just fell into his arms blubbering, crying, sobbing about the incident with Joe, losing all traces all of the cool and grace that I had been able to maintain on the boat, and the drive up to the house. I was just so relieved to see him, and to be back home again.