Chapter 36: Deep Dive and Narked

Maungatutu didn’t happen. There was no alarm and no trespass on the Conservation Estate to facilitate an illegal search for psychotropic fungi.

Instead, we lay about until late, playing with Pauline’s little vibrator. Fucking while we were pegging her with it was a completely new sensation for me. There was very little flesh between the underside of my penis and the hard plastic of the toy, and the vibrations when I switched it on went right to the sensitive spot in the ‘V’ of the underside of my glans where my frenulum joins. I coped with my fear of bacteria and came very pleasurably again. Pauline liked it too.

I left arrangements for our deep dive at the Moturangis to Pauline. She had dates with both Ryan and Henry that week, but the only intimate contact on my schedule was with the water-blaster and deck stain. I went home after lunch and got on with it.

She rang at sparrow-fart on Thursday morning.

“Forecast’s good. Ryan’s available. Can we go this afternoon?”

“I’ll pack your gear and mine, gas the boat, and meet you and Ryan at the ramp at half one. OK?” We said goodbye and I busied myself with practical matters.

I dug out an old DCP, an obsolete piece of diving equipment that used to do part of what Pauline’s modern dive computer does. I hoped it still did. My local ramp is only a couple of kilometres away, but the ramp for the Moturangis is an hour’s drive, so the boat cover and everything else had to be well secured.

Ryan ran the trip. Pauline and I were going to have the first dive while Ryan did boatman, and then he was going to have a solo dive while we reciprocated. The pinnacle came to within a few feet from the surface, and was easily visible from the boat, with the golden brown kelp that covered its top hundred feet or so swaying in the swell and acting as a mobile backdrop to the big shoal of blue maomao feeding on plankton just above it.

The Moturangis are a Marine Reserve, and anchoring is prohibited to avoid damage to the marine life, so Ryan’s job was to drop us off on top of the pinnacle, and hang about to pick us up from the top again when we finished our dive. We suited up and checked each other’s gear. Ryan checked it too. Any diving is relatively serious business, and a deep dive especially so.

Pauline laughed at my DCP. The only other one she had seen was in the ‘museum display’ of antique gear at the dive school where she did her course.

“Does it work?”

“Dunno. I suspect we’re about to find out. It used to.”

“What do I check when you show me?”

“Watch the needle. When it gets to the red zone we are at our ‘no decompression’ limit. But this is really just for decoration. It’s your dive computer I’ll be watching and working off.” Ryan indicated wholehearted agreement.

“Good! You should treat yourself to some decent gear!” I ignored him with my usual quiet dignity and turned back to Pauline.

“OK. Let’s sort some signals for intoxication.” She was all ears. “If I point to my head and move my finger in a circle, I am asking how far off your face you are. You reply by holding up fingers. One for a two drink buzz, two for ‘too far gone to drive’, and three for ‘take me home and put me to bed’.

“How many for lay me down and fuck me senseless?” Ryan snorted.

“When we come up, I think we will find that sitting around while Ryan dives is all we are up for.”

I was nervous. This was my first dive past the PADI limit of 40m (about 130 feet) for nearly forty years. In my ‘mad bugger’ days, we would bomb off happily to 60m, sometimes twice a day, completely relying on the info provided by our DCPs. But that was before a very scary episode of decompression sickness disabused me of the notion that I was somehow ‘bulletproof’, and later there were Health and Safety restrictions on commercial divers and the knowledge that I had family responsibilities to consider. They put a stop to that particular nonsense.

We rolled backwards into the water and swam down to the top of the pinnacle, and after exchanging OK signals, we dropped down on the outside to about 50ft, passing through a loose gaggle of pink maomao and splendid perch under the blue maomao schooling just below the surface. The kelp was still dominant, but smaller than on the top of the pinnacle, and under its cover, sponges and hydroids grew in multi-coloured profusion. The visibility was excellent, and we could see the pale sand surrounding the base of the pinnacle a hundred feet below us, and a trio of large snapper hanging motionless in the back eddy of its lee.

It makes sense to follow safety routines right from the start, so we paused, adjusted our buoyancy, and checked depth, remaining air, and ‘no decompression’ time remaining before dropping down further. We paused again around 80ft, and repeated the procedure. Plenty of remaining air, the needle of my DCP had barely moved, and Pauline’s computer showed we had another 41mins at that depth before we would need a decompression stop on ascending. We made signs to assure each other that we were both still sober, and went on down, repeating the checks at around 100ft and 120ft.

By now we were deep enough for some divers to feel the effects of narcosis, and our remaining ‘no decompression’ time was reducing exponentially as we went down, so we both checked each other carefully. Pauline signalled that she was feeling ‘two drinks’, and her dive computer told us we had nine minutes ‘no decompression’ left at that depth. Remaining air was not a worry – but then it never is – until things go wrong!

By 130 ft, I was dimly aware that my reactions were a bit slow, and that Pauline’s attention seemed fixated on a small Scorpion grouper as it took up a ‘threat’ posture between us and the patch of eggs it was guarding. I wondered about my own condition, and whether she was actually past the ‘two drinks’ stage, so I moved a bit closer and took her hand. She turned to face me and we exchanged OK signals before going deeper. At 140 ft, or remaining ‘no decompression’ time was down to 4 min, Pauline was ‘too far gone to drive’ and as far as I could tell behind her mask and regulator mouthpiece, was giggling a lot. On some level, I wondered whether a responsible dive leader would go further, and then giggled a bit myself at the thought that a responsible dive leader wouldn’t have dived this deep in the first place.

A couple of large kingfish approached out of the blue, and came in to inspect us. I was caught up in admiring their grace and power, and ruminating on the value of the Marine Reserve status of the Moturangis, when I became aware that Pauline had let go my hand and drifted down below me. Shit!