Chapter 39: Diving Drama and Denouement

Pauline rang on Wednesday, with the news that Ryan was available to dive the Moturangis next day. The forecast wasn’t brilliant, 20kt gusting 25 Northeasterly, which meant a slow, wet trip out, but there would be shelter at most dive sites and a quick trip home. We agreed to meet at the ramp at noon. We suited up on the ramp, since we expected there would be a fair bit of spray thrown around, and took extra care to secure all the gear.

The trip out was indeed slow, rough and wet. Pauline learned lots about finding a ‘sweet spot’ where throttle setting, course, wind direction and sea conditions all balanced each other for the best ride.

We had agreed that we would go to the very Southernmost point of the island group, where there was a black coral tree at 140 feet, and dive to see that, with Pauline and me diving together, and Ryan going solo. We flipped to see who would go first. It was Ryan.

We watched Ryan’s bubbles breaking the wind ruffled surface as he submerged. We were physically in the lee of the island, but the wind (and swell) bent around it a little and our dive site was not totally calm. As Ryan went deeper and the tide took his bubbles out away from the shelter of the island, the full force of the wind and swell disturbed the surface so we could no longer see them break it.

Pauline kept the boat out of the wind, close in against the steep cliffs that characterise the Moturangis, and I filled her in about what was happening with Leslie and Carol. We should have talked lots about the dive we were about to undertake, but for reasons I wasn’t absolutely clear about, Pauline was much more interested in talking about coral reef diving in the tropics. So we spent the time while Ryan was down on the coral tree talking about the charter trips I had made to various places in the Pacific. She listened intently and quizzed me about the boats and their accommodation and the prices and schedules as far as I knew them. Much of my information was well outdated, but she hoovered it up anyway.

Ryan was gone just over twenty minutes. He surfaced hard in against the cliff face, where he had been cruising along at 10ft for the previous three minutes for a ‘safety stop’ as a precaution against getting bent. We had all reached the age when Decompression Tables and Dive Computers designed for fit young people didn’t mean too much and a decompression injury was likely to be very serious. So we were conservative and cautious. But many things could still go wrong.

“How was it?” Pauline could barely keep her excitement under control.

“Couldn’t find it. I think I went down the wrong side of the ridge.”

“Ridge?

“The cliff goes down pretty well sheer to about fifty feet, then there’s a bit that sticks out further and further as you go deeper, like an underwater ridge. There’s a bit of tide too. Lotsa Splendid Perch!” I wasn’t listening very hard. I shoulda been. Shoulda woulda coulda!

We were only going to see the black coral tree, a wee bit past the PADI limit, so the plan was simple. Down the cliff to fifty feet, follow the top of the ridge down to the tree at around 140 ft, follow the ridge back up to the cliff, come up to 10ft and take a safety stop. Our predive check was careful.

The Southeast corner of the Moturangis is an interesting dive. It’s always shaded, so the kelp stops around 50ft, and there’s black coral 20ft shallower than anywhere else up here. We checked our buoyancy around fifty feet, and swam down on top of the ridge. Sponge city! Hydroid heaven!

Pauline had it together. We were in the groove, checking our gauges and each other frequently, and everything was going to plan. I don’t know how Ryan missed the black coral tree. We saw it from a long way away. The pale bodies of its millions of polyps stood out clearly against the dim surroundings. Ryan was right about the Splendid Perch. There were shitloads of them hanging just off the ridge. He was right about the tide too, but that wasn’t obvious at the time.

Black coral is not really a coral and of course it’s not really a tree. The ‘foliage’ is polyps, filtering plankton from the current, the ‘trunk and branches’ are a dense black horny material that takes a high polish and used to be sought after for jewellery. There are a couple of species of brightly coloured brittle-stars that live in the trees, coiled round the branches. And even shallow coral trees are deep enough so divers who go down to see one are inevitably ‘narked’. Quite a trip!

And we were both thoroughly enjoying it. Pauline was transfixed by the small fluorescent fish that hung about the tree, and the banded arms of the brittle-stars coiled tightly round the black branches. Our buoyancy was finely adjusted, and we hung motionless at 145ft with the coral tree in front of us, the ridge stretching away into the black beneath us, and a cloud of Splendid Perch behind and above us. Cruisy!

Until it wasn’t. We had just exchanged signals. Plenty of air, but only one minute of No Decompression time left at that depth and it was actually time to go. Pauline was about 15 feet away at the same depth, and then she wasn’t. Without swimming or doing anything to her BCD to change her buoyancy, she was suddenly 30ft away and 15 ft below me. Shit!

For a few seconds I was gobsmacked. She didn’t appear distressed. She was breathing normally, but was making no effort to adjust her buoyancy, so how the hell did she get down there, and why was she so far away? Shit shit shit! I swam down and over to her. We checked gauges. Still plenty of air, but we were pushing 160 ft and we were right on the edge of No Decompression limits. We had to get up.

The plan was to come back up the ridge, but when we turned around, the ridge was 100ft away, right at the limits of visibility and we were moving away from it in the tidal current Ryan had mentioned. Not a chance of swimming over to it and ascending up it to the cliff and the surface. Shit! But we still had to get up. I grabbed Pauline’s harness in one hand, and thumbed the button on her BCD to puff some air in and start our ascent. Slowly! We had done this before on the pinnacle on our last deep dive, but then we had the visual reference of the pinnacle. Now there was nothing but blue all around and black below. We had to concentrate on our depth gauges (or rather the digital one on Pauline’s dive computer console), and bleed out enough air from our BCDs to make sure we kept ascending. Slowly!

I was keeping very calm. I didn’t know whether Pauline was as calm as she looked. I hoped so. Objectively, we didn’t have a problem. Yet! But it was (as they say) challenging. We had to pay constant attention to our depth gauges, all the way up. We had no other references to make sure we were slowly ascending, and could level off and hang ten feet below the surface until Pauline’s computer beeped to let us know that our 3 minute “safety stop’ was up and it was safe to surface. The question that occupied my mind for most of that three minute stop was ‘where would we surface?’. We had been swept away from the ridge by a current that had been taking us Eastward away from the Moturangis and the NZ coast all the time we were coming up. We had been current borne for about 15 minutes. How far would we have drifted?

We soon found out. I kept hold of Pauline’s harness until we had both fully inflated our BCDs to lift out heads clear of the water, and taken out our SCUBA mouthpieces. Then I looked around. Shit! We were the best part of 400 yards seaward of the Islands. First things first. I used our various hoses and the D rings and clips on our harnesses to tie us very securely together. Pauline was puzzled.

“Why are you doing that?” In the old days, I would have joked. Black humour was one of the ways we coped with losing mates, but ‘so at least they’ll find both our bodies’ or ‘so the sharks will eat you first’ didn’t seem appropriate. I settled for a serious answer.

“Easier to find a pair than two people separately.”

“Can’t we swim back?”

“No. Save your energy and hope we don’t need it. Get out your safety sausage.” I was digging for my own sausage in the pocket of my BCD as I spoke.

“We did a drill during training.” She seemed calm.

“Good! Get it up as quick as you can.”