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Ocean Gladiator: Part2
By Mark Ellyat on 25 August 2008
First Break In The Business
A diving centre in Barbados, called Shades of Blue, had agreed to employ me at exorbitant cost. For seven days work, with each day near sixteen hours duration, I could relax in the knowledge I would receive the princely sum of seventy U.S dollars. Still, my rent was cheap and we got free lunch when memory served the owners. My first day at work was my first chance to experience being underwater while unconscious. A tropical storm had lashed the west coast for a week or more. Virtually every dive boat resting at its mooring was now sleeping with the fishes. Monster winds meant biblical seas. Most of the vessels had simply filled with rain water and capsized into the abyss. The dive centre I worked at had a glass-bottom boat they used for dive trips. The boat had an automatic pump that drained the water from the sieve-like hull. After 5 days of terrible wind and rain, the battery that powered the bilge pump had failed, causing the boat to list badly. I arrived at work at 7.30 am. We looked out to the stricken dive boat through damp and misty binoculars. If we didn’t get over to the boat and drain it soon, it would become a permanent fixture on local maritime charts.
The waves were angry, they crashed with a promise of pain and suffering for anyone stupid enough to try and launch a rowing boat from the shore. The constant barrage of surf and its insidious undertow had already removed the sun-bleached sand from the beach, exposing the sharp coral rocks that give Barbados its coral island status. Desperate measures were needed, the situation shouted for them. Myself and Adam, the dive shop owner, dragged a little rowing boat called “Li’l Hero” from its rack and ventured closer to the rabid, snarling jaws of the ocean.
Pushing the boat quickly into the big waves was ridiculous and foolhardy, so that was what we did. The boat was spat up into the air over ten feet, it somersaulted over our heads before returning to earth upside-down between the two of us. Uninjured and not put off, with a liberal sprinkling of stupidity we tried again and again to launch the eleven foot wooden boat. Each time, the waves easily flipped the boat and sent it crashing down, miraculously missing us (mostly). I had the inspired idea to enter the water with my flippers on while dragging a tow-rope tied to the bow of the boat. I would swim out with the rope and attempt to pull the boat, which we filled a little with water to weigh it down in an effort to prevent more gymnastics.
Theoretically brilliant, but practically flawed. The waves overturned the boat in seconds, this time the undertow sucked the boat down with it still tied to my wrist. I slipped the knot luckily, and watched the boat disappear to become another days problem, or maybe some barbecue driftwood in a week or so. We resorted to swimming out in the huge seas. The tumultuous conditions made it a struggle, but thirty minutes later we were alongside to see the dive boat almost completely at one with the ocean. We lamely dipped plastic buckets into the boat in an attempt to bail it out. For a while it looked promising but the waves would sometimes set us back minutes in a second. We watched with dejected disbelief as the sea took its prisoner. With a burp of foul air from some compartment, the final oily groan sent our dive boat to the bottom. Bugger!
The owners had brought a bottle of the local Mount Gay Barbados Rum, and after a horrible swim back we imbibed a little of the hard stuff as a consolation prize. I earned less in a week here than sometimes an hour in my previous job. But the feeling of life that now coursed through my veins alongside the searing heat of the refined cane sugar was worth more than any used-car sale, except selling jalopies to unlicensed taxi drivers, obviously.
It was still before 9 am. We arranged a sport fishing boat to take us to our new wreck site. To recover the boat the same day meant saving thousands of dollars in repairs to the engine and hull timbers. We drove to the Careenage, the main port in Bridgetown. The town marina, used for glitzy catamarans and Marlin sport fishers, was desolate of people but full of boats shivering in the rain with their glossy canvas sails lashed tightly down, bracing the storm.
Our captain was a diminutive but very stocky Barbados coastguard member with one foot missing! I introduced myself and learned that his name was Shorty…perfect. The life jacket he donned was enormous, he joked that he couldn’t swim and usually never wore a life vest, as they only delayed the inevitable, many local fishermen shared this view, “let de sea take what she want…mon”.
The hour of knock-down seas was hard to endure, but we made it over to the hopefully temporary grave site of our dive boat in one piece. We planned to drop down atop of the wreck and fill lifting bags with air to raise it up. I asked the boat captain for a calculator and the specifications of the submerged engine with which I would work out just how much air we should take down to complete the lift. I was keen to show the other guys my academic prowess, honed to perfection during my recent diving-instructor training. Surprisingly the skipper produced the calculator but of course not the engine’s instruction book. I wedged myself in a corner of the boats’ heaving and spray soaked deck, tapping away on the keys but not being able to get an answer without the displacement details for the outboard. The local divers laughed out loud when they asked what I was doing,
Shorty shouted “Just fill de bag until she rise…mon – we be here all day else-ways”.
I had to acquiesce to Shorty’s practical logic really, it made perfect sense. We had the idea to raise the outboard engine first, and then the boat itself second. Getting the two-stroke engine to the repair shop today would increase the chances of the outboard polluting the ocean another day. Putting on our diving equipment while slipping around the bucking deck would be the first challenge though. I picked up the spare scuba tanks for the lift bags and dropped backwards into the boiling white spray that became the sea. The drop to the sea was further than ideal, the sport fisher had a very high free board and meant almost a 2metre drop on a calm day. I timed the waves as best as possible, but hit the water disastrously.
Scuba air tanks feel almost weightless when worn underwater. The large aluminium tank weighs almost 15 kilograms at the surface, but it felt more than this as it hit me in the jaw, knocking me into unconsciousness as I hit the water. I slipped beneath the surface upside-down, the clip that secured the tank allowed it to dangle in my now mask-less face. The tanks weight and the other equipment dragged me down towards the seabed and its waiting diners. The pain in my ears, caused by the gradually increasing water pressure as I drifted downwards, threw me a lucky reprieve. My eyes opened as disorientation filled every crevice of my brain. I realised soon enough that I was dropping upside-down without a mask but also with a definite throbbing in my jaw. I noticed that my breathing regulator was out of my mouth next, I quickly recovered my air supply and held my nose. If I took a breath without my mask on, while upside down, I might inhale water through my nose, adding a proper drama to my predicament.
Frantically trying to ‘pop’ my ears, I managed to equalise the discomfort and stop water entering at the same time. I turned the right way up and headed back to the surface. My diver’s wrist computer was beeping a warning, I was ascending too quickly. I slowed down to avoid getting decompression sickness, a condition many divers call the bends…I had this malady some years before in these very waters – it was enormously painful then, so best avoided today.
Reaching the safety of the surface, I felt like I had recovered my senses enough to head down again. The boat captain threw me another mask. Down I went, swimming down to seventy feet or so, I could see the others gathering around the sunken dive boat. She looked to be quite relaxed in the tranquil blue, the hull resting serenely in the sand. The angry waves above did not reach far below the surface, at these depths only calm prevailed. I’m sure that if a boat could feel seasick, then this one had every reason to be, after riding the rodeo waves for the best part of a week. My dive buddies had undone the bolts that held the outboard engine to the transom plate. I handed them one of the smaller lift bags. Inflating the PVC bag with air allowed the 150 kg engine to become as weightless as a cloud for a second before rapidly ascending to the sunlight above. We tied a rope to help locate the engine should the bag leak its buoyant contents. Open-ended lift bags like ours would let the engine get an unexpected second dive at an unknown location if they emptied or leaked on arrival at the surface.
So far so good. In no time we had attached the bigger lift bags to the boats hull and inflated them, but the boat wouldn’t budge. If an object is partially submerged in a soft surface like mud or sand, then it will be much heavier than if it simply rested on top. Our dive boat was stuck by a vacuum to the seabed, and refused to give up its watery resting spot. Our solution to this problem should be avoided by any readers thinking of a successful maritime salvage career.
As the boat was sitting upright, we decided to run a tow line to a metal ring in the bow and attach the other end to the fishing boat at the surface. Using the tow rope to pull the boat free, we imaginatively surmised that the boat would simply float through the water and return to the surface, using the hydrodynamics of its own hull to climb upwards. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but as soon as the boat broke free of the seabed’s vice-like grip, it surged forward with all the control of a newly darted elephant. The large roof area of the boat acted like an underwater sail. With all this forward motion, the roof-turned-sail made our boat start to climb upwards to the surface. We all felt pretty cool, until the roof peeled away like the lid of a sardine can. Without the roof in place, the lift bags rushed to the surface like champagne bubbles. The hull turned over immediately and headed straight back down to be smashed to pieces on some rocks.The dive centre rented another glass-bottom boat the following week after the weather improved. I put this one on the seabed within a fortnight. During a frolic with my girlfriend, I slipped and fell into the glass bottom viewing area and knocked the glass panels out. We both shook our heads as my career dissipation light started blinking faster than the water gushing in through the new opening in the floor. Frantically I started the engine and raced towards the shore – it became ‘too late’ just an anvil throw from the beach. We did however successfully raise this one after a few days. The tow and disintegrate method we perfected a week or so earlier was not used.
This dive centre was where I nurtured my interest in deep diving. At the end of every day, three or four of the staff would head out and dive deep into the ocean’s belly. The feeling of descending into the electric blue of the Caribbean is truly magic. We always breathed just regular compressed air. Air is not the ideal breathing gas much below two hundred feet depth, as it takes on anaesthetic properties. Many divers compare the effects to drinking alcohol. But instead of turning to drink, every day I would dive a couple of times to two hundred feet, or only once below three hundred, breathing normal air. As a group we would decide our maximum depth before rolling over into the sea. I generally led the dives, as I always seemed to be still in the driving seat at maximum depth. My buddies were almost always rendered paralytic, overcome by the intoxicating effects of the nitrogen in the air we breathed.
Slowly the group size dwindled, as divers reached the point where they were unable to function and would rely solely on me or luck to return them to the surface. Divers, I believe, must have some kind of natural ability in this area. It requires certain skills that can be learnt, but ultimately you need to be able to function in an automated response mode that ensures a return to the surface, also an extremely strong will to tolerate the nitrogen’s anaesthetic properties. My personal metabolism seems to break down hospital or dentists anaesthetic at an unusually fast rate. But I think my personal success while duelling with depth comes down to never having touched a recreational drug and even avoiding alcohol for many years. My brain seems fairly active, even now after honing a wary relationship with gin and tonic. I have noticed a definite link with stoners (pot smokers) being very poor deep divers, what with their easy-to-subdue nature, general lack of spatial awareness and tireless excuses.
The draw of deep air diving is quite addictive. To overcome the insidious side effects of breathing oxygen and nitrogen at immense depth, and return to the surface in control is very rewarding, and often leaves ardent deep divers in a euphoric state. Descending into the oceans womb in clear warm water is extremely relaxing. My breathing rate falls to 5-6 breaths per minute, my body behaving like a fine Swiss watch mechanism, totally functional while completely at rest. Dropping down quickly, I take a long blink, exhale fully and enter a state of utter calm. My left index finger is poised to hit the inflator button of my buoyancy jacket when needed. I have trained my finger to respond automatically if necessary, should unconsciousness strike. An index finger muscle and the slow rise and fall of my diaphragm will be the only activity in my body. My fins act like rudders to keep my position stable and steer me almost like a driverless ghost train. With time trained responses all working in unison, my brain slows down and my eyes become cameras only. Images in front of me cannot be processed until the nitrogen-hit subsides during the ascent. The scenes ahead will bypass my short-term memory and skip straight into old memory limbo. I will re-live the dive afterwards, during the decompression stops.
The nitrogen content of the air I breathe is acting on my central nervous system like a powerful morphine. It slows my thoughts to a virtual standstill. The oxygen part of air that I need to fuel my body and simply stay alive on the surface is far more insidious underwater though. As the nitrogen tries hard to cause a mental traffic jam, the oxygen starts to cause massive chemical changes in my blood and brain. These changes will cause epileptic convulsions if I pass the point of no return. Unfortunately this point is variable, I’m sure its not coming soon, but wonder if I will recognise it, if I’m indeed lucky enough to get an advert of its impending arrival. Oxygen toxicity is my only real concern. My deep air mantra is “Nitrogen Narcosis is for Christmas, Oxygen Toxicity is for Life”
Dropping to extreme depth breathing air has some interesting effects. As I approach three hundred feet my hearing becomes super enhanced. I can hear my own heart beat clearly and my cycle of breathing becomes as loud as barking dogs. My eyesight seems to have improved contrast, the most subtle difference in sand contours standing out like a mountain range relief. Descending further, the water gets colder and denser. Noises of ships engines are apparent, these ships are not visible on the horizon yet, but the dulcet throb of their engines projects for many miles in the deepest parts of the ocean.
Some days, I would descend towards a sandy bottom over three hundred feet down and stay for up to fifteen minutes. My brain would enter a tranquil state devoid of all back-scatter. A place for advanced thinking, math problems solved with ease, ideas to work with later, all conjured up from the brains back waters. Deep air diving is similar to Free Diving in that higher mental processes only reveal themselves when the humdrum thoughts of modern day life are sedated by water pressure. Pure Magic.
I look at my scuba tank contents gauge and it registers two thirds full as I pass three hundred and fifty feet deep today. The nitrogen has another interesting effect that now has my full attention. Something in my brain is short circuiting in the hearing department. I hear a short verse repeating in my head, getting louder and louder. The tune is quite familiar to me. I’ve done this dive many times before. A sort of requiem funeral beat done on a drum machine at break neck speed. The speed of the tune and its loudness always increase with depth. Sounding like the distant memory of a heart beat at two hundred and fifty feet, it progresses to a thrash rock concert with an audience of one as I approach four hundred feet.
Other deep air divers have labelled this aural phenomenon the Wah-Wah effect. The call of the Wah-Wah is to deep air divers, what the call to prayer promises the devout Christian. It was my reason for visiting today, I’ve heard it and now I must leave. I have dived today with a single tank of air, its eighty cubic feet volume and single breathing regulator leave little room for problem solving or equipment dramas. Like my body and its blood chemistry, the equipment must behave flawlessly. Dives to these depths done formally would require at least four diving cylinders containing exotic trimix gas mixtures, each tailored to remove each of the excesses I seek today. Oxygen toxicity has left me alone so far, to over-stay my welcome could mean becoming a permanent fixture at the Davy Jones Bed and Breakfast.
My finger draws inwards to depress the up-button, and air rushes from my tank into the buoyancy jacket, arresting my fall. To use my legs and kick my fins would require energy that swaps oxygen for carbon dioxide. Any exercise causes a rise in carbon dioxide levels in my blood. If carbon dioxide rises, a diver will become extra vulnerable to oxygen toxicity either at depth or during the return to the surface. Ten seconds of air rushing into my buoyancy jacket is enough to arrest my free fall. I become neutrally buoyant for a few seconds, then positive. I start floating up towards the sunlight, faster and faster as my buoyancy jacket grows with the decreasing pressure of the water around me. I travel upwards faster than my own exhaled bubbles. God only knows what bubbles are forming in my bloodstream. I continue upwards until I hit the safety of two hundred feet. Seeing my depth gauge flick back to the required depth, I hit the brakes by dumping the air from my buoyancy vest.
Hanging motionless in the void, looking downwards, I feel safe again. I see the cloud of bubbles that I had exhaled a minute before. In a second I will be enveloped in a Jacuzzi effect of my own breath. The tiny balls of air tickle my face as they tumble upwards away to the surface. They bump into each other and merge, growing into larger bubbles. The diminishing pressure will make sure that every breath I exhaled at three hundred and fifty feet will have grown at least eleven times bigger as it races to join the surface atmosphere above.Believe or not, all this is actually highly pleasurable and rewarding, albeit very dangerous and apparently hugely irresponsible. Deep air diving is probably as addictive and damaging as heroin abuse with similar catastrophic consequences if you overdose. Unlike heroin it doesn’t rot your teeth. Anyway that was the entertainment available most days of the week, and it was cheaper than the cinema.
My first year in Barbados allowed me unlimited diving to the depths that interested me. I had brought over from my instructor training in England, an understanding of enriched air nitrox diving and how to blend it. I set three dive centres up with enriched air back in 1994, a first in the eastern Caribbean. My thirst for advanced diver training and information was unquenched back then. Very few facilities had sought to offer training in the emerging discipline of technical diving. I had to travel to Egypt to further my knowledge and complete training in extended range diving and Trimix diving. In 1994 and 1995 Trimix diving was still in its infancy, the only available course instructor was known to me and despite that, I flew five thousand miles to receive further tuition.We met at a dive facility in Sharm El Sheik on the edge of the Sinai desert in Egypt. The centre was full to the brim with shiny chrome things and loaded with people knowing little of how to operate any of it properly. We were here to train as deep as seventy five metres using mixtures of helium, oxygen and nitrogen called Trimix. Each mixture was specially blended to avoid any nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity problems for the chosen dive depth. When I came to Egypt, I had more dives below seventy-five metres than many of the group had dives in their entire log books. My technical dive buddy was an ex military diver with the claim to fame of being attacked by a conger eel in a loch in Scotland. He had been drinking heavily apparently, and decided to offer a night dive experience to his pub pals in a freezing seawater lake. As you’d imagine, the whole experience capsized badly, with tales of giant angry conger eels attacking the diver and dragging him to the bottom of the loch by a loop of fishing line that was hanging from the slimy leviathan’s mouth.
A sprinkling of decompression sickness and a tabloid head line titled ‘one eel of a story’ set back diver training in Scotland some months. I remember reading the headline in the News of the World paper one Sunday morning. Recognising the culprit straight away, I gave him a phone call to get the whole story. He was sticking with the newspaper version however unlikely it sounded.Three years later, I taught a group to dive on the tiny island of Herm. After one of the class sessions we retired to the only pub on this diminutive rock in the English Channel. We swapped diving stories until my ferry boat home arrived. One guy said he was the recompression chamber tender on a Scottish military base some years earlier. This chap told of a dive instructor who was bought in with suspected decompression sickness. The story in the news told of duels with giant eels. The diver was apparently found hiding in undergrowth the morning after, trying to nurse a hangover and a bout of debilitating embarrassment. The diver divulged his tail of woe to the attending doctors, who were not overly sympathetic, especially when they smelled the alcohol oozing from their charge.
This patient was asking for anonymity as he was currently absent without leave from a nearby special forces training camp. The mystery diver showed his special boat squadron sweatshirt that he was wearing under his black Avon rubber drysuit. The story was almost plausible until the shirts clothing label revealed the Top Man brand. Top Man clothing is more synonymous with teenagers with customised Ford Mondeo’s than trained elite underwater demolition experts. Definitely more Special Farces than Special Forces.
Still, he was a comfortable and experienced deep diver and easily outclassed the rest of the gaggle in the class. Pre-requisites for the Trimix class included having eight hundred dives logged. I noticed that several of the group had less than fifty dives total. Technical diver ‘training standards’ should be a registered Oxymoron. It easily equals my favourite contradiction in terms…’Mature Student’. This lack of ethics has tarnished the technical dive industry for the last ten years and gets steadily worse. Nowadays, one training agency requires little more than two dives to 71 metres during instructor training to allow the new instructor to take 4 students to 100 metres!
After some highly lacklustre academic performances by the course instructors, we did some fun dives ending at seventy-five metres for eight minutes, including the five minutes it took to get down there. The quality of the compressor filters at the dive centre was a good reason not to dive deeper or longer. Forty minute dives breathing a cocktail of carbon monoxide and entrained engine oil was more than many could endure. A respite and recovery period during our decompression stops was thankfully supplied during the shallower portion. Just below the surface, we breathed 100% oxygen to speed up the off-gassing process. Pure oxygen came in separate bottles rented from a local gas supplier. As such it didn’t need to be supplemented from the dive shop compressors toxic exhaust pipe and was therefore safe to breathe.
Egypt is a popular destination. The Red Sea is both warm and clear with some fantastic reefs and walls. However, the more easily accessed dive sites would see on average ten to fifteen boats all tied to a single mooring buoy. The boats taut bow lines resembled children’s balloon vendors, with many boats sharing one buoy line. If the single mooring line broke then a dozen boats would be cast adrift like pin balls, crashing into surfacing divers and, more often than not, each other. The purpose of this was to allow the boat captains to sleep in the sun while the deck hands swapped horror stories about the latest group of customers. Shoals of novice divers from dozens of boats were thrown overboard to gaze at the often featureless and over-dived moonscapes that also lured our group of deep explorers. The large groups of novices herded about by a clueless, gap-year dive instructor, intent on getting home long before happy hour finished. During our technical deep excursions, we would swim around in a dark and gloomy area close to the wall, trying to avoid the shower of lead-filled weight belts that often fell from panicking beginner divers above. After completing the course we were told not to dive deeper than our training depth until we had built up considerable experience…unless we simply paid two hundred dollars more each and dived with the chief instructor to one hundred metres in groups of eight at a time! That sounded fantastic; to save money I dived on air. The madness could not have been more completeLife as a diving instructor has allowed me an insight into what the public get up to when they are on holiday. When people are not delivering milk or examining tax returns, they often develop a whole new persona. The more interesting ones live on in these pages. I hope that if this book does get to print, people recognise themselves and mutter the words “Bastard…he knew all along…must have been the Special Air Service speedo’s I was wearing”.
If my customers are to be believed, in the last ten years of recreational diver training I have apparently trained more Special Forces soldiers and spies than normal members of the public to dive. If scuba diving attracts such an odd bunch, technical diving must be the Promised Land for ex secret agents and Walter Mittys everywhere. The Special Forces must be the largest regiment in the world and easily out number the regular army if this many of their number seek scuba diver training!This book is not trying to focus purely on the negative side of scuba diving with all its bull-shitters. It’s just painting an alternative picture of diving to contrast the smiling faces and pristine reefs that fill travel brochures. If even a handful of readers learn that all is not happy beneath the waves, both with the quality of the diver trainers and the aqua-scapes you train to visit, then, I will be happy. Divers should be able to make informed decisions and recognise nonsense, rather than naively support the industry cowboys that are ruining everything. Diving is very rewarding even if it has a dark side; to recognise it and shun it will be more beneficial to everybody. All I’m trying to do is shine some light onto the dark…(long sigh)
Returning to Barbados was a relief, as I had grown quite familiar with the daily script there. Teaching diving in the day and then touring bars with the customers at night was very congenial. The dive centre had taken on a new staff member while I was in Egypt, Kevin from the UK. What he lacked in diving qualifications he made up for in humorous stories. We got him up to speed with the diving certifications and in exchange he told us funny tales of his brushes with various authorities while pursuing his career as small time drugs dealer. One morning we had picked up a large group of ladies from a visiting cruise ship. What had promised to be a possibly interesting flirtatious few days of dive guiding went aground as soon as we saw the cruise ship was chartered by a gay’s-only tour operator.Kevin and I sauntered over to the meeting area facing a barrage of cat calls from moustached men and village people look-a-likes. I gave the dive shop sign that read “Go down with the experts” to Kevin to deflect most of the verbal shrapnel towards him. Some ladies with short hair and serious expressions came over and we made our introductions. The mini-bus journey took 45 minutes and we all chatted about what we could see underwater over the next few days. Some of the group had bought waterproof cameras and they dictated to the others that fish and coral were what they sought as opposed to shipwrecks. It was my turn to lead this group today as we headed for an area called Dottins reef. Kevin the dive guide was not actually certified for leading anyone except for his friends, but he came along to assist me as the group was nearly 14 people.
I brought my new girlfriend Avril, as she had just finished her diving course, and Kevin carried along his trusty spear gun. I told him to keep it well hidden as most of the group sounded a bit environmentalist, the last thing they wanted to see was someone shooting small reef fish in the name of target practice. Kevin would have to dive with Jesus (alone) and stay well away from the group. The group put on their diving equipment after I had given them the usual briefing as to what to expect and how to behave. They all could set up their own equipment themselves, which was highly unusual, most of the time we had to remind the customers which way around their own wetsuits went. Over the side of the boat we went, as a group, dropping down the 30 feet or so to the reef top below. I’d been to this reef many times before, so started to lead the group around the rocks and coral to look for the reef dwellers that the dive shop had promised would be in plentiful supply. Looking behind me I could see some of the group impaled in the reef much like usual. I headed into deeper water to where the seabed is mostly sand so as to give the reef mattress a well deserved rest. Divers who haven’t been underwater since their last holiday tend to virtually walk across the bottom for the first twenty minutes, until they get some practise with their buoyancy control.
Most dive centres dream up very misleading names for the reefs that often included highly exotic marine life varieties. We had dive sites called ‘Stingray Landing’, ‘Shark Alley’, and ‘Manta Station’ plus scores of other destinations where you could virtually guarantee not seeing any of the species in the name. But you could get to look at a fish book after the dive to get the Latin names of what you didn’t see. My favourite “semi exotic” was the Blue Spotted Manta Ray because we could often guarantee seeing at least one, even in areas where the dynamite fishing was epidemic. I looked in all the various nooks and crannies as my gaggle of divers snapped away with their cameras, the underwater strobes leaving all manner of fish life dazed and confused, swimming away quickly like they had just been through a crazy X-ray machine. Things were going swimmingly and I’d virtually crossed off all the usual suspects from my mental ‘to find’ list.
Photographers are the worst offenders when it comes to smashing delicate corals, as they think that lying prone on the reef for long periods taking crap photos is the only way to interact with the shy marine life. The air supply was coming to an end for the heaviest breather of the group, so we headed for shallower water where the air lasts longer. Sometimes a customer could drain his scuba tank completely of air even before we had reached the bottom, but these ‘big breathers’ were ideal customers really because it meant the dives were shorter. As we travelled up across the reef I saw two large green Moray eels sticking their heads out of a hole, this would make a cool photo opportunity so I pointed the scene out to the dozen diving paparazzi spread out behind me. I felt a little sorry for the Eels as they were in for a strobe light extravaganza, and no doubt be prodded and posed endless times until every last diver had taken every last frame of film on the rolls. The depth was about 15 feet from the surface and everybody looked like they were enjoying themselves clicking away at the stunned and dazzled marine life. In amongst the background noise of divers bubbles I heard the unmistakable twang of a spear gun being fired. Being underwater means you cannot tell where a sound comes from – as sound travels so much faster in water, you lose sense of direction. I span around looking for who was firing the spear gun and saw in the distance a diver holding a discharged gun with spear dangling several feet below on the shock cord, hopefully he was just going to the surface as its customary to unload a gun before surfacing.
I quickly swam around the dive group to check everybody’s air supply again. Photographers could sometimes get so focused on their prey that they would forget to monitor their air gauge and simply run out of the breathable stuff. Some of them were getting low and I signalled them to surface. All agreed and turned back for one last click of the shutter. Suddenly, I heard an almighty crack of a spear gun firing very close to me. I turned around and saw a grinning buffoon holding the smokeless gun. I looked back to see a 2 metre Moray eel which had just been skewered through the head by the harpoon and was going absolutely bloody ballistic. Photographers sometimes take on a Nirvanic stoned look as they snap away totally relaxed and oblivious to their surroundings. This look of relaxation had permeated through my group just seconds before, but they now had looks of someone who had just had a drunk throw up on their birthday cake. The poor Moray Eel still had enormous strength and was spinning around like a whirling dervish on Ecstasy. The spear gun was easily pulled from the hands of my soon-to-be-sacked colleague. As the big fish twisted and turned with the four foot spear sticking out both side of its head, the scene just exploded. Divers were having their breathing regulators pulled from their mouths as the spear and gun caught and wrapped itself around anything nearby.
I had to swim quickly and cut the spear guns shock cord, before things went further downhill. My career dissipation light was blinking so fast and bright now, I feared an epileptic seizure. I had my knife out in a blink and swam directly into the affray. Divers were panicking but had swapped to their spare regulators as they kicked the last few feet to the fresh air with the huge Eel in tow. On breaking the surface, the air tuned blue from the swearing and the water went pink from the leaking Eel. I had to cut the spear free to release the mortally wounded animal, but one of the ladies started screaming that they wanted it on the boat for the evidence photographs! Threats of law suits faded into obscurity as US law firms came up against the impenetrable brick wall that is the Caribbean legal system.
Living in a developing country can be pretty exciting; it would be great to write more about daily life on an island with some of the most colourful characters imaginable. One day you are in shop were they are literally hanging shoplifters by their necks as a message to other would-be discount shoppers, a few days later there is a live sword fight in a crowded shopping centre with arms and other bits flying around like mosquitoes. During one government election, the opposition party tried to increase their fund raising coffers by dropping huge bundles of cocaine from an aeroplane into the sea, just off shore, near to where I stayed. Unfortunately most of the consignment fell into a fish farm and the curious tuna attacked the packages thinking it was food. As the fish floated belly up, the owners of the drugs turned up at the same time as the coast guard. A small gunfight completed the scene and some of the key players were handed 100 year prison sentences. The main presidential candidate was offered a 50 year reduction if he offered some evidence as to who might have provided the Trinidadian marching powder, plus pay a million dollar fine. He would have been 90 years old by the time he got ‘early’ parole.
A memorable dive trip some weeks later had me escorting a customer into deeper water. This English guy was a fairly experienced diver with fifty or so trips already under his belt. He had been diving deep with the company dive guides for a few days who remarked that although he was very quiet he was a capable diver. The idea today was to dive to fifty or sixty metres to see some black coral. The boat ride was only twenty minutes but the lack of conversation should have rung some alarm bells with me. It didn’t seem like nerves but more a preoccupation of some kind. I offered my buddy du jour a spare breathing tank but he declined it, I clipped a spare bottle to my jacket before we both went over the side of the boat. This guy never looked over at me once during the descent, I had to resort to using a tank banger to break him from his trance and return hand signals. A lot of older European divers like to solo dive in this way, if he had taken the spare breathing equipment I wouldn’t have minded so much him flying solo, but now he didn’t even carry a spare parachute. We hovered above the top of the finger reef in forty-five metres looking into the darker waters below. Slowly we dropped another ten metres deeper in search of the black coral trees that are ironically coloured orange. My buddy was swimming slower and slower and stopping all the time. I waited for him to catch up with me and then pointed to the big bush of coral below us that resembled a Christmas tree with orange branches. He looked okay so we swam towards the target. The weight of my spare tank clipped to my chest kept me in a face down position. If I looked up I could see the guy’s fins just above me. Getting to sixty-three metres, I stopped by the rare coral bush. I looked upwards to see a weight belt falling past me into the abyss. The owner had also managed to remove his buoyancy jacket and mask and fins. Incredibly, he was also swimming away from me using a comically fast doggy-paddle stroke. I was a little surprised as you could imagine. Using my flippers at full speed, I quickly caught up with him and tried to push a breathing regulator in his mouth.
Chummy was having none of it, but was quickly finding out that drowning was not the relaxing way to go, as suggested often by Hollywood movies. I dragged him back by the arm to his equipment and clipped it back around him. I picked one of his own breathing regulators up and forced it into his mouth. His eyes remained clamped shut as he pulled the mouthpiece away again. I was a little confused at this point, this was not like any nitrogen narcosis symptoms I had seen before. This chap was going exactly the right direction if he wanted to kill himself. I decided to head towards the surface and pulled him with me. It must have been close on two minutes since I saw him without equipment and he would likely pass out soon if he didn’t burst his lungs first. I tried to make sure he was breathing out as we ascended, although air bubbles seemed to be coming out of his nose anyway. En route to the top I stuffed a regulator back into his mouth once more and again he rejected it. At around thirty metres depth his eyes opened like saucers and he went from calm and serene to rabid dog. He grabbed the regulator from my mouth and breathed from it.
He started to hold on to me like a limpet now and was grabbing me so hard I couldn’t find either of my own spare regulators. I got a hand free and took my regulator back so I could breathe again. I kept the mouthpiece in so my own breathing could relax, although this guy had not wanted to breathe much before, now he did, but not from his own equipment. He grabbed my regulator from me again, at the same time I found the second stage of the spare tank that was clipped to my chest. Now we could both breathe, my suicidal buddy just hung limply in the water looking downwards, still without a mask. The ascent had gone fast, then slow, then fast again and we had built up decompression stops according to my wrist dive computer. I tried to fix the ascent by adding pauses at random depths before starting the more formal deco stops in the shallows. My buddy did nothing but hang motionless as I controlled the final minutes to the surface. He had decided not to wear a wetsuit just before the dive, this helped enormously now as he had thrown his weight belt away two hundred feet deeper and this would have been disastrous now if he was clad in buoyant neoprene. It was dawning on me that this was not an advanced case of narcosis but more likely an attempt to die. I would give him the benefit of the doubt until we reached the surface. The final minutes ticked off and we hit the sunlight. Before I could even voice a “what the f#@k was all that about?” this chap was repeating “sorry…sorry…I’m so sorry”.
This guy had issues. While waiting to be picked up by the dive boat I listened to his story. He was a doctor who had been diagnosed with something nasty. He came away on holiday without his wife with a plan to end it all. Of course he was welcome to shuffle off this mortal coil in any way he thought fit, however I was more than a little miffed as he had tried to pull his stunt on my shift, his sob story didn’t dampen my anger any. As the boat pulled up to us, he washed his face with seawater and regained his composure. The other divers asked if we saw anything cool on our deep dive, some head shaking from both of us seemed to answer their questions. Getting back to the shop, the guy wandered off up the beach while waiting for his hotel taxi to arrive. He didn’t come back for his belongings and some phone calls to his hotel found he had checked out the same day. I told the other guys in the dive centre about my action-filled deep dive over some rum and cokes later. The general ‘compassionate’ opinion of my workmates was that it was lucky he had paid in advance and even better that I had been around to recover the shops scuba tank. We put his private regulator and buoyancy jacket into the shops rental stock. I thought about going to look for his mask and fins during my next deep air adventure.
Following this, weeks were spent looking for a container of toxic waste that was bought for disposal in deep water from Japan, the story went. The local fish life was definitely decimated as the chemical cocktail was dumped only 100 metres from shore, in a planned one mile depth of water. The project planners didn’t check the local sea charts very closely as Barbados has a very shallow surrounding sea. A mile of water depth could only be found many miles off shore, but the cash was useful and the government didn’t have many civil servants interested in scuba diving anyway. Eventually we found the containers that had been clearly axed open before being thrown overboard, the contents dissipated with the ocean currents. For weeks after, shoals of fish continued to be washed up dead. Mutated fish were appearing all along the west coast dive sites also, so God only knows what was actually in the drums. We all purged the chemicals we had been swimming in from our bodies through a regimented consumption of alcohol.
I became a bit gun shy when customers turned up wanting specifically go ‘crazy deep diving’, we even had some pop stars turn up wanting to go to three hundred feet deep straight after they completed their open water courses – very rock and roll. Time and rum eventually faded my reticence to take customers tandem deep diving and soon it was business as usual. Within days, three blokes walked into the dive centre looking to go deep, I agreed to organise it. They had heard at the local Boat Yard bar that an instructor was in town that taught deep diving courses. They all introduced themselves saying that they were divers from the nuclear submarine that was visiting the island for a few days and were looking for some stunt dive action rather than any instruction. Two of the group said they were SEAL Special Forces divers and the other was a British Army diver that dealt with mine clearance. All three were probably Bakers or Window Cleaners, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I listened intently as they bigged themselves up with tales of underwater daring deeds. My eyes normally glaze over when I hear the war stories, but I hid it like a true veteran and we arranged a dive for the next morning. They wanted to start at 200 feet deep and only if they felt copacetic to continue to 300 feet as it had been some time since they had done that. I imagined that the last time these guys had dived to 300 feet was in a previous lifetime, so indeed a long time back. My constant mock yawning must have looked real enough. They said I looked tired and should get some rest.
I imagined that I would need help with these three as they were all pretty big and could easily prove a handful in deep water. I phoned my girlfriend Avril, who was becoming a bit of a deep diving addict and had shown herself reliable in deeper water many times recently. She thought it would be fun and jumped at the chance of a deep dive en masse.
The boat ride out in the morning had the bullshit bravado coming thick and fast. Even my girlfriend was matching her few months of diving experience against our three James Bond candidates who were talking about scuba dives to the Titanic and beyond. All the divers were lying through their teeth right up to the point I told them the depth sounder had stopped working and we would just head out into ‘proper’ deep water
“How will we know how deep it is, and how will we stop?” one guy said. He was clearly expecting a seabed to use as a springboard back to the surface. I threw him a glib answer “Look at your gauges and hit the brakes when you’ve had enough” this caused some Adam’s apples to dance up and down like Mexican jumping beans.
“Okay…let’s drop to 150 feet, group up and if you’re still in the drivers seat, we can drop further” I offered to the now quiet audience. Avril was to buddy the British mine clearance diver, and I would stay with the two Americans. Down we went. The English guy was an older vintage to the others and a bit of Wily Fox and sensibly pointed to his ears at about 130 feet indicating that he couldn’t go any further. The rest of the group carried on steadfast on the journey to oblivion. We stopped a little short of 200 feet with one of the navy seals pointing at his head with a spinning finger. That was his cue to stop, again a sensible response. I motioned to Avril to get closer to me, together with the other guy who was looking at little spaced out by the whole experience by 240 feet.Dives beyond established relative safety limits are generally discouraged and shunned by the diving community. Whilst it is acceptably cool to go free climbing or base jumping, there is a palpable stigma attached to seemingly irresponsible scuba diving. The diving centre I worked at did not offer training or fun dives outside of training agency outlines. At this time, I offered a deep air certification course only to 220 feet and a trimix course to 300 feet with mandatory use of adequate helium in the breathing mixture. Deep Air dives were conducted occasionally for friends of the owner, but never for walk-in customers, regardless of their experience claims.
In the early days of technical diving, trimix use was not widespread and deeper air dives were far more common, I remember hearing many early ‘pioneer’ tech divers commenting the fact they didn’t feel the need for trimix until they were below 300 feet. I have met maybe four divers in the last ten years with whom I would be comfortable diving to 300 feet or below breathing normal air. The rest should stay nearer 150 feet even when using any amount of trimix.
It is interesting to see how things have changed since the internet chat room revolution. If a diver mentions in a whisper that they dived below 100 feet breathing air, they would be banished from polite conversation. Unfortunately modern technical divers use helium often to excess as it increases perceived ability, much the same way as steroid (ab)use ‘helps’ bodybuilders. My point being that it is better to increase ability through repetition than by relying on temporary performance enhancers. Helium really only adds a modicum of sobriety, it does not improve buoyancy skills. Helium does not give you an ability you didn’t possess before the dive. This statement will no doubt raise the blood pressure of armchair tech diving gurus everywhere.
So, back to the deep air story, As the dive shop did not endorse very deep air dives, this group had agreed to dive from a privately hired boat. We would be diving in teams of one, and I was there as a guide only, as it would be unreasonably dangerous for me to effect a rescue. All the customers were rufty tufty types and apparently trained to take others lives, it seemed perfectly fine for them to jeopardise their own.
Around the 240 feet the last guy was overcome by narcosis, my girlfriend was 20 feet or so deeper and spiralling around drifting slowly downwards – quite literally a passenger on a driverless ride. I felt still like I was in charge of my bus, but started to slow down my descent, as you never know what’s coming round the corner. Looking up I could see the surface shimmering some 300 feet above, and between me and it were two divers decompressing in the shallows and two more divers about to decompose in the deep. Feeling like you are in control does not mean you are, but I still felt mentally alert and capable of decision making on this dive. I decided that I had had enough and headed up to meet the others. Avril was closest to me and I approached her first, she was grinning but not responding to my hand waving. It is easiest to simply take an unresponsive diver closer to the surface and often they recover quite quickly with little memory of the current situation. I lifted Avril up some 30 feet only, before she awoke from her temporary syncope. Initially quite startled, she realised what must have happened and looked kind of angry but she would have to save the self recriminations for later and any anger felt now would likely be forgotten as adrenaline fed elation always takes over when returning to the surface after an crazy air dive. Deep air diving has been likened to legalised drug abuse many times, but it won’t keep you up dancing all weekend.
We both drifted up towards the next guy, he also looked frozen in time, eyes open but fast asleep. I grabbed his arm and gave a circle in the air with my index finger to Avril, this was the sign that our entertainment for today was over and unless we headed towards the surface now, the diminishing air supply in our single air tanks could spice things up really unpleasantly and soon. Our sleeping dive partner snapped out of his nitrogen induced hypnosis en route. I doubt if he would ever want a repeat performance and I’m sure he felt mortified to see a small blonde girl grinning at him as his Cinderella spell was broken. When a diver is overcome by the effects of deep diving while breathing air, they appear quite normal with eyes wide open, but I’ve never noticed anyone blink. The afflicted diver doesn’t respond to stimulation and they have no memory of the event. The oxygen and the nitrogen gases that make up normal air cause many ill effects when used at extreme depth. In a short time, excessive oxygen toxicity causes epileptic seizures and a host of other insidious although temporary ailments to occur unfortunately without warning or mercy. The symptoms if experienced at the surface would not be life threatening, but underwater they involve drowning and the outcome of this is predictably dire. Nitrogen on the other hand gives a narcotic response similar to alcohol consumption or certain anaesthetics. Diving to 330 feet breathing air would be similar to drinking half a litre of whisky in 5 minutes and then going for tight rope walk, over a precipice. Obviously some people could practice a lot and do this everyday, like myself. But I know that one day a stumble, followed by the inevitable long fall will have my internet judge and jury laughing so much they might spill their Ritalin milkshakes! Using either gas to excess will one day cause symptoms of gas toxicity to creep up on you like a stealthy mugger or worse…the seemingly friendly accountant.
This type of diving probably sounds completely irresponsible, but no more than speeding in your car, and when diving you do not endanger anyone else’s life, unless you are responsible for others of course. Until a macho type of diver finds their personal limits, they tend to feel quite invincible underwater. If you are lucky enough, you will find your limits just before incapacitation, or be lucky enough to be rescued. A deep diver who feels out of control and incapable of self rescue will not stay a diver for very long, they simply give up and take up other less adventurous sports. Technical diving doesn’t have to be ridiculously deep to be over-challenging. Rebreathers, drysuit’s and even hostile conditions are all more than adequate to scare an ill prepared diver into becoming a skier. Sadly too many new divers leave their scuba training without self confidence or, even worse, graduate with a false sense of security gained by having an ‘easy-ride’ throughout training. Traditionally, diving courses were structured to give much repetition to the more challenging skills. Bad or just ‘new’ scuba instructors often allow fast learners to proceed without enough practise, and this does nothing to turn a fun practise session into life saving motor skills.
Barbados was a fun place to live, and working as a scuba instructor was busy and varied. When I taught holiday makers to scuba dive we sat on the beach with a paper instructor manual and just chatted for a few hours, it was very informal. Now, in 2005, I have a laptop computer full of multi media presentations from all the popular training agencies, these new cyber manuals contain far less than 10 years ago and need updating it seems on a daily basis with an accompanying ‘improvement’ fee.
I started work at a new dive centre after a brief trip to England and one of my first jobs was to train the shop staff in First Aid and CPR. This should have been easy, until I was told that there was no mannequin to demonstrate chest compressions with. The shop owner suggested I use one of the new dive guides who incidentally could not swim a stroke, and always wore a life jacket even when walking on the beach! My CPR dummy was called Patrick and he said he would gladly allow us to practise chest compressions on him, who was I to argue? The weather outside was overcast and raining so I had the full company of staff to train in First Aid.
We began and the next couple of hours trickled by as I rambled on and we all had a good laugh while pushing Patrick’s chest in and out and inflating his lungs for 30 minutes…looking back, this was possibly not the cleverest procedure to be practising on a currently living person, but he grinned and bared it and most importantly, didn’t die. The dive shop owner had pulled out all the stops and brought his video player and television from home so we could watch the crackly and poorly acted training video that was mandatory viewing for completion of the class.
I stared out of the window during a long video segment and watched as the rain fell onto the flat sea as it lapped the shore just 50 feet away. Down the beach, I could see a crowd forming and they looked out to a restaurant that stood on a pier. I could see a large slick of red in the sea and immediately feared the worst. I shouted to the class that there was a huge amount of blood in the water and dashed outside to investigate, strangely, nobody came after me.
I asked some of the crowd what was happening, but they didn’t know and were just concerned holiday makers that saw the blood. I hadn’t heard of any shark attacks in the area, so jumped into the water with my diving mask and snorkel. I could hardly see anything as the visibility was terrible, but I noticed a sweet smell as I swam into the red water. I came up to get some orientation and take a breath. The water tasted like melon flavoured bubblegum and my skin was turning red. I headed back to shore and saw some of the other dive guides and instructors laughing their heads off and pointing at me. The dive centre shared a stretch of beach with a hotel and a soft drink manufacturer called Juicy Drinks. Every time it rained heavily or the high tide level occurred after sunset, they would flush the drink containers into the sea to make way for a new batch of flavours. Over the next few months I taught class in Blueberry, Melon, and even Cranberry flavoured seawater. It was quite entertaining, but hardly environmentally friendly as all the local fish life had very bad teeth from drinking fizzy drinks all day.
Most of the days of work didn’t see crazy antics like this but it was never dull. One of the few perks of the job is the fact that diving Instructors seem to be objects of desire for the many single ladies that holiday alone in paradise. When I was not in any long-term (more than two weeks) relationships there were many opportunities to flirt with the customers, and this is still one of the few tangible benefits that go with the job. So that this text keeps its family show certificate I won’t go into too much detail, but maybe the tales of relations with ladies while attempting the deepest shag on scuba, or being caught on camera underneath a glass bottom boat by holiday makers as they looked for unusual marine life will make it into an adult version of this publication coming soon.
Contact
Author: Mark Ellyat
Email: info@travel-dive.com
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