This might be a tad long -- but I was in a forgotten old file, and just found an old magazine article I wrote. You might get a kick out of it.
If I took up too much bandwidth, the mods can bomb it.
Channeling Hemingway
©Walt C. Snedeker
I really cannot figure how I have made it this far. Going diving with Charlie is a tad more hazardous than with, say, a charter boat. Nope, that won’t work, because the Shenandoah was a charter dive boat.
Odd thing – charter dive boats are very frequently idle. Weather, temperature, random chance… anyway, that meant that Charlie and I would go out for stress-free diving. No customers. I was the Cabin Boy.
There never was a single time either of us mentioned anchoring and diving. The hassle of hauling in the bloody anchor would be too much after diving -- especially since we always did two dives each. We always dove the 110-foot line because we had oversized tanks, and we had the tables down pat.
The maxim “never dive alone” is intended for divers who are ordinary mortals. And that’s exactly what Charlie and Himself ain’t. We may be as dumb as an acre of fungus, but apparently we cannot be killed.
A short list of some of the things that occurred while one of us was on the bottom 110 feet down and the other was aboard the
Shenandoah includes:
- The time Charlie was down, and I was just drifting and staying with his flag. Had to put it in gear occasionally to catch up. OK, flag is getting ahead. I put it in gear, and here we went. Tried to turn – the steering was no longer connected.
- The time I was down and completely inside a small cave, working at tickling a huge lobster out to where I could grab him (he was too big for the net). It was dark, and I really couldn’t make him out. HAH! A flash of light exactly like a flashbulb… and I saw and caught the bug. Came up to find Charlie dousing flames.
- The time I came up just as Charlie shot by at absolute top speed. Missed my head by one inch.
- The time Charlie was down, and one engine overheated. On a two-prop boat, that means you cannot go straight. How to pick him up in an hour?
Well… those were the easy ones. The Day I Channeled Hemingway started off in absolutely stellar fashion. Charlie and I had taken turns diving, and we both had gotten both bugs and hogfish. Charlie had just come up from his second dive and now it was my final turn for the day.
I already had my limit for lobsters, so I only took my big, wooden-stock speargun. The spears for this gun were not attached by cord. It is called “free-shafting”. There are pluses and minuses. On the plus side, your range is doubled or better. On the minus side, if you miss… you could be out forty-five dollars.
In my case, the risk would be double that; my speargun carried a second shot in a special holder on the side.
I loaded it up when I hit bottom. Hooked the dive flag clip to my carabineer, and was off. The current was mild, just right for moving along like a hunter should – but without any real effort. This is something many divers never learn – they are detected by their pressure waves.
The coral protrusion ahead of me seemed different, somehow. Just for the heck of it, I flipped off the safety, extended the gun at arm’s length, and approached carefully.
OMIGOD! Half the coral wasn’t coral at all -- it was an absolutely huge cobia!
My spear was only six feet away when I shot. The heavy stainless-steel rod crashed through the cobia’s skull and into the coral behind it. I was swimming as quickly as I could to the beast, because I could see that he was recovering.
Trying to move quickly in liquid is the stuff nightmares thrive on. I just barely got my hand on the back end of the spear when the big fish came back to life. Fortunately, I had instinctively slipped the speargun bands over my arm as I was going after the spear end. It was fortunate because I was holding on to the spear with both hands, being dragged around and around so fast my goggles were in danger of coming off. I would have lost the gun for sure. We traveled at least fifty yards.
He suddenly slowed down, and I took advantage of the break by getting my other hand on the far side of the fish. Now I had him “strung” and I had far more leverage on him.
I was pretty much out of breath from all the swimming, rushing, fighting, and I just had to sit on the sandy bottom for a couple of minutes. I had a good ten minutes of time and twenty minutes of air. Time for a breather.
BUMP! BUMP!
BUUUMMMMPPP!
The third bump on my back resulted in my right arm being lifted up. At first, I couldn’t really make sense of what I saw: it was just all flat and gray. Then more of it came out from under my arm and I could see quite well what it was.
A very large hammerhead shark.
The sorry bastage took a bite out of MY cobia! I was not a happy camper. In fact, I was in the process of trying to one-handedly get the second spear out of the holder so I could drive him off. Poke him, not shoot him. No way to load the gun. The cobia was still giving me toco.
Finally got the second spear out, put the bands back over my arm, left hand back on the blunt side of the first spear (but holding it very close to the head) and poked the bug-eyed shark.
Zip! He bounced away, stopping about ten feet from me. Strange behavior. The cobia was still pulling every which-a-way on the spear, and I was having trouble holding it. I turned to get a better grip… and dang near catted on the spot.
It was another, larger yet, hammerhead. Tearing great chunks out of my cobia.
That did it. Time to go back to the boat. Right now. I started on up, but remember – you cannot go up fast from 110 feet. Especially if this is your second long-and-deep dive of the day. So I started up at “little bubble” speed.
Both hammerheads followed.
So here is Waltie, jabbing with a handheld spear, trying to control ascent, and unable to wrap up the rope from the dive float.
Like Buffalo Bill Cody use to say, “Well, boys, they kilt me.”
Nevertheless, I got to the surface in time to shout to Charlie to cut the engine so the rope wouldn’t get wrapped.
He was right on target. Told me he could see my float going crazy – looked like it was pulled completely under a couple of times. Then he saw the two huge hammerheads and thought I was a goner.
So we’re talking, and I go to hand up my cobia.
It was a flash! The Old Man And The Sea. My gosh! That was me!
The cobia would have weighed over a hundred pounds. There was not one tiny piece of unchewed, usable meat on that whole monster.
Charlie looked at me strangely.
“What!”
“Why the hell didn’t you just take your spear out of the fish and let those monsters have it? How you were not eaten along with it I just don’t know.”
“Just never thought of it.” I felt kinda… umm.
