A Day of Drowning
By Glenn Gordon
Published by Glenn Gordon at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Glenn Gordon
Smashwords
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A Day of Drowning
It’s the spring of 1975, I’m a couple of months shy of 20 years old, and — as the saying goes — the world of Grand Turk is my oyster. Well, more like the world is my conch, those ubiquitous giant mollusks that so symbolize the Turks and Caicos Islands. Like the locals, at the Salt Raker Inn we served them up every way imaginable: conch salad, conch chowder, conch fritters, conch steak parmesan. Think about a large clam or abalone and all the ways you might cook those. Great grub, and a favorite at most GT shindigs, both for their local flavor and just the plain fact that they taste fantastic.
I’d been hanging out for a few months with a couple of Navy grunts, who were stationed at the base on the north end of the island. Neither Bob Shrank nor Mike Pigg had arrived on Grand Turk with much snorkeling experience, so I’d been teaching them the ropes at various hot spots along the western coast. In turn, they’d dragged me eagerly along to a few of the picnics and parties the Turk-based swabbies liked to throw together every weekend.
On this day Mike and Bob had recruited me to help them harvest the fresh seafood for that night’s party, and I spent the morning out among the coral heads free-diving for a few dozen of the pearlescent pink-lipped conch shells. My usual hot spots had run a bit dry for decent-sized specimens, so I spent an extra couple of hours snorkeling down as deep as 25 feet and exploring a dozen new sites. All in all we were out there close to four hours and I made about 40 descents, each ranging from 50 to 200 seconds underwater. Three minutes may not seem like much, but that second atmosphere (33 feet) and its doubling of the pressure on your body, plus the constant up and down fin work . . . well, let’s just say, an afternoon siesta would have felt pretty great right then.
But we’d only filled half the menu and still had a few more fish to spear, and we knew we’d find plenty of grouper and hogsnapper near the Dropoff on the back side of South Pier.
Some quick background: on the south end of Grand Turk, long before the cruise ship station and Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, the main attraction there was the pseudo-military base jointly operated by the Air Force, Pan Am (yes, of airline fame, but not in this case) and RCA (as in makers of all things electronic).
The RCA personnel actually lived there on base, shacked up in apartment-style bungalows with a BX, a mess hall/restaurant/bar, and even an outdoor movie theater. Bingo on Sundays, dart league a couple of other days each week, and tropical-themed soirees a few times a year. Most of these guys were professional techies operating the satellite and rocket tracking equipment used by NASA and the military in an area stretching southeast of Miami and all the way to Ascension Island — a region they called the Test Range.
Now, as for the Air Force and Pan Am presence on the base, well, it’s like this . . . if I told you I’d have to track you down and kill you. Consider this:
This was the 70’s when the Cold War was at its height,
Grand Turk was really not so far away from Cuba, a suspected safe refuge for friendly Soviet submarines, and
Pan Am manufactured and sometimes partnered with the U.S. military to operate extremely sophisticated sonar listening devices.
You do the math.
So, anyway . . . Mike, Bob, and I hustled down to South Pier, which butts up to the north edge of the Air Force base, and juts out a good 250 feet into the sea. Acres of coral beds and rocky caves make up the shelf there and stretch out to what marine geologists call the continental slope, what experienced divers call The Edge of the Deep, and what local islanders call The Dropoff. Bottom line, after gradually deepening from the soft sand beaches of Grand Turk, the sea bottom abruptly and suddenly turns 90º and drops unobstructed for more than a mile into the mighty trench known as the Turks Passage. Yeah, it’s really like that: snorkel, snorkel, flip, flip, 15 feet deep, 20 feet, 25 feet, then Holy Crap!!! Straight down 7,200 feet. Ever see movie star Ed Harris falling endlessly into the depths in the aptly named movie The Abyss? Well, had not James Cameron secured an abandoned nuclear cooling tower for the task, that scene could have easily been filmed a quarter mile off the coast of Grand Turk. And with no sleight-of-hand movie magic. Just 1.4 miles straight down.
Mike chose to stay at the nose of the pier to watch our progress — which turned out be a good thing; the watching, that is — while I borrowed his recently purchased $100 speargun and flippered out with Bob to the Dropoff, a prime location for poking big fish as they ascended from beyond the Edge to munch on all the incredible edibles growing on the sun-rich seafloor. The swim out took us a good ten minutes, but once there the fish-hunting went well. Within an hour we’d speared a half dozen hogsnappers weighing five to fifteen pounds each, and we’d seen a few groupers, but none that strayed within range. That is until a large 3-foot yellowfin wandered by heading right for The Dropoff. I sucked in deep, filling my lungs with air, scissor flipped, and began the last dive of my life.
Holding your breath for the purpose of duration is an acquired talent. Your body has numerous and significant mechanisms built in to deter you from doing so. First of all, there’s the psychology of it. You’re under water, for God’s sake. Yeah, we all gestated in that medium for nine months, but after the birth age of maybe 5 seconds we’re latched on to air as our singular source of oxygen. So, the number one obstacle to holding your breath underwater is your head telling you, You’re not a fish. You don’t belong here. The instant the ocean closes over your head your brain begins screaming, BREATHE!
Most casual swimmers can actually stay underwater for 20-30 seconds longer than they think, before their survival sense says, “Okay, I’ve had enough!” But fear sets in quickly, and fear induces hyperventilation—short, sharp breaths intended to speed up energy production. And unless the frontal cortex and its will-power engine can convince the brain’s fear response that you’re doing just dandy, well, you’re going to open your mouth and breathe.
There’s an additional reason for that; it’s an issue with the physiology of your thorax. The lungs of most normal people aren’t used to being stretched to their limits, and this over-inflation fills up more space than normal in your chest cavity, such that your innards notice the difference. Especially your ribcage and its networked web of muscles and tendons. When they feel the extra pressure, they know it’s not normal. Again, fear sets in.
And finally, there’s the whole problem with carbon dioxide saturation, your body’s final protection straw. Ironically, for being a corporeal entity so dependent on oxygen to survive, the mechanism that regulates our breathing is less concerned with O2, but focuses instead on increased concentrations of respiration’s byproduct: carbon dioxide. Inside the heart are chemoreceptors which monitor the partial pressures of oxygen and carbon dioxide. When the CO2 reaches saturation levels too high, a chemical alarm goes off, signally the brain’s medulla, which in turn tells the lungs to inhale. Whether you want them to or not. It’s as simple as that – when the medulla says it’s time to breathe, you breathe. Even if you’re still a few dozen feet under the surface.
Okay, now the advantage an experienced free-diver brings to the table is very simple, and what it comes down to is a body’s breathing mechanisms gradually growing accustomed to the unusualness of not breathing. Every day for two full years I had been swimming in the sea off the coast of Grand Turk, acclimating my body to longer and longer periods under the surface. Three to four minutes had become the norm. Beyond that . . . I just didn’t know.
The
fish I was after is called a yellowfin grouper. They range from 2 to
4 feet in length and they’d weigh in at 20 to 50 pounds. Through
the glass of my mask at sea level this one looked easily 35 pounds.
The yellowfin flesh is white, flaky, and oh so tasty, and would be a
big hit with the party crowd that night. 
Groupers,
in general, are casual swimmers and approaching from above or behind
would usually mean a successful hit. Which all factored into my
immediate and ultimately foolish decision that I was going to get
this damn fish no matter what. Even if it killed me.
No lie. I actually thought that.
Anticipating a rousing and possibly time-consuming hunt, I lifted my face from the water, pulled the snorkel out of my mouth, and said to Bob, “See that grouper, there on the Edge? Nice one.” He nodded his head and gave me a thumbs up.
With a slow flutter-kick of my fins, I held my shoulders above the water and checked the steel spear shaft on my weapon. Everything looked in order. I sucked in a few deep breaths – hyperventilation would cleanse the CO2 from my bloodstream, effectively delaying my body’s warning response to carbon dioxide build-up – and placed my faceplate back in the water. I wouldn’t even use my snorkel for this dive as my lungs were already full.
A lurking red-spotted form in the near distance identified my prey, so I pike-turned on the surface, thrusting my legs into the air and my head and shoulders downward, then let my own body weight pull me into the depths. I flicked my fins once or twice, but kept my form as quiet-still as possible; no wasted motion, no extra effort. Every muscle twitch meant more energy spent and more oxygen depleted.
Plus, I might spook the fish.
The art of spearfishing is a choreographed combination of thrust and pause, motion and immobility. A few gentle kicks for acceleration, then a quiet glide towards the intended prey. And if the fish turns its back on you, that’s when you pounce.
But it’s a smooth pounce. A subtle go. Because the target usually won’t travel very far and will pull up nearby and fiddle around there for a while. So, you keep your momentum heading forward, staying as close as possible, slowly bending your body to swerve left or right, up or down, because one of these times the fish is going to stop just right and turn its body just enough broadside to give you a shot. And if your aim is true and your distance within range . . . then you’ve got ‘em.
My body sank quietly into the azure sea and within seconds I found myself four fathoms deep on the seafloor, where I hovered beside a tower of staghorn coral. I slowly brought my left hand to my face and pinched my nostrils shut with thumb and forefinger, then blew outward, performing the Valsalva maneuver to equalize the pressure in my Eustachian tubes. The grouper nibbled at a coral branch only five yards away, just at the fringe of the Deep, as if hesitant to venture too far from safe refuge.
Mike’s speargun gave me a range of about 14 feet: 3 feet of gun barrel, 8 feet of black nylon line, and a final 3 feet of stainless steel shaft capped with a twin-barbed bulletnose tip. I preferred to approach within maybe ten feet; ensuring better accuracy and that the spear would get to my prey just that much quicker.
But then the yellowfin moved. I don’t know what spooked it; whether it detected me visually or maybe felt the radiating pressure waves generated by my movement. Or maybe its sensitive hearing picked up the beat of my heart. It sensed something, though, and twitched its tail and yellow-tipped pectoral fins a few times, and that’s all it took. In a split second it was six feet farther away.
And so began our game of cat and mouse, our paso doblé of death.
I gently flipped one fin and then the other, drifting towards the place where it had settled, immediately above the Dropoff. And when it shifted position again, now leery of the shallower depths, and disappeared over the Edge, I continued my pursuit after it.
Now, let me just say, descending over the Edge and along the Wall of the Deep is as freaky weird, heart in throat an experience as you’re ever going to know. You look downward and it just goes forever. At 35 feet I could still see the bright sunlit surface above me and the ocean with its typical Turks visibility of 100-plus feet. But beneath me it got darker and darker and darker, blue turning to indigo, turning to gray, and then black. And down in the black lived the bad things. The little demon barracuda who on their individual own didn’t seem so bad, but when they traveled in packs of fifty or a hundred, their wicked toothy sleekness made for an unfair fight. And, of course, down there were the sharks. More prevalent on the less-populated east side of the island, I’d seen more than my share here on the people side: Caribbean reef sharks, nurse sharks, and the gut-chilling hammerhead sharks.
But the diving on the Edge of the Deep is also exhilarating, a once in a lifetime experience that I had the privilege of enjoying every day. A thousand forms of plant life and sea creature in every color of the rainbow, clinging to this vertical wall and descending below me out of site. Like planting the most gorgeous and exotic garden imaginable on the side of the Sears Tower, filling it with every species of bird and insect, and then strapping some futuristic anti-gravity device to your back so you could float around it, enraptured by its beauty.
Welcome to the Edge of the Deep. Welcome to the Wall.
And so I descended. Five feet. Then five more. The lead blocks of my weight-belt kept me near perfectly balanced between sink and float. Every flick of my fin or gesture of my hand turned me, propelled me, and brought me closer to my prey.
I didn’t really think about my time beneath, simply because my body felt fine. Lung pressure? Sure. But that went with the territory. Seriously, I felt just fine. I could easily go for a while longer. And besides, the longer I chased it, the more this elusive fish became the most important quarry I’d ever pursued.
But then this silent siren of the deep made a crafty, clever move that assured its own survival and probably saved my life. It suddenly dove straight down a good dozen feet in one wild surge, then turned around to look at me, basically flipping me off and shouting, “Kiss my fins, snorkel boy!” And in a flurry of movement it tore off into the blackness and was gone.
Had I not been hovering weightlessly in the middle of the ocean, my shoulders surely would have slumped. But hey, you win some and you lose some. I shook my head farewell and turned my head to the surface.
“Oh,
shit.” I may have even muttered the words. And I know I at least
opened my mouth because I quickly clamped it shut again when I tasted
the cool, salty flow of seawater into my mouth. Far above me I could
see the blue bright glow of the Caribbean sky and the dark floating
outline of Bob’s body silhouetted against it. I was more than 50
feet over the Edge, a good 85 feet below the surface. That’s an
eight-story building. The height of a foul pole in 
Yankee
Stadium.
And I’d been down below way too long to make it back.
Bob Shrank knew instinctively that something wasn’t right. And to be honest, it scared him half to death. When the U. S. Navy stationed him on Grand Turk he assumed he’d get into diving – both snorkeling and SCUBA – and he totally lucked out to meet this local guy, Scott Gordon, who not only swam like a dolphin, but also was willing to teach him the ropes. They’d been out together a dozen times by then and he’d watched Scott submerge to depths that he himself was reluctant to attempt even with a tank on his back. And it blew his mind how long the guy could hold his breath.
But this time was different. He knew it in his bones. It was like an internal stopwatch had been ticking since the moment Scott’s head dipped below the surface, tracking his time below to the second, and now an alarm was sounding in his brain and in his soul. This is too long. Even for Scotty. This is way too long.
But what could he do? His dive buddy was already deeper than he himself was capable of going. He just didn’t have the lungs for it. And at this distance though he couldn’t detect exactly what Scott was doing, he appeared still to be trailing the grouper. The fish itself was beyond his recognition, its shape and color blending in with the face of the Wall.
Then in an instant everything changed. Scott was moving, making for the surface. But it was all wrong. The enduringly calm and smooth-stroked swimmer – the guy who always swam like he’d been injected with Flipper’s DNA – this time he looked different. His fins kicked in frantic cadence and the back-and-forth oscillation of his body made it clear that Scott Gordon was swimming for his life.
Bob could see that he’d already jettisoned his weight belt and dropped the speargun, and then 20 feet into his ascent his friend reached up with one hand and ripped the mask and snorkel from his face. All Bob could think was that he was trying to reduce the drag of his body through the water. And he knew intuitively that Scott wasn’t going to make it. Hell, he was still along the Edge and hadn’t even made it to the shelf yet.
Seconds after discarding his facemask the diver below him stretched his right arm fully above his head, his hand open, his fingers splayed, as though grasping for . . .
The reality hit Bob like a brick to the face. He’s grasping for ME. He’s grasping for my help.
Then Scott’s kicking ceased, his arm drifted back to his side and his body went limp. And though he’d never witnessed it in person before, Bob knew what he was seeing. Shallow water blackout.
Every fiber in Bob’s body screamed for him to immediately respond to his friend’s trauma by descending into the depths to save him, but years of team discipline convinced him otherwise. Instead, he lifted his head from the water and turned towards the South Pier, surprised to see Mike Pigg standing at the very edge of the platform 100 yards away, his arms raised in earnest inquiry. Clearly, he’d been observing them and had seen Scott begin his descent. Had noticed he wasn't back yet. A half dozen local kids stood beside him, pointing out to the water, their eyes glued on Bob’s face.
Rhythmically flipping his swimfins to keep his shoulders above water, he raised his right hand to his neck and swiped the fingers blade-like across his throat, the universal scuba divers' gesture signaling I'm out of air! As Mike dropped his arms in resigned acknowledgement, Bob sucked down one final breath, and pike-turned into the sea, hoping he’d be in time.
His dive partner’s body floated in stasis, legs slightly bent, back arched forward, arms awkwardly spread to either side. Bob gauged him at 40 feet, just beyond the lip of the Deep. He couldn’t be sure in that instant, but he felt a slight tug of hope that Scott wasn’t sinking, that he in fact still retained sufficient air in his lungs to keep him ever so slightly buoyant.
If that were true, then he hadn’t breathed yet.
One of the quirks of hyperventilation is that it potentially delays the autonomous breath-hold breakpoint to a place beyond hypoxia. Bob had learned all about it in U. S. Navy ocean survival classes.
Normally, carbon dioxide saturation reaches a level that triggers breathing before a person blacks out from the lack of oxygen in the brain, a condition called hypoxia. A person is underwater too long, CO2 levels in the blood reach the trigger point, and boom!, water is breathed instead of air. The esophagus and lungs react to the liquid intrusion with a convulsive expelling, followed immediately by another breath. If the lungs fill that second time with water, then that poor soul has officially drowned.
With hyperventilation, however, the equation is altered. A series of deep inhalations of air before descent does nothing to add additional oxygen to the lungs or bloodstream, but does accomplish a reduction in CO2 levels. That’s important to understand: there’s the same amount of oxygen, but less carbon dioxide.
So, as the diver goes about his underwater business, oxygen is depleting and carbon dioxide rising at the same rates they always do. But when oxygen is critically low and reaches that point at which the normally equivalent CO2 level triggers a breath-hold breakpoint, in a hyperventilation scenario the chemoreceptors in the heart don’t see a problem. They’re fooled into believing that gas ratios are still within safe parameters. The body keeps burning oxygen and a very short time later the brain realizes that it doesn’t have enough O2 to function. To protect itself, it shuts off consciousness. Divers call that shallow water blackout.
Bob swam harder than he ever had in his life, knowing that the convulsive breath was imminent. Whether he was conscious or not, at some point Scott’s medulla would tell his lungs to inhale, and at that moment, Bob’s sole purpose in life was to reach his friend and transport his body as close to the surface as possible before that happened.
When Bob finally arrived, he grabbed Scott by the hair. Like most teenagers on the island, he wore his hair long, often tied back in a ponytail or single braid, and instinctively the Navy man knew that if he dragged him by his hair the more streamlined the lifeless body would remain as he hauled it upward. “Sorry, brother,” he apologized in his mind, then clamped his fingers in a death grip around the tangled mass of hair and began a hard kick to the surface.
Four fin-strokes later Scott breathed.
Bob felt it more than he saw it, a sudden wild wrenching against his fingers. And then again. He kept swimming, but glanced down to see a gray cloud of vomit dispersing in the water. He turned his face upward again and kept kicking, still 30 feet to go.
Then 20.
Then 10.
Then what? Even in the adrenalin rush of rescue Bob had to ask himself the question. What was he going to do once they made it to air? How could he as one man, alone, barely floating on the surface of the sea, ever hope to both purge Scott’s water-sodden lungs and then inject them with air sufficient to bring him back to life? How could he possibly do it?
With five feet to go his ears detected the distant, high-pitched whine of a boat propeller and he knew he wouldn’t have to save his friend alone.
When his face broke the surface, Bob gasped with a series of massive inhalations. So concerned had he been with the task at hand that he hadn’t even noticed his own body’s struggle to withstand the underwater ordeal. He heaved in and out while raising the facemask to the top of his head. Behind him, the sound of a full-throttle outboard engine reverberated across the water, and he turned to see a 16-foot skiff bouncing over the chop, bee-lined straight at them.
With a hoarse and unbidden sigh sputtering through his lips, Bob reached down with both arms and raised Scott’s body to the surface. He couldn’t help thinking – hoping – that once his friend’s skin felt the warmth of the sun’s rays and his tongue the sweet taste of fresh ocean air, that his body would recognize their familiarity and react spontaneously with a thankful shudder and breath. But no, Scott just lay there, floating, his eyes half-open but unmoving, his body limp.
“Hang in there, Scotty, the boat’s almost here,” he whispered in his ear. Like a cop on some TV thriller, Bob used his fingers to press closed his friend’s eyelids and wiped beads of water from his face.
The speeding skiff was now close enough that Bob recognized the two Turks Island boys at the helm and bow, and more importantly, sitting between them, one of the medics from the Air Force base. “How the hell did . . .” The words spilled from his mouth, betraying his thoughts, but then he remembered the large group of airmen killing time at the base of the pier as they had walked out to begin their dive.
And then the boat was upon him. The TI kids were older than he first thought, and bigger. As the boat slowed and drifted to a stop, the one in the bow jumped in beside him while the medic reached over the gunwale and grabbed Scott under one arm. Bob and his new partner each wrapped their arms around one of Scott’s legs and together lifted him upward. Unexpectedly, when his belly flopped down on the edge of the gunwale, a torrent of seawater exploded from his mouth, cascading into the bottom of the boat. This followed immediately by a low-pitched and miserable groan.
“Atta boy, Scott. That’s exactly what we want to see.” The medic snatched his patient by the waistband of his shorts and pulled him fully into the boat. “I may need you,” he said to the TI kid in the water and thrust his hand down to help him aboard.
“I’ll swim in,” Bob waved them off. And then urgently, as if the medic would require the information. “He only took in water maybe three minutes ago. Four at the most. When I was bringing him up.”
The medic raised his thumb in acknowledgement and nodded to the boy with his hand on the outboard tiller. “Let’s go. Fast as you can.”
The boat accelerated in a tight arc, then Bob watched it streak across the water toward shore. He gently moved his legs, fins cycling left then right, his shoulders just above the surface, reluctant to make his own way to dry land before he gained some assurance that his friend would be okay. While the skiff approached the beach, an ambulance from the hospital pitched up a rooster tail of dust as it left the paved roadway and maneuvered out to where the boat would make its landing. Only then did Bob shift his facemask back in place, insert the snorkel between his lips, and begin a slow, steady swim back to the pier.
It would be almost a month before Scott could join him for another afternoon of diving for dinner. ♆