Bentley, it seemed, really was only there for the ride, as he obviously wasn’t planning on getting wet. He hadn’t brought any swimmers with him.
‘Where are we diving?’ Henri asked. ‘I don’t want to go too deep.’
‘The wall first, then Kittiwake after,’ Martin said. ‘It will be good to do Kittiwake without the usual mass of tourists getting in the way. No one else dives on Christmas Day.’
‘What is Kittiwake?’ I asked him.
‘The USS Kittiwake. It’s a retired naval ship that was deliberately sunk here in 2011 to provide an artificial reef and a dive site.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ I said. I’d never dived on a wreck before. ‘How deep is it?’
‘It sits on the seafloor at about sixty feet. But we’re going to do a wall-dive first. That will be a deeper but a shorter dive.’
Like every diver the world over, I’d heard of the Cayman Wall, that point where the shallow shelf on which the island sits ends and the surrounding deepness begins. It is characterized by an abrupt and almost vertical falling away of the seafloor down into the Cayman Trench, the deepest part of the Caribbean at a depth of over twenty-five thousand feet. But, of course, we would only be exploring the very top of the ‘wall’.
‘I’ll skip the first dive,’ Henri said. ‘It’s too deep for me.’
I watched as Martin and Truman began to pull on a wetsuit each.
‘Do we actually need a wetsuit?’ I asked. ‘I’ve done all my diving in the Red Sea without one.’
‘It may be hot up here in the sunshine,’ Truman said, ‘but it’s still wintertime. The water will be cool a hundred feet down.’
I pulled the wetsuit out of my mesh bag and started to put it on.
‘I must have a photo,’ Henri said, laughing, as I grappled with the black neoprene outfit that was none too big for me. She took my iPhone and snapped away on it as I struggled to pull up the long zip at the back.
‘Very funny,’ I said to her, pulling a face.
I felt like the Michelin Man.
‘It’s Theresa’s,’ Martin said. ‘It’s the largest spare one I could find.’
Even though Theresa was only an inch or so shorter than I, she was considerably less substantial around the waist. But I managed to do it up in the end with some extra help from the giggling Henri.
Next out of the bag came a BC, a buoyancy compensator, a short jacket that has an air bladder between the inner and outer layers, which, when connected to a tank, could be filled with air to make a diver neutrally buoyant, so that he neither floated up nor sank down but remained level in the water as if weightless.
I attached the BC to one of the yellow tanks and connected the regulator to the valve, checking that the pressure in the tank was well above 2,500 pounds per square inch. The pressure gauge, together with a depth indicator, was housed in a console about eight inches long that was attached by a length of high-pressure hose to the tank’s valve.
I next tested the two mouthpieces, breathing through both the primary and the emergency alternate.
All seemed fine.
It had been several years since I had last been diving and I was pleased that at least I hadn’t forgotten how to set up the equipment.
‘You’ll need a weight belt,’ Truman said to me. ‘The air trapped in the neoprene will make you float otherwise.’
‘You’d just bob round on the surface like a cork,’ said Martin, laughing. ‘Ten to twelve pounds should be enough.’
I attached several rectangular lead blocks to a two-inch-wide belt and placed it around my waist. Next I tried on the flippers and the mask.
I was ready.
The note of the engine dropped away as we arrived at the first location and the boat was tied to one of the coloured buoys that mark every dive site in Cayman waters.
‘Have fun,’ Henri said as Carson carried my heavy gear over to the boarding ladder. I had decided that going down the ladder was a preferable means of entry for my still-delicate abdomen to jumping off the side.
I sat on the bottom step, put on the BC, flippers and mask, and slipped gently into the clear blue Caribbean water. Martin and I were acting as dive buddies, hence we would constantly check one another for safety, but, after so long a break from the water, I was pleased that Truman, the dive master, was also coming with us.
As we descended the buoy’s anchor line I equalized the pressure in my ears by frequently holding my nose and blowing air into my sinuses. We arrived at the bottom almost at the point where the sandy floor disappeared over the top of the wall into the abyss.
‘Remember to continually check your depth,’ Truman had told us in the pre-dive briefing. ‘It is far too easy to go over the edge and down too deep. One hundred feet maximum. Bottom time no more than fifteen minutes.’
I reached around for the hose to the console and looked at the depth reading on the indicator. Seventy feet. Theoretically, therefore, I could go some thirty feet down the wall face, but I was happy staying up near the top where there was plenty of bright coral.
Truman had also told us to be aware that we were diving in a designated marine park and that we should not touch or remove anything. But looking was all I was interested in doing anyway.
What a delight it was to be down here exploring a world so different from the one above the surface that it could have easily been on another planet, yet it was, in fact, just a few short yards from life as we knew it.
Back in the 1940s, Jacques Cousteau had perfected the open-circuit scuba equipment we were now using, solving the problem of a diver having to inhale air at a low pressure by attaching a gas regulator to a highly pressurized tank. But he probably had no idea at the time that he would also be creating a whole new leisure industry.
The ability to breathe underwater must have been a dream of human beings since they first walked on dry land, and here we were doing it.
I checked the pressure in my tank. It was fine, a little below 2,000 psi.
I looked around for Martin.
He was below me, his white tank clearly visible against the darkness beneath. He and Truman were some way down the wall but I was happy remaining close to the lip. I was enchanted by the multi-coloured anemones swaying in the gentle current, and by the shoals of black-and-yellow-striped sergeant major fish, or the beautiful cobalt blue angelfish as they nibbled away at some invisible food on the surface of the coral.
Truman swam up to join me and placed his thumb and index finger together, making a circle in the universal dive signal for OK. He was asking if I was all right. I answered in the affirmative by repeating the signal. He pointed at his watch and then held up his open right hand. I repeated the OK, indicating that I’d understood. Five more minutes.
I again checked the pressure in my tank. It had now dropped to 1,700. To be on the safe side, it needed to still be above 800 when I surfaced.
No problem.
After the five minutes, the three of us ascended slowly towards the surface, stopping for prearranged decompression safety stops at forty and twenty feet. The last thing any of us wanted was to get the ‘bends’, the agonizing, hugely dangerous and potentially lethal condition that can occur when a sudden reduction in pressure causes bubbles of gas to form within the body in the same way that they do in a bottle of fizzy drink when the top is rapidly unscrewed.
‘That was fabulous,’ I said to Henri as I sat on the bottom step of the ladder to take off the heavy equipment. ‘I’d forgotten how much fun diving could be.’