Thinking about the noise and chaos that night, the awful fear her passengers and crew must have experienced and the eventual loss of most of their lives, I was nervous. The Rhone lies in two pieces. Her bow section remains the deeper dive but since it was mine and Mike from MickBeth’s first dive on her (the Cap having dived it twice already with his trusty dive buddy, Lu) we decided to dive the shallower stern end first. At this point, I have a confession to make. I’ve developed a small addiction to… here goes… Kalms. Alicia brought a couple of packs with her. ‘Try these,’ she said to me after living with us for a week. A week being all it took to know that living on a boat with your family has its four thousand interesting moments. She'd held up a couple of white pills and raised her eyebrows for effect. I swallowed them before I could say the word placebo. Not bad, I thought. Not bad at all. 

So the three of us dropped straight down onto the Rhone’s propellor. I stopped when I saw it. Two enormous blades sit vertically; one partially lodged into the sea bed while the other points towards the surface. Now here’s the bit that gets me. I used to be a calm and fearless diver. There was a time when dropping into darker and darker blue didn’t give me the slightest heebie. So what’s changed? I wondered furiously at myself. Meanwhile, Jack and Mike had descended completely and looked as if they were standing by two huge, underwater doors. I was still mid-water, my heart doing its own thing irrespective of what I told it to. Ahh, I thought suddenly.. the Kalms. In my heart-knocking, hard-to-breathe anticipation of the dive, I’d taken two earlier. Before thinking that no matter what placebo effect they may have, it would double at 10m. Triple at 20. Hmmm. 

Jack turned towards me. 'Are you ok?' he asked with his hands. Actually, I’d love to get the hell out of here, I thought but jiggled my hand like I wasn’t sure. He swam up, grabbed my hand and together we went down to the propellor. He made us into a little three-man queue to go through the swim through; through the propellor, under a long ledge and out again. From here, the Rhone’s stern lies like a metal rib cage. Heart still beating like a drum kit's floor tom, I swam and tried to concentrate on corals instead, sponges, colours everywhere. It struck me that everything down here is filtering something, Christmas Tree Worms with their spiral projections, peacock worms waving brown feathers, sponges purple and slimy to stop any one taking a hopeful bite, I touched everything and anything to steady myself. And then a flash and Jack swam off, Mike not far behind. I followed, rounded a corner and found Jack wrestling the biggest crayfish I’d ever seen. He was holding it in two hands and it was still bucking out of them. He recoiled, the crayfish scratched its spiny way out and shot off backwards into a piece of metal wreckage. Another lost supper, I shrugged and went to turn away until I saw Mike’s _expression_. Of course. Not everyone’s seen Jack do this on a regular basis. He hadn’t finished either. He poked around the crayfish’s refuge for a few minutes, finally coming out empty-handed except for a single antenna. He shook his head and Mike shook his back and they buddied up together. We swam to the Rhone’s plaque then which reminds divers this is a no fish/no take-zone. See? I pointed to its words and back to Jack. He shrugged. Even with his regulator in, Mike's smile was unbroken. Boys.

A dive boat picked up the buoy next to Quest as we were filling our bottles for the second dive. ‘Did you see the crayfish down there?’ Jack called over to a blond South African diver. ‘Yeah,’ the South African shouted back, ‘we call him Cray-zilla.’ 'Good thing you didn’t take Cray-zilla,’ I muttered under my breath. Happily for the second dive, my head was still cotton wool but my heart beat out more cymbals and less snares. Except when we were standing by the propellor again, I unclipped my camera from my jacket, went to turn it on and discovered the charging compartment was waving peacefully in the current. Uh-oh. I peered into the camera. A new waterline ran right through the middle of the lens. I showed Jack. His eyes bulged behind his mask. 'Was it me?' he asked with a pointing finger. ‘No, me,’ I waved back. No more camera. Groan on the Rhone. 

Love from Quest and her crew xx