Hi Everybody, 

The dive site at the marine park in Moliniere Point has a drop-off which, while not quite as dramatic as the one in Finding Nemo with the cool talking eagle ray, still has enough depth to feel the pressure squeeze your body and the bulky unfamiliar-feeling dive equipment protecting your body. We’ve done this drop-off dive twice in two days while the girls were finishing off at dance camp. There’s nothing of the addict in us then.. The first day we dived it, we went looking for a wreck we’ve heard lies off the reef called The Buccaneer. The Buccaneer! How’s that for treasure, me hearties? Well, treasure if you want to poke around a scuttled trawler from 1977. ‘Right,’ said the IDC PADI staff instructor/Quest's captain/smarty pants/husband who never remembers to pick up his knickers off the floor, after we’d tied Evil Edna to a marine park mooring buoy and put all our gear on, ‘we’re going to swim mid-water for a minute and if we don’t find anything, then we’ll turn back.’ ‘Ok,’ I replied, busy counting the number of releases on my BCD (fancy acronym for dive jacket). 

So we were off. Kick our way off the reef, check, float down the wall, check and start swimming. In front of us lay a grassy field of sand covered in dark sand eels who were all obviously copying the meerkat after seeing them on David Attenborough and flinging themselves back into their holes when we came too close. Beyond was darkness. Depth and the ocean. Hold on, I thought as we kicked into the gloom, where’s smarty pants? Well, I’d like to pause here for a sec and ask: you know that iconic image of your life when you come to lie on your death bed that you’ll probably be infused with because it’s happened in front of you like seven billion times? Well, mine will be the back of Jack moving away in the distance. In every port we’ve docked at so far, in every crappy town we’ve walked around looking for somewhere to buy milk or a French stick, for every phone call he’s needed to make, he’s gone on in front while the rest of us have lagged behind like bedraggled, salty groupies holding the dog and usually significant amounts of the shopping. Really he should have, ‘Come on!’ written on the back of his t-shirt. It would at least save him the annoying trouble of turning around. 

In this same vein, during our dive down into the deep, I could see his white fins in the distance getting further and further away. Is he on the phone? I asked myself, starting to feel puddled. And where’s the dog? Then it hit me; the same sensation I’d had when we crossed the Atlantic and according to my own paltry research, the only person I know to feel this going across the Atlantic; claustrophobia. My throat tightened like a blocked drain and I began making a seriously good impression of Darth Vader on steroids through my breathing regulator and wondering if my gear was going to fail on me. What’s the ‘I want to get out of here' sign? I thought in panic and looked up, well that’s the direction, here goes but just before I shot back up to the light, there was a face in mine. 'Are you ok?' he asked with his hands making the ok. Suddenly I remembered the, ‘No, this sucks’ sign and flattened my palm and waggled it from side to side. He watched me do it and pointed back to the reef. Ok, good idea, something to focus your fears on. I took his hand, this time you’re not going anywhere, Buster, squeezed it and realised with a sudden whoosh that I haven’t held his hand for a long time. He squeezed it back. We got back to the base of the wall which I clocked with a small cringe wasn’t far away at all but still, instantly I felt better and the wind tunnel breath in my ears started to calm. Nice and slow, we came back up ten metres into the bright colours and activity on the coral reef and it was, well, it was beautiful. Just beautiful. Fish and eels and crayfish and coral and sponges and everything else too. Man, Nemo must have been happy when he finally made it home. 

‘What happened?’ Jack asked upon our re-surface by Evil Edna an hour later. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, taking my regulator out of my mouth and I held onto the side of Edna, ‘I kind of panicked. You shot off and I got a little scared. You looked really far away.’ I tried not to sound accusatory or like a scared girl because that wouldn’t be very cool I thought and of course, I sounded like both these things. ‘Well, there was a bit of a current,’ Jack said, slipping out of his jacket and propping it next to Edna. ‘So I thought we’d be better doing our mid-water swim faster rather getting caught up in the drift.’ Oh yeah, there was kind of a current, I realised with a flash and nodded as professionally as I could. ‘You do remember how we were going to swim for a minute?’ Jack asked, pointing me a look. ‘Oh course,’ I said, thinking, shit, the organised mid-water swim. He stared at me some more before finally shaking his head. ‘Shall we try again tomorrow?’ I slipped off my jacket too. ‘Good idea.’ 

Love from F/F Quest and her crew xx