If I had my way, the little outboard-motor chase boat towed behind the Carpe Vita, as it meandered among the Maldivian atolls, should be rechristened Kristi’s Folly, at least for the duration of our cruise. It certainly deserves a new name in honor of the stunt I pulled on Sunday, and in my mind will forever thus be known.
When I took up scuba diving years ago I made a promise to God that I would honor His Sabbath by not diving on His day. I’d be lying if I said this commitment wasn’t sometimes a test of my faith, though I’ve never wavered. According to some spiritual calculus, logical only to me, I saw my promise as binding God to a protection on the other six days of diving to which I might not otherwise be entitled. That’s why I found myself the only guest staying behind on our floating hotel, the 125-foot safari yacht Carpe Vita, this morning while all the others went out to look for and dive with whalesharks on the dhoni, our 65-foot dive boat and companion vessel to the Carpe Vita.
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| The dhoni |
A sudden squall sprang up while we were anchored in open water and began to pitch and roll the yacht so violently the captain had to move the Carpe Vita to the sheltered waters of a nearby harbor.
I worked on the computer in the salon for a while, posting my homework assignments to my graduate school class website and writing a long email to my husband. The morning passed quietly.
I was just starting to update my dive log when one of the crew came in and told me the group on the dhoni spotted a whale shark. A couple of the Carpe Vita crew would gladly run me out to the dhoni in the chase boat if I would like to see it.
“Sure”, I said and dashed to my cabin to throw on my swim suit, cover up, and grab my scuba mask. The rest of my gear – fins and snorkel – was on the dhoni. While diving was out on Sunday, I did allow snorkeling; the rationale being the risks involved and protections required are vastly different between snorkeling and scuba diving.
In less than three minutes we were in the chase boat, untied from the mother ship and racing through five foot seas in grey, angry open water. The harbor was so deceptively calm and peaceful; I wasn't prepared for the violence of the seas outside our sheltered oasis. I was scared, but too much of a coward to tell the driver-captain and first mate of the chase boat that I’d changed my mind and to turn around. The little boat bounced violently from wave crest to wave crest, banging down in the troughs so hard I thought I would certainly fly out of the boat and into the drink. Of course there were no seatbelts.
The driver turned to me and asked if I was okay.
“Yes,” I squeaked unconvincingly. And then, still in a voice an octave higher than normal, “Do you do this all the time?” Meaning, do you always drive this little boat this fast in roiling seas?
He looked at me and smiled. “Oh, not vedy often,” he called out in his sing-song Indian-accented English over the roar of the wind and the boat motor.
Great, I thought, the boat will flip over at the next wave and I will get hit on the head as I’m being thrown into the sea and drown near this atoll whose name I don’t even know. All I could manage in response was to ask how far we were from the dhoni. He pointed straight ahead and I could barely make out the dive boat on the horizon between wave crests. It was disconcertingly small. I hung on grimly, hunched rigidly against the stinging salt spray, and tried not to think about how frightened I was. The first mate just looked at me and grinned. He actually seemed to be enjoying this.
After a twenty minute teeth-rattling pounding we came up to the dhoni tossing on the waves. All the divers were back on board and the whaleshark was long gone. Figures, I thought, disgusted at the futility of this adventure.
The chase boat crew angled in behind the dhoni stern swim platform, the large step from which divers enter the water, so I could just hop from the chase boat onto the dhoni. A good plan, in theory and in calmer water. But in those rough seas it was a clash of the titans between the two boats as the chase boat driver tried to get close to the dhoni swim platform and nearly rammed it in the bargain. Churning seas pitched the two boats first together and then abruptly tore them apart. I was sure the chase boat, the dhoni or both would be wrecked. The two boats maneuvered around each other for long minutes in a violent dance of ocean spray and gunning engines, their captains trying to figure out how best to get me transferred from one boat to the other. It didn’t help that the dhoni’s wheelhouse was closer to the bow than the stern, making communication between the chase boat, the crew at the stern, and the captain a confusing chorus of shouted instructions in rapid-fire Dhivehi.
I had visions of getting caught during the transfer and crushed between the dhoni’s stern and the chase boat’s bow. The faces of my friends aboard the dhoni looked on in helpless amazement.
“Just let me jump in the water and they can throw me a rope!” I yelled to the chase boat captain amid the commotion. In a split second of absolute clarity I knew they would never be able to transfer me safely from one boat directly onto the other. Amid the excitement no one thought that a wiser course would be for the chase boat to come along the dhoni’s port, let me jump overboard and climb up the dhoni’s ladder the same way divers are routinely picked up. Or better yet, abandon the attempt altogether and return me to the Carpe Vita in the chase boat.
The sky was quickly darkening into a deeper grey. The wind plucked at the foaming crests and sent spray stinging into our faces. The weather was only getting worse.
I lost track of how many times the two boat crews tried the risky docking maneuver. Five? Six? This time the bow of the chase boat thudded up onto the swim platform, scattering the crew who came down the steps from the dive deck to help with the transfer, and then slid obediently back into the water. It reminded me of the orca shows at Sea World, where the huge animals lurch out of deep water onto a shallow shelf for a fish reward from their trainer, then slide gracefully back into the water. But there was no applauding crowd here. The situation had already crossed the line from remotely possible to dangerously insane. I was terrified.
After a last failed attempt to bring the little boat up behind the dhoni, the crew agreed to let me jump in the water. The dhoni crew could throw me a line from the stern and haul me aboard. I pulled my scuba mask over my head and down around my neck to free my hands, climbed awkwardly on hands and knees out onto the rolling bow deck and hollered to the crew to tell me when to jump. The boat pitched wickedly again as it backed up to put more water between it and the dhoni. They were as concerned as I about the boats clashing together with me in the roiling water so close to both of them.
Someone yelled “JUMP!” and I launched myself over the side into a cresting wave. I felt very small and pitiful tossing in the rebellious sea between the two boats, which appeared massive above me from this position. No amount of space between these boats seemed wide enough, and yet I needed to get closer to the dhoni.
I realized at once that being in the water rather than on the chase boat might not have been such a good idea. Wide-eyed and horrified, I watched the stern of the dhoni rise above me three feet out of the water and crash down; smacking the surface with enough force that it felt like someone trained a fire hose on my face.
My friend and self-appointed protector, Bob Whelan, and several of the crew leaned anxiously out over the edge of the dhoni swim platform toward me, powerless to help as again the dhoni’s stern vaulted up menacingly. I watched water stream off the platform in many waterfalls. Some detached part of my brain wondered idly why none of my rescuers were swept off as the platform hurled down and was completely submerged for a few seconds. Abruptly the sea exploded and assaulted me for the second time. I disappeared beneath the surf, gulped a generous helping of sea water and saw nothing until I fought my way back to the surface.
A combination of waves and current widened the distance between me and the dhoni. The chase boat was behind me, but where exactly I couldn’t tell. I only hoped it was nowhere near me; I didn’t need to be caught between these two out of control leviathans, a terrifying rock-and-a-hard-place. For a moment I had the ridiculous thought I might lose my contact lenses.
Another wave, another dunking and I gulped more sea water. I was frightened but, oddly, not panicked. It was the kind of fear that galvanizes one into action. Someone on the dhoni threw me a rope, but it was a couple of yards out of reach. I swam hard until I caught it and hung on. Instead of feeling tension, the rope was spaghetti, coiling and limp in my hands. Too much slack, start reeling me in!, I wanted to shout but couldn’t get the words out. The stern platform again launched violently upward until this time I could almost see the propellers. I imagined myself being sucked underneath it with the full weight of the boat crashing down on my head as it dropped into the next trough.
At last I felt the rope go suddenly taut in my hands. The crew worked urgently to haul me in before the next wave threw the platform back in the air.
The stern shuddered down into a trough and the inevitable flood hit me squarely in the face. Before I was swept under again Bob stretched out over the edge of the platform, grabbed my arm with one hand and heaved on the rope with the other until I came up and out of the water, washing onto the swim step, coughing and sputtering sea water.
Many hands hoisted me to my feet and I staggered up the steps to the dive deck and the stunned faces of my friends. Larry, one of the helpless witnesses to my lunacy, offered me his towel and water bottle as I shook my head to clear it, coughing up more salt water, amazed how I managed to come through this idiocy unscathed. What had I been thinking? I couldn’t believe what I had just done.
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| On board the dhoni and getting the knots out of my hair. |
The crew was obviously relieved. I must have given them a fright with that little stunt. My friends apologized I went though such a harrowing experience only to miss out on seeing the whaleshark. But I was not disappointed. I was euphoric just to be here.
Later that evening, back on board the Carpe Vita, conversations at dinner on the upper deck, and afterwards in the salon, ebbed and flowed pleasantly around the day’s events. The excitement of my escapade was already only a footnote in our minds, elbowed out of the spotlight by the thrill of another whaleshark sighting in the afternoon. My misadventure ended without injury and that somehow diminished its peril. It was easy to even joke about it. If someone mentioned the incident I quipped wryly, “What are you talking about? I was on the Carpe Vita the whole time. The woman you hauled out of the drink was just my stunt double.”
As evening gently faded into a peaceful night, tired, happy and sated, one by one we drifted off to our beds. Soon the only sounds on the Carpe Vita were sundry motors humming their monotonous white noise symphony, the slap slap of small waves lapping against the hull, an occasional indistinct creak, and the soft sing-song conversations in Dhivehi of the crew on watch.
The dhoni was anchored nearby, its crew of four snoring undisturbed in the dive boat’s tiny bunks below the wheelhouse. Twenty-three scuba cylinders sat filled and waiting for tomorrow’s first dive at dawn. The noisy air compressors rested, covered and silent.
And in the moonlit quiet of the protecting harbor Kristi’s Folly rocked contently on her tether behind the Carpe Vita.
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| Carpe Vita and Kristi's Folly |
