Cosmic Rogue Wave

The beeping of the dive computer tells you it’s time to begin your ascent. You check your pressure and see almost 850 psi left in the tank. You’ve only been 50 minutes and could easily stay down a bit longer, but you did your deep dives earlier in the week, and don’t need to push it. Maybe just one more relatively shallow dive this afternoon before resting surface-side for a few days and that will culminate a truly spectacular week of diving off the coast of Roatán. Kicking up a bit, you’re thinking of the fresh water, the sandwich, and the fresh bottle of Nitrox waiting for you in the boat.

Alternating between looking up at the outline of the boat’s hull, strangely immobile in the glass-like water, and gazing down at the receding reef, you relax as your BC floats you gently towards the surface, the air bubbles, like hares to your tortoise-like progress, rising ahead of you. Your mind is on the coral, creatures, eels, fish, and sharks that you’ve seen today and the things you want to see on your next and final dive, when you break the surface.

You pull your fancy new regulator from your mouth and exhale, spitting sea-water from your lips, but when you go to inhale nothing happens. It seems that while you were diving all the air on the planet vanished. What a drag! Maybe some sort of cosmic solar wind/rogue wave came by and just blew it all away. Who knows?

Although you still have over 800 psi of EAN32 in that bottle on your back, after slapping your Cressi Sub back into your pie-hole you begin hoovering like a novice, so that stuff may not last too long.

You want to grab that other bottle? It’s right over there in the boat. But then what? I hope you realize the outboard motor isn’t going to start.