After our sad goodbyes from the night before, we woke up to another big day. Exmouth holds some of the best scuba spots in the world. Most notable is Navy Pier, which is listed as one of the top 10 dive sites in the world. Navy Pier is a massive concrete and iron pier that shoots into the ocean and rises high above it. Underneath it lives a plethora of aquatic life; everything from sharks to tiny vibrantly colored nudibranch along with giant schools of fish that swarm in the pier’s shadows. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any of these things.
We booked the tour with an amazing dive company, but one thing they couldn’t control was the ocean conditions or the weather. We happened to arrive during one of the worst weeks of the year; it rained all week. This is a place that doesn’t see rain for years. The bad weather was a bit of a shock. We didn’t let the downpour stop us, and our tour headed out as planned around 4pm to catch the best tide conditions of the day. Our tour was plagued with problems before we even hit the water. After our briefing, we pulled away from the dive shop to head to the pier. We were given a paper that had an alphabetical list of everyone on the tour, which we were supposed to legibly sign next to our names. I emphasize LEGIBLY.
The first bump in the road of many problems came when a German father, with his son (the father was in his fifties, the son in his twenties), signed his name in an unreadable chicken scratch. There is extremely tight security at Navy Pier, because it is on a fully-functioning, American-owned and operated Navy base. We all needed to have our passports with us, and to have our signature on the page legible, or else we would be denied access. This meant the man needed to re-sign his name, and therefore we needed to turn around the bus and go back to the dive store for the dive assistants to re-print the page. Another manifest was printed and was given to the group to be signed again.
Ok, Round 2. This should have been easy; we had all done it once.
“Oh, what is that, German father? You wrote your name horribly AGAIN?? Turn the bus around!”
This is exactly what happened.
Round 3. All eyes were on the father as he carefully signed his name nice and neatly. As he passed the list on, we all released a sigh of relief. Then Cassie got the manifest, and went to sign next to her name. As she looked down the list of names she could see that the man had in fact signed his name quite legibly… in the wrong space! He signed next to her name instead. As Cassie explained the problem to the dive assistant, the son translated in German to his father. As the rest of the bus stared at him, all he could do was throw his head back, with both hands gripping his hair, and scream, “Noooooo!” As frustrated as we all were, we couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy, and the bus made one last turn around.
After driving in circles for almost half an hour, we had made it to the Navy base. After a short stop at the security gate, our list of names and signatures was approved and we made our way down to the pier. Upon arrival we were given flashlights. “You probably won’t even have to use these,” the dive assistant explained, “Maybe just a little at the end of your dive. This ended up being the biggest understatement of the year! Those flashlights saved our lives.
The jump into the water is hardcore by itself. It’s a 10 foot jump off a platform on the underbelly of the pier and that’s with all your weighty gear on. Before making the plunge we noticed the water looked very angry. As we stood there, a gust of wind blew the assistant’s clipboard with the manifest, other dive information and the company’s cell phone into the choppy sea.
We should have seen all of this as a sign, but we assured ourselves that just because it’s rough on the water’s surface, won’t mean that conditions will be bad 40 feet below, but we were wrong. It was. It was much worse, in fact. As we floated in the churning waves, below the quickly darkening skies, we gave each other the ok sign to descend. We slowly glided down, using a lengthy rope to guide us to the landing zone at the bottom, and we realized how quickly darkness was enveloping our small group. Instantly everyone had his or her lights on and we were only halfway down.
It was chaos at the bottom. There was a powerful current running its course right through our group, it was pitch black, except for the beams of thrashing flashlights, and as the people on the bottom were trying to get their bearings, other divers were unintentionally descending right on top of them. No one could tell who the group leader was, and panic kicked in. Our breaths were growing quicker as we sucked through our air supply, trying not to give in to a full-blown panic attack. Soon, we had found our guide in the murky water and he was working hard to keep our group together. He got everyone in a tight circle, and once he checked that we were all ok, he signaled to our group to slowly follow him.
A few people in our group decided to take a different route than that of our guide, and those who were following them in line (including us) were unknowingly led astray, and we were right back where we started. Lost and panicking. We decided rather than get ourselves more lost, to sit right where we were, alone in the dark, hoping our guide would come to find us. As we sat in this creepy alien environment, 40 feet below the surface, trying our best to avoid the tangle of sharp, barnacle-encrusted support beams below the pier, all we could think was, “This f-ing sucks!”. It didn’t take long for out guide to come back for us, and realizing that we were in over our heads, he led us carefully through the maze of beams and pipes in the darkness back to the starting point. Our guide once again signed to us, checking that we were ok. I wish there were a sign for “Get me the hell out of here!” Instead, we signed that we had had enough, and wanted to ascend. We slowly floated up back into the light, and lived to swim another day.
It was such a great feeling when we had made it back to dry land. As we undressed from our wetsuits, we soon found that our friend Nate was not so lucky. Somehow he had gotten lost and separated from the rest of the group. Down below, Nate had searched for his lost partner for one minute, then, as is standard when diving in a pair, ascended to the surface, where the two could reunite. By the time Nate surfaced, he had drifted out from below the pier into the open ocean where the waves are bigger, the currents stronger, and groups of Tiger Sharks were known to hunt. Luckily, Nate is an all-American, gold medalist, Olympian swimmer, who is half-man, half-dolphin and managed to swim back to safety quickly. We’ve seen him swim, he really is half-dolphin.
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