Author and snorkeller Jock Serong recounts a rocky, breathless moment at sea. The moral of the story? Never underestimate the depths, your lungs, or a mischievous disappearing lobster.

There is a real-time component to this story. See if you can hold your breath and kick your legs for as long as it takes to read to the end. Because this is how long it took me to almost drown myself.

A perfect summer day, a flat sea. A few of us in a tinnie, west of town where nobody goes. We anchored in shallow water – really only six or eight feet – over a limestone reef studded with urchins, anemones and shellfish. The kelp hung listless in the tired ocean. As always seems to happen in such conditions, there was an unspoken race to gear up and get out of the boat, meaning there was never a discussion about which way we’d swim. Mistake Number One.

I was clad in mask and snorkel, wetsuit and fins. Because I was hoping for a lobster, I was also carrying a bag, wearing weights and bright yellow leather gardening gloves. I would have been in those gloves, absurdly, when they found my body. But it would have taken them a while.

The clarity was sublime, the sun coming down in searchlight rays that made bright spots on the reef. I combed the bottom, lifting fronds of crayweed, peering under things. A little motorcade of wrasse and sweep followed me along, hoping I’d prise out something worth eating. Every time I looked around they all looked the other way, pretending they were doing something else.

I found a rockpile that was skirted with heavy bull kelp and I hauled the kelp aside. To my surprise, there wasn’t just a hollow under the rocks but a substantial cave. Up for another breath, then down, through the kelp and into the cave. Here, I registered several things at once. Firstly, there was a round hole in the roof of the cave that admitted the light. The surface of the ocean was visible there, only inches above the hole. The light that it gave was illuminating the far end of the cave, in which huddled a large lobster, lit up orange and yellow. The distance from me to the lobster, and the shape of the space around me, are best compared to the inside of a car: imagine you opened the boot of an ordinary SUV and you could see the lobster somewhere around the dashboard. I know – what’s it doing in a car? But imagine now, climbing through that space to reach it.

Another thing registered as I eased my whole body into the cave: the heavy curtain of kelp that I’d come through had now closed behind me. No matter – I knew where it was. I kicked forward and hung still until I saw the cray relax its defensive crouch, then grabbed it by its back. It flipped hard, trying to get away, and I did some more kicking to give myself purchase in the struggle. In an instant, the cave clouded up, and all features disappeared. I rotated once, and saw that there was nothing to see.

But there was the chimney above me, glorious summer light. I would grab a breath and assess the problem. I pushed upwards, the space being small enough that I could press off the bottom. But just as my mouth approached the surface, the edges of the hole stopped my shoulders. There was a moment of incomprehension: I tried the manoeuvre again, angling my head to poke the snorkel at it. But the result was the same.

I felt the familiar pinching sensation through my chest. I needed air now.

There’s a languid pace about underwater movement, partially a product of the physics, and partially a way of conserving air. I knew this subconsciously, but now I began to move with more urgency. I ducked back down into the soupy interior and made a circle, pushing out with my hands, feeling the contours of the rock. There were no walls, in the sense that this was a random pile of rocks, not a uniform cavity. Spaces appeared and disappeared under my fingers: sharp things, squishy things, voids. But none of them were the opening I’d entered through.

My lungs were beginning to convulse. Still, I could see nothing. I tried the chimney again, as though the result would change. It did not, and now I’d lost the time it took to do that. Panic, in theory, is a conscious choice. We’re told as children that if we find ourselves caught in a rip, or lost in a shopping centre, that we mustn’t panic. But in the grip of the circumstances that induce panic, it doesn’t feel like a choice at all. It feels like a bodily function, and it will not be told. Synapses firing at muscles, muscles responding with blind affray. The chain reaction burns air like a hungry furnace.

There is no telling how time works in such conditions. I had maybe 20 seconds left – though counting them out now, that guess seems overgenerous. I started ramming myself into the rocks, hitting my head over and over, tearing the wetsuit, ripping the gloves. The bag was gone, the cray now an irrelevance. A fin came off, making my movements lopsided. A terrible sucking sensation had come over me, as if I could squeeze oxygen out of the tissues of my own body. My arms were foreign objects.

Some blind thrust found an opening and I pulled at the margins of it, dislodging a small rock. Light. Light that defined itself as the haze cleared. I could see out, and this time I could get the rest of me to follow into open water, up and through the surface. It had been so long that there was a brief instant of not knowing whether to breathe in or out.

The other fin had floated out through the cursed chimney. I collected it, looked down at my prison. I had not come out the way I went in: by some miracle I had found another exit entirely. I swam slowly back to the boat, climbed in and flopped in the bilge water, staring at the sky. My head hurt: there were little trickles of blood running into my eyes with the seawater. Before long I had started weeping.

After a while I looked over the side, squinting through the tears and water and blood. The others were still swimming in contented circles, only metres away.

I’ve had 10 years so far out of those remaining 20 seconds. Such is the exponential nature of chance.

 

By Jock Serong

Jock Serong is the author of seven novels, most recently Cherrywood, and the founding editor of Great Ocean Quarterly. He also writes for screen and in the surfing media.

 

Published in ed#738