June 13th, 2010: Sailing to Flores Island through Komodo National Park, Day Three

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June 13th, 2010: Sailing to Flores Island through Komodo National Park
Day Three

On the third day, the real diving began, and the first two were amazing. We were all rather relaxed from the dives and simply lounging about waiting for the current to change so we could do a final, third dive. This dive would end up being more of an adventure than anyone had counted on.

My ears were being little buggers from a sinus infection (which makes diving not so pleasant because it’s harder to equalize), so I decided to sit out and take pictures from the boat instead. A sunset was on the make and looking to be a good one.

The sun was hanging low—which was making everyone rush to get in the water. If divers come up after dark, the boat can’t see them. Something we had not thought about was the fact that we didn’t have our dingy—which is the small boat that usually fishes us up out of the water after dives. It had left in the afternoon around two for some supplies: water, beer, cigarettes, etc. The dingy was due back around ten that night. And on this dingy were two of the four crewmen, including the captain.

Everyone finally went down, and I climbed on top of the roof deck to finish an audiobook that had 56 minutes left in it. The dive instructor had said they would all do a short dive of 40 minutes because of the sunset. The sun was setting fast, too. Forty minutes passed since the final team went down, but I hadn’t seen anyone surface yet. As I was looking for divers or divers’ bubbles, I noticed this flashlight up on one of the deserted islands that was a good ways away, too far to make out much except for a slit of beach at one side. The light was coming from the middle of the island’s mountain and zig zagging across. Odd, I thought, and return to looking at the sea where our divers should be popping up.

Finally, we saw the orange safety balloon on top of the water and could see it was the advanced team that surfaced. All the divers in this group (four divers and one instructor) had at least 100 dives each. When they come in, though, no one was smiling like they usually did. “How was it?” I asked. They all looked down, busy taking off their gear. “The current was really strong,” someone said. “We came up early because someone got a little panicked,” another diver told me. This dive had been briefed as low currents, and it turned out to be otherwise. To be fair, this is how it goes in Komodo. The currents are not only surface currents, but there are down currents at the sites—and things will change quickly.

“No one else is back yet?” Malin, the instructor of this group (and a great one at that) asked me.

“No one else is back yet,” I said, but at this point there is not much concern. This group had gone in first. But then one of them said, “This is the advanced group…. I wonder how the others are doing.” We all kinda chuckled.

I went back to looking for the other divers along with the crew as the advanced group was taking off their gear. The light on the mountain was still there, flashing in repetitive patterns. I flash a pattern and the light mimicked it back to me.

It was now dark and everyone was looking out tensely at the sea wondering where were the other divers.

“I think that is someone trying to signal us on that island,” I said.

“We’ll check it out after we find our divers.”

This is a perfectly reasonable statement because the current toward the island is the exact opposite direction the advanced group experienced. For that to be our divers, the divers would have had to swim all the way around the island, passing the other group. And as Malin reiterated, “I never saw either of the two groups.” Logically, that light could not be our divers.

It was now about an hour and a half after they had left. All black. No moon. An occasional lightning bolt. We could barely see anything, and with the clouds that moved in, we didn’t have starlight either.

We had one good flashlight that we kept scanning across the waters. All I could think about is a group of divers at the surface in this dark. They would have been waiting now for an hour. The other two dives were a bit cold, about 27 degrees. That’s not bad, but with wet suits on and no sun, it could be bad. We keep shouting hello on the count of three. Nothing in response. We thought we heard a whistle a while ago, but it didn’t last long, and after we motored near the whistle, there was nothing.

We decided to turn our attention to this island with the signals. There are now two: one faint and one strong. They were both coming from the beach. This may not be our group of divers, but it might be someone else in need. The issue is that I saw the light begin on top of the island rather soon after the divers went down, about thirty-five to forty minutes after the dive began. That would mean the divers had dived for a short time, gone ashore—against the current that the other group experienced—and up the mountain in about 50 minutes. This would be nearly impossible.

We were focusing on the wrong group? Maybe just some dude on an island who wanted a free lift? Just one or two of our divers? Just one team? Nothing at all?

We were trying to move our large boat to the island, but it was too large to get close, too far for anyone to swim who was on that island. “Go closer, go faster,” we all kept saying, but the guy driving the boat—who wasn’t the captain—was looking straight ahead. “I can’t. The current is too strong.”

I felt like it was time that we signal for help from other boats, a thought that felt scary, a full-on admission that things were very bad. Granted, we couldn’t see any other boat lights on the water, but I figured someone must be near with a smaller boat, a better flashlight, anything.
“How would we call for help?” Malin asked.
“CB radio I guess.”
“We don’t have one.”

I went down below to cry a minute and them came back up, telling myself to not cry and to not to panic. Malin suggested a drink, and so I brought out the bottle of rum and we shared it at the bow of the ship. “Tell me about your dive,” I asked one of the divers, Alex. I just wanted a story, but I was also trying to piece together what might have happened to the other divers. Alex smoked another cigarette, I had more rum, and we all decided that we just have to wait for the dingy to return so we can have it go and check out the light on the island.

We have decided to stay still in the water, occasionally flickering our light to the light on the island. It was now two and a half hours since they left for a forty minute dive. I was ping-ponging between imagining the worst and imagining the best. The worst: me telling Adam’s parents that we lost him on our honeymoon in a diving accident. The best: the group on the beach, seeing the boat, and knowing they just have to wait it out for morning. Maybe a round of kum-ba-ya. And of course it was not just Adam that I was worried about, but all of the divers. Two of them had just finished their open water course, so this would be about their ninth dive. And they were all out there somewhere waiting for us.

ADAM'S ACCOUNT OF IT ALL:

We were all rushing a little more than we should have, since we were anxious to get in the water for our third dive of the day before the sun set. Mantas had been spotted on top of the water, and we were hoping to see them. Charlotte was having trouble with her ears, so she decided to stay back on the boat. The first, more advanced group got in the water a good five minutes before the second two groups. There was a fork in the current. It split at the North of a small island, and we had been told that the stronger of the branches in that split would take us along the Eastern side. But by the time we got in the water, there was a shift, and now the stronger current was the one running along the West side. Shannon, one of our two dive guides, yelled to the guy driving the boat that current had shifted, and then we made a fast descent.

The current was faster than any I’d been in, pulling all of us along in something that felt more like a roller coaster than a dive. We’d go on our backs, kick against the current, then turn around and barrel forward in flight. Shannon pointed out some sea creature or other, but I went by too quickly to see it. A fun, adrenaline-heavy dive.

The sun was setting as we surfaced. The boat wasn’t there. The rest of the group didn’t make much of it, but I’m a worrier, a compulsive contingency planner, and I was already wondering how this one would work out. We floated in the water about fifty meters off shore. Shannon and the other guide Sara had one flashlight between them, so Shannon decided to go up to a high point on the island and signal to the ship, which he figured was on the other side of the island. The guy driving the boat must not have heard what Shannon had told him about the current, we figured, or else they were just picking up the other dive group.

Shannon and Sara told the rest of us to get in closer to shore. There wasn’t really a beach, just a place where we could maybe climb up on the rocks. But we had to move both further south and more inland to get there. It was hard going. When we tried to swim, the current wanted to pull us away from shore. We could move a little closer to shore and then scoot along the rocks on coral, but that was tricky, too, since corals can be sharp and poisonous. We ended up swimming as far as we could, but the current was pulling us pretty hard and we all were getting further and further from one another as each person tried to get closer to shore. This was our first moment of real panic.

Still, we all managed to get up close to shore, waste-deep in water and crouched or perched uncomfortably on rocks and coral below. Shannon had gotten up on shore with the light and was off. We sat awhile. A long time. I was quiet, thinking over scenarios. I kept thinking that the worst case was that we had to spend the night on the island. It was warm out and there were a fair number of other boats in the area. I kept reasoning with myself that we weren’t going to die. I’d reason it out and reason it out again to make sure I could convince myself. The rest of the group were yucking it up, singing an army song from Fred, a Canadian who’d been in Afghanistan. But I was pretty quiet, sticking close to Sara, seeing what she’d do. There was only a little light left in the sky. Shannon had been gone a long time.

We heard the engine of a boat, then saw it chugging along the island from north to south, but we had no way to signal it, since Shannon had the light, and was presumably on the other side of the island. We yelled for Shannon, kept yelling. “Shannon!” The boat kept going. We yelled some more. Yelled together. Whistled. No answer. The boat went by. And now it was nighttime. Now it was dark.

Shannon was still gone, and Sara was starting to worry. I kept wondering what would happen if he’d fallen, if he was bleeding to death on the rocks, our only flashlight gone. We stayed close, wondering aloud about where the boat could possibly be.

“You think Charlotte’s worried?” someone asked.

I said yes, definitely. Charlotte was very worried. I explained how left to imagine possibilities, she often goes to the most dramatic.

We joked about what this possibility could be. Pirates on the island, Komodo dragons that we were fending off with rocks.

Someone asked about how long Charlotte and I had been together, and I told them three years—that we’d just gotten married, that this was our honeymoon.

“Cool,” one person said, and they all agreed that this was a very cool honeymoon.

I agreed, too, even waste-deep in the water without her, perched on coral, and still going over the possibilities that might lead to our deaths.

After a long time, we saw a light. It was Shannon coming back. The boat, too, behind him. He was signaling the boat, and they were flashing something back, but we didn’t know what it was. The relief, though, was brief. The boat wasn’t coming any closer. Why wasn’t the boat coming any closer? It just stayed out there. I asked Shannon about it. Maybe trouble with the other dive group? That seemed the most likely possibility.

Shannon said he figured it might be awhile, so we should try to get out of the water, up on shore. It was very hard going over the coral and rocks. We ended up taking off our BCDs and flipping them around, dive tank down, then sort of pushing them over the coral in front of us.

Eventually, we all got up on the rocks to wait. There was a fair amount of joking, more songs. The conversation trailed from topic to topic. Charlotte’s worry came up again. And I remember their asking me about what I wrote, and my somehow winding up explaining to them why their couldn’t be a moral to a literary story (which was, incidentally, the only thing we talked about the whole time that actually took my mind off the fact of our being marooned). We talked a lot about drinking beers when we got back aboard. The boat stayed where it was; we couldn’t figure it out.

Soon we saw a smaller light coming toward us. It was the dingy, returning from its trip to get supplies. We had to take turns using the same pair of booties to cross the rocks and coral.

We’d been on that island for an hour and fifty minutes. When we came back, they were all out on the boat, cheering. I climbed up the ladder, and Charlotte was on me. We kissed and she cried pressed herself into me, and I was really struck by how worried she must have been. I mean, I’d only thought of it conceptually until then, as a fact, but then the reality was so much bigger. As we kissed, I felt like I was at the end of a Hollywood movie, or in the photo of the navy guy kissing that girl at the end of World War II. Then one of the crew said, “I’m sorry, excuse me,” because we were in the way of their helping everyone else and all the equipment back onto the boat.

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Photos

Team Awesome (minus Charlotte) Ready to Dive
Shannon (the instructor) is at the left and accessing the situation.

The Last Group to Go Down
It's already pretty grey and getting dark here. Just by the looks of it all, it doesn't look great to begin with.

Comments

[mama jean]

marooned
No one gave up-the divers on the island nor the crew in the boat but each kept putting the pieces together. I would have been sick with worry on either side. It was real life just seemed like a movie b/c this was not in the plans. So what did you learn?

[Lise]

glad you guys are ok
Hey, I'm just reading through random indonesia blogs, looking for some info for an upcoming trip and have just read your entry. Just felt compelled to write and say I'm glad you are ok Adam and Charlotte, I can only imagine how scary those few hours would have been. So yep, this is probably a bit random but keep up the blogs! Oh and indeed a super cool honeymoon :) Lise

[Shakuntaladevi]

I enjoy reading your post. I looked like you had a great fun experience. Try to come to Java and check this place called Karimunjawa (you can googled it, you will find thousand information on the island). In Karimunjawa you will find less tourist there. Very beautiful place to go diving.