Chapter Nine: The Case For Contact Lenses Part Two
“It is not long before the lure of the aquamarine water is too great.”
• • •
Stuart did not recognise the person that was waving at him until she took off her face-mask.
He had given up alternative plans for the day once he had seen the faint, fading notice, hand-written in chalk on the board beside the reception hut at Chez Pauline’s: Shark’s Breakfast, 10 a.m., meet outside Hotel Bora Bora, 3500CFP. The up-market hotel shared the same stretch of beach at Matira Point as Pauline’s Camping Ground, and Pauline’s huts superficially mimicked the traditional thatch-style accommodation of their swankier neighbour, although at a fraction of the cost. Enquiries ascertained that he could hire snorkel, flippers and face-mask on the boat, and other than his swimming trunks, the only other thing he needed to bring along was his money.
Stuart contemplated waking Stefan to see if he wished to join him on his morning excursion, not so much out of a spirit of friendliness towards the German, more from a ‘safety in numbers’ philosophy, but decided against it: it would be more of an adventure to go alone. After all, since he had chosen independent travel over a package holiday, it was about time he began to do something independently.
Two long canoes laden with passengers had set off from the wooden jetty of the Hotel Bora Bora, meeting up with two small motorboats, fifteen minutes later, at a predetermined spot on the reef, some considerable distance from the main island itself. The canoes were a strange mixture of the old and the new: a traditional outrigger-style log ran the length of the vessels, presumably to add extra stability in the water, although Stuart thought this was purely a cosmetic and rather incongruous touch on otherwise modern and machine-crafted boats. The outboard motor was pure twentieth century too. The power to this engine was now cut, and the heavy motor upended and removed from the water, leaving the canoe untethered, gently buffeted by the swell of the ocean.
Stuart removed his trainers and his denim shorts, and stowed them away in a plastic carrier bag he had brought with him. He had hoped the bag would keep some of his possessions dry, but the combination of the permanent inch of water laying in the bottom of the vessel plus the spray from the ocean journey, had already succeeded in wetting everything through. He was a little concerned to discover that the elastic had begun to perish in his swimming trunks - he had not had much opportunity for wearing them recently - but he hoped they were not so far gone as to cause embarrassment. The sun was already high in the sky, and although the sea winds were keeping Stuart feeling cool, he was not deceived into thinking he would not burn without sun-screen. He had slapped on his factor twenty back in the dormitory and decided to keep on his tee-shirt whilst in the water, to make sure he did not catch too many rays on his back. It was in the middle of putting on his flippers that he noticed the woman waving.
It was Jenny. She was sitting in one of the newly arrived speed-boats, putting on snorkelling equipment similar to himself, evidently about to go into the water. She shouted something across to him, but the distance was too great and the words were lost in the divide between the two of them. Realising the futility of the spoken word, she first pointed to him, then down at the sea, finally making a breast-stroke swimming motion with her arms. Stuart raised his thumb to indicate that he understood, “See you in the water.”
“Flippers on in the water.”
“Eh?”
The canoe’s skipper was giving him instructions, “Leave your flippers until you are in the water. There is not enough room in the boat. Try out your face-mask.”
“You don’t have one that wraps around over the top of spectacles?” asked Stuart.
The sailor frowned, not understanding, “All the same size. Here.” He tossed a bright yellow mask in Stuart’s direction, adding, “Tubes are in the box there.”
Stuart collected a snorkel tube then struggled for several minutes trying to connect it through the tangle of rubber loops on the side of the face-mask. Finally having rigged up the contraption to his satisfaction, the sailor passed by him again, “Other way around.”
Everyone else appeared to be ready and several of his fellow travellers had already lowered themselves into the clear, blue waters, one showing off by entering the water with a backwards roll from the side of the canoe, which succeeded in making the whole vessel sway alarmingly and had Stuart grabbing on to the side for support.
The water was warm and surprisingly shallow considering the distance the boats were away from the towering twin peaks of the island. Stuart was just about able to stand on the sandy bottom and keep his head above water, only having to bob up and tread water when a larger than average wave threatened to submerge him. He spat into his face-mask in the way that he had been instructed - to defog it apparently - and washed out the whole apparatus in the salt water. He ducked his head just beneath the waves and breathed tentatively through the snorkel tube. Everything seemed in order. The face-mask leaked water slightly, where his spectacles prevented the rubber sealing securely against his skin, but what could he do? It was either a choice between removing his glasses altogether and not seeing anything, or keeping his glasses on and having to surface every minute to empty the brine from inside his mask. Finally deciding that the flippers were a liability and not really required since the currents were fairly gentle, he threw the rubbery shoes back inside the canoe, and with a steady breast-stroke joined the rest of his group, where they had assembled in a long row, close to one of the launches.
“Hang on to the line.” It was a bare-chested local man, who was evidently in charge of proceedings, issuing instructions from his vantage point on the nearest motorboat. The line in question was a thick, white cord, stretched out, just beneath the water’s surface, linking one boat to the next, some sixty feet in length. “It will stop you drifting off with the currents,” the skipper went on to explain. “OK. Ready everyone?” There was a muffled rejoinder in the affirmative, as everyone tried to speak with their snorkel tubes still in their mouths. “OK. Remember whatever happens, just keep hanging on to the line. You’ll be fine. Heads under. Enjoy the show.”
Stuart kept his head out of the water just long enough to see the buckets of dead fish, bone meal and blood being brought up on deck, and to watch as the bare-chested man dug his hand into the foul concoction with a look of something approaching relish on his face, and proceeded to throw the pungent mixture into the open waters between the two boats, just ahead of the line of expectant, sub-aquatic onlookers. Like the proverbial ostrich, Stuart’s reaction was to bury his head, but rather than hiding from danger, Stuart wanted to see it coming. Head on.
It was like stepping into a different world. There were fish galore. Blue ones. Striped ones. Small ones. Yellow ones. Beautiful ones. Ugly ones. Quick ones. More blue ones again. It was fish soup with an extra helping of fish. The reef beyond was no less wondrous too: an other-worldly panorama of mountains and peaks, outcrops and crevices, all in a flooded microcosm. Delicate fronds swayed on invisible currents; great, pitted, living rocks sat obstinate and immovable on the sandy ocean floor. There was green grass like the savannah; the sense of purity of the tundra; the mystery of outer space. Stuart wondered if this was how it felt to be an astronaut, looking down on something which was ostensibly so normal, but which in practice was anything but. Perhaps you have to be one removed from an object to appreciate how special it actually is. The sense of freedom too. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. It was like flying; being suspended in mid-air; an out-of-body experience. Wow. The first shark appeared as if by magic. It was swiftly followed by a second, and then a third, and then a fourth.
The normal human emotion on seeing a shark is one of fear, followed by a reaction to flee and, if you were not underwater and your mouth plugged up by a rubber tube, possibly an instinct to scream. The primeval brain is a remarkable thing which instinctively recognises danger and sends u
rgent signals to that effect around the body: a bombardment of irrefutable logic along the lines of ‘the shark is in the water, you are in the water, the shark lives in the water, you live on the land’ or perhaps more graphically, ‘this fish has sharp teeth, you have soft skin, sharp teeth tear through soft skin’. It is a logic not altogether born out by the facts - humans actually kill thousands more sharks each year than sharks kill humans - but all the same, you cannot fight against centuries of instinct.
The shark’s ability to home in on the sound of a fish in distress, or to smell the tiniest spot of blood in the water from several kilometres distant is legendary, although, since the ‘Shark’s Breakfast’ extravaganza had occurred at this same venue, on a daily basis, for several years now, the current assembly of fishy predators was probably more the result of lazy habit rather than honed senses.
They were black-tip reef sharks. Even a complete piscine-ignoramous could have guessed as much from combining the evidence of the spot of colour at the top of their dorsal fin with their particular liking for this shallow water environment. They were not big sharks, but six feet of fast-moving executioner is plenty large enough when you are so close as to be able to see the blank, lifeless expression in their eyes. The combination of shallow water and big fish was a strange anachronism. It was like diving into your local swimming baths and coming face to face with a ... well, with a shark. It is not what you expect. Swimming pools spell safety and familiarity: nothing more aggravating than the occasional swimmer who cuts across your lane, the show-off who dives off the side and creates a big splash, or a particularly high chlorine - or, if the school party have just been in, ammonia - content. The length of white cord acted as a strange sort of placebo too: it was as if, just because you knew you should not venture beyond it’s safe confines, the sharks must have the same sort of knowledge and would not stray into territory that had been previously earmarked as ‘human-friendly’ only. As a protective barrier it worked on a mental level. Only.
The four sharks swam back and forth in increasingly decreasing circles before, impatience got the better of politeness, and they all fell upon the man-made snack in an impressive display of survival. They were gone again as quickly as they had arrived.
“That was incredible,” said Jenny, surfacing, with a big gasp of air.
“Argoo ooo eh ooo ah eh.” Jenny pulled the snorkel out of Stuart’s mouth so that normal speech was resumed once again, “Amazing. Fantastic.” He spluttered up a great mouthful of water, before continuing more truthfully, “Couldn’t see a bloody thing.”
“Eh?” Jenny looked puzzled.
“My face-mask completely filled up with water. I just saw the first shark arrive, and then I had to come up to the surface to empty it out. It was almost all over before I submerged again.”
“So you didn’t see the feeding frenzy?”
“A bit of it when I went back down again, but it was all a bit blurry.”
“Poor you.”
“Don’t worry,” Stuart went on to explain, “I managed to take plenty of pictures.” Treading water, he held up a cheap, throw-away, underwater camera for Jenny to see. “I’ll get them developed when I get back home and then I’ll be able to see what I couldn’t see while I was actually here.”
“Armchair traveller,” accused Jenny, good-naturedly.
“Actual traveller,” countered Stuart. “Armchair viewer.”
Big Fish Page 10