Challenger lay at anchor under a full moon in the lee of Raine Island. Phosphorescence twinkled like stars at my fingertips...
We'd dived at night here a year before. Deep on this wall we'd seen prolific life. Turtles ghosting overhead on their way to the beach and their torturous egg laying exertions. Sharks, befuddled by the bright lights, blundering blindly into our flashing flashlight beams. Tuna, reflective as mirrors streaking, along the reef face.
Few other anchorages on this section of the Great Barrier Reef offer access to open water at night. The wall on Raine drops vertically for 300 meters.
From 30 meters I could still see the brilliant moon dancing, wraithlike, through the limpid surface.
Two... three...turtles passed soundlessly silhouetted overhead. In the cool of night thousands of them come in from the open sea to lay their eggs in the sands of Raine.
We'd found a turtle on the island last year, bleeding and mutilated, still trying to haul itself up the beach. Sharks had taken two flippers. It would be a long swim back to Challenger without at least two legs...
Wayne and his brother Glenn were on their hands and knees poring over the circuit diagrams and electronic componentry of the echo sounder strewn across the forward thwart of the wildly pitching Cossack Kid.
Shrieking wind and hissing greybeards made it almost impossible to hear exactly what they were saying but, from the snatches of conversation which did manage to swirl past me before being hurled to destruction in the maelstrom it was clear that they were into heavy electrical and electronic diagnoses. '....could it be the inverted dispersional transhedral accumulator...?' '...more likely the transpondentially arrayed accelerated impedance arrestor...although the farradazical horizontally opposed hertzcube could be intermittently squaring' '...hmm'
This was the second attempt to find the submarines...
The subs we were looking for are all legendary J Class vessels. Seven were built by the British Navy between 1915 and 1918. Imaginatively and inspiringly named...JI, J2,J3,J4,J5,J6,J7 these were regarded as experimental subs....
What remains today are hollow shells, fractured and dislocated, but easily recognizable as submarines. Rearing bows indicate their innovative sea-keeping design. On at least one, a conning tower remains virtually intact and its possible to sink gently onto the fragments of rusted and corroded plates once trod by the feet of brave and determined British and Australian submariners
On calm days, when clear water floods the strait, it is possible to safely enter the hulls...
Low kunuku scrub moaned softly as the trade winds billowed in from the north east and passed through the thorns that only goats will eat. Klein Bonaire, flat, uninhabited and already biscuit dry, baked in the mid day Caribbean heat...
Hans Hass had made the same tortuous walk nearly sixty years ago. 'At the same time the sun burned as if to transform us too into cactus. The cactus jabbed back where ever you put your foot...it was not a pleasant walk.'
So close to Venezuela, deep in the Caribbean, you could be forgiven for expecting Bonaire to be cloaked in lush rainforest. Not so. It is a desert island. Hard. Bristling with cactus and the abandoned, stunted, remnants of aloe vera plantations...
Quite a lot has changed since Hass visited. For example, divers are now welcome there! Bonaire's entire fringing reef system has been declared a marine park. Near the capital, Kralendijk, on the sheltered west coast there are numerous resorts, many of which cater for divers. We chose one simply because it promised unlimited diving.
Diving on Bonaire is superb - and some of the easiest diving you can imagine. Any morning, within ten minutes of getting out of bed, you can be hovering at 15 meters over profuse coral in a swarm of colorful fish all of which insist on swimming too close to the camera to enable them to be photographed...
As I tilted the flashlight upwards in the feeble hope of at least saving the reflector and the globe, a giant metallic head speared into the lightglow no more then 20 centimeters from my face! If I'd been wearing a frightmeter to record my reaction I'd now be in the Guiness Book of Records. One disdainful flicker of the tarpon's baleful eye signaled 'see, that's how you get close!' and the silver water-rocket silently blasted off into the liquid night.
One pathetic last glimmer seeped from the drowning flashlight and then all was black.
Sharks don't roar or growl. Eerie, soundless, hunters, they issue no audible sign of their intentions. Languid and liquid in their movements one moment. Instantly taut, aggressive, and arrow swift the next...
The great white shark had been with me for some time. It had coasted silently into view while I lay amongst the reef-top kelp ten meters beneath the surface, trying to lure a blue morwong into the lethal range of my spear gun.
Polished great white shark would be a more appropriate description. Sharks' skin is covered in tiny denticles - miniature modifications of the nerveless teeth which serrate their jaws. Translucent and densely packed, the denticles flashed refracted light and, like nylon stockings on a shapely female leg, added sensual luster to the dun coloured hide of the lithe, flexing shark beneath my feet.
Instinct prodded me to lift my face above the surface. A brief glance shorewards - there was our house - and then to left and right. No boats within a kilometer. I lay alone on the surface of the sea, at the interface of two worlds. One modern and modified by humans. The other timeless, natural. Almost indistinguishable ancestors of this shark had been patrolling sunken reefs for about 190 million years. To encounter such a creature in its own element is to swim through the shrouds of time and into prehistory...