A Series of Unfortunate Events

There is something almost mystical and more than a little eerie about scuba diving in the deep ocean, hundreds of miles from land and a mile from the bottom. You are surrounded by blue, all shades of blue, vanishing into deep black as you look down. No fish, no coral, just endless blue.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t really in a position to appreciate the magnificence of the scene in which I found myself. My focus was mainly on looking out for sharks, only slightly on the task at hand and not at all on the beauty of my Zenlike surroundings.

We were on passage from Raratonga, in the Cook Islands, to Neiafu, Tonga, with a possible stop at the island of Nuie. We’d been dealing with the usual ever-changing weather, the wind dying completely for a few hours and then swinging round to the north, giving us a nice sail. It had been too good to last, though, and we’d also run into a line of squalls with 25-plus knots of wind, to meet the latter and ease our motion a little.