“Check it out, Landon,” I said, holding my compass at eye level and sighting along the top of it to a point out on the water.  “You decide on where you want to go, and then turn this bezel thus, and then we’re going to swim out in that net direction, and when we’re ready to come back home we just line up the compass arrow with this pointer and it will lead us straight back here.  Get it?”

“I think so…”

“It’s the same as vector addition!  Trust me!  I’ve got it all figured out.”  It was the second day of our open-water dive certification, and my diving partner and I were the two top students in the class.  We’d out-swam every one else, done perfectly on all the tests so far, and were now on the shore just to the south of the pier at our dive site, preparing to submerge into what was for us as-yet-uncharted waters, right about here.  This was going to be our fourth and final dive for the weekend, and the first without our instructors.  In keeping with our trend of being the best, we’d decided we were going to swim deeper and farther than anyone else.  So far in our dives this weekend we hadn’t come close to the maximum depth of 60 feet at which we were rated at our level — on this dive we intended to go that deep, and see what there was to see that we hadn’t seen yet.

“If this is the right box,” Landon said, tracing his finger around on the little plastic dive table he carried, “then at a max depth of 60 feet we’ve got fifteen minutes for this dive.  That’s not a long time.”

“No,” I agreed.  “How do you feel about this – instead of submerging right away like we’ve been doing, what if we swim out to the buoy there before switching to our tanks and diving straight down?  It’ll give us more time to spend that deep, and we can swim back in the normal way, right back up the shore.  What do you say?”

“I like it!  Check my gear, buddy!”  We spent a minute or so checking each other’s tanks, straps, buoyancy compensators, respirators, and all the other things that were supposed to keep  us alive underwater.  Another few minutes spent hefting our scuba gear onto our backs and strapping into it, and we were ready to go, waddling awkwardly towards the water where we’d be much more free to move.  Fins on, masks cleared, we sighted on the orange buoy about forty feet from shore before biting down on our snorkels and kicking away from the land where most sane people spend their lives.  Once at the buoy, we swapped out our snorkels for regulators, took a few test breaths to make sure our air was working, and after flashing the A-OK sign to each other, jack-knifed ourselves heads down like ducks diving under the water and let the air out of our BCs, heading straight down towards the unseen bottom of Hood Canal.

It wasn’t long before the rocks and seaweed and sponges that line the bottom of the ocean came into view, and I started fiddling with my BC, trying to let just the right amount of my precious breathing air into its air bladders to keep me just buoyant enough to float a few feet above the sand.  I looked around to make sure Landon was still with me, and then checked my diving gauge.  Forty-two feet.  Another A-OK sign flashed at each other to indicate that neither of us was in imminent danger of drowning, and then my dive partner and I swam further away from land, following the gentle slope of the land down towards our target depth, kicking hard because the clock was ticking.

After a bit we came to a little upside down boat, startling a school of fish that had been hiding underneath it.  We swam around it, Landon pointing his flashlight at a crab that went skittering sideways away from us, and I remembered to check my dive gauge again.  Sixty feet.  Finally. I grabbed Landon’s shoulder, and pointed at my gauge, and then pointed roughly south.  He understood, and as we’d planned we were going to swim parallel to the shore to keep from going any deeper for as long as we could before hitting the half-way time for our dive and turning reluctantly in the direction of land again.  Or, that had been the plan – in my mind this sunken boat was a good landmark to find again, since we were swimming directly away from it.  All we have to do is reverse course, find this boat again, and then hang a left and we’ll end up right where we left the shore. Sweet! Of course, there was no way to communicate this insight and change of plan to Landon while underwater.  I was in charge of time-keeping and navigation, though, so I’d just point us back this way when the time came.  He’d see the point of it all later.

I don’t know what we’d hoped to see down there, deeper than any of our classmates had gone.  There’s not much sixty feet down in Hood Canal, just eel grass and sand, and the occasional sponge.  Most fish seemed to keep to a shallower depth, and even the crabs had left us.  Not much light penetrates the deep, so our whole world shrank to a bubble about fifteen feet across.  It’s sort of barren and spooky, to be honest, and it somehow seems even quieter, although there’s little to hear when scuba diving beyond one’s own labored breathing anyway.  I was sort of glad to be able to put this bleak landscape behind me when I checked my watch and noted that we were at the halfway point for our dive.  I swatted at Landon’s flipper, and when he turned to look at me I pointed at my watch.  He nodded, looked at his compass, and pointed in the direction that would take us back.  I shook my head, and in a complicated series of gestures said No dude, check it: we’re going to just go back this way that we’ve been swimming, find that boat, and then hang a left.  It’ll be cool!  That’s how we’ll know we’re lined up to go straight back towards where we left the land.  See?

He looked down at his compass, looked up at me, and pointed at the shore again, saying: Should we not trust in science and the instructions of our teachers to find the way back?  Weren’t you the one who told me how this navigation thing worked at that these compasses would guide us safely home?  Are you high or something?

I shook my head and gestured again.  Goddammit, look at what I am trying to tell you with my hands here.  Us.  Boat.  Hang a left.  Land.  It’ll be rad. Though little of my face was visible through the tiny circle of glass on my mask, I tried my best to make an expression that conveyed TRUST ME I TOTALLY KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT, I’M LIKE A GENIUS OR SOMETHING AND SOON WE WILL BE EATING HOT SANDWICHES.  He shrugged, and we swam back the way I was pointing.  Kicking hard, keeping Landon in my peripheral vision, I waited for the little boat to materialize from the gloom.

I never saw the boat again.

With such low visibility, I would not have had to have been too far off course to have sailed right past it.  It seemed big enough that it should have jumped out us, a welcoming beacon showing us the way home, but we didn’t have to be more than twenty feet away from it for it to have been completely invisible.  I looked down at my watch, realizing that we should have seen the boat by now.  Eleven minutes of dive time left.  I grabbed at my compass, guessed at our location, oriented us towards land, and started kicking even harder.  A minor setback!  We’re still the best scuba divers in this class!

I was hoping we’d see something encouraging to show that we were getting closer, though I don’t know what.  A familiar rock?  A sponge that I might recognize from a previous dive?  Other divers from our class?  It was a big ocean and we were only able to see ten or so feet of it at a time.  At least we seemed to be heading back up, although with out any reference points it was hard to tell.  Worried, I re-checked our direction on my compass, and my depth gauge.  Eighty feet. I stopped in the water, looked around.  Shit shit shit!  Had I really screwed up, pointed us in the wrong direction completely?  We were getting deeper. Were we headed out deeper into Hood Canal, farther from land? I shook my compass in case it was lying to me, checked our direction, and resumed kicking.  This should be the right direction, but we weren’t supposed to have hit eighty feet!  I had no idea where that put us on the dive tables for maximum safe submerged time.  Those tables had a bit of a fudge factor built in, but I shaved two minutes off our time remaining anyway.  Seven minutes.

We soared along in our gloomy bubble, around odd clusters of kelp, the ground racing along underneath us, kicking up silt in our wakes.  Fish sensed us and schools veered out of our way.  The cold was seeping in through my wetsuit, numbing my limbs.  If my breathing regulator wasn’t in my mouth I’m sure my teeth would have been chattering.  Sixty feet again.  Four minutes.

I had no idea where we were, why we weren’t ascending faster, or why the pier I had been hoping to see some sign of hadn’t appeared or where we were in relation to the shore.  And who gets lost underwater on a navigation exercise, anyway?  Fifty-four feet.  Two minutes.

I began to despair that we were not headed in the right direction at all, that despite the compass pointing us in the known direction of land we were just swimming away from everything, either deeper out into the water or farther north, because Jesus Christ we were swimming as fast as we could and surely could have gotten to the next town along the shore by now much less found land and where the hell were we?  Fifty-one feet.  Time’s up.

I reached for Landon and shook his arm; when he was looking at me, I pointed at my watch, jerked my thumb towards the surface.  We’re out of time!  Bail out!  Emergency ascent! He nodded understanding, and we both raised the inflation controls on our BCs and began feeding them air from our tanks to begin our escape towards the surface.

Or at least, I thought that’s what we were both doing.  Mask pointed up as I watched for the light of the surface, I was probably twenty feet up before I realized my dive partner wasn’t with me.  I looked down, and saw him still at the bottom of the sea, unmoving.  I flipped over and kicked towards the bottom, wondering what the hell he was doing.  Please, please don’t let him be going into nitrogen narcosis or any of the other potentially nasty complications of breathing compressed air.  Shaking him to get his attention, I made a complicated series of gestures meaning Goddammit, what do you think you’re doing?  We have exceeded our maximum safe submersion time at this depth and need to ascend!  Do you want the fucking bends or something?!  Here, do what I am showing you with exaggerated gestures and put some air into your BC so we can start heading for the surface. He nodded again, moved his thumb over the control, and together we began to rise, watching the stream of bubbles from our steady and prolonged exhalations to make sure that we were not rising any faster than was safe.

The normal safe rate of ascent is one foot every two seconds, though in an emergency ascent you could rise twice as fast.  The best way to judge this speed was to watch your bubbles as you breathed out and not rise any faster than this.  And breathing out almost the entire time is important during the ascent is important as you get firsthand experience with Boyle’s Law: as the pressure outside decreases, the volume of air in your lungs increases, and you find that you are miraculously able to keep exhaling far beyond what life experience has previously told you should be possible.  It’s like trying to deflate an air mattress while some joker keeps pumping it full of air from the other end.  What would happen if you didn’t breathe out?  Well, take as deep a breath as you can, completely filling your lungs with air, and hold it.  Now imagine you had twice as much air in your lungs.  Seems like it would be messy, doesn’t it?

Eventually the water around us became lighter, and we broke the surface some distance out from the end of the pier, and on the other side of it from where we’d started.  Our instructor, standing at the end of the pier, saw us emerge far from where we’d planned at called out to us.  “Hey!  You guys okay?”

Breathing in the sweet, freezing December air, we waved our arms in the universal scuba signal for We are just fine and not quite as fucked as our unplanned emergency ascent might lead you to believe, thanks. Given the distance involved and how tired we were, it turned out to be easier to roll over onto our backs and kick lazily back towards land.  Landon recovered enough air to say, “Got this whole navigation figured out, huh?”

“Yeah, something like that.  Ugh.”

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