The reef they were surveying was called Yule Reef and that pleased Andrew as he admired the work of Lieutenant Yule, Royal Navy, who as the captain of the British gunboat HMS Bramble, had done much of the detailed surveying of the Great Barrier Reef during the mid-nineteenth century. Yule Reef was only about half a kilometre long and perhaps two hundred wide and was completely submerged on the high tides.
At that moment Andrew and his friends were at the northern end. Separating Yule Reef from the next reef to the north, Challenger Reef, was a deep-water passage named the Challenger Channel. Andrew was glad it was behind them as it was half a kilometre wide and was so deep that the bottom was not visible. Instead the seabed just faded down through shades of blue to an inky blackness and was the sort of place that conjured up all of Andrew’s worst fears about monsters of the deep. To make it worse a strong current was now scouring through it, running west with increasing force as the tide rose.
Andrew moved to look around. Off to his left rear, away to the northeast, he could just make out the tiny black square that was the old stone building on Prescott Island. That was their base camp and was five kilometres away with the main stretch of the Challenger Channel in between.
Directly to his left, to the east, was another set of distant reefs, the Longbow Reefs, so named because of their shape on the chart. They were also about five kilometres away and were marked by two dark lumps that Andrew knew were shipwrecks, one 19th century and the other a very recent 21st century wreck. Half a kilometre to the south of Yule Reef were a series of long parallel reefs called the Feathers Reefs. Between Yule Reef and the Feathers Reefs was a large area of shallow seabed and another deep-water channel, the Bramble Boat Passage. That was where they were swimming to on the next dive.
Carmen turned to Andrew and began checking his straps and the connections of his air tank. Then she took his alternate air source and tested it. Andrew managed to return her grin and then do the same safety checks with her equipment. Beside him the other two divers, nineteen-year-old Tristan Lyall and his seventeen-year-old sister Ella, were busy carrying out the same drills. Ella ruffled her curly fair hair and then zipped up her BCD and began doing up the buckles. In the process she squeezed her breasts together. Unlike the other three divers she wore only a brief bikini, preferring it to the neoprene wetsuits worn by the others.
Andrew tried not to look at those bulging bosoms but found it hard not to. He was at the age where he had become very interested in girls. But he did not want his sister to notice this, so he hastily looked away and pretended to check that his weight belt was securely buckled. It was a relief when Ella had the BCD done up as it covered her whole upper body. Now he could only see her very shapely hips and bare legs!
Another Uni student, Dan Powell, sat at the stern and was the safety boat crewman. The blue and white diver’s flag fluttered on a short whip that doubled as a radio antenna. Dan had a small radio and now informed Mr Craig, the master of the launch, that the divers were ready.
Andrew spat in his facemask and leant over the side to swill seawater around in it. Then he pulled the facemask over his head so that it hung under his chin. As he did he heard a distinctive sound.
Aircraft, he thought, looking around.
The others heard it too and all stared at the sky. It was Duncan who saw the machine first. “There,” he said, pointing south.
Andrew saw it then, a twin-engine machine that grew rapidly larger as it approached. The aircraft flew past about half a kilometre to the east and at only about a thousand feet altitude. It was painted a distinctive red and white pattern and Andrew knew what it was even before it was close enough to read the words painted on its fuselage.
“Coastwatch,” he said.
Four times in the last four years the Coastwatch planes run by Customs had played an important part in his life so he was quite happy to see one flying by. They flew daily patrols to try to detect ships and boats involved in smuggling, illegal immigration and illegal fishing in Australia’s Economic Zone.
Like that Taiwanese trawler over there on Longbow Reef, he remembered.
That had been fishing illegally in Australian waters but had suffered an engine failure during a storm the previous year and had been blown onto the reef.
As the aircraft flew past low overhead all five divers waved. Andrew knew that it would have been in radio contact with the dive launch and that the aircraft crew would know who they were. That was important as they were in a restricted zone where special permits were needed. As a university research activity they had these. The aircraft flew on and was soon lost to sight.
Tristan now looked at each in turn, a quizzical expression on his freckled, cheerful face. “All OK? Good, then let’s get this done before the tide gets too strong.”
With that he placed his regulator in his mouth, adjusted his facemask and rolled backwards into the sea. As Andrew watched Tristan’s fins vanish into the water he felt his stomach churn.
Bloody hell! Here we go! he thought.
He would have dearly loved to stay in the boat, but he dutifully positioned his facemask, gave Carmen what he hoped looked like a cheerful grin and not a sickly smile, and then placed his regulator in his mouth. Carmen did likewise and then turned her head to check that she was not going to hit Ella with her fins as she went over backwards. Then she rolled away. Ella gave Andrew a grin and then put in her regulator and followed.
Andrew took a last quick look around at the clear blue sky and the sunlight sparkling on the blue sea then he also rolled over backwards. It was something he hated doing and was a procedure he had never understood.
Why don’t divers just lower themselves into the water? he wondered for the hundredth time.
But it was better than jumping with legs spread from the deck of a launch, so he just clenched his teeth and did it rather than excite comment.
The water closed over him, cold only on his head and hands to begin with. He heard the familiar rasping, sucking noises as he began breathing through the regulator and he allowed himself to sink and settle to a feet down position. The first thing Andrew did was look around to check on the position of the other divers and in particular his dive buddy, who for this dive was Ella. She was only a few metres away and was looking at him while she adjusted her buoyancy.
Andrew used the valve connecting his air tank to his BCD to adjust his own buoyancy so that he hung effortlessly and apparently weightless a few metres below the surface. Above him he could clearly see the outline of the rubber boat as it bobbed on what looked like a rippling silver ceiling. Then he took a quick look in all directions, this action motivated more by fear than anything else. It did not really reassure him when he saw nothing unusual.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, he thought, ‘they’ being the sharks and other creatures of the deep that he feared.
What he saw was the wall of the reef only ten metres to his right. Ahead of him stretched the reef and a gently sloping sandy bottom. To his left the sandy bottom extended outwards, slowly getting deeper until it was lost in the blue. That was alright. He was on the right in the pair of divers so was the nearest to the reef. That meant considerably less danger of some giant shark suddenly rushing out of the darkness with jaws agape. But perversely it also meant it was the direction from which smaller but also worrying creatures like moray eels might suddenly lunge forth to snap and bite.
Now the dark abyss of the Challenger Channel was directly behind him and Andrew could not resist the urge to frequently glance back at that dark blue-black void of liquid fear. With an effort of willpower, he looked back towards Ella. She gave him a thumbs-up and he returned it, hoping his