Boys Love to be Heroes

Originally posted on January 19, 2015, by cruisingrunner

Day before yesterday we did some crew swapping with Iguana (our buddy boat). Tim went with Jack on Iguana on an overnight passage up to Three Kings Island, which is north of North Cape and a notorious fishing spot. Camille stayed with the boys and me on Exodus in a nice protected spot in Mangonui Harbor. There is a cute little tourist town here with a few restaurants and shops and a community cat that keeps them “mice free,” at least according to a little sign on one of the shops.

Yesterday, our friend Briana drove up from Opua to join us for some wine drinking, window shopping, cooking, and general female camaraderie. I joked with Tim before he left that he should take the boys too, since they would be seriously crashing my girlfriend time. It turns out to be a really good thing they were here with us.

After a shore excursion, we were arriving back to Exodus, and as Camille was climbing out of the dinghy I caught a brief visual of her phone teetering at the edge of her pocket. And while I’m yelling, “Your phone! Your phone!” I watch it fall out, splash into the water, and quickly disappear. I had that sick feeling when it really hit me what had happened, but I’m sure I didn’t feel half as sick as Camille did when she realized it was her phone that took the plunge. We called the boys out to quickly get in the water to help find it, and we dropped a GPS waypoint on the chartplotter so that we would maintain a rough idea of where the phone splashed down as Exodus swings about her anchor. Brenden was in the water first. He dove down and came up with a report that it was only about 10 feet deep, and he was yelling for someone to toss him his gloves, because his hands were freezing. You’d think 10 feet would be a piece of cake for them to recover a dropped object, because I think Brenden’s record is 42 feet to salvage a wayward plate. But the problem was the visibility, which was so bad Brenden said he almost hit his face on the bottom.

Camille was quickly behind Brenden into the water and the two of them tried for a while, but both became discouraged. It was just too hard to search for it while free diving when you had to be right on the bottom to see anything. So, Briana and I became convinced that we needed to get the hookah out it order to find it. Camille wasn’t totally on board that it was worth the effort, since she was the one that already had the first hand experience of trying to find that needle in the haystack, but Briana and I persisted. Especially Briana. She had used our hookah before (at Minerva Reef) so she was willing to be the one to use it. However, Camille is a diver and after a couple of questions about how the hookah works she decided she was comfortable doing it.

The hookah is basically a gas engine that drives a compressor. So, instead of carrying a tank of compressed air on your back like regular scuba diving, when you are using the hookah your air source is at the surface and you are connected to it by a long hose. Alex became a really important part of the process at this point, because I had never set up the hookah before, and because Alex is often Tim’s helper in all sorts of things, it turned out he had a good idea of how to set it up, start it, and operate it. One of Camille’s questions was, “where is the air intake?” since she was rightfully concerned about the possibility of breathing in the engine exhaust fumes. Alex remembered that the flag pole doubles as an air intake pipe so that it’s pulling in air from further away from the engine. So, he got that out and quickly attached it.

The hookah definitely made the search easier, but it was hard to stay on the bottom, so Camille asked for a weight belt. It turned out that Tim took our weight belts with him, which seemed reasonable to me at the time. We had absolutely no intention of doing any diving while he was away. So, Alex dug out one of the weight belts that actually came with the hookah, but then we realized we didn’t have any weights either. So, Briana and I searched around and the only thing we could come up with that would fit in that belt was some galvanized shackles in the linen closet, a.k.a. Tim’s spares locker. It wasn’t much weight, but it helped a little bit. Brenden was very interested in the status of the search and kept an eye on Camille hoping she would come up with the phone. I asked him if he would get in and help some more, and he slowly moped over to grab his gear as if I was forcing him to. I quickly said, “well, you don’t have to, of course.” But I had put the thought back into his brain, and I watched him continue to think about it and go over and test the water again to try and decide what he was going to do. When Camille gave up the search, and I started to tell Alex to shut down the hookah engine, Brenden made it clear he was getting back in for one more go at it. We all cheered him on, and I speculated that he had visions of being the hero dancing around in his head. He was in the water just a few minutes when he came up with a carrot stick that he found on the bottom. We had tossed a bunch of dried out carrot sticks overboard the night before, so we got a chuckle over that find. He kept searching and searching and we were all getting a bit defeated when we saw Brenden’s arm extending out of the water holding the phone. It was such a triumphal moment and we cheered and high fived and joked how Brenden could pretty much name his price for his recovery reward. Chocolate or ice cream? We still aren’t sure what he’ll choose.

Later I asked him what he was thinking, that is, what made him get back in the water and keep looking for it. I sincerely think he was motivated by those visions of being the hero, but he surprised me with his response. He said he was just really curious whether or not the phone would work again. I have no idea if it was a genuine response, but either way, I am pretty happy with it. He wasn’t flashy, and he didn’t play up any drama. And then there’s Alex, who did so much to help us with the entire process. We joked how he had one of those behind the scenes crucial jobs that just doesn’t get any of the glory. He gave a slight grin. No fanfare there, either. They both kept it real. My dad will be proud.

-D.

P.S. We still don’t know if the phone will work. It is made by Caterpillar, and is actually a waterproof phone, but when Camille opened it up, there was still water inside. She dried it out and now it’s still sitting in a container of rice. Hopefully, this will turn out to be a happy ending.