| It was one of those perfect blue sky turquoise
water days, with air so deliciously warm that you feel like you are being
hugged by mother nature. Kelly was being Kelly....zipping around like a
speed freak. My hammock was beckoning, in a most alluring way, and I was
at a very exciting part in my book. Kelly is almost frantic to be out doing
something.
"Let's go diving Roy" he says, as he paces back and forth in the palapa. He is my daughter's husband and him and her had talked me into taking a trip to Mulege with them. There is no wind. The conditions are perfect for a dive. We were at Punta Arena, just South of Mulege. Conception Bay is not always this calm. With one last fond look at my book, I grabbed my wet suit and gear. We had my twelve foot aluminum boat with a ten horse Honda outboard dragged up on the beach above the high tide mark. In minutes we were flying across the water towards the islands in the middle of the bay. Our first stop was at a reef on the far side of one of the larger islands. The water was so clear that is was like being weightless in air. The visibility must have been over a hundred feet. We are surrounded by fish in every imaginable colour. They range in size from two inches to two feet. Because we are free diving, we have to come up for air every minute or so, but the up side is that we are in perfect silence gliding through the schools of fish. Back in the boat, Kelly is eager to show me more sights. "Wait till you see this beach....it's so cool!" We are now heading across to the other side of the bay, and the wind is picking up a bit. The beach is every bit as beautiful as he has described. It is about a half mile of white sand beach with a few groves of palm trees right on the shore. At the South end of the beach is a creek and the mangroves are lining the banks of the creek. We almost surfed in to shore on the two foot waves rolling in to the beach. It is a very gradual sloped beach, so I had to pull the motor up a long ways from shore. I haven't mentioned the best part yet. There is nobody else on the beach. We sit under the palm tree and eat some lunch. I want to see what the other grove of palms looks like up close so I leave Kelly and walk down to take a look. It takes five minutes of brisk walking to get to the grove. I start to walk back I am trying to pick out Kelly on the beach. Can't see him...wonder where he's gone...maybe when I get closer...still no sign of him. I walk past the palm trees to see if he has headed for the mangrove area. No...my footprints are the only ones here. I look inland...no footprints there. That leaves the water. He is a strong swimmer. I'm not worried. But I can't see him. He has got to be out there in the water.. I decide to try to launch the boat by myself, and go out and look for him. I make it out about fifty feet, and a big wave throws the boat over my head and back to shore. I remembered a technique called kedging, where you throw your anchor ahead and then pull the boat to it. I have a twenty lb. danforth anchor, so throwing it is not an easy thing. I swing it around my head and let fly. Not bad about twenty feet. I jump into the boat and pull on the rope until I'm up to the anchor. That was easy! However by the time I repeated this maneuver the twenty or thirty or forty times that it took to get into water deep enough to start the motor I barely had the strength to lift the anchor. The waves are higher now, which makes looking for Kelly much harder, and takes some maneuvering to keep from being capsized. Still no sign of Kelly. I'm starting to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. How can he disappear like this? Half an hour of completely unproductive search patterns...I decide to head straight out from shore into the waves and make a circle towards the North end. I see a flash of red in the trough of a wave about three quarters of a mile from shore. As I get closer I can see that it is Kelly. His face is grey-white and his movements are slow and awkward. I have to pull him into the boat. He can't talk for about five minutes.. He had decided to try diving around the shore while I was walking. When he came up after his first dive, he noticed that he was quite a bit further from shore. The water wasn't very deep but the undertow had pulled him out. He dove again. After this dive he was twice as far from shore, but he wasn't concerned. When he came up from his third dive, he started to get worried so he started to swim toward shore, but the longer he swam, the further he got from shore! By the time I found him he was past the point of being able to swim, or think. Was he grateful.?...no. He thought I should have been watching him more closely. And to think; I gave up hammock time to go! Won't make that mistake again. |