Mozambique - Part 2

I decided that if I didn't see any whale sharks, then I wanted to see the manta rays which live in the area. I did 2 dives: the first was a shallow dive just to get used to diving again, since when out of practice you tend to spend most of the time looking at dials, your buddy and making sure that you have the proper buoyancy so as to not accidentally kill thousand year-old coral with you fins. The second dive, apart from wanting to see rays was done because of the first
dive.

There were 15 people on the zodiac for the first dive; 3 people doing the last dive of their open water course, myself, 4 instructors, 3 dive masters, a free diver (which means he had no air tanks...he basically was able to hold his breath for a long time) and 3 crew. Two of the dive students I had not met before and the third was an American girl I met several days earlier. The free diver was a guy from Australia who I met the day before and went out for dinner and drinks, and I vaguely knew some of the dive masters and instructors.

The free diver went in first, followed by the divers. The divers followed a buoy line held by one of the dive masters and at the bottome they were split into two groups, each following a different dive master. It was a simple dive with a maximum depth of about 18 meters and we basically made our way around a coral reef. I used up my air quicker than the other people in my group, so I surfaced with one of the assistant dive masters in our group. When I made it back on the zodiac, there was already some of the other group up there, so we just waited for everyone else to surface. By this time, my ears were hurting a bit because I didn't equalise well enough when I first entered the water.

A few minutes later, the remaining divers surfaced and were in the boat, when an uneasy feeling came over everyone. Nobody knew where Brad, the free diver was. Although I wondered why I couldn't see him when I came up, I didn't think much about it since I figured someone in the crew knew where he was and he just wasn't visible from our spot. Someone saw a person walking on the beach, so we figured he got blown by the current, but looking a bit closer we realised it wasn't him. Everybody started looking around for him, but he didn't carry a buoy with him and he went without a dive buddy, so if was in trouble there was nobody to notify the boat.

The instructors and a dive master decided to take whichever tanks had the most air and go look for him. Personally, I thought this had to be an act of desperation; trying to find a lone diver in a large area, not knowing which way the current could have taken him. I found out later that the other students felt the same way. The instructors were not in agreement as to where to look, but in the end decided to fan out from the dive point marked by the GPS. About five minutes later, two of the group surfaced with Brad.

We went to go pick them up, but as we got close we saw that they were holding him up shaking their heads in a "no" gesture. His skin was pale, lips blue, eyes closed and there was bloody water in his mask. The boat pulled up beside them to pull him in. He was big guy and quite heavy so I jumped to help pull him in, reaching down to grab his legs and pull them up over the boat while they pulled him in from the shoulders.

The instructors who found him pretty much knew any first aid attempts would be useless. Everyone else came to the same realisation when we pulled him in because as he was face down, and due to gravity, what seemed like litres of blood and water that filled his lungs rushed out onto the boat deck, where it lingered pretty much until we got the zodiac to shore. What the instructors thought at the time - having found him lying face-down in the sand not far from our entry point - and was later confirmed by the autopsy was that he had suffered from a shallow-depth black-out.

It seems free-divers use a hyper-ventilation technique to help them stay down longer than a regular person normally can. It's a standard thing, but it also puts them into a kind of state of elation. If they misjudge the amount of time they are down there, they can black out on the way back up, and if they go too fast, the air in their lungs expands so rapidly that it causes rupture. And since no-one was there to see it happen, nobody could help him and it was suspected that he had remained under water for about 40 minutes before he was found.

I've never seen a body outside of a casket, and I've never had to pick one up before either. I had read that in situations like this, one of the ways to deal with the shock is to disassociate, or turn off what is going on around them and just concentrate on what had to be done. I thought I would just tune everything out to the point where I wasn't actually aware of what I was doing. But it wasn't like that at all.

The entire time this happened there was no real emotion but I was fully lucid of the events taking place around me. As we came closer to the body, I was thinking that it was definitely Brad, and as we pulled him in I remembered that he was from Brisbane and had attended the same college I did (Though not at the same time since he was about 6 years younger) when I was on exchange at the University of Queensland. And as I reached down to remove the mask from his face and his lungs started to drain, I thought he was dead and there was nothing that could be done about it.

On the way back to shore, I wasn't thinking about the horrific accident and the loss of life. I was thinking that I was hungry, thirsty and my ears were still hurting from the dive. Occasionally, I would take a look back at the body, lying face down near the back of the boat with a small towel covering his head, and all I could think about was how odd the image looked.

It dawned on me after several days that the reason it looked so odd was that the position of the hands at his side didn't seem right. They weren't in a "wrong" position, but I realised that with the arms down to the side of his body as his were, it wouldn't be a comfortable way to lie, and thus you'd never see people in that position.

Later that day, while waiting to see if the police wanted our statements, I still hadn't had any emotional reaction to what happened. It was just a fact, no more. Fine, I had only known Brad a short while, but surely I should at least feel something regarding the loss of life, but nothing came about. I almost envied the American girl who burst into tears almost immediately when Brad was found, as she seemed to at least come to terms with what happened.

Those I spoke to seemed to think it was a natural defense mechanism to have a delayed reaction to the event. Mind you, they hadn't gone through something like this before now, and they all seemed to be moved by the event. Of course, as nasty as it is to think, they might have been faking it as well, behaving in what they thought was the accepted "normal" manner.

Well, it's been almost 2 weeks since Brad drowned and still no reaction. To be honest, it's scaring the living shit out of me! Maybe Bugs Bunny cartoons and watching too many A-Team episodes do desensitise kids to violence. Maybe my reaction is just very delayed because I have a very, very strong defensive mechanism, but how long can a delay be before you are officially a heartless, uncaring bastard? I guess one test would be to watch Bambi again. If I feel a lump in my throat when her mom dies, well then everything is OK, but if I don't…well, I'm not sure I want to find out for fear it's the latter.

What's even more troubling is the fact that my reaction - or lack of it - to Brad's death has pre-occupied and disturbed me more than the death itself. Of course, I could argue that merely writing about the event was my way of grieving, but I'm not sure I believe it. But in the interest of promoting my own saneness, I could probably be convinced.