Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

‘I suppose we must be related somehow,’ Truman said with a similar lilt, grinning with his large white teeth showing brightly against his dark face, ‘but from way back.’

The equipment was almost fully loaded when Bentley came walking down the beach to join us.

‘I thought I’d come too,’ he said to Martin. ‘Just for the ride.’

Henri clearly wasn’t happy.

‘Fine,’ Martin said. ‘Let’s get going.’

I thought for a moment that Henri wasn’t going to come, so I took her hand and squeezed it. She smiled at me and shrugged her shoulders in acceptance.

‘OK,’ she said.

The dive boat consisted mostly of a single flat platform that ran right through from bow to stern, with the driver position situated in the centre, a bench down each side with dive-tank holders behind, and an overhead awning that provided shade to most of the boat. The bow had been run aground on the sand and Martin, Bentley, Henri and I now climbed a short ladder to get on board. Truman then pushed us off the beach into deeper water.

The trip out was wonderful with the movement of the boat causing a refreshing breeze to blow into our faces, keeping us cool.

From out at sea, I could assess the whole sweep of Seven Mile Beach with its array of hotels and condominiums stretching away into the distance in both directions.

‘Do most people live near the beach?’ I asked Henri.

‘Nowhere is that far away,’ she said, ‘but this is certainly the busiest end. Three-quarters of the whole population live in George Town or West Bay. Most of the eastern half of the island is just deserted mangrove swamp.’

‘Here you are, Jeff,’ Martin said, placing a blue mesh bag full of gear by my feet. ‘All you need is in here. Take the yellow guest tanks. The yellow will make it easier for Truman and me to keep an eye on you.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

All the scuba tanks I had ever used before had been a uniformly boring grey aluminium that came with the dive boat, but here we had eight smart brightly painted ones, two each in white, yellow, red and light blue. I’d heard of personalized number plates, of course, but I’d never come across personalized dive tanks before. The red ones had HENRI painted in large black letters down them; the white had MARTIN , the blue had THERESA , and the yellow, GUEST .

Bentley, it seemed, really was only there for the ride, as he obviously wasn’t planning on getting wet. He hadn’t brought any swimmers with him.

‘Where are we diving?’ Henri asked. ‘I don’t want to go too deep.’

‘The wall first, then Kittiwake after,’ Martin said. ‘It will be good to do Kittiwake without the usual mass of tourists getting in the way. No one else dives on Christmas Day.’

‘What is Kittiwake ?’ I asked him.

‘The USS Kittiwake . It’s a retired naval ship that was deliberately sunk here in 2011 to provide an artificial reef and a dive site.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ I said. I’d never dived on a wreck before. ‘How deep is it?’

‘It sits on the seafloor at about sixty feet. But we’re going to do a wall-dive first. That will be a deeper but a shorter dive.’

Like every diver the world over, I’d heard of the Cayman Wall, that point where the shallow shelf on which the island sits ends and the surrounding deepness begins. It is characterized by an abrupt and almost vertical falling away of the seafloor down into the Cayman Trench, the deepest part of the Caribbean at a depth of over twenty-five thousand feet. But, of course, we would only be exploring the very top of the ‘wall’.

‘I’ll skip the first dive,’ Henri said. ‘It’s too deep for me.’

I watched as Martin and Truman began to pull on a wetsuit each.

‘Do we actually need a wetsuit?’ I asked. ‘I’ve done all my diving in the Red Sea without one.’

‘It may be hot up here in the sunshine,’ Truman said, ‘but it’s still wintertime. The water will be cool a hundred feet down.’

I pulled the wetsuit out of my mesh bag and started to put it on.

‘I must have a photo,’ Henri said, laughing, as I grappled with the black neoprene outfit that was none too big for me. She took my iPhone and snapped away on it as I struggled to pull up the long zip at the back.

‘Very funny,’ I said to her, pulling a face.

I felt like the Michelin Man.

‘It’s Theresa’s,’ Martin said. ‘It’s the largest spare one I could find.’

Even though Theresa was only an inch or so shorter than I, she was considerably less substantial around the waist. But I managed to do it up in the end with some extra help from the giggling Henri.

Next out of the bag came a BC, a buoyancy compensator, a short jacket that has an air bladder between the inner and outer layers, which, when connected to a tank, could be filled with air to make a diver neutrally buoyant, so that he neither floated up nor sank down but remained level in the water as if weightless.

I attached the BC to one of the yellow tanks and connected the regulator to the valve, checking that the pressure in the tank was well above 2,500 pounds per square inch. The pressure gauge, together with a depth indicator, was housed in a console about eight inches long that was attached by a length of high-pressure hose to the tank’s valve.

I next tested the two mouthpieces, breathing through both the primary and the emergency alternate.

All seemed fine.

It had been several years since I had last been diving and I was pleased that at least I hadn’t forgotten how to set up the equipment.

‘You’ll need a weight belt,’ Truman said to me. ‘The air trapped in the neoprene will make you float otherwise.’

‘You’d just bob round on the surface like a cork,’ said Martin, laughing. ‘Ten to twelve pounds should be enough.’

I attached several rectangular lead blocks to a two-inch-wide belt and placed it around my waist. Next I tried on the flippers and the mask.

I was ready.

The note of the engine dropped away as we arrived at the first location and the boat was tied to one of the coloured buoys that mark every dive site in Cayman waters.

‘Have fun,’ Henri said as Carson carried my heavy gear over to the boarding ladder. I had decided that going down the ladder was a preferable means of entry for my still-delicate abdomen to jumping off the side.

I sat on the bottom step, put on the BC, flippers and mask, and slipped gently into the clear blue Caribbean water. Martin and I were acting as dive buddies, hence we would constantly check one another for safety, but, after so long a break from the water, I was pleased that Truman, the dive master, was also coming with us.

As we descended the buoy’s anchor line I equalized the pressure in my ears by frequently holding my nose and blowing air into my sinuses. We arrived at the bottom almost at the point where the sandy floor disappeared over the top of the wall into the abyss.

‘Remember to continually check your depth,’ Truman had told us in the pre-dive briefing. ‘It is far too easy to go over the edge and down too deep. One hundred feet maximum. Bottom time no more than fifteen minutes.’

I reached around for the hose to the console and looked at the depth reading on the indicator. Seventy feet. Theoretically, therefore, I could go some thirty feet down the wall face, but I was happy staying up near the top where there was plenty of bright coral.

Truman had also told us to be aware that we were diving in a designated marine park and that we should not touch or remove anything. But looking was all I was interested in doing anyway.

What a delight it was to be down here exploring a world so different from the one above the surface that it could have easily been on another planet, yet it was, in fact, just a few short yards from life as we knew it.