Nigel Thompson - Pheia

At the end of their practice dives, Kate really did feel she was a better diver. She was more aware of herself, her equipment and those diving with her. Duncan had often pointed out that the greatest threat when diving was usually other divers, especially those with less experience. Either they got in trouble with their equipment or they did something to you, like kicking your mask off as they swam too close over the top of you trying to get to the front of the group.

The other point that Duncan had driven home relentlessly was that at the depths they would be diving, there was no option for a free ascent. He made fun of the PADI procedure: “Whistle all you like. Whistling and little bubbles will get you a hundred feet or so. And then you’re dead.”

Kate had to bring herself back to the present. When she was alone, her mind often went off on random trips. Thinking about Duncan wasn’t doing her any good. Right now she needed to focus on getting up the next few hundred feet and dealing with the arrival of the divers.

But she wasn’t sure what exactly to do. The Pheia was moving up at its usual sluggish rate. She had food and water and a delightful, almost dry mattress to sleep on. Perhaps she should vacuum and make cookies? That gave her an idea, but it would mean another dive. Looking out the portal at the wall she thought: “Nothing else to do.”

In the brilliant sunshine on the surface, the dive team were preparing for a test dive. Morrison and his team were suited up. A large steel cage was attached to the hook on the barge’s recovery crane. Everyone who wasn’t at some sort of duty station was out watching. It made Babin think of the scene in Jaws when Quint is eyeing up the shark cage. “Cage goes in the water, you go in the water. Shark's in the water. Our shark.”

Babin looked through the railings at the sea. No sharks.

She had worked with Morrison to arrange the lifting and support cables into manageable groups. Each assembly had a small float attached to one end. The float wouldn’t be enough to lift the cable, but if the cable was dropped it would mean that it would descend very slowly. Babin hoped it would also make the cables easier to handle in the water. As the diver uncoiled the cable, it’s upper end would float up slightly helping make it obvious which was the ‘up’ end and preventing it from being tangled. Morrison had liked the idea, and Babin got the idea that he was actually impressed. It seemed to her that he mostly had to figure things out for himself and wasn’t used to getting much real help. Or maybe she just fancied him? Hard to tell. She watched him work with the other two divers to move the cables to the cage and load them onto hooks they had welded onto the outside. Each cable was then secured with a cable tie.

Babin walked over to Morrison. “You do have cutters don’t you?”

Morrison smiled at her and without breaking eye contact reached down with one hand and produced a set of large cutters attached by a short line to his gear.

“Just checking.” Babin smiled too. “I’d hate for you to get down there and not be able to get them off the hooks.

Morrison put the cutters back in their pocket. “And if those get lost I have this. He produced a huge dive knife. Not one of the dinky modern dive knives with a square tip that could be used to cut cheese providing it was pretty mild. This was a knife right out of the Sea Hunt era. He took a step back and waved it around like a sword.

“Where the hell did you get that?”

“A former Marine buddy of mine has a small business that makes them.” He put the knife back in its sheath on his leg and pulled the retaining strap back over the handle, then went back to checking out the lift cage.

When the divers were satisfied that they had all the gear stowed and their communications were working, they stepped into the cage.

Morrison gave the other two an OK and they responded with their own. Then he gave the crane operator the ‘go up’ signal and the cage lifted off the deck rotating slowly as the tension in the cable produced some torque. When the cage was about six feet up, the crane operator swung it out over the water.

Morrison checked the other divers again, and gave the crane operator the go down signal.

Babin watched the cage drop slowly into the water. The big wire spool on the hoist paid out the steel line for a long time. She tried to imagine what that felt like for the divers. They had no control over the descent. They just had to stand there and wait.

The test dive was to 150 feet. Just below the sport dive limit.

When the cage stopped descending, all three divers checked the depth and all their gauges. They had switched from air to trimix for this dive. On the rescue dive they would switch again to hydrox but much deeper than they were now.

Morrison adjusted his buoyancy so he was just floating and waited for the others to do the same.

The divers spent the next hour removing the cables, uncoiling them and checking that the floats performed as expected. Morrison was impressed that they worked exactly as Babin had said they would. He smiled to himself. This was much better than some of the commercial operations he’d worked where the equipment was often old, unreliable and not suited to the job; a side effect of trying to keep costs down. It seemed to him that Miss Babin knew her business.

They practiced attaching the cables to the dive cage. It wasn’t anything like the size of the Pheia but it allowed them to verify all the pieces worked in the water. They had tried it out on the ship twice but Morrison knew from experience that what worked on the surface sometimes threw you a curve in the water.

When they had tried out all the adjusters, they unhooked the cables, coiled them back up and put them back on the hooks on the outside of the cage in the original positions. Each one received a large cable tie to hold it in place.

There had been very little chatter over the comm system on the dive, and Morrison was pleased with that. His team knew what to do and went about it with the minimum of fuss. When they were all back in the cage he said, “Good job,” over the comms circuit and gave them a big OK.

“Morrison to surface. We are ready to ascend.”

The team listened to the response from the surface then felt the cage start on its way back up.

“Perfect.” Morrison thought. “If that’s how it goes, this will be a piece of cake.”

Kate was back in the crew quarters. She had decided to collect any personal items she could find and put them in one place. She thought that the relatives and friends of the crew might like that, and she wasn’t at all sure that the items would be preserved when the Pheia was being shipped back home. She had a large box of ziplock bags and a big plastic storage bin.

She felt bad rummaging around in the lockers but this time she had a purpose and soon left the bad feeling behind.

It was a little sad just how few items she found. Some of the crew had brought a book to read or photograph to stick on the wall but most of them seemed to have brought nothing other than clothes. If it wasn’t for the clothes, it would be hard to find any evidence of the crew at all.

Kate pulled down a photograph of an old couple from one of the bunks and tried to remember who had been sleeping there. She thought it might have been Kayla Miller, the chef. Perhaps these were her parents? She carefully pulled off the pieces of tape from the corners and dropped the photo into a bag, which she sucked the air from as she sealed it. The bag joined to small collection of items in the bin.

Kate looked at the storage bin. It was such a pathetically small collection of items. She wondered briefly if she should forget the idea. If she could only find items for one or two of the crew, how would the other relatives feel? She imagined the questions: “Surely my son had a photograph of his girlfriend?” She didn’t want any questions. It was going to be hard enough facing the crew on the surface barge, let alone relatives and friends of the dead.