Crocodiles of Guadalcanal
In January 1996, I sat with 11 other scuba divers on the top deck of a 150 foot live aboard, watching the sunset over the mountains of Guadalcanal. As the boat moved away from the shore and headed out to sea the intense heat and humidity of mid-summer began to fade as we sailed into an ocean climate. The cooling breeze changed the dense oppressive conditions of the jungle to one more conducive for a livelier exchange among the divers.
Scuba diving is always the favorite subject of conversation among divers. They have been travelers to another world and their conversations express the wonders of what they have seen. They discuss all the places they have been, the animals and plants they have seen and sometimes tell stories that are quite harrowing. I asked one of the divers how many dives had he done. He said 5000. Another had 3500 and so on. One turned to me and asked “how many dives have you done?”
I said “10.”
“10!" "How long have your been diving?" He asked.
“Six months ago, I went to Hawaii for a break. Having nothing to do, I spent the whole week taking diving classes.” I replied.
“What brought you to the Solomon’s Islands?”
“I wanted to see Guadalcanal. My dad landed on Guadalcanal with the 1st Marine Division in 1942 and spent 6 months of his life here fighting and holding the airport at Henderson Field.”
They were quiet for a few minutes until another asked quietly and almost sentimentally “is your father still alive?"
“No he died in 1986.”
“What do you think he would say if he knew that you came here?"
“What would my father say?”
He’d say “what’s the matter with you? Why in the heck would you go to such a godforsaken place like that for?”
We had been sailing and diving among different islands for a few days when one morning I came up to the deck for the daily dive briefing and saw something that I had not counted on before paying for this voyage. There in the front of some folding chairs was a blackboard. In the upper left hand corner was a drawing depicting our first dive of the day. It was a crude drawing of a cave under the water with the giant snout and teeth of a salt water crocodile sticking out. The dive master announced that our first dive was a journey into the cave to see a salt water crocodile.
The only voice I could hear after that was that of my dad, who late at night would describe to me how the Marines would be dug in along the perimeter of the airfield waiting for the Japanese to attack. His face grimaced as he recounted the screams of the Japanese soldiers and the thrashing of the water by those who were attacked by the crocodiles while trying to cross the river at night. My father was not a man easily intimidated, but the salt water crocodiles of Guadalcanal made him squirm. No one asked me after the briefing “what would your father say if he knew you were going into a crocodiles cave?”
The dive master asked the group who wanted to go. I prayed that no one did as my dive partner was the dive master and where he went, I went. Unfortunately, three divers volunteered. As we motored over to our drop off location, the dive master asked me if I wanted to go into the cave. I casually responded, “no not today, maybe some other time.” He gave me instructions to wait outside the cave for him. Chances are he said; he won’t be in there this late in the morning and, in any case, they would only be a few minutes.
We went over the side of the boat and into the water. Swimming along the reef at 30 feet in the sunlight the coral and fish were a brilliant kaleidoscope of color. The water was clear as glass. The visibility was, at least, a 150 feet and the temperature was 83 degrees. Rays of sunlight beams shot through the water illuminating the coral and fish. The life and color that surrounded us on that reef are what makes the Solomon’s one of the most famous dive locations in the world.
The fish would swim up to your face and look at you through your mask. They looked like they were trying to figure out what kind of fish are you? Sharks would circle at a distance watching every move perhaps wondering the same thing. To them, I was the alien in this world. Was I something to be feared or eaten?
When we reached the cave, the black hole of its opening was like looking into a giant mouth. The crocodiles prey would be taken through that mouth and down the rock throat into the belly of the earth and eaten. Floating before that opening my dive master signaled for me to wait and armed with their flashlights and cameras they disappeared into the darkness of the cave.
Floating with neutral buoyancy in liquid space, I just marveled at the exquisite vista of color that surrounded me. It was so beautiful and serene. The only sound I could hear was that of the expelled air from my regulator. With my arms folded across my chest, I just slowly bobbed up and down blowing bubbles and waited for them when all of a sudden the thought popped into my mind. “What if he is not in there?" "If he is not in there then he is out here.” “Then where in the heck is he?”
I feared that in this entire Pacific Ocean that the crocodile would be close by watching me. A chill covered my body. Realizing that being suspended in water at 30 feet of depth he could upon me from any direction. I wondered what could I do if I saw him? If he did come at me where could I go? I knew into his cave with three other divers was a bad idea. Heading to the surface with my legs dangling waiting for a boat didn’t appeal to me at all.
I turned anxiously around and tried to look in every direction at once. My breathing accelerated as I realized how vulnerable I was floating there alone. My wetsuit was not a suit of armor; it was more like sandwich wrap for a crocodile. A beast so big and powerful like a crocodile would not even bother to unwrap my wetsuit before eating.
My vision was limited to looking only in one direction at any moment; I could only see 10% of my surroundings at any one time. I rotated my head around to see in as many directions as I could. My head bounced like a bobble head doll looking above me, beneath me, behind me and in front of me to see if that 1000 pound reptile was coming at me. My heart rate was high. I felt like a beef carcass hanging in mid space while I waited for my companions to return.
I don’t know how long I was alone before my companions returned. Time is not measured underwater in minutes: it is measured in pounds per square inch of air. Air is time. Without the one, the other ceases. When the dive master signaled me the “are you ok” sign; I lifted my air gauge to show him it was sitting right on the red zone at 500 PSI. I could see the surprise on his face as he saw that somehow I quickly went through a lot of air and had to surface right away. He motioned me up and away I went.
I was filling my orange sausage and blowing my whistle before I even breached the surface. The whirring sound of the little boat to ferry me back to the mother ship was a welcome relief. Back on board one of the divers called out “Hey Bob how was it?” I thought to myself “up here I am Bob. Down there I am just lunch.”
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