Читать книгу Into the Abyss. Diving to Adventure in the Liquid World онлайн

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We kicked our fins and moved up the side of the hull, dumping excess air from our ABLJ’s. As we reached the top of the side of the hull, the gunwale, we were at a depth of about 10 metres. Moving over the side of the hull onto the deck, there were a few feet of deck space - before a large open cargo hold, which beckoned me inside. Pushing myself forward from the rim of the hatch I moved out into open water in the middle of the hatch opening.

Exhaling to make myself slightly negatively buoyant, I started to drop down into the hold. I could see a uniformly flat covering of silt beneath me - but couldn’t tell if that was simply the bottom of the hold or a layer of silt covering a small cargo. I wanted to find out what if any cargo this vessel had been carrying.

I continued to drop downwards and soon landed on what turned out to be a flat silty but unyielding Hold bottom. The Hold was disappointingly empty - but as I kicked to move forward, first one small Queenie scallop, a clam shaped shell about three inches across, opened and snapped shut propelling itself upwards from the silt into the water in front of me. It continued to open and close as it made off comically like an outsized pair of false teeth. As it did so, a cloud of perhaps ten or twenty Queenies in turn rose up from the silt in a confusion of opening and closing false teeth as they tried to make good their escape.