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

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I stared fixedly at my boat, which had now started going round in circles, seemingly flat out. It was going so fast that it was bouncing off small waves almost to the point of getting airborne.

I watched, as the boat seemed to come round in a full circle and start coming towards me. As it came to its closest point I could clearly see that the boat was empty. The tiller was hard over – which was what was causing it to go round in circles. The throttle on my Johnston 35hp outboard stayed open at the point you throttled up to – it was intended to do that to avoid having to hold the throttle open on long journeys the whole time.

As the boat came past me, there was at first a feeling of disbelief – denial even – that this was really happening to me. As the boat bounced and sped past me I suddenly saw Derek in the water, head up and gesticulating at me. I couldn’t hear his cries for the noise of the outboard.

We started swimming over towards each other. In my full wet suit with wet suit boots on, it was hard to make any way at all on my front. I flopped over on my back and sculled over to him. As I did so I looked towards the distant shore – we were an awful long way offshore and I felt that there was no way I could swim it in the restrictive 7mm wet suit.