大象传媒

The nets

Several weeks after the accident the surgeon, conducting one of the regular examinations of my eardrums, said that perhaps I might try a dive.
'How deep may I go, Sir?'
'Well, that's difficult to say. The important thing is not to strain it again. So provided you don't get the internal and external pressures out of balance, I leave it to you. But don鈥檛 overdo it, or there'll be another period of two or three weeks to strengthen the membranes again.'
Overjoyed, I reported to the well-deck for diving, and was kitted up in the suit and put on oxygen. It felt good to breathe the sweet, slightly powdery gas from the breathing bag once more. In no time I had jumped off the pontoon, I and was venting out the air through the valve at the top of my head piece. At the rope I steadied myself, to make sure I didn't overstrain my eardrums, and checked that I could clear my ears against the noseclip. Then I began moving down, hand over hand.

The pontoon disappeared upwards, and from below I saw its flotation drums being lightly slapped by the small waves around the ship. To my left, the chariots bucked about, jostling each other; it was a blustery morning. At ten feet down I stopped, to take stock. I had already cleared against the pressure a couple of times. There was a slight tingling in my ears, as if something was being stretched; but no real discomfort. I went down another six feet, and cleared. The same sensation. Ten feet further, without discomfort. And so I went on, carefully equalising pressure as I descended the shot rope till the water round me had turned dark I green. I paused again; my eardrums gave me no pain. So I completed the last few feet to the bottom: seventy feet. All well. Cautiously, I began the ascent. For now the pressure from inside the eustachian tubes had to escape, and do so without bursting the drums from within. Visibility began to return as I moved hand over hand up the rope, venting out from my bag to stop me gaining too much buoyancy. I could feel the equalising happening inside my head, and the eardrums clicked and crackled in the familiar way; still tingling, but not hurting. As I broke surface, Pod was there, holding the line.
'All right, Lefty?' he asked with a smile.
I raised both thumbs in emphatic affirmation.
'Right, come inboard then. And off to see the medic.'
As Pod was helping off with the bag and out of my suit, I was excitedly telling him how well it had gone, like a child who has been ill and is finally permitted to go out again to play.
The medic took a careful look.
'Very slight signs of strain, but not serious. You can recommence training, provided you avoid sudden changes of depth for a week or so. But the singing in your ears will continue, at least for some time.' He was right. It is still there, to this day, more in the right ear than in the left.

The following day Pearcy and I got into our diving gear, and carried out the same exercise as had led to the disastrous dive when the buoy hooked round the tail of the chariot. This time we checked at every turn, and Pearcy often at other times too, to make doubly sure that the tow rope didn't take a turn round us, or foul the screw. The weather was a good deal rougher, and that made it quite hard to proceed with visors just breaking the surface, for the waves slapped sharply against the glass, and twisted out heads this way and that, all according to the angle of impact. But we managed. Underwater it was quite calm, so the runs from skiff to shore and back went off without a hitch, and we were signalled back when the whole exercise was fully accomplished.

Going through the net

Now it was a matter of getting as much training in as quickly as possible. First we had to practise on the anti-submarine nets. These were made of one-inch thick wire held together by riveted clamps in a diamond pattern, each length of wire between clamps being about three feet. This made a hole just too small to manhandle a chariot through, owing to the shape of the shield. So we had to practise cutting the wire, using pressure cutters powered by compressed air held in a steel canister aft of the Number Two. My job was to steer the chariot underwater - fifteen feet was a favourite depth - into the net, and hold her there, either by running the motor at slow speed, or if the tide was running in the other direction by holding on as the chariot lay alongside the net.
At the same time Pearcy had to get off the chariot, take out the cutter and the pressure hose by which it was attached, and make his way forward, hauling himself along with his free hand, until he reached the net. He then had to choose the right strands of wire to cut, according to where and how the chariot was lying, fasten the jaws of the cutter on it, turn on the pressure, and let the blade crunch its way through. To keep himself in place he had to use his legs, crossing them round a lower strand of wire. The moment the wire parted, the chariot would begin moving through the wider gap. Then I had to keep the speed down, while Pearcy made sure he wasn't left hanging on to the net; he had to grab some part of the chariot with one hand, while stowing away the cutter and its hose with the other. If however the chariot was lying alongside the net and not nuzzling into it, we would both have to manoeuvre it round and through; then the cutter could be replaced first and at leisure, rather than all at the same time as the chariot was sliding through the gap.

When we actually came to the net for the morning's practice, we found it was so full of holes from previous cutting that I couldn't find a solid bit to nuzzle against. We simply rode straight through an enormous hole about twenty feet wide. So I turned at once, and went back through the same opening, picking out where to go for next time round. The only firm bits left were much deeper down, at about twenty-five feet. I knew this wouldn't suit the skiff, for the trainer wanted to have sight of us working as we cut and manoeuvered our way through. But at levels closer to the surface all that was left were the few remaining strands attached to the buoys, from which the whole weight of the net suspended. There were no diamond shapes there left to cut, other than beside the buoys themselves, and to work at net-cutting three feet below the surface seemed ridiculous.

So I swung round and aimed deeper, settling the nose of the chariot against a diamond around which all the other strands were intact. The tide was ebbing; hence with the motor at slow, the chariot held steady. I felt the chariot buck as Pearcy hauled himself along with powerful arm movements, and in a moment I saw he had wrapped his legs round the right strand and was setting the jaws of the cutter on a strand under strain from the chariot motor. I saw the water around the jaws discolour, as elements in the wire powdered under the fierce strength of the cutter. Then the wire gave, Pearcy was hastening to lever off the cutter, and grabbing the bar aft of the main tank as I glided through. I heard the door slam open as Pearcy stowed the cutter away, and then he was aboard, for he had thumped my shoulder with the pre-arranged signal. I glanced astern to make sure, and saw his left hand gathering up the remaining coils of the pressure hose as we glided forwards, and the net disappeared in the green gloom behind us.

We surfaced and signalled OK to the skiff, then moved away a hundred yards to make our approach to the nets with the current. This time I knew I would have to keep down deep, and we hit the net at some speed not far from where we had made the previous cut, then were swept alongside. This time, after Pearcy had made the cut, we both had to manhandle the chariot through. Both of us were dismounted, and I controlled motor speed and rudder and hydroplanes with one hand while swinging against the nets with the other. Pearcy was doing most of the work, however, pushing and kicking to get the chariot at sixty degrees to the net, so as to allow the nose to engage in the opening he had created. By the time we finally slipped through, we were drawing heavily on the oxygen in our breathing bags.

To save time, they had asked us to do the other net exercises on the same morning. So I took the jeep round and approached the nets from a hundred yards away as before, at about twenty feet below. As soon as I saw the line of buoys, I picked out a wire between two of them that seemed to sag a bit deeper than the others, and pointed the jeep up at the space between the buoys, revving up to top speed. We broke surface, lifted our feet up high, and with a scraping and clanking scratched our way across the wire, tipped the nose down, and slithered down over the other side, Pearcy helping us along by taking purchase on the two buoys, which had closed together the jeep鈥檚 weight on the joining wire. Twice more we had to leap the wire in this way; there were only a few places where it could be done, where the buoys were in fact taking the weight of the net directly on one of the few remaining strands connecting the buoys with the rest of the net. Each time we leapt I had to act quickly to ensure that we didn't go down too quickly on the far side, for fear of damaging my ears again, but I was greatly encouraged by the response of the drums to changes of pressure.

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