Dolphin Island - Arthur C. Clarke [35]
Mick told a hair-raising tale of sitting on this same board while a tiger shark prowled around, trying to take a bite out of a thirty-pound barracuda he'd shot and foolishly left dangling in the water. "If you want to live a long time on the Great Barrier Reef," he said, "get your speared fish out of the sea as quickly as you can. Australian sharks are the meanest in the world—they grab three or four divers every year."
That was nice to know; Johnny wondered how long it would take a shark to chew through the two inches of foam-and-Fiberglas in Mick's board, if it really tried…
But with Susie and Sputnik as escorts, there was no danger from sharks; indeed, they hardly ever saw one. The presence of the two dolphins gave them a wonderful sense of security, such as no diver in the open sea could ever have felt before. Sometimes Susie and Sputnik were joined by Einar and Peggy, and once a school of at least fifty dolphins accompanied them on one of their swims. This was too much of a good thing, for the water was so crowded that visibility was almost zero; but Johnny could not bring himself to hurt their feelings by pressing the GO button.
He had swum often enough in the shallow pools on the great coral plateau around the island, but to dive off the reefs outer edge was a much more awe-inspiring experience.
The water was sometimes so clear that Johnny felt he was floating in mid-air, with no means of support. He could look down and see absolutely nothing between himself and a jagged coral landscape forty feet below, and he had to keep reminding himself that it was impossible to fall.
In some areas the great fringing reef around the island ended sharply in an almost vertical wall of coral. It was fascinating to sink slowly down the face of this wall, surprising the gorgeously colored fish that lived in its cracks and recesses. At the end of a dive, Johnny would try to identify the most striking of the reef butterflies in the Institute's reference books, but he usually found that they had no popular names, only unpronounceable Latin ones. Almost everywhere one might run into isolated boulders and pinnacles, rising suddenly out of the sea bed and reaching almost to the surface.
Mick called these "bommies," and sometimes they reminded Johnny of the carved rock formations in the Grand Canyon. These, however, had not been shaped by the forces of erosion; they had grown into their present forms, for they were the accumulated skeletons of countless coral animals. Only the thin surface was now alive, over a massive core of dead limestone weighing many tons, and ten or twenty feet high. When the underwater visibility was poor, as was sometimes the case after a storm or rain shower, it was startling to come across one of these stone monsters looming suddenly out of the mist.
Many of them were riddled with caves, and these caves were always inhabited; it was not a good idea to enter them until you had discovered who was at home. It might be a moray eel, constantly snapping his hideous jaws; it might be a family of friendly but dangerous scorpion fish, waving their poison-tipped spines like a bundle of turkey feathers; and if the cave was a large one, it would usually be a rock cod, or grouper.
Some of these were much bigger than Johnny, but they were quite harmless and backed nervously away when he approached them.
In a surprisingly short time he grew to recognize individual fish and to know where to find them. The groupers never strayed far from their own particular caves, and Johnny soon began to look on some of them as personal friends. One scarred veteran had a fishhook embedded in his lower lip, with a piece of line still hanging from it. Despite his unfortunate experience with mankind, he was not unfriendly and even allowed Johnny to come close enough to stroke him.
The groupers, the morays, the scorpion fish—these were the permanent residents of the submarine landscape