Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [31]
Kalama didn’t know it, but the situation was still beyond grim. In his near panic, Doyle had forgotten to give the boat’s name or identifying number in his mayday broadcast. The Coast Guard ignored the call. The light of morning revealed a sight of terrifying desolation. The other boats were gone. The men were tiny, insignificant creatures, treading alone atop a vast ocean.
Kalama thought about his family—his wife, young son, and daughter—wondering if God would ever grant him the privilege of laying eyes on them again. He directed his prayers toward his mother, who had recently passed away. “My mom—I felt she was out there with me,” he continued, his voice breaking. “That mana. That spirit. I felt so at ease. It was sort of, what will be, will be.”
They bobbed alone for perhaps a couple of hours. Then in the far distance, they saw a lone fishing boat. It appeared to be motoring slowly but generally in their direction. It disappeared in the troughs of the steep swells, but when boat and diver were simultaneously borne to a wave’s crest, it would reappear, each time slightly closer. After an hour or so, she was perhaps a mile off. Then, unexpectedly, she veered away. “Our hearts just dropped,” Kalama said.
Kalama and Doyle reached a decision. They would attempt the forty-mile swim to San Clemente Island. The effort itself would offer them some sort of hope—something to focus on. Yet deep down, Kalama knew this was essentially impossible. He had canoe-paddled the brutal twenty miles from the mainland to Catalina Island, and the relentless twenty-six miles of wind and current that separated the Hawaiian islands of Molokai and Oahu. What were the odds of swimming forty miles to San Clemente? But if they continued simply treading water, slowly bleeding heat into the Pacific, their chances were zero.
Then the fishing vessel reappeared to the south. Her captain had chanced to have his radio tuned to Doyle’s channel during the mayday. He recognized the panic in the mariner’s voice and proceeded toward Bishop Rock, where he eventually sighted a small but telling oil slick and, shortly thereafter, a floating hatch cover. He commenced a zigzag transect of the waters. A couple of hours later, he was shocked when he literally stumbled upon two men bobbing in mile-deep water. Their death march had ended just in time for lunch.
A month or so later, Kalama did something that I’ve found an astonishing hallmark of many who’ve nearly died at the Cortes Bank. He simply couldn’t ignore the sirens—and went back.
“After we got saved and came back in, I was able to get on another boat,” Kalama said. “I wanted to dive again at the same spot—because if I’m going to dive again, I wanted to do it where we sank. I went with another fella, Kenny Cohen. When we got out there, we saw that the waves were up. Cortes was breaking—the first time I’d seen it break. It was a good 25 feet, perfect rights. Perfect. I wish I had friends out there with me to go surf. It was just an amazing sight.”
Because of the current and turbulence the swell was bringing in the shallower water, it was impossible to free dive at the usual depth of thirty to thirty-five feet. They dove without scuba tanks down to ninety or a hundred feet, where the currents were somewhat manageable. “All that time, when I came up, I could see the waves breaking just five hundred yards away,” Kalama said. “When we were done that afternoon, we anchored, and wouldn’t you know it, at one or two in the morning, the wind and ocean got rough. I pulled anchor and the ocean was almost washing over the back of the boat. It was the slowest we ever went to San Clemente Island. Kenny and me were just getting pounded left and right. You can’t believe how many Lord’s prayers I said on that trip. After that, I hung it up. I said to myself, I think Akua wants me to stay on land.”
As we spoke, Kalama grew quiet for a moment. He had, it seemed, been granted freedom from the belly of the whale not once, but twice. “You know, I grew up respecting the ocean. I was taught