The Reckless Ones

I’d never seen water quite that shade of clear-sky blue, and I’d never seen men quite as shifty as the two that stood in front of us on the beach in Negril, Jamaica. One man wore a UC Berkeley t-shirt and the other wore a faded fedora.

One of the men (the ringleader, I assumed), introduced himself as Captain Smiley (!) and the other did not offer a name, so I mentally christened him the ex-con sidekick.

Captain Smiley was smiling. “You wanna snorkel? We take you in a glass-bottom boat. We wait. You snorkel.”

I gave my husband a measured look, but he seemed unconcerned.

“How much?” He asked.

And so the haggling commenced, until we all agreed on $60 for the excursion.

“How far out do we go to get to the reef?” My skin almost itched with suspicion.

Captain Smiley pointed vaguely out to sea.

“About a mile.”

My eyebrows tried to jump off my face.

“A mile?”

In a practiced way, the “captain” worked to put my fears to rest.

“We take care of everything, madam. You look through the glass in the bottom of the boat and then you snorkel.”

It wasn’t a particularly impressive speech, and yet before we knew it, the four of us were chugging along in the boat, headed for the illusive reef. The two men sat at the front of the boat, and we had the rest of it to ourselves, since we were their only customers.

Rob and I took turns looking down through the glass at a predictably sandy sea floor. I spent the time worrying about leaving my expensive camera on the boat while we snorkeled.

Before too long, the two men cut the engine and handed us our gear. Amazingly, we were still in about six feet of water, which was not the crystal blue that we’d seen earlier, but still reasonably clear.

Clumsily, we pulled on flippers, masks, and attached the snorkels to the masks. Ours would be extremely low-tech snorkeling. Too late, I noticed the short ladder that was our gateway to that particular patch of ocean.

So we took off our flippers, made our way down the ladder, and tried to put them back on without drowning.

I kept one eye on my camera, left on a bench on the boat, until it was no longer practical. Rob and I paddled away from the boat, dipping our faces below the surface to see what lived beneath our flailing limbs.

We were supposed to wear life jackets, but the salt content in the water was so high that our bodies stubbornly floated on the surface, and we had a very hard time staying completely under water for even a few seconds. So we dispensed with the life jackets.

As it turned out, drowning could only be accomplished with concerted and sustained effort and, maybe, large rocks tucked into one’s bathing suit.

Looking back at the boat, I gasped as effectively as I could, with a mask strapped to my face. Dropping my voice, I jerked one thumb toward the boat.

“Do you smell that? They are smoking marijuana!”

My husband glanced back.

“Yup.”

A wave knocked me sideways, but I fought my way back.

“If they murder us and feed us to the sharks, no one will ever know what happened to us!”

He continued to tread water.

“True.”

And I was worried about my camera!

He continued, “We might as well get in some snorkeling.”

And with that, he heaved his body downward, fighting the highly salinized water. I, however, would not be so easily diverted from the dire nature of our predicament.

Still, I thought I’d have a quick peep at the reef below, since I was there.

I’d never win any awards for low-tech snorkeling, but I pushed my body below the surface long enough to see, through my foggy mask, the craggy bulk of the dun-colored reef that stretched out in a narrow band on either side.

As expected, small, multi-colored fish darted from puckered rock, just to find a new hiding place six inches over.

Every couple of minutes, I would barely break the surface of the water with my mask and check on the goings on back at the boat–our lifeline back to our lives. Yes, the two men were still laughing uproariously and slapping each other on the back.

It wasn’t easy keeping an eye on them while keeping an eye out for sharks at the same time.

After 40 or so anxiety-filled minutes (for only me, I guess), one of our hosts signaled that we should make our way back to the boat. Rob was reluctant, but I was ready. He had an emergency-room-level sunburn on his back and had taken many blurry photos with his new waterproof camera.

Now all we had to do was make it back to shore in one piece. Once back on the boat, we chugged along, promisingly, for a few minutes, so I started to relax. Captain Smiley and his cohort were having an alarmingly animated conversation, but they were aiming, more or less, for the shore.

But when the beach was almost within reach, we were suddenly "pulled over" by a marine police boat! Captain Smiley looked very nervous. How much marijuana did he have on the boat?? (Marijuana is actually illegal in Jamaica.)

But, ironically, the inspection was more of a "safety" inspection, and Captain Smiley was forced to spend an awfully long time digging out a first aid kit from the 1970s, and a corrosion-covered fire extinguisher that looked like it had been recovered from a shipwreck.

By some miracle, the police determined that those would work fine in an emergency (!), and we passed the inspection!

In another few minutes, we were standing on the beach.

It appeared that we would get away with all our limbs–and my camera! The four of us had agreed, in the beginning, on $60 for the excursion, and yet our hosts were extremely put out when we didn't add a tip. I wondered why we had bothered coming to an agreed price.

As we walked away, I muttered, “That was a little reckless. Anything could have happened to us out there.”

“Well, nothing happened.”

“But something could have.”

“But nothing did. And no one is ever going to call us reckless.”