First Blood - Part 7

Damn, what happened to my air? My thoughts raced over both what caused this and what I should do next?.  How could all the air have leaked out that fast without my noticing?  With no more air I would have to continue on the surface and if the police weren't checking the water, I'd be okay.  Or should I head directly to shore, walk back and hope for no searchers there.   I was about a mile and a half to two miles from my pack and hiking gear and another 2 miles to the car.  I could walk that in less than 2 hours.  It was just about 8 o'clock so I still had lots of time.  It would stay dark until at least 4:30 in the morning.

Doh, I'm such an idiot.  I wasn't out of air.  I just hadn't opened the air valve on the tank.   I reached back to turn the valve knob and Mr. Murphy kicked in again with a sharp, vicious cramp in my right shoulder.  I put my arm back down and wiggled the shoulder.  Damn, it was a bad one.  I should have figured this would be likely to happen from being cold and tired.   I wiggled out of the BC, opened the valve, then struggled back in.  It hurt like hell when I tried to move into position with the dive scooter.

Time for plan B.  Definitely nothing fancy. Just back to basics - an energy boosting snack.  I pulled off my left glove and then pulled an energy gel packet out of the fanny pack and sucked it down.  These normally taste like crap but right now I was like a baby on a teat.  It was pretty amazing how quickly I could feel the sugars kicking in.   While it took the edge off my shoulder cramp, the muscle was tightly knotted.  Still, I could now hold position on the dive scooter.  I dumped some air from the BC, ditched the ditch duffle and resumed scootering.

My scooter battery died before I ran out of air. It was almost 9 o'clock and I was about half a mile and half an hour away.  I still had plenty of time. I could have crawled to my hiking gear with the time I had left.  So it was more a question of what would look more suspicious - me walking on shore in a wet suit and running into someone or being spotted by helicopter snorkeling at night, alone and not using a dive light.

I decided to stay in the water and swim for it.  The exercise would warm me up.  I unstrapped the fanny pack and then ditched the scooter.
I also figured I'd use up my remaining air now and then ditch the tank and BC and snorkel the rest of the way in.  This way the tank and BC would end up in deeper water further from shore.  I sucked the second tank dry about 10 minutes later and dumped it and the BC.

I took a break and had another energy gel.  In retrospect I should have slurped one of these about half an hour after I hit the water.  With more energy, I might not have forgotten to open the air valve and avoided the cramp. Bah. Coulda Woulda Shoulda.   I made it to shore at 10:23.  It was dead quiet all around.  Nothing on shore and I didn't see anything in the air.   I swam back out a couple of hundred feet and ditched my diving mask then came ashore.

I circled around to my shore gear and everything still looked clear.  I hunkered down by my pack, pulled out some energy bars and ate them. 
I pulled off my hood, rinsed off my face, toweled off and put on a hat.  Then I jogged in place to build up some body heat.  If I wasn't such a wuss about the cold, I would have changed out of the wetsuit right away and become the weekend hiker.  I finally stopped fooling around and squirmed out of the wet suit and into dry clothes.  I still had an extend session of the deep shivers and sure enough several days later I would be sick in bed with a head cold.

My next task was to dispose of the wetsuit and fins.  I couldn't just throw them in the ocean.  The wet suit was too buoyant and while the fins would sink, with all that surface area I could see them getting pushed ashore eventually.  I considered burying them, and even coming back weeks later to recover them (I told you I'm a cheap bastard) but I decided to ditch the fins in the water but burn the wetsuit. The tradeoffs never end - do this or that - which branch of the decision tree would lower the odds of my coming under suspicion or leaving traceable evidence?

If a dive mask or swim fins washes up on shore, hey somebody must have dropped them or they fell off a boat -- that happens.  But an entire wetsuit floating ashore, that's kind of odd.  It also gives a fairly good size of the owner and perhaps even some DNA.   And how odd is it if someone finds a wetsuit buried in the ground?  How accidental is that?  That can't be accidental.  It's a sure sign someone was trying to hiding something.

So I sliced up the wetsuit, put the bits in a trash bag, then gathered some driftwood and built a campfire.  Yeah, the fire gives away my position, but I'm just an innocent camper who got cold and has nothing to hide.  Fortunately there was a gentle breeze blowing out to sea so no one on shore would smell burnt rubber.   About  45 minutes later almost everything was gone.  I just needed to pick out the metal remnants when the fire cooled off.   I ate some more food, real food, and I was ready go to sleep.    I hadn't dwelled very much on today's events while I was in the water but my thoughts would catch up with me while I slept and over the next few days.  And I wasn't sure how it would ultimately settle and what I would do next...