[ChristianG]

Date: 26/10/1992 - please note that, it wasn't yesterday
Time: about 1900 - in other words at night
Wreck: Hoyo Maru - the "upside down" wreck
Location: Chuuk (Truk) Lagoon
Surface to surface time: 37 minutes (includes the "bounce")
Maximum depth: 29.7 metres
Equipment: Skinsuit, 88 cu ft ali tank, conventional pony, appropriate regs, Nikonos V camera and strobe. Itty bitty baby dive light attached to mask strap. No BCD, no weight belt, no spares.

We jumped off the tender at the fattest, and shallowest, part of the wreck (pretty well the middle then) and descended down the side. The guide then took the group underneath the wreck and a little way along I saw a hole and decided to investigate. By "investigate" I thought that I had only entered partway with my legs still extending out of the hole.

It was a chamber of some sort, nothing of particular interest in it, and so I backed up - to bump into something. Ooops.

I looked around and the hole through which I had entered was nowhere to be seen, nor were the lights of the rest of the group.

I stopped and a very cold feeling enveloped me. Dread was another one amongst many. I thought that maybe I should turn off my torch to see if there were lights elsewhere, but what if it didn't turn on again? I turned it off - blackness as I've never seen it before. I turned it back on and thought, OK, what next?

Understand that during all this I was constantly fighting the ogre of PAAANIC!!!

I looked around, and reflected on the fact that I at least had a pony (big deal in retrospect but it was consoling at the time) and then I saw some measly gorgonians at the other end of the chamber. If there were gorgonians there, there was light there so I resolved to go there, a "push" of some 15 metres.

I made it but, no hole that I could see. But there was another bunch of growth that I could see and eventually using the same method each time I found an exit right beside the twin screws of the ship.

Could I have navigated back the way I went? I like to think that I'm pretty good at navigation - but in this case certainly not. All I did do was ensure that I wasn't going either deeper or more shallow. 29 metres is pretty well ingrained into my memory, to this day.

I'd travelled halfway through the innards of the length of the ship to get there. No, you absolutely cannot imagine my feelings of relief, elation, what have you.

I then went up the spine and found the anchor to the tender (about 7 metres). I looked at myself and decided to descend again, exactly along the line I'd taken the first time, on the basis that if I now surfaced chances were that I would never dive again and that was something that I could not contemplate, still can't for that matter.

No, it's not written in a bignoting style. I did something wrong, very wrong and I've written it as a salutary lesson for others.

My first problem in those days? OVERCONFIDENCE!