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El Navegante
safely at anchor in a Socorro Island cove. (Photo by
author)
first night dive, which we planned to do after supper. Even though we
hadn't seen anything that posed a real threat, the fishermen's stories
about the ravenous sharks of Isla Socorro were fresh in our minds.
Supper was over and all signs of daylight were long gone. We
couldn't procrastinate any longer, so slowly we began to get our dive
gear together. We'd decided to dive in two groups of three: while two
divers would work together on the bottom collecting fish, the third
would hover just above them with a loaded bang stick for shark pro-
tection. We were quite nervous. Careful to avoid any shark-attracting
splashes, we slipped quietly into the black water o¤ the swim step. No
sharks were in sight—at least, we saw none in the narrow beam from
our dive lights. So down to the bottom we went.
Tr ying to work e‹ciently and calmly, we hand-netted fish and trans-
ferred them into our plastic bags as quickly as possible so the vibrations
from their struggling didn't sound the dinner bell for hungry predators.
The third diver, riding shotgun above us, kept flashing his light around
looking for sharks. None of us saw any. But all of us heard the weird sound.
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