Swim away slowly when confronted by enemy frogmen
My wife and I are off to Mexico for a week — lucky us — where we plan to do some scuba diving. It has been a year since we last went, so I have been going through the manual to get back up to speed. Contained within are the procedures that make diving statistically safer than riding in a Mexican taxi.
Scuba procedures are fairly intuitive and easily learned, even by Prairie dwellers. What struck me this time going through the manual was what isn’t included. Sure, it tells you what to do if you get a cramp or if your diving mask gets knocked off or if you are approached by marauding sharks. The procedure in that case is to slowly swim away, which seems fairly obvious, except for the slowly part. The manual has no instructions, however, for a diver running low on air whose foot is seized by a giant clam.
This can happen. It was more or less routine on Sea Hunt, a popular TV series when I was a kid. Starring was the late Lloyd Bridges, father of Jeff Bridges, whose first roles, incidentally, were as a child actor on Sea Hunt. It was Lloyd, however, who carried the show. He was cast as Mike Nelson, former navy frogman turned freelance scuba diver. This was a compelling premise in 1958, when Sea Hunt was launched. Modern scuba apparatus then was a recent invention and still highly exotic. Underwater photography was another compelling novelty.
Every week, Mike Nelson would brave the depths to defuse a sunken torpedo, or to rescue children trapped in a tidal cave or to recover vaccine from a shipwreck. Whatever the mission, when Mike’s air supply was all but exhausted, a giant clam often would grab his foot. This was a favourite Sea Hunt plot device. Of the 155 episodes produced, the foot-grabbing clam appeared in about 140. These are the episodes that still haunt me.
Speaking of which, you have to be impressed by Sea Hunt’s gruelling production schedule. They did 38 episodes a year, all of them involving underwater stunts and shot on film with cameras the size of cement mixers. Modern series are not nearly as generous even when they’re shot on dry land. The Big Bang Theory, for instance, produces only 24 episodes a season, 14 fewer than Sea Hunt. Why the difference? Cost, probably. Big Bang’s stars reportedly are getting $1 million an episode. With Sea Hunt, the giant clam was paid exactly nothing and thought itself lucky to have work, while Lloyd Bridges got just a little more than that.
What worries me is that I can’t remember how he persuaded the clam to let go before his air ran out. The dive manual sheds no light on the subject. It only advises against touching marine organisms of any kind in the first place. That’s fine until a giant clam comes at your foot. My plan in that case is to slowly swim away, but backwards.
Something else not covered by the dive manual is what to do when attacked by an underwater speargun army of SPECTRE assassins. That’s what happens in Thunderball to James Bond, played by Sean Connery. He would have been reduced to fish bait but for the timely intervention of a friendly underwater speargun army in contrasting wetsuits that happened to be in the area. Unfortunately, this is not always available to the casual, recreational diver.
When I look in my diving manual index for “underwater speargun army, attack by,” however, there is nothing. Swimming slowly away is not going to get it done. In Thunderball, Bond defends himself with his own spear gun and by cutting through his enemies’ air hoses with a knife. We’ll be diving in a marine national park where spear guns and knives are not allowed. I just hate relying on SPECTRE to follow the rules.