Cascading Colors NSFW

I usually go out on Friday nights, but tonight I’ve decided to shut myself in my bedroom to type down the most horrifying memories I have. I guess I feel that if I lay out everything that went down in a tangible way, like in a way I can step back and look over abstractly, that it may give me closure. Hopefully writing down this story will help me work towards reaching normality in my life again…I haven’t had a full nights sleep in what feels like forever. I also hope that by reading this story others may be able to learn from my past mistakes, so what happened to me won’t happen again. I know this story seems too crazy to be true, but please believe me when I say that what happened to me was one hundred percent real. It has taken every fiber of my being, and a fuck ton of alcohol, for me to force myself to write all of this down.

I love to scuba dive. It’s safe to say that it’s my passion in life. Some people have a particular academic subject, others have sports or the arts, while all I need is my gear and some time to kill so I can dive and explore the reefs that sit right off the coast of where I live. I have found in my experience as a diver that some of the most beautiful diving spots to visit are actually manmade, many being old naval buoys or shipwrecks that the ocean has reclaimed. I especially like these artificial reefs because they allow me and my diving mates to explore parts of the ocean that would otherwise be totally void of anything substantial given the fact that many of these mini ecosystems float on top of miles of open ocean. It was at one of these artificial reefs, hanging over an ocean drop-off thousands of feet deep, that my story takes place. Recently, I officially wrapped up my sophomore year at college so after moving out my life long friend and roommate, Dave, and I decided to go diving to celebrate. Dave and I grew up in the same small beach town so after moving out we drove back to our respective homes and met up at the local marina where we took my Dad’s boat out to sea.

We decided to go to an old naval buoy turned reef that floats about ten miles directly off the coast from where we live. Although neither of us had ever been to the buoy (it was recommended to me by another diving buddy of mine) Dave and I were quite familiar with the area and had no trouble following our friend’s instructions to the dive spot. The water was too deep to drop an anchor so we decided to tether my dad’s boat to the buoy, giving the boat about 20 yards of slack as to avoid a collision. Dave and I were giddy at this point while putting on our gear, it had been forever since the last time we could go out diving because of finals week and all we could talk about was diving in. Finally, at around one in the afternoon, Dave let down the ladder at the back of the boat, we put on our respirators, and dove in.

The first thing I noticed after entering the ocean was how clear the water was, visibility must have been more than a hundred feet. Despite the clarity of the water there was no bottom in sight, just a blue abyss underneath me that seemed to go down forever. This was scary, yes, but it was something to be expected given how far out we were. I used get scared of not being able to see the bottom of where I was diving, but with experience (Dave and I had done dives at a dozen or so buoys similar to this one in the past) it really doesn’t matter, you forget about the depth after a while and tend to fixate on the reef you’re at instead. The second thing I noticed was that this particular buoy, which was about twelve feet tall and ten feet in diameter, was a beacon for life the likes of which I had never seen before in the open ocean.

Barnacles and algae completely covered the underside of the buoy, which provided cover for the hundreds of small fish that would hide in their many crevices. Dozens of larger fish also circumnavigated the buoy, with some looking to hunt the smaller fish and others looking to eat the local algae. These larger fish included game fish like bonitas and mahi mahi, along with schools of common reef fish like triggerfish and tangs. I personally found the triggerfish to be the most beautiful because of the wide array of colors they can have, and because they often swim in schools, which makes for some really beautiful photos. Dave and I really could not have asked for better weather or ocean conditions that day, there wasn’t a cloud in sight and the water was warm and placid with almost no current. The combination of the environment and the beauty of the fish created, for me at least, a corner of the ocean so scenic that at that moment I felt as if I were in a dream.

I immediately descended about twenty feet below the surface, pulled out my underwater camera and started snapping photos of the buoy and its sea life from varying vantage points. I looked over and saw Dave doing the same with his camera on the far side of the buoy. And that’s what he and I did for the next thirty minutes or so, taking photos and swimming around before going back onto the boat. While back on the boat Dave and I shared our photos, mostly talking about which ones were worth posting online or not, and discussed where we should dive next. We eventually agreed on diving at a shipwreck reef we had been to a few times in the past before heading back to the marina. I was about to take off my flippers to start up the boat when Dave grabbed me by the shoulder.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Let’s go for one more dive, we drove all the way out here we might as well get our money’s worth. I’d really like to get a shot from underneath with the buoy blocking the sun. That’d look dope.” I definitely agreed on the amount of dopage that photo would be (I wanted to get one myself), and we still had a few more hours to kill before having to return to the marina, so we put our headgear back on and jumped back into the sea for one final snapshot. Dave quickly dove downward, and positioned himself directly below the buoy in an attempt to find his perfect angle. At the time I was only about ten feet below the surface, and was about to follow Dave when a flash of white in the bottom corner of my visual field caught my eye. I quickly looked around, saw nothing and dismissed the flash as sunlight reflecting off of the scales of one of the larger game fish when I realized something. I hadn’t noticed it at first but most of the big game fish, like the bonita’s and mahi-mahi that I had seen the first time I dove down, were now gone…

“What the fuck.” I thought.

I could’ve sworn they were there only moments earlier. Dave and I couldn’t have been up on the boat looking at pictures for more than five minutes... I looked around once more to find that the only fish left were small and seemed to be hugging the sides of the buoy, circling the floating mass in dense schools along a tight circular path. The atmosphere didn’t feel right anymore, the spectacle of life that surrounded the buoy only minutes ago had dissolved without warning. The buoy now looked skinny, as if it were malnourished. I was about to signal Dave for us to surface when I saw another flash of white. This time when looking around I was able to follow the flash to a fin, and it was at this point that I realized those flashes of light weren’t from the scale of any game fish. They came from sunlight reflecting off of the dorsal fin of a shark.

I must not have noticed the shark before because it was farther away at the time of the first flash, but now it was closer, circling the buoy at a depth of around twenty yards. The shark must have been around twelve feet long, though in the water it looked a hell of a lot bigger. It had a slender body with long pectoral fins with splotched white tips that propelled the fish through the water eerily. Every time a ray of sunlight hit the shark the white splotches on its different fins would flash randomly, like a strobe light. Although I was nervous at the sight of the shark I wasn’t alarmed, after all this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Anyone who dives half as much as I have has had multiple run-ins with sharks, it’s just part of the hobby. Most of the time they get disinterested, or get scared by the bubbles you make every time you breathe.

It wasn’t until I spent more time looking at the shark that I became alarmed. Upon closer inspection I quickly realized that this particular shark…was different... It wasn’t just slender; it looked like it hadn’t eaten in a long time, like it was starving. It had a hook hanging out of its mouth and a deep gash in one of its fins forcing it to swim with an awkward gait, like it was limping while gliding through the water. My memory instantly flooded with stories I had heard in the past about sharks or other large predators becoming hurt by fishing nets and ending up attacking people simply out of necessity, because people are easy targets in the water. Not to mention the fact that it was a fucking white-tip.

Oceanic White-Tips, or white-tips as divers call them, are open ocean sharks that rarely encounter humans because they avoid the coasts. As a result they don’t attack people in numbers alike to say Bull or Tiger sharks, because there are less people fucking around in the open ocean than right off of beaches. Despite this they have a reputation for being opportunistic hunters with surprising intelligence and aggression, and are known for systematically picking off survivors from ship or plane wrecks. I’ve been around them before without any trouble, which is why I wasn’t super worried at first, but the fact that this particular fish was hurt and also a part of a notoriously aggressive species of shark set off too many red flags for me to stay complacent.
I knew we needed to get out of the water ASAP.

I tried to signal Dave again but he was still below the buoy, looking up and taking pictures of whatever fish were left with his camera. He had no idea that there was a shark in the water. I waved my arms trying to get his attention when I noticed that the shark had vanished. I started looking around frantically in all directions for the shark but I couldn’t see anything… then I saw it. The shark had abandoned its circular scheme and descended directly below Dave, adjusted its position and began rising up towards him at a startling pace. It must have known that I saw it but Dave hadn’t, and decided an ambush was its best bet. I swam towards him to warn him to get out of the sharks way but the fucking fish was too fast. All I could do was watch in horror. In mere seconds it was upon him, ramming at full speed into Dave, landing a blow in-between his side and his air tank.

By this point I was only ten yards or so from Dave, he looked to be okay, but he was pretty obviously in shock. Although the shark had probably not broken his back because of his air tank he looked too stunned to move. He dropped his camera, which sunk like a rock to the ocean bottom, and began to flail about with his hands over his head and his legs kicking wildly. I think he was trying to get to the surface…but he didn’t get very far. I was only twenty feet away from him when the shark circled back around. Its eyes rolled back white, its mouth opened, it lunged forward and in one fluid motion its pearly teeth sunk into Dave’s right thigh just above the knee. The whole motion of slamming into Dave, turning around and biting into him couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds…but I saw it in slow motion. The whole thing unfolded in front of me in what felt like minutes.

I arrived seconds later and started hitting the shark as hard as I could, aiming for its gills and eyes. Dave was a big guy and a fighter so he started doing the same, kicking the shark wildly with his free leg. The shark responded to the double team by letting go only to bite into Dave’s other leg. I could hear Dave screaming through the water as the shark started thrashing its head back and forth. It ripped into Dave with such force that in mere moments I saw bone. My once dreamy environment had become a nightmare, an echo chamber of screams and flesh ripping only barely muted by the seawater, which at the time looked more like grenadine. I didn’t know what else to do than to continue punching the shark. It responded by head-butting me, Dave’s leg still in mouth, hard enough to send me spinning backwards. For a starving fish it sure was fucking strong. After the few seconds it took to reorient myself I started making my way back towards Dave and the shark, but by this time the fucking fish had repositioned itself again. The shark was still holding on to one of Dave’s thighs but now in a downward motion. Dave was still fighting but he seemed to have lost the use of both of his legs, all he could do was flail his arms about helplessly as the shark began to drag him downward.

I lunged forward and was able to get a hold of both of Dave’s arms, expecting the shark to stop dragging us down on account of the extra weight. It didn’t. By this point blood was gushing out of both of Dave’s legs, like in the climax of some horror movie. At least one, if not both, of his femoral arteries must have been cut. I looked into Dave eyes, his face was pale and his normally calm eyes were wide and glossy. I knew he was dying. I knew that he was mere minutes, if not seconds, from bleeding out. But I didn’t know what to do…the shark was so strong, and relentless. All I could think about was trying to get it to let Dave go.

The shark continued dragging the two of us at a downward angle. A couple of times I tried to grab at the shark’s gills but Dave had a monster grip on both of my hands…his eyes never straying from mine. Blood was still billowing out of Dave’s legs in long, black streaks, and it was at this point I realized how far down into the abyss of the open ocean we actually were. I was once told that blood begins to look black at depths of more than one hundred feet, as opposed to its crimson red color in the sunlight zone near the surface. The thing about color in the ocean is that the deeper you venture, the less sunlight penetrates and the darker the environment becomes. As a result the different layers of the ocean provide a cascade of colors that to many might seem beautiful, but to me on this particular day revealed the dire extent of my situation. The ocean starts off at that picturesque turquoise blue you see in pictures, what scientists call the sunlight zone. From there the ocean becomes an increasingly dark shade of blue and violet in an area dubbed the twilight zone, which all lead to the crushing blackness of the abyss.

The shark attacked in turquoise; now we found ourselves approaching the twilight zone of the open ocean, with violet water surrounding us. I looked upward and could barely see the sun, my Dad’s boat looked like a tiny dot in the sky. We continued diving deeper and deeper, the shark never letting up on its goal of taking Dave wherever it was it wanted to eat him. After what felt like hours I looked at my depth gauge; we were over three hundred feet below the surface. Scuba diving safely means never going below a hundred feet, which meant that at any moment I could die from the water pressure. It was here that I was faced with a decision, stay with Dave and meet a watery grave alongside him…or let go.

I looked down at his mask. He was still looking at me with this wild gaze in his eyes…I could tell that he knew what I was thinking. He started shaking his head, eyes still locked on mine, and tightened his grip, which by this point was a lot weaker due to all of the blood loss. I knew he was telling me to not let go but I didn’t have a choice…I had made my decision. I pried off his hands and just…let go. I had to. I let go and just stayed in place in that violet hell. I watched the shark continue to drag Dave downward, with Dave looking up at me all the while, until he and the shark eventually disappeared completely into the gloom. I rose very slowly back to the surface to avoid getting the bends and made it back on the boat. I was strangely calm, I think because of the shock, and I looked at my phone to see how long I had been down there. The whole experience, the fucking nightmarish experience of being dragged down into the bowels of the ocean by a fucking shark and losing my best friend to the abyss took just over fifteen minutes. Fifteen fucking minutes…was all that took to turn my life completely upside-down.

The rest of the story is what you’d expect. I drove my dad’s boat back to the marina, called the police and told them what happened, and had my parents pick me up. They looked for Dave’s body around the buoy and of course didn’t find anything…I was with Dave’s parents when they called off the search. The funeral was last week, which was the first time I cried since the attack. And just like that everything was done, Dave had been metaphorically put into the ground and now I am just stuck here supposed to continue on with my life like I had before I watched him die. The hardest part of life since his death has been trying to sleep. I can’t get his eyes out of my head…or the eyes of that fucking shark. I can’t sleep because I usually see Dave’s glossy, frightened eyes or the white eyes of that white tip every time I close mine, which keeps me in a constant state of either fear or guilt.

It’s my fault. I keep thinking to myself if I had been able to pull him free from the shark’s grasp or had been able to fight the shark off at the beginning of the attack, or even if I had been able to get his attention before the shark hit him in the first place then maybe he’d still be here today. I wish the shark had gone after me. Dave was bigger and stronger than me; maybe if that desperate shark had grabbed me he would’ve been able to fight it off. He was too weak to fight back after being rammed in the initial attack but maybe if it were me we both could’ve gotten out alive… I don’t know if I’ll ever dive again, but if I do, I won’t make the same mistakes I made in the past. I’ll never dive with only one buddy and I sure as hell will never go diving without some sort of weapon like a knife or a bangstick.

If you ever decide to dive over a major ocean drop-off, beware of the cascading layers of color that lie beneath you, and of the creatures lurking because if they take you into that black abyss, that iridescent gloom, like Dave was, you’ll never be seen again.