“Steve, Datu is coming back, but there’s nobody else with him,” I reported. The Filipino crewman had taken the aluminum skiff, called a panga in this ocean, around the point from the yacht’s anchorage to search for the missing scuba diver.
“Captain, I spotted this rolling in the surf,” Datu said, handing Steve some camera equipment. Datu revved the outboard and rooster-tailed back to resume the search.
“It’s full of water,” Steve observed glumly. “Here, Ginny, what’s this all about?”
I brought the gear to the rinse tank to empty the seawater from the housing. “The camera is ruined, of course,” I replied. I know from my own experience how easy it is to flood underwater cameras. Just a hair caught in the o-ring causes the seal to fail. A moment’s inattention while closing the camera into the housing would ruin thousands of dollars of camera equipment and spoil an expensive dive vacation. “But it’s Brett’s gear. He’s shooting the Nikon D3. See, it’s set up for wide angle. The strobes are probably OK.”
“He’s been gone too long,” Steve groaned. “Eight passengers, fifteen crew, and nobody can say for sure when he left the boat.” The yacht had been anchored all day, so the guests could dive as often as they liked, returning periodically to allow the crew to refill their air tanks. The guests ate, rested and changed camera batteries during the surface interval. “Well, you’re the photo pro. See what you can figure out. I’m going to radio that fishing boat again. Why don’t they answer? You’d think if they did pick up a diver, they would have brought him back here. They didn’t even visit to sell us fish.”
I turned the plastic housing over and saw a hairline crack. “That’s where it flooded. When would that have happened? If he’d dropped it on the deck, we’d know all about it by now.”
I brought Brett’s ruined camera to my cabin, where I extracted the media card, a seven-gigabyte CF unit. It didn’t look wet. I touched my tongue to the card’s surface: no salt. Maybe it’s readable. I inserted the card into the media reader cabled to my laptop computer.
The media reader blinked, and Adobe Bridge came up, revealing, one by one, the images Brett had recorded. The first image was of the camera table; the second image the inside of the rinse tank. Brett had tested the camera before sealing it into the housing, and again after sealing it. A careful photographer’s standard procedure, checking out that the equipment is properly connected before the dive. Next, he had recorded fifteen images of the pink and yellow soft coral abundant on the drop-off beyond the anchorage. The close-focus wide-angle scenics were unevenly lighted but improved as Brett adjusted the strobe angle to illuminate his subject in the foreground while exposing the sea surface above for ambient light. Clearly, he had entered the water with a properly sealed housing without a crack to admit seawater. “When were these taken?” I right-clicked the mouse to ask for file information about the last image. “Yesterday’s date? At 11:54 pm? I don’t think so. These aren’t shots from the night dive. They all show blue water and sunlight. Anyhow, the night dive was over by 8 pm.”
Did he forget to change the time setting in his camera when he came on the trip? He told me yesterday he’s from Los Angeles. I clicked up my laptop’s clock to check time zones. The time zone in Los Angeles is GMT minus 8 hours. Here in the Philippines, we are GMT plus 8 hours. I chased the arithmetic for a few minutes to pin down the local time the image was taken: 2:54 pm today.
I brought the image up in Photoshop in order to see more detail. Clicking the Zoom tool for Actual Pixels, I moved the Navigator frame to view different sections of the image. There. Above the soft coral in the foreground, I saw the silhouette of a small boat in the negative space of the water’s surface, floating above the reef scenic. It was not our panga.
Shouts from the dive deck brought me running. “Boss, we found him.” They heaved the diver’s inert body up on deck and began emergency resuscitation. The yacht carried an extensive medical kit, necessary in such a remote place, and one of the guests was a physician from Sydney. Twenty minutes later, Dr. Lambert pronounced Brett dead, cause of death indeterminate. “He drowned, yes, but why? Heart attack? Some other medical condition? Something wrong with his regulator? What sort of accident happened?”
“Steve, there’s something strange about Brett’s last photo,” I whispered. We moved to the wheelhouse. I explained the time it was taken and the unknown small boat in the image. “Was the fishing boat nearby then? Wasn’t that when we heard that boom?”
Steve thumbed the page of events that pertained to managing the yacht itself. “Yep. The noise was noted in the log. Illegal dynamite fishing? It could be. The concussion would injure a diver, if he were too close. Even if he wasn’t killed outright, he could be knocked unconscious and drown.”
“That would crack the camera housing too,” I agreed. “It’s not a dive accident. It’s murder.”