In my senior year of college, my husband and I went to the Florida Keys for Labor Day weekend and decided to go scuba diving, just renting tanks and a boat and heading out on our own.
It was a beautiful day with a blue sky and puffy clouds, but there was a good bit of wind and six-foot waves. We motored out to where we thought the edge of the reef was, cut the engine, dropped the anchor in the sand, and made sure it was set. Since the water was murky, we decided to descend down the anchor line. I remember seeing the line above the water and reaching for it as we began to descend, but at the exact moment I went under the surface, it disappeared and my hand closed on nothing. We were in only about thirty feet of water, so I figured we’d see the anchor when we got below the waves and the water cleared.
When we reached the bottom, we looked for the anchor but couldn’t find it. My husband signaled to go up, and when we reached the surface, the boat was nowhere in sight. I immediately found myself struggling with a profound sense of fear. We could see nothing but water towering above us on both sides, except for the brief moments when we reached the crest of each wave. Then for just that moment we could see the boat, which was surprisingly far away considering how short a time it had been since I had reached for that anchor line. We were about three miles offshore, and that was also visible at the crest of each wave, but I had no idea if we could swim that far. Moreover, if we were caught in a current, we would have to swim faster than the current to make it to shore, in which case we might exhaust ourselves and get swept out
to sea.
