Article July 9, 2001 Issue

Help from God, 80 feet under

If you're a scuba diver, you know you never dive where people can't see you or where you will be alone.

By Mark Swinney

I love to scuba dive. And when I was with my family and a group of friends in the Cayman Islands a few years back, we were diving with a very experienced guide.

One day we went on a dive that wasn't very deep for that area—our maximum descent would be about 80 feet. We were going to be diving around a huge coral head—that's a big colony of coral. This one was about 100 feet across and was shaped kind of like a giant mushroom.

The guide told me about a place underneath the coral where there was a small opening—you could swim a little way underneath the coral and then come up through what is called a chimney—it's just like a cave but it goes straight up.