Shall I tell you about my near-death experience with a saltwater crocodile?
It was the year 2000 BC (Before Children) and Jim and I took a scuba diving holiday in the Solomon Islands. It was heaven.
Except for one day.
The skipper took us to a small island, split by a wedge-shaped crevasse – imagine a jagged sliver missing from a cake. The idea of the dive is you swim along the bottom of the crevasse, then ascend into a lagoon surrounded by rainforest alive with lorikeets; much like the island in Barbie, Island Princess.
Jim is a more experienced diver than me, so he led the way. There wasn’t much room; if I stretched my arms, I could touch the rock on either side. We were in about 10 metres of water – not deep in diving terms and I was enjoying myself – we were a day and a half from any town and a million miles from home.
When we reached the lagoon, Jim stopped, and being the cautious type, looked up before he ascended. Directly above us was a three metre saltwater crocodile, sunning himself on the surface. Apparently our bubbles bounced off its belly. I can’t say for sure; I never saw it. Before I had a chance to look up, Jim was telling me, in underwater sign language, to turn around and get the f*ck out of there. Naturally, I was annoyed – I’d swum all this way and I wanted to see the lorikeets. Jim didn’t want to tell me there was a croc above my head (international diving signal for a crocodile is a chomping motion made with both arms moving in scissors fashion) because he rightly assumed I would panic.
‘F*ck the lorikeets,’ he gesticulated before spinning me around and pushing me back out to sea.
When we were on the boat, limbs and torsos miraculously intact, Jim told me about the crocodile and asked the skipper if they’d seen one in that lagoon before.
‘Yes,’ he drawled, ‘But not lately. We reckoned he’d moved away.’
Moved away? Where to? Hadn’t he left a forwarding address? Bastard.
We then heard about a guest who had actually been chomped by a salty while snorkeling. I thought it was a diver’s tall tale but incredibly, I read the same story in Good Weekend years later.
Scary stuff, huh? Who knows I may have cheated death today by driving one route instead of another?
Sometimes we’re aware we’ve been lucky, and sometimes we aren’t.
Have you cheated death or disaster? What saved you?
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Top Comments
almost got taken out at the lights in Dubbo.... had pressed the pedestrian button, the noise and our green 'walk' signal had lit up, and without looking (i know, silly!) i started walking, thankfully my husband grabbed my arm, he saw the ute speeding around the corner, and 2 things made this the scariest day of my life, one, i had my 16 month old daughter in the pram, and 2, the bloke had the hide to shake his head at us! he honestly thought he had right of way! scary, scary, scary! so if you're at a crossing and you have a lady with a pram eyeball you before she walks, its probably me making sure you've stopped!
My appendix burst whilst canoeing down the Amazon. There was only one bus a week to the nearest jungle town (which we nearly missed as I was so sick), and then a 24 hour local bus ride, complete with a menagerie of farm animals, on the road universally know as the world's most dangerous, to the capital. Long story short - bus trip ended up taking 48 hours, first two hospitals wouldn't take me in, and the one that finally did also let my kitten (which I had saved from the gutter in Colombia) stay on my hospital bed, and safety-pinned a tube to my stomach for 'drainage' into a bucket on the floor. The pièce de résistance were the multi-coloured stitches hapharzadly holding my abdomen together, and the surgeon muttering under his breath in Spanish, "I don't think she's going to make it". But make it I did, with my Frankenstein-esque scar as a souvenir :-)