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downwards. Below
me was opaque gloom, but the cliff sliding past at my side was a reassuring presence. My mind flashed back to a sea cliff I dived from off Oban, western Scotland, when I lost contact with this
reference surface and found myself with equal darkness all around. For a few brief moments I had no sense of which way was up and which was down until I checked the direction of my bubbles. But
here I was producing no bubbles. My weight belt had slackened around my middle, now compressed by the weight of water, and I had equalised my ears once more as I finned further down the smooth,
sculpted rock. And then, sooner than expected, I saw the bottom, a field of sand and scattered boulders that swept in from a dim horizon to meet the base of the cliff. I pulled myself into an
upright position and looked around me. The landscape was cleaner than expected, the loose boulders smaller. I couldn’t see any fish, but I couldn’t explore further because I had to get
back up. I kicked and watched the rock flash past, getting brighter as I neared the liquid ceiling above.
    Although I was starting to feel more comfortable underwater, managing longer submersions, and starting to spot sucker-mouthed carp swimming close to the rock in places where a strategically
placed loop line could have snared them, the low visibility was a problem. Diving here was like blundering around with a small candle in a dark room. We were only likely to see a goonch if we were
right on top of it, whereupon mutual shock would cause it to bolt. Nevertheless, after half a dozen more dives, Rick surfaced with a whoop: ‘I’ve just filmed my first goonch!’ But
it wasn’t a close view, just a shape that disappeared into a cloud of sand.
    A little while later I was sliding head first down a forty-five-degree slope towards a lip where the rock fell vertically away, and there, in the overhang under the lip, was an open-sided tunnel
with a goonch wedged inside: four or five feet long and inches from my face. I slammed on the brakes by grabbing the rock above and reversing away, and then explained to Rick where it was. But
despite descending from the correct spot, he couldn’t find its hideout, and nor could I when I went back down. The landscape we were exploring was a complex abstract sculpture whose features
seemed to rearrange themselves when we weren’t looking. And with such a short horizon, navigating by following one remembered landmark to another was nearly impossible. A few dives later,
though, I was drifting along the excavated angle between sand and rock when something made me stop. I slowly floated up and found myself face to face with the same fish – although a moment
later, following a dull thump, there was only a blur of water filling the space it had occupied.
    We needed to review our tactics. Perhaps it was time to deploy the ROV. The Remote Operated Vehicle was a minisubmarine we’d brought along inside a suitcase-sized flight case with another
water-tight case housing the control panel and the screen that displayed the view from the remote camera. Pictures were relayed back through a neutrally buoyant quarter-inch cable, by which the
craft was also controlled electronically. It reminded me of Thunderbird 2 from the TV show Thunderbirds , which I used to watch as a kid. A scale-model toy was something I had desperately
coveted, but Santa Claus had only considered me well behaved enough to deserve mints and tangerines. Okay, this was forty years late, but I was going to be flying this ship on a mission every bit
as exciting as those piloted by Virgil Tracy.
    We fired up the small generator and launched the ROV halfway down the pool, from the boulder beach across from the cliff. Although the current was scarcely visible here, it was still powerful
enough to put a bow in the tether. We compensated for this by swimming it across to the cliff then turning its head up-current, exactly like a fish. With the current slower