Brian E. Powers: A Diving We Will Go

In September 1975 Mannix "Killer" Miller, one of my new roommates in a house on Hamburger Hill in Kailua Kona asked if I wanted to go along on a dive and play bagboy.
"What do you mean by bagboy?" I asked and was told I would carry the fish bag and anything Mannix killed or caught I would have to stuff in the bag and carry for him underwater. "Sounds good to me" I told him and the next day we were bouncing along in his 14 skiff full of gear heading south along the Kona Coast.

At some point south of Keauhou Bay we came to a spot Mannix decided was what we were looking for and we dropped our anchor and began the process of getting ready to dive over the side with scuba tanks strapped to our backs to hunt what we came for. Mannix handed me a tank and back pack and a one hose regulator consisting of an attachment to the tank and a hose containing the regulator from which you would garnish each breath while underwater.

As we prepared to jump over the side into the sea I asked Mannix: "Is there something I should know about this?" He looked at me confusedly and then brightened saying: "That's right, you've never done this before have you?" "No," I said. "OK, fair enough, well, don't hold your breath when you are coming up and don't come up any faster than your bubbles...that's pretty much it, let's go."

With that we fell over the side of his skiff and headed down. No BC, no pressure gauge, no depth gauge, no nothin'...just a tank strapped to our backs, a pair of fins a weight belt and a mask. We headed down slope gathering shells, debris and the fish Mannix would shoot with his three prong spear. At one point Mannix reached into his pocket and showed a depth gauge that looked like a pocket watch...it showed that we were at a depth of 110 feet. No wetsuit, no BC, no nothin but a 25 pound bag of sea crap slung over my shoulder swimming along the bottom of 110 feet of ocean.

About forty minutes into the dive Mannix looked at me and pointed back uphill towards where the boat was anchored and turned towards the dark blue water and swam away. I began to make my way towards the boat but realized that with all of Mannix's fish & booty weighing me down I was going
to have to walk back to the boat. I found myself swimming for a few yards and then landing on the bottom where I would walk a dozen yards and then leap over a coral head and walk along the bottom for another twenty yards.

I was walking/swimming up hill for a good while when I realized taking a breath from the regulator was becoming harder and harder. Damn! I was running out of air! I began to run along the bottom as best I could when finally there was no more air in the tank.

Well damn, here I was twenty feet underwater with no air, thirty pounds of ocean booty over my shoulder and wearing a bunch of scuba gear that didn't belong to me...what the hell was I going to do? Well, I wasn't about to drop the bag full of treasure Mannix had in trusted me with or drop the dive gear he was kind enough to let me use so I did the only thing possible: I ran along the bottom until I was out of air and then sprinted to the surface to grab a quick lung full of air before sinking back down
to begin my bottom sprint again. I finally reached the boat and hung my hawaiian backpack on the side of the boat, pushed Mannix's bag over the gunwale into the skiff and stayed there exhausted hanging on the rail until the Mankicks surfaced and helped me aboard.

I still have a Triton shell I found that day on my first ever dive below the surface of the sea, and I still know Mannix Miller and call him my friend.

Thirty- seven years later I went diving with my son. I gave Luke a dive trip for his 14'th birthday. His best friend Josh went along with us aboard the Sandwich Isle Divers boat yesterday. Josh and Luke have been taking progressive diving classes each summer since they were in fourth grade, they are both excellent divers. Hell...they knew more about diving when they were in fifth grade than I knew the first two years I was diving!

Here are some photos of our dive trip yesterday:

I don't have an underwater camera anymore, but a nice fella named Tom from Texas on the dive shot
some photos of us and was kind enough to send me some of them.