Wet, wet, wet...
Cuban weather isn't usually like this, we are assured, and we know that to be true, but it was unfortunate that Andy Blackford and John Bantin (who took the pictures) should choose that week to spend on a Caribbean live-aboard.
I Can't Stand the Rain, said Linda. "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," offered Vinnie.
"It Might As Well Rain Until September," muttered Bantin.
"God Save The Queen," piped up Steve 2.
"What??" we cried.
"Long To Rain Over Us," he replied. We threw mango slices at his head, and processed cheese.
This is what we were reduced to, as we clung precariously to the afterdeck of The Bull's Mouth, 50 miles off the Cuban mainland, playing home-made party games as the plastic garden furniture slithered drunkenly from rail to rail with the swell.
The boat was pitching so violently that diving was about as feasible as building matchstick models of the world's architectural wonders. And it was raining.
If the Eskimos have 13 words for snow, then the Cubans needed 20 for rain. This wasn't a mist nor a drizzle, nor a slight precipitation, nor a shower, nor a steady downpour, nor a cloudburst, nor a deluge. This was sitting bang under a warm tap for a week.
In recent Cuban meteorological history, it was unprecedented. A day or two, yes, the Captain shrugged. But this? Impossible.
Strange to tell, I didn't really mind. When you go diving, drowning is always a possibility. But the real risk of drowning above water was sufficiently bizarre to lend the trip a refreshing novelty.
Finally, we reached a small inlet in a chain of low, uninhabited islands, bafflingly called the Labyrinth Cays of Twelve Leagues.
We hovered there and waited for the seas, and our stomachs, to subside. There was a momentary pause in the rain. The sky staged a Crufts for clouds while the conversation swung between the political correctness of organised shark dives (the lifetime earning power of a Bahamian shark, apparently, now exceeds $250,000) and the increasing incidence of drunks vomiting in taxis. Eventually we ventured out to the reef wall - actually, a wuthering scarp edge, plunging away into the Caribbean abyss - and staggered off the stern into the heaving water.
From a technical point of view, the dive lacked a certain finesse. Bantin dropped his mask. A bore at the best of times (mask-dropping, not Bantin), this particular item contained prescription lenses and a £350 talking computer. As it waltzed away into oblivion, the computer's robot voice intoned: "Deep dive! Deep dive!"
Thanks to a spectacular duck-dive from Steve 1, the mask was retrieved.
But I was too light, my own mask flooded continually and I ran out of air. All told, just the sort of performance you would expect from a hardened old sea-dog of my experience.
I ended up hanging, head-down, on Bantin's octopus. As he cruised around with a camera the size of Surrey, I felt like a remora trying to clean a whale shark.
From what I could see from this singular position, the diving looked pretty good. The drop-off was spectacular - the problem being that it dropped off from 35m to about 6000.
The usual coral crew was hanging about - French angels, parrotfish, that sort of thing. But viewing them upside-down didn't lend them any special magic, and I decided to submit to the forces of nature and head for the surface. I passed a reef shark on the way up.
Getting back into the boat was always an interesting exercise. The giant seas and the bucking chromium ladder combined to make one feel like a shrimp in the giant blender of a mad, cosmic chef. A little far-fetched. Possibly, but it seemed bloody dangerous to me and despite my fixed, seen-it-done-it grin, I was profoundly relieved just to be back on board.
After a couple more dives on the Labyrinth, we surrendered to the weather. We were going all white and wrinkly, as if we'd stayed too long in the bath.
We set a course for Trinidad, a little Spanish colonial town at the eastern tip of Cuba, and hunkered down for another 12 hours of pitching and rolling through a huge, oceanic swell under a lowering sky.
I recall an insane conversation with Doc Martin, a Manchester medical man, about astrophysics and its uncomfortable relationship with ordinary perception. It was probably bollocks, but over four days of dreadful weather, we had exhausted the conventional topics of sex and how big the mantas are in the Maldives.
As we argued, our chairs slid back and forth across the deck so that one minute we were in a head-to-head, Mel and Griff style, while the next we were barking at one another over a gulf of 6m.
Once we had returned to a spot one nautical mile from where we joined ship, the diving was smashing. There is a moral here: don't go looking at the end of the long and winding road when all the time what you are looking for is right in the middle of your own backyard (or perhaps something slightly snappier).
The reef was at a respectable depth, it was riddled with mysterious holes you could wriggle pioneerishly through, the water was a virtual traffic jam of barracuda, drum and tarpon. And (I swear) I saw a grouper as big as a house.
The trip was over almost before it began. We drove the 200 miles back to Havana through rivers of red mud that poured from the fields and swept away ancient Ladas in their wake (Cuban transport is mad ballet, symbolising mechanically the Cold War of the Missile Crisis: fantastically finned Plymouth Plazas and Chevrolet Impalas rub grilles with the dourest, most utilitarian expressions of the Soviet production ethic).
In the capital, the tour guide tried vainly to point out grey ministry buildings through an endless veil of hot rain. Kids on improvised surfboards hung on the back of buses as they ploughed through the floods.
We drank in a bar once abused by Hemingway and marvelled at the decaying, pastel facades of rococo mansions and the contradictory, electric vivacity of the population.
And then we were airborne, $1300 over Cubana Airways' purely imaginary weight limit, and still soaked to the bone.
In a year or two, America will lift its senseless embargo on Cuba and the money will pour in like the rain poured down, and the world will overwhelm this last, poignant echo of a wonderful dream.
Go there before it's too late.
Andy and John travelled to Cuba with Regal Diving (tel. 01353 778096). A week aboard The Bull's Mouth including flights, board, transfers and up to three dives a day costs £1099 (discounts for parties). A second week can be added at Maria La Gorda for £499 including diving or at Trinidad for £299 ex-diving.
Flights with Cubana leave Gatwick for Havana every Tuesday.
Appeared in DIVER - September 1997
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