“Hey look! It’s a waterspout.” Says I, as a wet, grey cone starts to reach down from the heavens a few kilometers away.
“A what?” Asked one of our guests.
“It’s like if a tornado and and the ocean had a baby. If we watch for a bit it might even touch down. And it would actually suck water up into the sky.”
“Cool!”
At which point the captain chimed in, “We’re here.”
So we geared up and got ready to dive. Just before donning my mask I looked up and saw that, of course, the waterspout was in full glory, having touched down, about 3 or 4 kilometers to the south.
“We good?” I asked the captain.
He glanced. “Yep. It’s fine.”
We backrolled and had an incredible dive. All the sea turtles. Lots of interactive fish. The whole place to ourselves. Just… an amazing reef dive. But…
The noise.
I glanced up when I heard the rain pelting - the surprisingly still flat surface of - the ocean and thought about how our captain was having an obviously very soggy day. And he kept close. Real close. I never saw the bottom of the boat, but from the rumble of that motor I could tell he was never far.
And so, after an outstanding dive, we surfaced, watching a big loggerhead turtle-girl scratching her carapace on a reef lip below us during our entire ascent we hit the surface to find the boat just a few meters away. The captain dripping like a puppy that just barely escaped from a bath.
“So… it rained?”
“That waterspout passed about 100 meters from us. Yeah. It rained. A lot.”
He got tipped well today.