Anyone who has indulged excessively in any kind of beer, let alone beer brewed in the third world, knows what effect this has on the bowels. Enough said. One golden morning at six o'clock AM, I was meeting my dive buddy Charlie at the early boat out to Grande Island to do some diving. Poor old Charlie had unfortunately imbibed a particularly potent batch of Red Horse the night before, and spent our waiting time squatting on the can at the dock. When he finally emerged, pale but victorious, he alluded to ridding himself of about six gallons of ass-pee. Naturally I called him a pussy for succumbing and bragged about my own rock-solid movement that morning, even after several bottles of Red Horse the night before.
Charlie shamefacedly reported that his cramps were gone. It looked like smooth sailing for the day.
Forty-five minutes later we were happily gliding around a beautiful coral reef about ninety feet under the surface of the ocean. Charlie had his underwater camera rig out and was taking macro pictures of sea slugs. Finding a gorgeous and rare red-and-black one (called a Spanish Dancer), I swam toward Charlie to call him over.
As I approached, Charlie looked up, saw me, and started making what I later realized were frantic shooing motions. Uncomprehending, I continued my approach, making "I have no clue what you mean" gestures of my own.
Suddenly an enormous brown cloud erupted around Charlie, billowing out slowly and eventually hiding him from view. I made a hasty exit-stage-left worthy of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, backpedaling frantically to avoid the slowly mushrooming cloud of particulate.
Anyone who's thrown a rock into a pond with mud on the bottom knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Unfortunately, my pin-wheeling arms and legs weren't propelling me quite fast enough, and I got a good, healthy inhale. If you think you don't get a taste AND smell of what's in the water because you're breathing air from a tank, think again. The stuff creeps into your regulator and up your nasal passages through the back of your throat -- a charming perk to diving in a cloud of shit.
Gagging, retching, and laughing hysterically at the same time -- especially at depth -- exerts a tremendous pressure on even the most elastic of sphincters. Alas, the force of my struggles produced a smaller yet equally toxic cloud of my own, leaking slowly out from the side of my shorts. This, of course, sent Charlie into identical fits of retching and laughing into his regulator at my similar predicament, which in turn caused... you guessed it.
Many lessons were learned that day, not the least of which was this: not every cloud has a silver lining. Whoever said that was full of crap.