The Tropical roof, the Depth Chargers and the Hookah.

 Hah! I bet that title gotcha!

I lived in Cairns, Far North QLD. for fourteen years, from '89 to 96 and again from '03 to '11. The seven year gap was spent in Japan. None of that is remotely relevant, apart from this story having happened during a few crazy days in days in '91.

I was part of a group of five, tight knit friends who enjoyed anything to do with the ocean, including swimming, fishing, sailing and diving. This story is about a diving trip to Cooktown over a long weekend holiday. The targets of our dive were Painted Crays (Google it).

The drive to Cooktown from Cairns was a long one, often taking most of the day, due to heavy rain and unsealed roads. We used a battered, old Toyota Landcruiser with over 1M kms on the clock and broken air conditioning. Fortunately, it was fitted with a tropical roof which kept the sun off the car's roof. For the uninitiated, a tropical roof was a rack mounted, usually wooden deck, fitted over the roof of the vehicle, designed to keep the tropical sun off the roof. It worked.

As the weather was quite wet and parts of the road seriously muddy, requiring a lot of slow 4WD driving, we decided to make a day of it, breaking up the monotony by having a pub crawl. The idea was to stop at every pub or booze shop and have one beer. Here's where I introduce "Dockie". Dockie was a Kiwi (not his fault) who had a habit of always going one step too far. For example, although we had agreed to the "one beer per stop" rule, Dockie chose to drink Depth Chargers. These were a schooner of beer that had a full shot glass of whisky dropped in them. You can guess the result.

We had music playing throughout the trip so it wasn't too long before Dockie wanted to dance. Yep, I'm serious. Fortunately he fell asleep before trying to dance in a car with four other big guys and diving equipment. It wasn't until we were about 45 minutes out of Cooktown when he woke up. At this point, we were driving very slowly through thick mud. 

Having just woken up, Dockie decided he needed to pee but, when he looked out the window and saw the mud, he chose to climb out the window and on to the Tropical Roof to do the business. We told him that we couldn't stop because we would become hopelessly bogged in the mud. He said not to stop and he'd be OK on the roof. Once on the roof, after about ten minutes of grunting and swearing, he proceeded to piss all over the windscreen which, because we had all the windows open due to the heat, filled the car with a foul stench and a fine spray from the pee and rain from the wipers.

Then he decided to dance.

On the roof.

How he never fell off, I'll never know. We'd all had enough of him by then, so we happily left him there, dancing. As we started to enter Cooktown, there was a loud banging on the roof and Dockie was screaming at us to stop the car. Fortunately, we were finally driving on bitumen, so we pulled over and got out to stretch our legs....only to see a fearful sight!

Crouched down on the roof of the car was Dockie. Absolutely stark naked! The silly bastard had been doing a strip tease and his clothes were strewn in the mud over the past 20kms. On top of that, the idiot was seriously sunburnt, all over. Don't ever let anyone tell you that you cant burn on a cloudy day, especially in the tropics!

We found a pair of shorts and a T shirt for him and drove him to the local chemist who sold us cream and pain killers for him, then booked into a motel for the night. For some reason, Dockie declined to have a drink in the bar with us.

The next day, we loaded all our diving gear onto the boat that we had hired for the day and headed out to The Great Barrier Reef, about 25km offshore from Cooktown to go cray hunting. It turned out very fortunate for us that Dockie was so sunburnt and could bear straps on his skin, as we didn't have to draw straws to see who was going to be in charge of manning the hookah gear, while rest of us dived.

For those of you who don't understand what Hookah is, it's a portable air compressor that feeds air, via a long hose for each diver, enabling him to stay down longer. Strict decompression rules apply, so I only recommend it to very experienced divers. Seriously!!

Hunting for crays has it's hazards. We never speared crays, but used a steel hook to pull them out from under coral and put them in a netting bag that was attached to our weight belts.

Hazard 1. Sometimes you pulled out a moray eel instead of a cray, Seriously unfriendly buggers.

Hazard 2. Sometimes your hookah hose got caught in coral. NEVER try to just pull it free.

Hazard 3. Live crays often make a snapping sound with their tails, while in the nets. This is a dinner bell for sharks, of which there are plenty, That's why we all carried spears guns with power heads.

Hazard 4. A malfunction with the Hookah on the boat meant your air is suddenly cut off and you had no emergency reserve, so you had to curb your panic and surface slowly, expelling the air in you lungs all the way up. Don't do that and you could get the bends and/or die.

Yep, you guessed it. The four of us experienced Hazard 4 in about 15 metres of water. Fortunately, we were all very experienced divers and surfaced safely. We all arrived at the boat to find Dockie sitting there with a glum look on his face.

As you can imagine, none of us were happy, to put it very mildly. When we asked Dockie what had happened to the Hookah, he replied, "I turned it off because I was feeling lonely".

It was a very silent trip in the boat all the way back to Cooktown, as was the long drive back to Cairns. 

The two outcomes from the trip were we did get an impressive haul of crays and Dockie was banned from all further diving trips, despite his begging.