I've finally lost control of my eyebrows.  I 've always wondered about people whose eyebrows had gone wild.  Stan Waterman's eyebrows are completely mad.  They're great curved hooks, course as bailing wire, that spring insanely from his brow and loop down to jab directly into his eyeballs.  I've often wondered how he can stand it!  Now I'm beginning to understand.  Another sign that I’m not so young anymore.  You can’t do anything about it.  Sure you can pull them out.  But that's for women - it's the way they condition themselves for the agony of childbirth.  I've tried pulling them out despite the discomfort.  But once the offending hook is removed, a new one rises from the ranks and becomes infested with the same sadistic demon.

   I stop, carefully neutralize my buoyancy and remove my mask.  The water is cold and I hold my breath a moment to acclimate.  Then I rub my face roughly and try to smooth the offending eyebrow back into place.  I pull the mask back on, clear it and open my eyes.  There it is.  The demonic eyebrow.  A drop of water hangs from it and completely occludes the vision in my left eye.  But at least it's not stabbing me.  I blink a couple times and the water drop vanishes.  Better.

    I check for the dark shadow of the wall I've been following to my right.  I can still visualize its shape in the dissolving early evening twilight - just barely.  Then I looked toward the bottom fifty feet below.  I was suspended at ninety feet and that made the bottom about 140.  I couldn't make out any detail, but I could see there were no bat rays there.

    I'd been down about thirty minutes and was probably about a quarter mile from the Betsy M.  I decided to swim away from the wall, ascend to fifty feet and go for another fifteen minutes then turn back toward the boat.  Pushing my 16mm movie camera around was getting old.

    "About thirty of them, right under the boat," Norbert Wu had said.

    The idea was to film bat rays in the act of mating.  We'd discovered about a hundred of them lying in the sand at the Southern tip of San Clemente Island.  Such a large aggregation implied courtship behavior, but certainly didn't guarantee it.  For the last four days we'd watched and filmed the rays lying in the sand - doing nothing.  Then in the afternoon of our fourth day, all the rays lifted off the sand and swam away like a squadron of heavy aircraft.  That would have been it.  We might have pulled anchor and gone home, but Norb had seen a group of thirty circling high off the bottom as he swam back to the boat.  "Might be a good silhouette," Norb said.

    I made another ninety degree turn to the left and headed west.  The sun is low and about to drop behind the island.  I'm using the bright area in the sky for navigation.  Sometimes I carry a compass mounted on the viewfinder of the movie camera.  But I didn't think I would need it today so I left it on the boat.  Norb said the rays were right below the bow.  Why would I need my compass?  I check my air pressure gauge -1000 psi.  By the time I'm down to 500 psi, I should be back in the vicinity of the boat.  I swim on through open water watching small gelatinous bits of plankton undulate as I pass by.

    There's something mesmerizing about navigating through open water with little more to look at than curtains of shadowed water streaked with cold afternoon sunlight.  I'm tired, almost sleepy, but at ease.  Soon, I'll be up on the boat.  Soon, I'll be enjoying a cold beer, watching Bob Cranston preparing another cardiovascular nightmare on the Bar-B-Q.  Soon I'll be giving Norb a ration of verbal abuse for sending me on this wild goose chase.  Soon, we'll all be watching the sunset laughing at Norb, laughing at me, laughing at Bob.  I've been swimming almost an hour now.  My eyes are unfocused.  Nothing to look at but curtains of light and shadow.  Shadow.  My eyes snap into focus.  There's something about that shadow up ahead and to my right!

    I'm already exhaling deeply even before I'm sure what I've seen.  Dropping quickly past sixty feet.  I check the pressure gauge again - 600 psi, still a decent amount of air in a 100 cubic foot tank.  I inject some air into my dry suit and level off at eighty feet.  I take three very deep breaths then I hold the forth and begin kicking with long, deep strokes.  I can see the school of bat rays clearly now.  They're passing from north to south and with a little luck I can intercept them coming in about ten feet beneath the school to shoot up directly into the evening sun.

    As I get closer I begin to realize the potential of my opportunity.  Good lord!  Norb must have seen only the edge of the school!  There are hundreds here!  Hundreds!

    I'm almost beneath the school now.  I raise the camera and take a reading.  My left index finger spins the aperture dial to f-11 and I look through the reflex finder.  I'm breathing now.  Long deep inhalations followed by long deep exhalations.  Swimming hard; trying to leave the calamity of bubbles behind.  The image through the viewfinder continues to develop and I see that the bulk of the school will pass right before me.  I swing the camera to my left, clearing the frame, and pull the trigger.

    Green and blue streaks of sunlight dance through the flickering image I see in my camera.  A bat ray enters the frame from the right followed by four others, followed by dozens more.  Wing-tip to wing-tip they are nearly five feet across.  Some must weigh more than 100 pounds.  Ten seconds into the shot there are more than a hundred in the frame, perhaps twice that.  Then the school turns and begins to swim directly into the sun.  Wonderful!  They fly against the setting sun like flocks of soaring birds passing beneath a sun filled break in dark thunder clouds!  Magic!

    Thirty seconds into the shot the image begins to deteriorate.  The school is out pacing me.  I'm not breathing enough and I can feel the throb in my head that promises a nice CO2 headache when I get back on board the Betsy M.  I turn the camera off and stop, hanging at eighty feet watching the school recede, sucking in deep lung-fulls of air.  I check my air pressure gauge although I know I haven't enough air for another try at the school.  Yeah, 300 psi.

    I begin slowing my ascent at forty feet and suddenly notice the anchor chain of the boat.  "Right under the bow," Norb had said.  Blast, I swam nearly a mile looking for that school and they were right where advertised.   I'll have to think of something else to needle Norb about.  Well, he said there were only thirty or so in the school.  That's it.  "How could you see only thirty when there were hundreds?  Did you get a photo?  You were out of film?"  Yeah, that should get a laugh or two.  Then I suppose I'll have to get serious for a moment and thank him for spotting the school.  He'll be suspicious if I get serious.  But that should be funny in and of itself.

   I'm hanging on the anchor chain now using up my last 200 psi in precautionary decompression.  Comb jellies drift by and I watch rainbow colors climb beating rows of cilia.  There's not going to be much sunset left.  I take another light meter reading into the sun.  F-5.6.  Dropping fast now.