“God, help me one more time,” pleads the lobsterman, Edmundo Stanley Antonio. “Accompany me in this water.”
There are a lot of worries bundled into that simple appeal. That the makeshift air hose he’s tethered to doesn’t spring a leak. That the air compressor at the surface doesn’t fail. That his innate awareness of distance and time he doesn’t have a watch or a depth gauge is better than the time he surfaced too quickly from about 150 feet down and got battered by decompression sickness, which left him partly paralyzed for a year.
Mr. Stanley, 33, still feels pain in his back and his heart when he dives. A doctor has repeatedly told him not to go in the water again, warning the next dive could kill him. His wife begs him to stop; she’s already lost her brother and a son-in-law in diving accidents.