“Can we please take out this tube now”

I gestured to my groin.

“We need to x-ray your lungs first”

I was wheeled down the hallway.

Thu-thunk, “Jesus” I muttered raising my head.

For some reason the floor on the way to the x-ray room had grooves that would rattle the bed, and more importantly my genitals, every five metres. The last groove couldn’t even be conquered in a single push so a small run-up had to be taken to bounce me over it.

My response was to start laughing through gritted teeth.

X-ray done. Yep, lungs still full of water. Fantastic. Back we go down the cobblestone corridor.

Now for the fun bit.

In a room of 40 or so people a curtain is drawn around my bed, as a doctor walks in with an ominous looking bucket and 5 nurses. One nurse pulled my pants down (revealing a very unhappy looking penis) one nurse held the bucket, one nurse gripped my todger in a fist, one nurse held my hand and the last one must have been on work experience because she was just looking. The doctor approached this strange BDSM scene, he was the one to remove the sword from the stone.

I’m not proud of what happened next.

If anyone in that room had a limited understanding of English swear words before this procedure, I can guarantee they know every single one now. After a toe curling wrench I shot up out of the bed, grabbed the bucket, that now contained my pee bag, and squeezed out the most painful piss I have ever done and will ever do.

During this excitement my oxygen tube had fallen out, so after 15 seconds of standing I collapsed back onto the bed, a broken mess with his cock out. They reinserted my oxygen tube and I pulled my pants up before one of the nurses went fishing for a vein in my arm.

I picked up the phone. Andy and Kath were not going to like this one

“Hey”

“Well, what’s happening?”

“Tube’s gone and i’m on oxygen and antibiotics”

“Send over the antibiotics they’ve prescribed. Are you staying in Dili or going back to Singapore?”

“I think I’m going to stay here, they seem pretty on top of it”

“Ok, those antibiotics are all for pneumonia so they’re doing the right thing. How are you doing…?”

“Erm yeah I’m Ok. It really hurts when I pee though”

“That will pass. Jesus Christ Josh that was a close one.”

Next came the phone call from Jasper.

“I told my mum you died and forgot to say you recovered and she started crying.”

“Jesus”

“I know… Are you staying in Dili?”

“Yeah, I’m here for 5 nights then I can discharge myself”

“Ok, well we’re going to carry on with the safari”

“I expected nothing less”

“But we’ll be in Dili to get you when you’re out”

“Cool. Cheers for the whole ‘saving my life’ thing”

“No worries. Rest up, we’ll see you soon”

And that was that. Spent the next 6 days getting better until finally I was out. I’d lost a lot of weight so took the health based decision to eat 3 Burger King whoppers. In the evening, Jasper and the girls arrived.

They filled me in on the parts that i was semi passed out for, told me that there was actual GoPro footage of my revival and went into great detail about the lobsters they’d been dining on.

Then Jasper pulled me aside.

“Josh, I’ve been to Elysium.”

“Huh?”

Surely if there was anyone who’d been to Elysium it was me…

“We made it all the way to Jaco… The fish Josh…”

Jasper trailed off as he spoke, hypnotised by the mental image of the pelagic tornado that had enveloped him off the island of Jaco.

“I saw a Spanish mackerel over five feet long… hundreds of dog tooth tuna… THOUSANDS OF RAINBOW RUNNERS” … “I managed to shoot a big giant trevally but Jaco had so much… more”

He bloody loves a superlative. It’s always “the best!” this or “the biggest!” that, but I’ve never seen him quite as enamoured with a topic as he was with Jaco.

Jasper was Gollum and Jaco was his precious.

“I have to go back…”

Jasper then looked at me, “You think you can dive?”

“Yeah, I won’t be going deep or anything but I can do it”

“You could shoot a dog tooth Josh”, and with that sentence spoken unto the universe, my fate was sealed.

Over the next few days we again drove east along the Timorese coast. I gave myself cause for worry when we arrived at the first camp site and I had left my bag in Dili, a 2 hour drive away. Maybe there had been more brain damage than I thought. I did IQ tests in secret which made my frontal lobe ache, not a great sign.

Day 2 involved driving back to the spot I’d blacked out. It is still to this day the most beautiful underwater place I have ever seen. A sheer 30 metre wall of coral with a chasm that splits the rock to form an underwater coral channel that you can swim through. It’s a strange thought, but I know for a fact that wherever my body does finally decide to call it a day will never compare to this place.

I dived down to the exact spot I’d shot the coral trout and took in the ridiculous colours and creatures that surrounded me. It made Avatar look bland. When I got back to the surface any doubts I had about free diving again were gone.

Just breathe normally, keep your heart rate low and you’ll be fine.

Jasper and I would constantly be in the sea, pulling out lobsters and catching fish, but all the while Jaco loomed in Jaspers mind.

The terrestrial scenery in Timor-Leste deserves a mention too. Scorched earth cliffs would come soaring 100 metres from the sea and the road would slalom back and forth, before reaching villages that could have been plucked straight out of a spaghetti western. I hummed “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” theme song in my head for hours.

Then finally, on day 3, with a thick layer of dust covering us, the car and all of our belongings, Jaco appeared through a thin patchwork of palm trees.

We would camp one night on the mainland and hire a boat in the morning. That evening, as a sign of what was to come, Jasper shot a Giant Trevally in 2 metres of water. This place was ridiculous.

In the morning we packed up the camp before sunrise and met with the boatmen.

This was it.

Jasper flopped over board, I threw the float in and jumped after him. I watched as he plunged into the depths of a 40 metre drop-off. The visibility was ridiculous so I could watch him the whole way. 20 seconds after he’d stopped kicking his fins, a bolt shot out and I saw the unmistakable keel of a big fish going onto its side that had just been stoned (killed instantly). Jasper swam back up towards the surface trailing a 3 foot long dog tooth tuna. On the first dive.

Then something massive came out of the deep.

At first I thought it was a shark, that had come to rip a chunk out of Jasper’s catch, but it wasn’t a shark. It was a dog tooth. This thing must have weighed over 200lbs. While Jasper struggled to get his tuna on board it circled a mere 4 metres below us. There was no “staying calm” from anyone, as shouts and thrashing ensued during the melee.

“What is going on!?” I shouted at Jasper

“Help me tie the line to the boat!” He shouted back. “If I shoot it on this float it will just explode from the pressure”

“We’re gonna try and shoot that thing?”

“We are definitely going to try and shoot that thing. Let’s give it a name… Bernard”

We dived the coast for hours. The dog tooth’s all seemed to be just out of my depth, but there were huge rainbow runner shoals everywhere, so I was still able to shoot a fish twice as big as anything I’d caught before. I held up the 80cm fish on the boat and felt like that was a decent ending to the Timor tale.

Meanwhile Jasper had stopped shooting fish.

“I’m not going to shoot anything else until either Bernard or something comparable in size comes along. It’s all about appeasing the fish gods.”

In the afternoon my atrophied muscles and lungs had begun to fail me. I was shattered. I swam myself to shore and fell asleep in the shade of a beach tree. 2 hours later the sounds of a very happy Jasper woke me.

“YESSSSS!” Jasper shouted to the sky, stood on the beach with his fists balled. As I walked over he leaned into the boat and pulled out a giant Spanish mackerel.

“It’s a horse!” he shouted, “LOOK AT THIS HORSE!”. It was almost as tall as he was.

“Jesus…How was the fight”

“Oh man I so almost lost it. Look at this”

He pointed to a flap of skin that had come away from the spears puncture mark.

“The spear was hanging from the flopper on that flap of skin. I was just hugging the float line, getting dragged for miles. Eventually it tired so I could reel it in and dispatch it.”

After a quick photo shoot of Jasper and his horse, in increasingly compromising positions, he asked if I wanted to have a last couple of dives.

“I’m pretty wiped man”

“Josh this is the best spot in the world, I’m convinced”

With that earnest superlative, as the sun approached the horizon, I strapped my weight belt back on and went in for the last dive.

I was swimming down with no real target in mind, just enjoying the feeling of free diving into these rich waters.

Then on my final dive, to a leisurely depth of 10 metres, the absurd occurred. I could see something large in my periphery. Surely I wasn’t deep enough for it to be anything of interest.

I allowed my body to flatten out in the water to get a better look. Staring back at me with a mouth full of teeth, was a three foot dog tooth tuna. The pinnacle of spearfishing due to their “difficult to shoot” reputation. Not only did this doggy swim straight at me, it flicked itself broadside right in front of my spear.

With my mouth agape, I straightened my arms and pulled the trigger. The spear went straight through. For a split second everything was still. The fish didn’t react and I had just enough time to make sure I was clear of the float line when, in an instant, it took off like a torpedo. Shit. I hadn’t stoned it.

I got back to the surface and asked Jasper “What the hell was that?” knowing full well what it was.

“A dogtooth Josh and you might have lost my gun”

The yellow float was being yanked violently at the surface as the fish struggled to dive deep into the reef. Jasper and I held onto it as we watched the fish thrash around on the ocean floor. Eventually the commotion subsided and we assessed the damage.

The worry was that it had wrapped the line around some boulder coral at a depth that would have been too deep for us to untangle and retrieve. When I say us, I mean Jasper. Thankfully the line was caught around a small coral outcrop at 25 metres.

“Can you go that deep?”, I asked

“Yes. When the line gets loose be sure to keep tension when pulling it up. We need to get it to the surface.”

I watched him swim to the ocean floor and maneuver the gun and fish into open water, once the last of it was untangled I pulled hard on the line and began to reel in the now waning fish.

Finally I had it gripped beneath the gills and with a quick knife to the brain the fight was done. We both flopped into the boat and began the journey back to shore. I stared at the dog tooth lying on the deck and shook my head in disbelief. Jasper got my attention.

“You don’t understand how lucky you are man. It took me years to land my first dog tooth… and my brother still hasn’t shot one. You managed to bump into the dumbest dog tooth I’ve ever seen haha.”

We paid the boat crew and donated the majority of our catch to the local village, which must have been close to 100 kilos of fish. We couldn’t join them for the feast as we needed to head back down the coast, so took one of the tunas for dinner and headed off in the Landcruiser, blasting out our victory song: Adele – Someone Like You.