Sounds like a good series. Hope to read it.
And I understand about the near-drowning bit: nothing else feels quite the same. I’ve had three such experiences. First was in my teens, when my dad asked me to help him to teach my new stepsister to swim. My own mother had died when I was a very small child and my brother only two years older, and long afterward dad had married a cousin of my mother who was a war widow with one child, who was younger than we were. She and dad then went on to have three more of their own. I already knew the stepsister as a cousin, but had never realised that she couldn’t swim.
She was a hefty eight year old. I was small for my age of about fifteen. My job was to stand in the river between her and the deep water, catch her as she swam between us and turn her back to dad, and stop her from going into the deep part of the river. That should have been doable. But she was flailing, reached me, flung her arms around my neck, pushing me back into the deep water, and sank like a rock. If I kept her head above water, given the amount of thrashing going on, I couldn’t hold mine up. Dad rescued us both.
The next time was in your part of the world, off the coast of WA. I was helping a mate who was trying to document and photograph an old wreck there, before it tipped completely over the edge of an underwater cliff and went down too deep to be reached. I’m useless at photography, but fairly good at carrying extra cameras and gear and doing shark watch, so that was what I was doing when a freak wave rolled in, picked us and our gear up as if we weighed nothing, and flung us randomly between rolling along the seafloor and popping up to the surface. Somewhere in the process I blew an eardrum, the one that still gives me trouble nowadays, which added nausea and disorientation to an already unpleasant situation, and again very nearly drowned.
Final time was at a swimming pool in a mining town in outback Queensland. I was standing at the edge of the pool with my toddler son on my shoulders, watching his three big sisters play in the pool with their dad, when one of the local louts thought it would be amusing to grab my ankles and pull me in. My son went flying, and landed in the water where his sisters rescued him, but I hit my head on the lip of the pool as I went down hard, and concussed and bleeding, nearly drowned before I was got out. Oddly enough, that son was the one who grew up to be a mad keen swimmer and surfer.
So yeah, all too familiar with the sensations of drowning.
