BY Manawatu Standard

For diver Rob Hewitt the hardest thing about re-entering the water after having been lost at sea for more than three days was the last few seconds of the dive, he said last night.

With a full support crew he went back to the area where he had gone missing some three months earlier, dived beneath the surface and offered a carving he had made to Tangaroa, Maori god of the sea.

Then when he resurfaced, he was suddenly alone again.

"I couldn't see the boat and I couldn't see any of the other divers," he said.

"I thought that the last three months had all been a dream and that I had been out there all that time. My eyes must have been bulging from my head.

"Then one of the other divers came into my view and said 'Mate are you all right?' I snapped out of it and said that I was fine and he said 'Well, you're breathing pretty fast'."

As frightening as it was, the moment soon passed and he now goes diving every week and said he had met and conquered his personal demons and was now no longer afraid to die.

Hewitt was at the Palmerston North City Library with author Aaron Smale to talk about their book Treading Water, which told of Hewitt's time at sea after being ripped away by a current when diving near Mana Island in February last year.

He said he believed he was caught at a point where the current merged again after being split around the island.

Within 40 seconds he was 600 metres astern of the dive boat and being carried further away all the time.

Eventually he would be taken 32 kilometres out to sea and brought all the way back to within 300m of where he had gone missing.

Asked what had led to his getting lost in the first place, he said "Greed".

A friend had caught a bigger crayfish than he had, so he went deep in search of a better one.

He looked down into a canyon and saw a big crayfish.

Once it was in his bag he set out after an even bigger one, went deeper and was snatched by the current.

While he was drifting with sea lice burrowing beneath his skin, he relied of five things to help him stay alive, he said.

These were: Love of family; a belief that he was under the direction of a higher being; respect for the ocean environment; his training from nearly 20 years as a navy diver; and confidence in himself.

"At different times I relied on each one of these things."

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