Scuba Dooba Doo

About a year before he died my husband Wendell decided he wanted to take up scuba diving.
Although, dear readers, you probably already know this, scuba is an acronym for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. For well over a hundred years man had been developing primitive ways and means to explore the world underwater. However, it wasn't until Jacques Cousteau co-developed and pioneered the use of the "aqua lung" in the 1940's that modern scuba diving came into being. For many years scuba was the purview of young, mostly male, daring and hardy individuals. In more recent years scuba training has become widely available, and many middle aged duffers, like my husband and me, have taken up the sport.

Learning scuba was Wendell's idea, and I wasn't 100% sure I would be able to do it. I've always loved to swim. My mother tells me as I youngster swimming in the city pool and friends' home pools I spent more time under the water than on top. Nevertheless, I always came up to breathe! I just wasn't certain I could master the technique of scuba breathing.

We found a place to take lessons not far from home and began in the instructor's backyard pool. As it happened I took to it like the proverbial duck. Wendell struggled with the first hurdle every novice scuba diver must overcome--not panicking when your entire body is submerged in water and you keep on breathing. Mirabile dictu it seemed to come naturally to me, and there I was, skimming around on the bottom of the deep end, while Wendell bobbed up and down in the shallow end, trying to get used to keeping his head under the water. After a few weeks we decided the instructor was not being as helpful to Wendell as he could be and we switched to a different instructor.

Glen Faith, a state police patrolman living in a nearby town, had leased a mined out, flooded quarry pit and was building a scuba diving and training business. We both immediately liked Glen, and his disciplined but easy going style was perfect for calming Wendell's case of underwater nerves. Soon we both passed the basic IDEA (International Diving Educator's Association) open water certification and proudly posed for our cert card pictures. (Here I apologize for my current lack of skill and inability to upload pictures that weren't taken with my own digital camera and also for not yet knowing how to add appropriate links to my text. Hopefully, I'll learn to do both of these soon. )

Our first "real dive", outside the sheltered confines of the quarry pit, was in a fresh water spring in Florida. We had been to New Orleans and made a swing over to the panhandle specifically to dive in this spring. Having never dived in a fresh water spring, and figuring that in late summer Florida would be warm, we didn't bring our heavy neoprene dive suits. As we prepared to enter the water in our thin dive skins, other divers made comments, such as, "Boy, you guys are tough." Hmmmm. What in the world could they mean by that? We soon found out! Fresh water springs in Florida are chilly! I'm not certain what the water temperature was, but it was way too cold to be diving in a "skin". We swam around for 20 minutes or so, and when we realized we were both turning blue, we surfaced and got out. Lesson learned. Check out the water temperature before you dive.

Soon I was itching to get into the big blue ocean and see something other than rocks and fresh water fish. When we got married 12 years before, we didn't have an actual honeymoon, so we decided to treat ourselves to a trip late that fall to Grand Cayman, one of the great scuba diving meccas of the world. Being an optometrist, my husband had specific ideas about the kind of lenses that should be in our dive masks. He did some research and found a company that made prescription dive mask lenses for both of us. In addition to being formatted to our prescriptions, the lenses were designed to compensate for the loss of color at depth. At a depth of 60 feet or so and beyond even brightly colored items viewed without additional lighting appear gray or dull blue because of the small amount of UV light that penetrates to that depth. The special lenses in our custom made masks promised brilliant color up to 120 feet!

When we arrived in Grand Cayman, Wendell seemed tired and irritable. He'd been working long hours, and I presumed he just needed a good rest and a break from routine. We set up a schedule of dives and arranged equipment rental. The next morning I hopped out of bed raring to get started on our ocean adventure! Wendell informed me he didn't feel like going, but that I should go and enjoy the dives. I offered to stay and keep him company since he wasn't feeling well, but he insisted I should do the dives. I admit thinking at the time that perhaps he was afraid to dive in the open ocean, since he had never achieved the same comfort level I had, even in the quarry pit. I agreed to go ahead with the scheduled dives, and arrived at the boat to explain that my dive buddy wouldn't be coming along this time. The divemaster paired me off with another "single", a young man from Chicago, who also was a first time ocean diver. Good, I thought. At least he won't be bored with my novice skill level.

I could tell my new dive buddy was nearly as nervous as I was. After we got out to sea, the divemaster explained how the dives would be conducted. We would do our deepest dive first, going to 100 feet, he explained calmly. 100 feet! I'd never been deeper than 65 feet in the quarry and then there was a "bottom" under my feet. We would be doing our first dive on a coral reef "wall", in "blue water", meaning don't even think about how deep it is to the bottom--you don't want to know. I was pretty savvy at controlling my bouyancy, another tricky hurdle for novice divers, but hanging at 60 feet, adjusting your up and down movements with tiny spurts of compressed air let into or out of your bouyancy vest is one thing if you know there is a solid rock bottom 40 feet under your toes. Doing it when making a mistake can mean sinking into what could be 1000's of feet of water is quite another!

We lined up to move to the edge of the boat, scooting sideways in our fins to take turns walking forward into the blue ocean. It reminded me a bit of watching movies where people are preparing to do parachute jumps. When my turn came I closed my eyes, held onto my regulator with one hand (to keep it from being knocked out of my mouth), and put the other hand against my mask at my forehead (again to keep it from being knocked askew)--and took a giant step into space.

The water was warm--bathtub warm--and as expected I popped to the surface immediately, since we all had put extra air into our vests to be sure we would bob right up. The divemaster counted heads and gave the signal to dive! That meant pressing the valve that would release air from my vest. I pressed it tentatively at first, then in short spurts as I felt the water close over my head. We were directly in front of the reef wall and when I turned my head and saw it, suddenly I was too awestruck to be afraid. As I drifted lower, the weights in my weight belt slowly pulling me down, I gazed at the most amazing array of colors and shapes I had ever seen. Coral, sponges, waving fans, brilliantly colored tiny fish darting in and out of a multicolored garden that seemed to be something from another world. Nothing I'd seen in pictures in dive books or magazines prepared me for this breathtaking spectacle! Bright red lacy fronds undulating with the current, orange and yellow sponges clinging to the reef face, dangling purple anemone with tiny bright red and white clownfish taking refuge among the stinging tentacles.

All of a sudden the divemaster appeared in front of me. He pointed to his depth gage. I looked at mine and realized I was at 104 feet! How did that happen? I had automatically been clearing my ears to equalize the pressure as I descended, and I was so compelled by the sight of the reef that I totally forgot to look at my gauges--a real no-no in diving! I nodded and puffed a slight amount of air into my vest. I drifted up a couple of feet and the divemaster gave me the diving OK signal of index finger to thumb. I saw him turn to check on the others in the group. Eventually he herded us into a line in front of him, and indicated we were to follow him. He began a lazy horizontal forward movement, propelling himself primarily with his fins. For the next 35 minutes we went where he went, through coral arches, over enormous brain corals, under the cliff-like edges of the reef. When I felt the need to clear my ears again I checked my gauge and realized he was very gradually swimming us up.

When we reached 60 feet or so, he paused and we hung suspended for a few moments allowing our bodies to accomodate. We swam again, ever so slowly moving toward the surface. Even most non-divers have heard of "the bends", another term for decompression sickness, caused from ascending too rapidly from depth. During rapid ascent deadly nitrogen bubbles don't have time to go back into solution in the bloodstream, and serious damage, even death, can occur. Our skilled divemaster was making sure none of us lost control of our bouyancy. We did another decompression stop at 30 feet for 3 minutes and again at 15 feet. By this time we could look up and clearly see the boat above us, the anchor line, and the bright sun easily penetrating to this level. My husband's foresight in equipping us with custom made masks paid off, since I never lost true colors throughout the dive.

We reached the surface and clamored aboard the ship, talking excitedly about the dive. "Did you see that enormous turtle?" (I had.) "How about that brain coral, isn't that something!" (It is.)
"Did you see the barracuda?" (I hadn't, but probably just as well on the first dive!) "How long before we can go down again?" The answer was at least an hour. We rested, ate fresh fruit and drank ice cold water. I couldn't believe how good they tasted. The boat cruised to a new dive site, and the crew prepared fresh tanks, checked weight belts, and got us ready for the second dive. The second dive would be on a sand flat at a depth of 45 to 60 feet, sounding somewhat tame now to those of us who had just been to 100 feet or more. We were advised how to dive on the sand--avoid kicking the bottom so as not to stir up silt or stingrays; stay above the coral, since touching it kills the animals and can leave you with a nasty scrape or worse (some coral is toxic); try to hover quietly as much as possible above or in front of coral formations, allowing the fish and other animals to relax and move so you can spot them. All good advice that paid off. The second dive was very different from the first but just as much fun. I knew I was hooked! The quarry would never be much fun again after this.

I returned to our hotel room bubbling over with stories to tell about the dives. Wendell listened patiently, but didn't ask many questions. After I showered and changed clothes we went out for dinner, but he ate very little. I realized he really was feeling ill, and figured it was some kind of bug.

The week passed quickly. I went on at least two dives every day. Wendell never went into the ocean. He spent a lot of time sleeping, and in the evenings we would pull beach chairs up to the tide line and hold hands, watching pinpoints of light from ships far out to sea. Neither of us suspected it, but he had less than a month to live.

When I lost my best dive buddy, I wasn't sure if I'd ever want to dive again. But the following summer my daughter and son in law persuaded me to go on a week long live aboard dive trip to the Bahamas. Living on a small boat, diving several times a day, eating fresh fish and lobster, and crusing the islands proved to be a pleasant experience that I enjoyed more than I had thought I could. Since then I've had the privilege of diving on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. I've enjoyed drift diving in the currents near Cozumel, and done many dives with my daughter and son in law off the Florida Gulf Coast. Two years ago I returned to Grand Cayman, this time on a cruise with friends. I didn't dive on that trip, but did snorkel with the stingrays again at the famous Sting Ray City sand bar. (I had dived with them in the same location on the first trip.) The island is still as beautiful as it was in 1997.

Anyone who has ever dived in the ocean on scuba has to come away with an increased respect for the ocean environment, it's beauty and it's vulnerability. As divemasters often tell their students, "Take nothing but pictures and memories; leave nothing but bubbles."