photo: Dorothy Pefferle
photo: Dorothy Pefferle
Family Dive, page 3
Once Hannah, my 12-year-old, sat on the gunnel with John and rolled back on a count of three as if it were nothing, what else could I do? My heart in my throat, I moved up to the rail. Feet on the bench, hand over my regulator, fingers on the mask, hold my weight belt. Breathe. Don’t think too much, just do. One- two-three, roll. Water, bubbles, breathe. The light through the bubbles and water sparkled as I looked up at the sky. It was comfortable, peaceful, even. A quick moment later and I was on the surface, lifted by the air in my buoyancy compensator (BC,) the vest part of scuba gear.
It was a windy day, and at the surface there was a lot of chop. Little Marlie was still quite chilled from the swimming pool. She gets cold even more that I do in the water, in spite of a wetsuit. On top of the cold, she was struggling with her mask and clearing her ears and decided shortly to go back to the boat, where she would wait with the captain. Raphael, the second instructor on the trip, took her back and John, Hannah, and I continued with our group underwater.
We were on the inside part of the barrier reef. As the waves of surf broke over the top I could feel the push and pull of the water. It was so much calmer than snorkeling, up where the air and water meet are the waves, chop and spray. Dives while snorkeling are short, a quick trip down to get a closer look at something. Here, we were between huge coral heads, in the seascape rather than looking in from the outside. Now I was hooked, this was the experience I had hoped for, after all. Grateful for the time spent in the pool becoming comfortable with being underwater, now I could enjoy this new world. Unfortunately, this was also when John learned that his underwater camera was not rated for ten meters, but rather for ten feet.
I seemed to keep floating upward, no matter how much I tried to deflate my BC, I could not find that buoyancy neutral place. After a few minutes Raphael seemed to be tugging on my BC from behind me, and once he came up by my side I saw an empty weight belt in his hand and realized he had put an extra weight in my pocket. He pulled me to the bottom and set me loose there, where I was able to stay where I wanted in the water, neither drifting up nor sinking without wishing to. I was becoming more comfortable, but still not fully aware of my surroundings. I bumped into fins, kicked my family with my own, and fully body slammed one of the other two people on our dive with my tank and shoulder.
A few days later, Marlie was ready to give it another go. I e-mailed Jan at Almost Heaven Adventures, requested Russ again, and we joined another discover scuba group of three as they finished their time in the swimming pool. With a 10-year-old, having two instructors with such a small group is perfect. Russ was able to stay with Marlie the whole time, give her as much time as she needed to clear her ears, and pull her along. The other benefit to this was that he knew where to look for life. He pointed out dozens of fish, lobster, and a magnificent, enormous eel he later told us was a goldspotted moving between the rocks and coral at the bottom. They also found what looked like an empty conch shell, which housed a large hermit crab. Neither of us would have thought to pick up a little of the course sand at the bottom, which was made of pieces of coral and shell that were not yet ground fine enough to be washed to the shore.