TSandM
April 12th, 2012, 12:31 PM
I've been doing a lot of mentoring and diving with newer folks recently, and last night, I had a chance to do a nice night dive with an experienced and skilled buddy.
We surface swam out to the drop point (which was where I got tired of surface swimming :) ). It was a dusk descent with no reference, into very poor viz. We gave the signal, and I emptied my wing. I slipped under the water, got myself horizontal, and looked in front of me -- and there, about two feet underwater with me, was my horizontal, stable, and quiet buddy. We both drifted downward, perfectly together, and arrested our descent a few feet above the bottom.
I realized I was already having fun.
We wandered downslope and checked out some possible octopus sites (and found none) and then headed upslope to some other attractions. On the way, I found a small red octo, who was doing his level best to look like a small collection of pebbles. I moved my light to start an "attention" signal, and before I had even begun to swing it back toward me, my buddy was looking -- but I couldn't convince him at first that there was anything there to see! Not until the little octo got nervous and turned purple, did he realize what it was. We then sat there for about five minutes, and when I say sat, I mean it -- floating, about a foot off the bottom, and neither of us doing more than twitching a fin now and then. We watched the little guy until he moved a little away, and then we swam off.
I realized I had enjoyed the octopus immensely, but I had also enjoyed the fact that we could both sit there for that long without moving.
We got to the pilings, which are called "jackstraw" for a reason -- they lie at all kinds of angles to the bottom, which means to look inside and on top of them, you do a lot of moving up and down. Again, my buddy and I moved up, hovered, and pivoted without difficulty, and neither of us ever turned the wrong way or kicked the other one, because we've been trained not to do that. It was a dance in the water column, and the dance itself was almost as much fun as the critter hunting.
We got to the wrecked sailboat, and I moved in under the hull to check out another octopus-likely spot -- hovering about three inches off the bottom, I played my light around the space and concluded, sadly, that he wasn't there. A couple of fin kicks backed me out from under the hull, so I could turn to my buddy and make "sorry, no octo" signals.
Looking for the octo was fun, but so was being able to go down there, back up, and rise without leaving a whisper of silt behind me.
We moseyed back toward shore, shoulder to shoulder, showing each other things of note or just things that were funny. (I love decorator crabs, because they can be incredibly silly looking.) The viz closed in and became soup, but we were still together, until we got to about five feet of water over the entry rocks, where I thumbed it -- and we both floated slowly and gently to the surface.
It was a good dive, with fun critters and a friendly seal. But some significant part of the fun was just that we could do this, and use the skills we worked so hard to learn, to make a dive a graceful and elegant thing, and not just a sightseeing trip.
Good skills are their own reward. I've known this a long time, but I got a delightful reminder last night.
We surface swam out to the drop point (which was where I got tired of surface swimming :) ). It was a dusk descent with no reference, into very poor viz. We gave the signal, and I emptied my wing. I slipped under the water, got myself horizontal, and looked in front of me -- and there, about two feet underwater with me, was my horizontal, stable, and quiet buddy. We both drifted downward, perfectly together, and arrested our descent a few feet above the bottom.
I realized I was already having fun.
We wandered downslope and checked out some possible octopus sites (and found none) and then headed upslope to some other attractions. On the way, I found a small red octo, who was doing his level best to look like a small collection of pebbles. I moved my light to start an "attention" signal, and before I had even begun to swing it back toward me, my buddy was looking -- but I couldn't convince him at first that there was anything there to see! Not until the little octo got nervous and turned purple, did he realize what it was. We then sat there for about five minutes, and when I say sat, I mean it -- floating, about a foot off the bottom, and neither of us doing more than twitching a fin now and then. We watched the little guy until he moved a little away, and then we swam off.
I realized I had enjoyed the octopus immensely, but I had also enjoyed the fact that we could both sit there for that long without moving.
We got to the pilings, which are called "jackstraw" for a reason -- they lie at all kinds of angles to the bottom, which means to look inside and on top of them, you do a lot of moving up and down. Again, my buddy and I moved up, hovered, and pivoted without difficulty, and neither of us ever turned the wrong way or kicked the other one, because we've been trained not to do that. It was a dance in the water column, and the dance itself was almost as much fun as the critter hunting.
We got to the wrecked sailboat, and I moved in under the hull to check out another octopus-likely spot -- hovering about three inches off the bottom, I played my light around the space and concluded, sadly, that he wasn't there. A couple of fin kicks backed me out from under the hull, so I could turn to my buddy and make "sorry, no octo" signals.
Looking for the octo was fun, but so was being able to go down there, back up, and rise without leaving a whisper of silt behind me.
We moseyed back toward shore, shoulder to shoulder, showing each other things of note or just things that were funny. (I love decorator crabs, because they can be incredibly silly looking.) The viz closed in and became soup, but we were still together, until we got to about five feet of water over the entry rocks, where I thumbed it -- and we both floated slowly and gently to the surface.
It was a good dive, with fun critters and a friendly seal. But some significant part of the fun was just that we could do this, and use the skills we worked so hard to learn, to make a dive a graceful and elegant thing, and not just a sightseeing trip.
Good skills are their own reward. I've known this a long time, but I got a delightful reminder last night.