Boogyman Effect

[Bob DBF]

We are not on their grocery list.

No, but sometimes there are tragic mistakes.

I don't eat shark and I'm expecting they reciprocate, as common curtesy dictates.


Bob

 

[Streydog]

Watch the movie Jaws if you haven't seen it yet.

I saw Jaws right after it came out when I was in middle school, then my Dad got stationed in Key West. I am not proud of how scared I was when I spotted my 1st 2' nurse shark while I was snorkeling.

I get a little uneasy hanging over a deep wall now but not enough to keep me from doing it and every once in a while during a night dive I will shine my light off into the distance, just in case.

 

[JamesBon92007]

The last time I was in Cozumel, I did the normal dive and came up for my safety stop. During my safety stop, I got pushed over the edge of the wall (I was floating over the deep end of the pool).

This freaked me out a little bit. I tried to fin back over the reef, but the drag of the safety sausage and getting hung up in some sargassum really kept me from making any progress in this endeavor.

I know it's somewhat irrational, but I can really imagine some bull shark or other creature looking up from the blackness below and saying, "Lunch!!".

I pretty much don't get this while night diving, which I think is a little weird. I don't think I got it trying to dive with whale sharks in Belize. It's only over the dark abyss that this happens to me. Does anyone else get bugged by the "boogyman"?

Yes, I used to get a "spooked" feeling when I was a new diver. Before I began scuba diving I used to have a repetitive dream where I fell into a swimming pool and a shark attacked me but it didn't do any damage because it had rubber teeth. I read every book I could find about sharks so I guess my sub-conscience was telling me that the danger was actually quite small. Of course, it didn't help that the scuba divers at La Jolla Cove would tell me horror stories (when I was about 13) about the GWS that swallowed a diver, twin tanks and all They also told me that a moray eel would hold down a diver until he ran out of air, but then I learned that they need to open and close their mouth to breathe. Now I see morays as about as dangerous as puppy dogs. I did actually meet a woman who had been bitten by a moray, so I made sure I always looked before sticking my hand inside a dark hole.

I suppose it might be a natural fear, when above the abyss, to think that loved ones might never know what happened to the diver in question, and that the body might never be recovered.

 

[Snoweman]

I did my first night dive in Maui. Again, this was in 2013, when there were a lot of shark attacks. I kept asking questions about being eaten during the dive. The DM assured me that we wouldn't see any sharks. It helped me a little bit that it was a shore dive, instead of jumping into the dark unknown. We had a pretty good dive (with the exception of the DM getting disoriented a couple of times and surfacing for bearings). We saw lots of cool stuff, like all the other night dives I have done since.

As we finished the dive and were walking out of the water she says, "I didn't want to alarm anyone, but did anyone else see that tiger shark?" I'm kind of sorry I missed it, but I'm also glad she didn't mention it during the dive, too. My dive buddy said he saw it, so I am pretty sure she wasn't joking.

 

[Nathan Doty]

I had a manatee scare the poop out of me a few weeks ago down in the keys. I was just snorkling in the shallows, face down and checking out what was crawling around below me. There were a ton of upside down jellies on the sand. Out of my perifs I see something cross within a couple inches of my head. I thought it was an idiot on a kayak until I lifted my head a bit and saw it was swimming. Jerked back and saw the tail as it moved past. Heart rate was up all over a sea couch.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

My buddy and I dived right at the base of Point Reyes light house in Northern California. It’s pretty much a sheer cliff right to the water and then it goes straight down to 40-50’, then it levels out slight and works down to 60-70’ just out from the cliff with lots of radical terrain, then it drops down vertically again after that into the depths. The area is very well known for a lot of great white shark activity with the giant sea lion population nearby. It was a very nerve racking dive, low visibility, very exposed to the power of the Pacific Ocean. Everything we saw was giant including some of the biggest rock fish and abalone we ever saw. We saw only one very nervous sea lion buzz us then was gone. That was not a good sign. We never saw any sharks but that doesn’t mean they were not there.
At that time we were into these types of very high energy exploration dives at the most treacherous places we could find. This was one of those butt puckering boogyman dives for sure.
The other one was when we went up to the Delgada Trench further north. That place was the freakiest dive of all time for me.

 

[Scuba Lawyer]

I still freak out when a big old Harbor Seal materializes out of the murk and into my peripheral vision. They sneak up on you really fast and get right in your face. Very friendly creatures but seeing something my size suddenly appear makes the old ticker skip a beat or two. M

 

[kablooey]

I was on a liveaboard trip at a location where sharks are rarely seen.
On a day dive I took my camera intending to get some shots of the macro life.
I spent most of the dive concentrating on photographing the small stuff, and shooting different camera settings.

When I returned to the boat, the dive deck was buzzing.
All the divers were unusually excited, saying things like...
"Did you see that big shark?",
"It looked hungry!",
"It kept circling that diver",
"I thought it was sizing him up for lunch",
"Who was that guy?"...

Well, turns out "that guy" was me.
I was so fixated on my photography that I never saw the shark.
Never saw it.
Not a clue.

K.

 

[Snoweman]

The other one was when we went up to the Delgada Trench further north. That place was the freakiest dive of all time for me.

I can't believe you're going to leave us (me, at least) hanging on this one....

 

[Chavodel8en]

I've never dove where I couldn't see the bottom underneath me. The closest thing to it is North Monastery in Carmel where its not a straight down wall, but still a very steep slope going down into the Monterey Canyon abyss. I don't like looking down at the abyss, I prefer looking at the face of the slope.

I'm not really scared of any animals, Im scared that some bizarre circumstance will happen and I will go bye-bye forever into thousands of feet of water. I have fine buoyancy, its an illogical fear. Still it gives me the heeby-jeebies. I don't think I would enjoy being mid-water with zero reference points beneath me, for that reason.