The night dive - Diving in the keys - Day 2

Day 2 - Betty's Reef    

The Team

Day 2 started with an early 8 am dive at Betty's reef. The early morning air was a tad chilly and the seas were a little more choppy. In fact by the time we got to the reef, I was feeling a little queasy, so I had to wiggle into my gear fast and get in the water pronto. This was a deeper dive than the first two and visibility was reportedly a little low - about 20 ft. Our dive profiles were pretty basic - get in the water, bottom out at 45 ft, complete a skills check, ascend with one safety stop. The descent was pretty fine, but I again had to stop and pop my ears more than a couple of times before I was able to get to the bottom.

This reef was characterized by a huge bowl shaped depression that probably measured a good 200 meters across. The fine, sandy bottom of the depression had an abundance of small, colorful fish but an odd eeriness because when u reached the center of the depression, u really couldn't see the bowl's rim properly. If you squinted you might catch a shadow of the rim amidst the gloomy blue-green murkiness. So there we were at the bottom warming up with some mask remove-replace and buddy breathing exercises all the while communicating in hand signals. It was easy when we were first training in 5 feet of water in a swimming pool to come up and communicate verbally what we wanted to do but it's a whole new ball game when you are in the middle of the ocean and under 45 feet of water. Suddenly those underwater hand signals from the course book din't seem silly at all. In fact, at first, they practically seemed woefully inadequate to convey the plethora of things that could go wrong down under. But then like the instructor said the hand signals did suffice as he signaled to us to start what was probably the toughest skill to learn and perfect in scuba - underwater compass navigation.

 It involved setting a course on your wrist compass to a distant landmark and then following the course just by looking at the compass needle and not the surrounding. Each of the students were asked to navigate a course from a point on the edge of the bowl to the opposite side with a dive master in training - Tyler blair who also happened to be a good life guarding friend of mine. I was the last to do this skill, and when I begun, the instructor got started with the next set of skills with the other students myself and the dive master to join them after completing the navigation skill. So off we went, me following the course with my compass and Tyler monitoring my progress. I worked up a good pace and was at the opposite rim inside 5 mins. Now I turned back, reset the compass and started on the return leg. By this time all nearby divers had moved on to different areas and the students were off doing the next skills check. When I reached, what I thought was the starting point, there was not a soul there. The dive master was confused too. He started in a direction hoping that the others were just a little bit farther from the starting spot. After a couple of such false alarms I realized with a sinking feeling that we were lost. It was a fleeting thought given that I was with Tyler who had logged nearly 50 dives and he was entirely calm and composed. There was also the fact that if we were truly lost we could always surface, hail the boat and get our bearings back. But the mind, being the funny thing it is, doesn't always think that logically when you are under 45 feet of water in the middle of the ocean but still I recovered my composure in a minute. Anyway, Tyler started navigating a course to get back to the starting point and after what seemed like hours of swimming around in circles (which in reality was only 5-8 minutes), out of the gloom there appeared the shadowy shapes of our certification group. The instructor appeared surprised to find us coming from another direction and signaled to ask if we were ok.

The better part of our skills check was over and we just had to do an emergency ascent and a couple of buddy breathing exercises to wrap up the certification. That done, we had a good half hour  to explore and look around. For the most part we followed the instructor, tried to fine tune our buoyancy and become comfortable with it while observing several eels, some sea urchins and helluva lotta fish. Soon, the instructor signaled for us to ascend and we did so as a staggered group rising slowly as if in a trance. We made a 3 min emergency stop at 15 feet, clinging to the guide rope because the sea was really choppy at this  shallow depth making it difficult to maintain neutral buoyancy and position. At long last we were back on the boat, excited, tired and elated to have finally become open water certified divers!.  We went back to tavernier for lunch and a little close-eye before returning to the dock at around 5 pm for what would decidedly be the highlight of the trip - my first night dive!.

Into the darkness

This was just going to be a single cylinder dive on davis reef - the one we had done earlier -  for familiarity purposes. The ride out was timed so that we would reach there at dusk so as to allow us to setup our equipment and get into the water when there was still some light left. The boat charted a course due northwest and the peppy breeze caught our hair in a frenzy. Overhead, the scattered clouds scurrying towards the horizon as if seeking refuge from the impending darkness, were tinged and smudged with the orange fieriness of the sun, as if small clumps of cotton were set ablaze. There weren't a single boat around us, with most of them heading back to port with the setting sun having done the day's worth of diving, snorkeling, cruising and whatever else. We finally reached the reef with the sun hanging dangerously low on the horizon as if it might slip over and fall off the sky at any instant. The captain started his routine briefing on the reef, explaining about the ledge that started just behind our boat and went roughly north west for a good half a mile or so. We were also advised to dive against the current starting out so that we could save both energy and air while heading back. I took it all in a kinda semi-trance, basking in the warm glow of the last rays and  mesmerized by the million golden sparkles in the 3- foot high waves as the sun finally went down like a floundering ship.

We now did final gear checks, and decided what teams we were diving in. The five of us rooming together - tyler, chris, jenny and another girl decided to dive as a team. Powerful handheld dive lights and glowsticks (color coded by team for recognition down under - we got blue!) were handed out and the latter, we attached to the back of our gear so as to be easily visible.The boats bright running lights were switched off and red diving lights and a flashing halogen light were turned on. By the time we got into the water there was still a little bit of light so we could orient ourselves a bit. My dive buddy was chris, and together with the other 3 we had worked out our communication signals and patterns  underwater since night dives require more caution and slightly different hand signals. Finally we began our descent and as we did, the darkness suddenly seemed to curl, twist and grow around us enveloping us menacingly. 

The Turtle!!

The descent was one of the most stunningly surreal experiences of my life. The scene was both beautifully eerie and forebodingly ethereal at the same time - a bunch of shadowy shapes with fuzzy multi-colored lights on the back drifting down, with only the hiss of the regulator to keep company. The smoky beams of flashlights, danced around and lit up microscopic life, dirt, fishes and coral alike painting them in vibrant splashes of color (something that you won't experience during a day dive because the depth and the refracted light washes out the colors making for a rather bland palette the deeper you go).  It was almost like a scene straight out of the James Cameron film, Abyss or maybe the Michael Crichton book, Sphere - Fantastical, and mystical but with some unseen evil lurking just beneath the surface.   Visibility was under 15 feet and a strong current kept pushing me back so I had to swim to keep my position. The groups split off and headed into the gloom as we were the last to reach the bottom and orient ourselves as it was hard to recognize people in the low light. We soon found the edge of the ledge and started to follow it due north west, peering under the ledges and in between cracks in the coral to spot the nocturnal fauna. Almost immediately we ran into a nice, big hawksbill turtle that was meandering a couple of feet over the ledge on the other side. We avoided shining a light directly into its eyes but swam around it and played with it making sure not to touch it or alarm it. Continuing on along the reef, our flash lights playing out a wild choreography of movements, we saw several big lobsters hidden in the deep recesses under the coral ledge, that wiggled and shook their antennae when we shone a light on them, as if annoyed at have been disturbed from their sleep. I constantly had to turn my eyes away from the reef or double back a bit to make sure my buddy and the rest of my group was with me. The blue glowsticks that we carried helped quite a bit to keep track but there was another group a little further off that had the same color glow sticks. And so we drifted on in that eerie world, the dim bluish halo of the moon's rays filtering through the water, the soft blotches of the glow sticks and the scintillating beams of the flashlights the only sources of light. We finally reached 1700 psi on our gauges and started to turn back, tracing our way back along the ledge to the dive boat. Floating along with the current proved much more relaxing and we got to see a bunch more lobsters, urchins, a blue parrot fish and stingrays. Soon, the pulsing, red and white dive lights of the boat were visible on the surface as smudges of color and we made a slow, steady ascent to the writhing surface. 

The whiff of fresh air at the surface was heavenly even though the choppy seas meant swimming back to the boat was a tad tiring. We were back in the boat by 7 pm and changing. The ride back to port was beautiful with the stars out in full force adorning the heavens like pinpricks of light, a light breeze and calm seas. It was one of those serene and peaceful moments that inspires nostalgia and makes you reflect on life's little joys. Life gets its real meaning in moments like these.