Scuba Diving

I have the good great fortune this semester of not having classes on Fridays.  So what does one do on a casual Friday in Wollongong, during the semester, in the earliest hintings of spring?  One goes scuba diving, of course!

The last time I had been diving was just over five years ago.  With an activity such as scuba diving, which puts a person beyond the realm of life-supporting media such as free air, held down by about sixty pounds of equipment, breathing through a tube, and trespassing on the homelands of all those notorious Australian critters that either want to poison you, eat you, or suck your blood, it really seemed best to do things right and find a way to take a refresher course.  Lauren, the other Colgate geology major on the trip, is also certified and also needed a refresher course.  So we called up a scuba place about half an hour away by train, and they fit us right in on a Friday. 

Our instructor was Mick, a true ole' salt who can throw around tanks and divers with hardly any effort, hilarious, careful, and bent on helping us have a good time.  One other girl came for the course.  Lauren and I were dive buddies, and Mick paired up with the other girl (I can't for the life of me remember her name). 

We dove at a place called the gutter, which is a big weathered gorge into basalt (incidentally, the same basalt flow that heated up the pore waters and made flow features in the sandstone I'm working on).  The water is rather chilly (winter just ended, after all, such as it were), so we wore full wetsuits and oversuits (a second wetsuit layer) with a hood to keep us warm, which evidently had the dual purpose of strangling us and covering up so much of the face that the most recognizable characteristic of an individual is the color of the snorkel.  We had to walk over the basalt for a little ways, wearing all our gear, before we could do a giant-stride entry into the water.  We descended to about three meters, began swimming, and the other girl promptly got lost (we were still in the gutter, nobody knows how she did it).  So Mick made very clear motions that Lauren and I were to sit on the bottom, hold onto a rock, and hold hands, which we did for about ten minutes while he went to find her and bring her back.  It was a nice bonding moment for us, I suppose, and there were for sure plenty of fish around to amuse us.

Then we swam out a ways.  It's kind of a rocky reef area, with lots of seaweed and sea urchins, tons of fish, and some stingrays around.  So many divers dive in the area that the fish were quite unafraid, and one in particular, a large blue groper (yes, that's what the fish is called) hung around a lot.  Mick pulled little slug-like creatures (it's quite late at the moment, which is my excuse for not remembering the names of the slug things, either) off of the rocks and put them in our hands, and the groper came and ate them.  We could feel his teeth, but he didn't really bite us.  We also saw some small stingrays, which were great.  And Mick caught a little cuttlefish - they're very squid-like and squishy - and let us touch it before it swam away and inked at us about four times.

This past Sunday we went back to the dive shop to do two dives, morning and afternoon.  Lauren and I went with Claire (another Colgate girl who lives at Campus East), Bianca, Richard, and Richard's roommate Brett.  The morning dive was just a standard dive, and there were divers EVERYWHERE.  They kind of broke us up into groups to stay with a certain instructor, and the six of us ended up in our own group with Mick.  We did the same sort of dive, but got a bit further than the last time because we didn't have to sit on the bottom and hold hands for ten minutes.  On the way out, Mick stopped and motioned us toward a piece of seaweed.  I stared at it for a long time, wondering why he would show us this particular piece.  Then I realized that one of the leaves was actually a little tiny pipe seahorse, maybe an inch and a half or two inches long, and very skinny.  We also saw a large cuttlefish, more stingrays, and fed the groper.  This time he got my finger all the way in his mouth, but again didn't bite me.

The afternoon dive ended up being just the six of us with three instructors, and was aptly described by the instructors as "herding cats."  Aptly, that is, if cats were to attempt to use jet packs, with a slow learning curve and only basic success.  They decided to give us cats each a scooter - an underwater personal diver propulsion device.  Ours looked like the one to the left.  You sit on the black part like riding a horse, and the throttle is the red button you can see on the handle.  These things are worth about five and a half grand apiece, and are heavy enough that I just barely got mine over the basalt.  Once we had carried them carefully down and jumped into the water, Mick carelessly launched the scooters one by one from the rock platform into the ocean where we were floating.  We then hooked them on to our gear so they wouldn't float off, and spent some time at the surface playing with them without really mounting.

Then we descended, and they instructed us to get on.  I mounted my scooter, managed to find the throttle eventually, turned it on,  and was suddenly several feet closer to the surface than I'd expected to be.  There was then a panicked moment during which I frantically tried to lean my scooter toward the bottom and to find the darn throttle which had somehow seemed to disappear again.  Fortunately nobody noticed my antics (except perhaps the instructors) because everyone was having equal trouble breaking their own steed, going in unplanned directions, running into rocks and each other, and generally admirably imitating confused cats with jet packs. 

Fortunately, after a few minutes we were able to get them under control (mostly), and head off in the correct direction.  You just lean forward in a normal swimming position and let them push you forwards - you don't even have to hold on, though I often felt like I wanted to hold onto something.  They really move!  Divers who know what they're doing cover five or six kilometers on a scooter dive.  To turn you just lean in one direction or the other, and keep an eye on the elusive throttle to change speeds or stop.  Any time we stopped or started things got really claustrophobic, with people flailing limbs and scooters, and I definitely got thoroughly punched in the face once - mask pushed off and everything - which Mick happened to witness and found highly amusing.  It was exceedingly hard to tell each other apart underwater, so I can't identify the culprit, but I can be sure that I did something similar to someone else at one point or another during the dive.  Once we were going, though, it was really quite fun and relaxing!

We saw more rays and cuttlefish (I got to actually hold one! cuddled the cuttlefish?), as well as our groper friend, on this dive.  Mick also picked up a very large sea urchin and put it on each of our hands.  It has lots of little nubby feet on the bottom that actually walk!  But the best part by far was the weedy sea dragon.  He looked a lot like the one on the right (not my picture, of course).  He was maybe six or eight inches long  Mick picked him up carefully and I got to touch him - they're very rough and leathery, just skin and bones!

We're headed up the the Great Barrier Reef for spring break, so it's great to have a chance to remember how to dive before then.  And it was great fun all-around!