I made a new years resolution to myself. This year, I will
get my rescue scuba divers licence. I’ve held an open water divers licence
since 2007 when school took us up to Cairns to get our qualification. We spent
three days on land sitting our tests and practicing in the pool, then three
days out on the reef in a little boat where all we did was eat, sleep and SCUBA.
I came to love diving so much. I loved the silence as you descended, which
forced me into my own head. I always have intense conversations with myself
when I am under the water because I feel enclosed in my own mind. I loved how
calming it was. Almost the only thing you can hear is your breathing (think
Darth Vader style). It’s like a meditation being so aware of your breath. Breathing
underwater is a very different experience and lots of people don’t like it. I
can’t say that I found it the most enjoyable feeling either initially but you
get used to it and after a while you stop having to concentrate on each breath
and relax into a very slow and consistent pattern. The best state to be in is a
very relaxed one so that you don’t use up the air in your tank so fast with puffing,
short, excited breaths. Having said that
the underwater world is a very exciting one and sometimes it is hard not to
start squeaking and pointing or rushing over to where someone else is doing the
same. Sharks don’t help relaxed breathing, neither do sea snakes or eels or
even just very large fish but that is why scuba is like a Zen test. “Be calm
young one for if it decides to hurt you, you have no chance and so why bother
worrying?” I have had shark encounters under the water. In Cairns they were
just reef sharks but when I went to Fiji where I got my advanced divers licence
we went on shark feeding trips where I
came face to face with 2 meter long bronze whalers and lemon sharks. I’m still
more scared of sea snakes though.
When I finished year 12 I wanted to be a dive instructor up
in Cairns and live half my days on a boat in the sun. But scuba diving licences
are expensive to get and so I resolved to slowly build on my licence over the
years. I did a few dives in Sydney; they were cold and sometimes gloomy with
very poor visibility and after the Barrier Reef, a comparatively poor array of
fish and coral. One dive was advertised to us as a ‘Wreak Dive’. The Wreak
turned out to be a motorcycle with a beer bottle sitting on the seat.
Disappointing. But the dives were fun for that feeling of still that came over
me, the meditation of breathing and the thoughts that came under the water.
A couple of dives in Greece again proved to me just how
lucky we are to have the Barrier Reef so close and accessible. I went diving
off the island of Santorini and at least these dives had the wreaks they
promised to us. Large boats, sunk at 15 meters and big enough for us to swim
through the cabins and hull. But I was shocked to see the disaster site that
surrounded them. Piles of rubbish covered the floor of the enclave the boats
were sunk in, rubbish floated around us and was scattered as far as we could
see. There was next to no plant life or fish which I suspect was due to the
rubbish and when we were again above water I asked our instructor why nobody
cleaned the area. He told me that they did, that at the start of every tourist
season all the dive organisations on the island gathered to clear out the cove,
but because of the cruise ships and tourist ferries that frequented the island
and the tourists who deposited their rubbish straight into the sea, it quickly
filled back up again. It was sad that because so few people see beneath the
waves, they can’t learn what damage they are doing above them.
During my time in Fiji I got to use my diving for a purpose
other than recreation. There was a cyclone and it had torn up the shallow reef
and with it the buoys that marked the boat free areas of the lagoon. A few days
after the cyclone some of us went out to replace them. This involved finding
stable areas of the reef to tie our buoys to and making sure the length of the line
could accommodate for high tides. I was also shown the clam farm and a few
clams that had been disrupted in the cyclone were gathered back and placed back
in the farm area. We also helped from underwater to dislodge some anchors that
had become too wedged to be removed from above.
My next diving trip is organised for a few weeks. I’ll be
heading over to New Zealand and doing a few dives at the Poor Knights Island
above Auckland. I am hoping it will be a multi-coloured explosion with plenty
of new things to see (there always are) but most of all I’m looking forward to
the splash as I roll over the side of the boat, followed by the slow silence,
the alien sound of breathing underwater and the calm as I descend.
