Under The Sea

Five hours of breathing and a PADI Open Water Certificate

This is Clouds Form Over Land, weekly writing about resilience, imperfectionism, and our relationship to the earth.

Photo by @lumonaut on a recent snorkeling expedition.

As a sailor and swimmer, I tend to focus on staying at the surface of the water.

Last week we attended dive class and spent five hours breathing underwater.

We let the sea into our masks and cleared it away by breathing through our noses.

We strung pounds of lead on our belts to achieve neutral buoyancy, hovering criss-cross-apple-sauce above the reef.

We learned hand signals to indicate problems, remaining air, and most frequently - that everything was OK. Our instructor shared signals for a bunch of types of fish, although I only recall shark and lion fish. The hang loose signal jumped from surf culture to dive culture seamlessly, in this case meaning “way cool”. Double hang loose hands? Way way cool.

The beginning skills were transferred to us in a session in the Caribbean blue waters off the dock at Carenero Island. Our instructor descended ten feet to the sandy bottom with each of us where we knelt in the sand and mimicked the skills she displayed. We all simulated running out of air and sharing with a buddy, losing track of our breathing apparatus and recovering it by tracing the lines from the tank, disconnecting and reconnecting gear, and swimming with an unresponsive diver to the surface. After ~10 hours of online learning, an hour underwater, and a few more in the dockside classroom, we were cleared to go aboard the dive boat the following day.

One of my favorite books growing up was a glow-in-the-dark adventure called Under the Sea. Our spunky protagonist Judy visited her aunt and uncle on their submarine. I recall being enamoured by the tidy galley and library and laboratory aboard the sub, and got a glimmer of this when I first met my partner and began considering living aboard a boat too. They see a shipwreck and sharks and all sorts of other creatures. I remember feeling a similar wonder and spookiness as my mom turned the lights on and off to experience the glowing book. After the dives, my mom asked if I remembered. Even 18 meters under water, we’re connected by memories across time and location.

The dive boat arrived at our first mooring buoy, a place called Pandora. Much of the class so far had covered how to properly check gear. We had pieced together our kit at the dive shop and now strapped in aboard a rocking vessel. We sat on the edge and backrolled into the water. After a few drills near the surface, we descended thirty feet and did a few more. Once cleared from schooling, we got in line behind the instructor and started kicking.

The coursework and instructors all reiterate that slow and steady movements are best under the sea. Overexurtion opens a can of possibilities ranging from using air faster to more dangerous prospects. Plus, if you speed by the reef you’ll miss the gaping stare of the moray eel, the expertly chamoflaged sea horse, or my favorite sighting and new style influence - the spotted drum fish.

While cruising around the reef, the lyrics “life on earth is long” looped over and over through my internal sound system. I’ve been playing the Life On Earth album by Hurray for the Riff Raff a lot, found through the theme music of the Emergent Strategy podcast. NOAA says: With growth rates of 0.3 to 2 centimeters per year for massive corals, and up to 10 centimeters per year for branching corals, it can take up to 10,000 years for a coral reef to form from a group of larvae. Depending on their size, barrier reefs and atolls can take from 100,000 to 30,000,000 years to fully form. Life on earth is long!

Being at depth removes the choppiness of the surface and greatly reduces the pesky salt water getting in your snorkel or mask. The pressure below keeps the mask tight and the regulator has no openings to the water. Inhalation of air increases buoyancy and exhalation decreases. The seafloor has ridges and valleys and long inhales and exhales, plus adding and subtracting air from the buoyant life vest, allows for gliding right over.

I love active meditative activities like knitting and sewing, and most recently scraping and sanding the varnish on our boat’s teak woodwork. Diving was like a walk in the woods, but as if you were hovering and intruding less on all the little critters at work and play. Bubbles make the breathwork visible and the tank encourages slowing down and breathing deeply.

While nearing the end of a dive, the event I’d hoped and feared occurred - our instructor put a sideways open hand at the top of her head like a fin, signalling shark. We slowly looked around and saw a seven foot nurse shark cruising the bottom, minding its own business. I thought this would be terrifying, but with all those long deep breaths and sightings of other fish that weren’t bothered by us, it felt neutral or as my grandparents might say, neat.

Sharks are a sign of a healthy ecosystem, just as the presence of babies and youths indicate that life can flourish. I was afraid of seeing one (chomp chomp) and afraid of not seeing one, perhaps indicated we have tamed even this out of reach place on earth.

On our last dive, I had an unbearable itch on my nose. We were fifteen minutes or so in, and I knew I wouldn’t stop the group to surface for a little scratch. And yet…agh! Like many irritants, breathing and focusing on what was in front of my dissipated the agitation.

At first glance, diving could be a very solitary activity. Verbal communication is impossible down there, while immersion in your sights and thoughts is easy. Instead, the buddy system is coded into planning and gear checks and staying close by. It had the feeling of doing exactly what you’d like with your time - a few hours on and in the water, emersed in nature, breathing.

When we got back to the dive center, a song by Mipso, a blue grass-y band I went to college with, was blaring from the system. Basking in the glow of our newly issued and stamped log books, the heat of the day in cold swimsuits, and apples for snacks, this felt like the stars aligning. In fact it was the sun and Mercury lining up for cazimi.

We received our log books, wrote down the details of the four dives, and flagged a boat taxi back to town. On the sidewalk on the main island, our instructor invited us to join her friends for some lionfish ceviche. Lionfish are an invasive species in the Caribbean without a predator. Spearing them with the help of dive tanks is legal, while this respitory assist is illegal for all other species. Soon we were surronded by people from all parts of North, Central, and South America, sharing a unique source of protein and the fruits of their earlier labor. The buddy system extended out of the water or dive boat.

The sun had set and we ventured on to find another taxi to return to our boat, Azimuth. We bumped into another friend from the dive center enjoying street tacos with a date and her giant white dog Leche. We ordered pollo and patecones from a street vendor and ate in the peaceful town square. A youth marching band came through, practicing for the upcoming parade. The boat taxi stand was winding down with several men watching a soccer match. One sprung up to take us home and declared he too was going home for the night.

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Can Do List:

1. Use the Seek app to identify species in your area. The data collection helps scientists understand the prevalence and distribution of organisms.

2. Jot down some notes on the new season. What joys and hurdles are on the horizon? What are you harvesting? What would you like to learn?

3. Take five deep breaths next time you reach for your phone. Bonus: exhaling longer than inhaling calms the nervous system.

4. Join a friend on an errand or other responsibility. Go to the grocery store together. Walk the dogs or kids in strollers. Ride co-pilot for that loop of errands. Cook a batch of food for the freezer.

Written in the spirit of not letting what we can’t do get in the way of what we can.

Did you try any of these? I’d love to hear about it.

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Transportation accounts for 27% of global carbon emissions and road travel accounts for 88% of that.

Many people hesitate to go electric over worries about the prevalence of chargers.

My friend Rosana is putting this to the test and chronicalling her EV roadtrip from Oakland, CA to New Mexico. Check it out!