I’m on a 3 day 2 night SCUBA trip now. We can dive 5 times a day. One of
those times is at night. We live on a boat.
Diving is a lot like meditation or yoga or something.
Because you’re super aware of your breathing. And when you inhale you float up
a little and when you exhale you float down a little. You’re often checking how
much air you have too. It’s all about the breath underwater. So you get a
little zen and oddly it takes me out of it. It’s like I’m just watching the
reef on tv or something. I think it has to do with the wetsuit too. You can’t
feel much. You just float around and look at all the pretty things. A surreal
displacement.
My initial reaction to The Great Barrier Reef was disappointed. Maybe that’s more me than anything else though, I was also disappointed with the New York City skyline and Bioshock Infinite. The Reef generally looks better in the pictures. It’s named the largest living organism but it’s broken up pretty frequently with large gaps in between reefs. There’s a lot of dead coral, and we were going to the good spots. That could be a function of global warming and pollution but it could also be a natural cycle of some parts dying while others grow.
Then you get this weird problem cuz you want to show the
reef at its best to attract tourists and get value but also want to show its
death to enact protection. So it’s like any marketing has to go through some hula
hoops. If you want to protect the reef then no one should go there. But then
there’s no value in it being there, so it wouldn’t matter if it existed. So you
have to have people go to the reef, but just being out there is bad for it. You
can tell, the boats all put out fumes and we dump food waste and we wear
sunscreen to not die from the sun. The general message is to be very respectful
of the reef, but ya know you can’t bne perfect.
That ends the burnt edges of the toast of my reef
experience. If you can cut those off, you get a very buttery sweet bread.
Fish in the reef have new colors. They’re like little water
crayons zipping around in the blue. Everything is a technicolor acid trip, and
it’s all swirling around you. Fish seem are simultaneously smart and dumb. Some
are really interested in you and they’re like scientists coming to check you
out. And they seem smart because theyr’re all judgey cuz you can't even move
right. Like what are you stupid? Can you even float? And then they seem dumb
cuz when you do move they dart around and they're always like "woah! What
is this?? I'm insecure. " Then they come back again.
Night diving is insane. Whoever did it first is out of their
mind. We huck ourselves out into the blackness at night and just hope
everything is fine. You get a little beam of light to poke around. And maybe
you flash eyes with a shark, you don’t know, and then it’s gone and your beam can’t find it again. You can’t
really tell when you’re moving unless you can see the ground or the reef too.
So you just paddle along hoping you collide with something to orient yourself.
You know how they say things aren’t like they seem in the
movies. This is not one of those things. You can flip on some film about people
in the ocean at night and it’ll be the same. The way the flood lights crack
through the surface of the water, and then if you look up at it from underwater
you get a lense flare.
The reason you dive at night is because different fish keep
different business hours. At night, sharks, giant trevalis, Red Bass, lobsters,
and sting rays come out. The other fish are asleep and you can usually find
some sea turtles with their eyes closed. If you shine your light on them you
can wake them up like a rude jerk. Sea turtles are so cool. You can flick your
hand around in the dark and get plankton to light up like Christmas dust too.
You know how you get like 1 or 2 things you’re automatically
good at? Like with no practice you’re just generally pretty good? One of mine
is baseball. The other one is diving. I’m a flotation master. I could probably
get to the bottom of the ocean and back just by breathing. I’m a man boy water
zeppelin.
Diving makes you feel like a navy seal too, since have to
use hand signals to communicate under water.
I was diving with some buds and we got lost (day time dive)
because we followed a stingray. Stingrays don’t know where they’re going. But
it was all good cuz we got the little boat (called a tender) to pull us back to
the big boat. That was a fun trip.
