Diving for Goats, St. Thomas: Part 2

BE SURE TO READ PART ONE FIRST
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The romance of scuba diving, for some, has its source in the old Lloyd Bridge’s TV program Sea Hunt. But for me, the draw is not from that black and white world of dumped weapons and submerged cars, but from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea, the world of Disney cinematic color, the world of Ned and his harpoon and the mysterious island home of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. Throw in the documentaries of scuba innovator Jacques Cousteau and childhood days in my small, local library paging through the magazine Skin Diver, and you can understand my attraction.

We were met by the staff of the dive club. They quickly gathered us on a small, concrete patio lined with metal folding chairs and began to educate us using flip charts on an easel. All of the instructors had that slightly wild look to them, the look of people who dance to their own, eccentric beat. And it was obvious that they all loved what they were doing—pretending that they were fish. The lessons themselves had several messages: this is fun; this is dangerous; some of you will make it; some of you will not.

Our final instructor—unbeknownst to us at the time—would also be our guide in the water. He was young, with long blond hair. He might have been a good-looking California surfer, but he had a slightly seedy look. Surprisingly, he was effective as a teacher. He was charming and witty.

How, I wondered, did all of these Americans and Europeans end up living and working on this island in the Caribbean? Some people run away from home to join the circus. Others, no doubt, prefer the sun, the sea and the good rum. Still, most of us lead a very patterned, very social life. And thank heaven. The world needs its patterns, its ways of assuring existence, sustenance and growth. But God bless the free spirits, as well.

Even though we were only diving to forty feet (the maximum without your certificate), the effects of pressure were still the most critical problems. Our blond haired instructor emphasized this: “If you have bad sinuses, you should not be doing this. You will be in excruciating pain and will likely rupture your eardrums.” I have bad sinuses. I have the worst sinuses in the world. I have the worst sinuses in the universe.

My wife looked at me with one with one eyebrow arched and sighed. She knew that even if my eyeballs dropped out like gumballs from a machine, I was still going to do this.

They split us into small groups; not everyone could safely dive at the same time. Those not in the initial dive—including us—were given free use of snorkel equipment and…dog biscuits.

The fish off Coki Beach have to be the fattest fish in the world. We put on our snorkel equipment and leisurely floated out, carrying our dog biscuits. “They’ll flock to you when they notice the dog biscuits,” they told us. And I’m sure they explained how to properly hold the biscuits—but I seem to have missed that point.

Beautiful fish—it seemed like hundreds of them, like a big flock of underwater seagulls—blue stripes on yellow. I held a biscuit out like you would for a dog and within a split second, it was all gone, including all of the skin from the end of my finger. They sucked it right off. Biscuit, finger—it was all the same to them.

It was time, I decided, to float back to the beach. We sat down next to a lawyer from Orlando who had been in the first group. She hadn’t made it; too much pain in her ears. She told us about the land speculation going on in the Orlando area and how property prices were becoming impossible. Then, like a Marine shot at water’s edge during an amphibious assault, a slightly overweight gentleman stumbled out of the sea and dropped to his knees, gasping and holding his chest. His air tanks nearly pulled him backwards. We went over to help.

“I’m ok, I’m ok,” he said. “I just panicked.”

Now we had a foursome. “It was while we were practicing emergency procedures in the shallow water,” he said. But we never got to hear all of the details. Our group was up next.

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Travels of the heart, mind and spirit.