vshearer
Contributor
Bob Grateful turned me on to this and I thought I would post it here. Part 1
Last updated: April 20, 1998
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Blub Story
A Very Deep Experience
by Dave Barry
by Dave Barry
I'm swimming about 20 feet below the surface of the Atlantic, a major ocean. I'm a little nervous about this. For many years my philosphy has been that if God had wanted us to be beneath the surface of the ocean, He would never have put eels down there.
But I'm not panicking. That's the first thing you learn in SCUBA class: Don't panic! Just DON'T DO IT! Even if a giant eel comes right up and wraps around your neck and presses its face against your mask and opens its mouth and shows you its 874,000,000,000,000 needle-sharp teeth, you must remain COMPLETELY CALM so you'll remember your training and take the appropriate action, which in this case I suppose would be to poop in your wet suit. I don't know for certain, because in my training we haven't gotten to the section on eels.
Also, I am just now realizing, we haven't covered the procedure for what to do if a large tentacle featuring suckers the size of catchers' mitts comes snorking out and grabs your leg and starts hauling you into a vast, dark, hidden underwater cave whose denizens have little if any respect for the Bill of Rights.
Also there is the whole issue of shar... of sha... of sh...
There could be s___ks down here, somewhere.
But so far, all the marine life has appeared to be harmless. Mostly it has consisted of what I would describe, using ichthyological terminology, as "medium fish," many of which are swimming right up and giving me dopey fish looks, which basically translate to the following statement: "Food?" That's what fish do all the time -- they swim around going: "Food?" You can almost see the little question marks over their heads. The only other thought they seem capable of is: "Yikes!" Fish are not known for their SAT scores. This may be why they tend to do their thinking in large groups. You'll see a squadron of them coming toward you, their molecule-size brains working away on the problem ("Food?" "Food?" "Food?" "Food?"); and then you suddenly move your arm, triggering a Nuclear Fish Reaction ("Yikes!" "Yikes!" "Yikes!" "Yikes!") and FWOOOSSHH they're outta there, trailing a stream of exclamation marks.
This is a lot of fun to watch, because many of the fish are spectacularly, psychedelically beautiful. I'm sure there are all kinds of practical reasons for their coloration, but I don't want to know what these reasons are. I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions you see hanging out in the nooks and crannies of the reef or contraptioning along the bottom on a ridiculous number of arms and legs with all kinds of feelers and pincers and eyeballs sticking out randomly on the ends of stalks.
It is a comical place, the sea.
So anyway, I'm swimming along the reef, with my nervousness gradually being replaced by a sort of high -- a combination of fascination and amusement -- when suddenly I hear my SCUBA instructor, Ray Lang, make the following statement: "Bmoogle." Everything anybody says through an air regulator underwater sounds like "Bmoogle," which can mean: "Hi!" Or: "Isn't this fun?" Or: "I'm having a coronary seizure!" So generally people communicate with hand signs.
When I look at Lang, he's pointing excitedly off to my right, so I turn and see a large ray, which looks sort of like a giant underwater bat. This is a major test of my ability to not panic. The only other time I've been in this kind of situation was in 1970 in the Virgin Islands, when I was snorkeling with a friend named Buzz behind a small, crowded dinghy, and a ray swam directly underneath us. I have never seen a missile launched from a submarine, but I can't imagine that it leaves the water at a higher velocity than Buzz and I attained as we vaulted, arms and legs flailing, into the lower atmosphere, creating a minor hazard for commercial aircraft before finally landing in the dinghy, which nearly sank.
And that was a smallish ray, compared to this one. This ray has enough square footage to qualify as a voting district. And it is very close, swooping along, flapping its enormous wings and going: "Food?" Instantly I wish that I had brought my Miami Herald identification card (which is laminated and would work underwater) so I could identify myself as a journalist. As it is, I have no choice but to strike what I believe to be a fairly inedible pose.
But the ray pays no attention to me. It just cruises by, very casual, very nonthreatening, a ray taking care of ray business. And as it passes by, I find myself, without really thinking about it, trying to follow it -- me, a weenie of legendary stature when it comes to dealing with the Animal Kingdom; a person who has on more than one occasion fled in desperate, armpit-soaking fear from chickens -- here I am, flippering through the blue-green Semi-Deep in pursuit of this nightmare-inducing thing.
Swimming next to me, Lang points toward the surface, up above the ray. I look, and there, silhouetted against the surface, is a large school of: barracuda. Yes! The ones with the teeth! In person! They're long and lean, looking very alert, all pointing in the same direction, as if awaiting orders from their commanding officer. ("OK, men. Today we're going to swim around and eat.")
But for some reason, the barracuda don't seem scary, any more than the ray does. For some reason, none of this seems scary. Even the idea of maybe encountering a smallish s___k doesn't seem altogether bad. It's beginning to dawn on me that all the fish and eels and crabs and shrimps and planktons who live and work down here are just too busy to be thinking about me. I'm a traveler from another dimension, not really a part of their already event-filled world, not programmed one way or another -- food or yikes -- into their instinct circuits. They have important matters to attend to, and they don't care whether I watch or not.
And so I watch.
Before I took lessons, virtually everything I knew about SCUBA -- aside from the fact that it stands for "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus" -- came from the syndicated television series Sea Hunt. This was a very popular half-hour adventure show that ran from 1958 through 1961 and starred Lloyd Bridges as "Mike Nelson, free-lance undersea investigator."
There were 156 episodes of Sea Hunt, but they all merge together in my mind into one basic plot, namely: Mike Nelson is swimming around, conducting a free-lance underwater investigation when suddenly a bad guy swims up behind him and cuts his air hose. Mike always acted surprised about this, which was pretty funny because in fact he got his air hose cut about as often as the average person burps. You'd think it would have eventually dawned on him that for whatever reason -- possibly related to the Gulf Stream -- the waters around his boat were teeming with air-hose cutters, but old Mike never seemed to catch on.
So the climax of Sea Hunt was always an exiting underwater fight (accompanied by dramatic underwater horn music) in which Mike, his bubbles shooting all over the place, would struggle to get some air into his lungs and subdue the bad guy and get back to the surface and head over to the air-hose store, where he probably got a volume discount. Sea Hunt was great entertainment, but it did not leave you with the concepts of "SCUBA" and "safety" firmly cemented together in your mind.
The truth is, however, that SCUBA diving, especially at the relatively shallow depths recommended for recreational divers, is quite safe. Bad things can happen, but not nearly as many as can happen in a truly dangerous environment, such as the Palmetto Expressway. And virtually nothing bad is likely to happen unless you go out of your way to help it. So far, I'm pleased to report, I have not had my air hose cut one single time. I did have one terrifying Lobster Encounter (which I'll describe in harrowing detail later, when I feel you're ready to handle the emotional strain), but fortunately I was able to handle the situation through a combination of (a) not panicking and (b) letting go of the lobster. But I probably never would have thought of this without proper SCUBA training.
The training I got was the standard course authorized by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, or PADI. If you want to get into SCUBA diving, you should take an authorized course. For one thing, you'll learn many useful tips that will help to make your dive as enjoyable and fatality-free as possible. For another thing, if you don't have a card certifying that you've been properly trained, reputable dive shops will not rent you equipment or fill your tanks with air, which, as you can imagine, comes in very handy in the aquatic environment.
The guy who trained me, Ray Lang, 39, knows a lot about the aquatic environment. This is ironic because he was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, a locale you very rarely see featured on Jacques Cousteau underwater specials ("Henri excitedly gestures to Pierre that he has found a piece of the sunken tractor.") But in his early 20s he became obsessed with SCUBA diving and moved with his wife, Teresa, to South Florida, where they eventually opened a small chain of dive shops called Divers Den.
But I'm not panicking. That's the first thing you learn in SCUBA class: Don't panic! Just DON'T DO IT! Even if a giant eel comes right up and wraps around your neck and presses its face against your mask and opens its mouth and shows you its 874,000,000,000,000 needle-sharp teeth, you must remain COMPLETELY CALM so you'll remember your training and take the appropriate action, which in this case I suppose would be to poop in your wet suit. I don't know for certain, because in my training we haven't gotten to the section on eels.
Also, I am just now realizing, we haven't covered the procedure for what to do if a large tentacle featuring suckers the size of catchers' mitts comes snorking out and grabs your leg and starts hauling you into a vast, dark, hidden underwater cave whose denizens have little if any respect for the Bill of Rights.
Also there is the whole issue of shar... of sha... of sh...
There could be s___ks down here, somewhere.
But so far, all the marine life has appeared to be harmless. Mostly it has consisted of what I would describe, using ichthyological terminology, as "medium fish," many of which are swimming right up and giving me dopey fish looks, which basically translate to the following statement: "Food?" That's what fish do all the time -- they swim around going: "Food?" You can almost see the little question marks over their heads. The only other thought they seem capable of is: "Yikes!" Fish are not known for their SAT scores. This may be why they tend to do their thinking in large groups. You'll see a squadron of them coming toward you, their molecule-size brains working away on the problem ("Food?" "Food?" "Food?" "Food?"); and then you suddenly move your arm, triggering a Nuclear Fish Reaction ("Yikes!" "Yikes!" "Yikes!" "Yikes!") and FWOOOSSHH they're outta there, trailing a stream of exclamation marks.
This is a lot of fun to watch, because many of the fish are spectacularly, psychedelically beautiful. I'm sure there are all kinds of practical reasons for their coloration, but I don't want to know what these reasons are. I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions you see hanging out in the nooks and crannies of the reef or contraptioning along the bottom on a ridiculous number of arms and legs with all kinds of feelers and pincers and eyeballs sticking out randomly on the ends of stalks.
It is a comical place, the sea.
So anyway, I'm swimming along the reef, with my nervousness gradually being replaced by a sort of high -- a combination of fascination and amusement -- when suddenly I hear my SCUBA instructor, Ray Lang, make the following statement: "Bmoogle." Everything anybody says through an air regulator underwater sounds like "Bmoogle," which can mean: "Hi!" Or: "Isn't this fun?" Or: "I'm having a coronary seizure!" So generally people communicate with hand signs.
When I look at Lang, he's pointing excitedly off to my right, so I turn and see a large ray, which looks sort of like a giant underwater bat. This is a major test of my ability to not panic. The only other time I've been in this kind of situation was in 1970 in the Virgin Islands, when I was snorkeling with a friend named Buzz behind a small, crowded dinghy, and a ray swam directly underneath us. I have never seen a missile launched from a submarine, but I can't imagine that it leaves the water at a higher velocity than Buzz and I attained as we vaulted, arms and legs flailing, into the lower atmosphere, creating a minor hazard for commercial aircraft before finally landing in the dinghy, which nearly sank.
And that was a smallish ray, compared to this one. This ray has enough square footage to qualify as a voting district. And it is very close, swooping along, flapping its enormous wings and going: "Food?" Instantly I wish that I had brought my Miami Herald identification card (which is laminated and would work underwater) so I could identify myself as a journalist. As it is, I have no choice but to strike what I believe to be a fairly inedible pose.
But the ray pays no attention to me. It just cruises by, very casual, very nonthreatening, a ray taking care of ray business. And as it passes by, I find myself, without really thinking about it, trying to follow it -- me, a weenie of legendary stature when it comes to dealing with the Animal Kingdom; a person who has on more than one occasion fled in desperate, armpit-soaking fear from chickens -- here I am, flippering through the blue-green Semi-Deep in pursuit of this nightmare-inducing thing.
Swimming next to me, Lang points toward the surface, up above the ray. I look, and there, silhouetted against the surface, is a large school of: barracuda. Yes! The ones with the teeth! In person! They're long and lean, looking very alert, all pointing in the same direction, as if awaiting orders from their commanding officer. ("OK, men. Today we're going to swim around and eat.")
But for some reason, the barracuda don't seem scary, any more than the ray does. For some reason, none of this seems scary. Even the idea of maybe encountering a smallish s___k doesn't seem altogether bad. It's beginning to dawn on me that all the fish and eels and crabs and shrimps and planktons who live and work down here are just too busy to be thinking about me. I'm a traveler from another dimension, not really a part of their already event-filled world, not programmed one way or another -- food or yikes -- into their instinct circuits. They have important matters to attend to, and they don't care whether I watch or not.
And so I watch.
Before I took lessons, virtually everything I knew about SCUBA -- aside from the fact that it stands for "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus" -- came from the syndicated television series Sea Hunt. This was a very popular half-hour adventure show that ran from 1958 through 1961 and starred Lloyd Bridges as "Mike Nelson, free-lance undersea investigator."
There were 156 episodes of Sea Hunt, but they all merge together in my mind into one basic plot, namely: Mike Nelson is swimming around, conducting a free-lance underwater investigation when suddenly a bad guy swims up behind him and cuts his air hose. Mike always acted surprised about this, which was pretty funny because in fact he got his air hose cut about as often as the average person burps. You'd think it would have eventually dawned on him that for whatever reason -- possibly related to the Gulf Stream -- the waters around his boat were teeming with air-hose cutters, but old Mike never seemed to catch on.
So the climax of Sea Hunt was always an exiting underwater fight (accompanied by dramatic underwater horn music) in which Mike, his bubbles shooting all over the place, would struggle to get some air into his lungs and subdue the bad guy and get back to the surface and head over to the air-hose store, where he probably got a volume discount. Sea Hunt was great entertainment, but it did not leave you with the concepts of "SCUBA" and "safety" firmly cemented together in your mind.
The truth is, however, that SCUBA diving, especially at the relatively shallow depths recommended for recreational divers, is quite safe. Bad things can happen, but not nearly as many as can happen in a truly dangerous environment, such as the Palmetto Expressway. And virtually nothing bad is likely to happen unless you go out of your way to help it. So far, I'm pleased to report, I have not had my air hose cut one single time. I did have one terrifying Lobster Encounter (which I'll describe in harrowing detail later, when I feel you're ready to handle the emotional strain), but fortunately I was able to handle the situation through a combination of (a) not panicking and (b) letting go of the lobster. But I probably never would have thought of this without proper SCUBA training.
The training I got was the standard course authorized by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, or PADI. If you want to get into SCUBA diving, you should take an authorized course. For one thing, you'll learn many useful tips that will help to make your dive as enjoyable and fatality-free as possible. For another thing, if you don't have a card certifying that you've been properly trained, reputable dive shops will not rent you equipment or fill your tanks with air, which, as you can imagine, comes in very handy in the aquatic environment.
The guy who trained me, Ray Lang, 39, knows a lot about the aquatic environment. This is ironic because he was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, a locale you very rarely see featured on Jacques Cousteau underwater specials ("Henri excitedly gestures to Pierre that he has found a piece of the sunken tractor.") But in his early 20s he became obsessed with SCUBA diving and moved with his wife, Teresa, to South Florida, where they eventually opened a small chain of dive shops called Divers Den.
Last updated: April 20, 1998