My apologizes if you've read some of this before, I was tightening it up for the book I'm working on and it just seemed to fit here.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was a student at U.C. Berkeley. It was notorious as the paradigm of the impersonal megaversity. But within Research Diving Program I found an oasis of incredible people who loved and cared for each other as only people who trust each other with their very lives are able. Our shared experiences had profoundly deep effects on us all. Relax, I'll get to the hand signals in just a little while.
There were many unique aspects to the Research Diving Program at Cal, there were divers in identical gear, the put GUE's DIR to shame: most of it black. This was becaus there was a equipment list, and you needed to show up the first night of class with a full set of gear. Everyone wore a skin out, farmer-john, attached hood, no zipper suit. Everyone had a neoprene instrument cuff on their left forearm that had an Ikelight compass, a Sears "Waterproof Sports Watch" and a capillary depth gauge. Steel ’72s with a K-Valve and a plastic backpack featuring two stainless steel twistlocks on the left shoulder were in fashion as was a black Mae West life vest with CO
2 detonators and a weightbelt with a wire buckle. You had to have a Dacor 300 regulator; and when you saw another Berkeley Diver, you knew who they were. Well … you knew most of them. Then there were the odd-balls, like me.
I was already a diver, at least I thought of myself that way. I’d been diving for more than 10 years, and had made about 500 dives. That’s about the point in every diver’s career that they know everything there is to know. Well, knowing everything about diving that there is to know is fine, but back then, when diving was dangerous and sex was safe, it was much more important to look sharp, and I looked sharp. Besides being 6’2” and a rather muscular 190 lbs., with a clean shaven, cleft chin and thick brown curly hair that fell down to my shoulders, and my eyes, which some jokingly described, stealing a line from Clive Custler's Dirk Pitt novels, as being, "opaline green, both alluring or intimidating, as need be" my gear was really knarly.
An orange U.S. Divers Taskmaster suit, with matching hooded vest, shiny aluminium ’72, Swimaster MR-12 regulator with (gasp) an SPG, and lots of ScubaPro: a triple pane mask, Jetfins, JetSnorkel, CamPack, five finger gloves, and the blue stripped weightbelt with the bungies in the back. And then there were my instruments, only the hippest gauges, a ScubaPro Helium Depth Gauge, a Suunto SK-6 Compass and my pride and joy, a U.S. Divers, orange face DOXA 300 dive watch that strengthening the rumor that Dirk Pitt was modeled after me even more than my passport, exhibiting, as it did, visa from most of the countries boarding on the last decades' trouble spots in the world. But even more than the watch, my BC was the pièce de résistance: a Fenzy.
Yeah, I was as cool a diver as they had ever been, and my poor instructor, Ken McKaye, had to deal with me. Exactly how Ken turned that refugee from the Thunderball set into a committed Berkeley Research Diver is a story for another time, suffice it to say that through a combination of Ken’s incredible skill as a diver, patience as an instructor and brilliance as a researcher I found myself, within just a few months, looking exactly like every other Berkeley Diver; well … almost … I did hang onto my really hip gauges and my Fenzy.
Part of how Ken accomplished this almost miraculous transformation involved the use of some truly unique training exercises like the free diving doff-and-don, the doff-and-don buddy-breathe, the circuit swim and the Edward’s Field Crawl. But there is one exercise that is indelibly engraved in the memory of every Berkeley Diver: the dreaded Hand Signal Test. It is as much a part of being a Berkeley Diver as our suits, surfmats and instrument gauntlet. Trust me, it may have been the sixties, but if you were there … you’d remember, you’d never forget. You stand nervously on the pool deck, John Osterello right up in your face, he gesticulates wildly and then stands there, judgment personified, belittling your intelligence and insulting your progenitors as a result of your inability to translate his arm and hand motions into something, anything, intelligible. Well, hand signals are important, but they don't always work the way you intend, as we shall see.
I rolled out of bed early on a Friday morning in 1973. I'd slept well. It had rained through the night, but now as the sun just started to paint the sky above the eastern foothills, it was clear; only the evaporative cooling chill of the early morning remained on the streets of Berkeley, California.
We loaded our dive gear and the Zodiac into a beige minimalist university van, that provide far too little creature comfort for that hour of the morning, and also far too little heat to offset the remaining evening chill ... Lloyd Austin (the DSO), Ken McKaye (my lead instructor), Carole Kane (a good friend) and I (now Ken’s assistant) were headed down to Pt. Lobos for a day’s diving. This was going to be a great day. I had finally had a properly fitted 3/8" inch (today you’d call that a strong 9 mil) wet suit from Harvey's (I'd only sent it back three times to get the fit right). Lloyd and Ken swore that now I'd be warm and were quietly relieved that they no longer had to be seen in public with a guy in a bright orange suit with matching hooded vest. The sun rose up over the east foothills as we headed south on the Nimitz (today, in imitation of the plague of U.S.C. communication graduates on the radio in the Bay Area you’d call it, preciously, “THE 880”
. By the time we reached 101 South in San Jose, I had snuggled up into my North Face Expedition Parka. The ride down had settled into the a drowsy morning, interrupted only by a stop for breakfast in Gilroy at the Busy Bee Diner.
What can be more beautiful then Pt. Lobos at oh-nine-hundred? There was a flurry of activity getting the Zodiac set up and putting our dive gear together. Lloyd and Carole motored over to Children's Garden while Ken and I set out for Blue Fin Cove on our surf mats. After our dives we sat on the picnic bench at Whaler's Cove and watched the chipmunks scurry in and out of the rocks. Lloyd wondered how my new suit was. I answered that it was so warm that, for the first time, I noticed that my hands were really cold. Lloyd and Ken told me that what I needed to do now was get rid of those effete five finger ScubaPro dress gloves and get a pair of truly manly three finger mitts. We drove into town to fill our tanks at the Aquarius Dive Shop and I sacrificed next week's food money to buy a pair.
As I pulled my new mitts on for the afternoon dive, I considered the effects of only having three digits on each hand: naught but an opposable thumb, a forefinger and the remaining three fingers welded together into a single rather ungainly appendage. I asked Lloyd and Ken what the hand signal for a shark would be, since when wearing these mitts I could no longer make the “peace sign” that indicated “dangerous fish.” They looked at each other, chuckled, and said, “When was the last time you saw a shark at Lobos?” We all agreed we'd never seen a shark there, so it wasn't a problem.
We put all our gear, except our fins on and got into the Zodiac at the boat ramp. Lloyd piloted over to the far kelp bed in Bluefish Cove. Ken and I rolled out backward, gave Lloyd an “Okay” and watched as he and Carole slowly navigated to their dive site, over by the Cone Shell Wall.
This had become one of those spectacular central coast days, blue sky, bright sun and 60-foot plus visibility. On a day like this Bluefish Cove is perhaps the most spectacular dive site in the world. Let the tourists have Palancar Reef, the wall on Cayman Brac, Rosh Muhammad and Heron Island, all that frantic motion and frenetic neon of the underwater Times Squares. Give me kelp, the kelp forests, subtle deep greens broken by shafts of light that look like a Sunday school painting. That's for me.
Ken and I hovered above the reddish-purple encrusted rocks, Ken with his slate and I with my new gloves. Our objective was for me to learn the names of the fish found in this aqueous forest. Ken, always patient, had offered to teach me. He would point to a fish and write recondite Greek and Latin nomenclature on the slate. I'd read what he wrote and try to commit it to memory.
After about twenty minutes we'd worked our way up from sixty to forty feet. Ken pointed to a cabezon, in among the rocks on the bottom, and wrote, “Scorpaenichthys marmoratus.” I was looking at the slate and trying to wrap my tongue around the phrase when Ken tapped me on the shoulder. He held his right hand up. He clenched his last three fingers into his palm, and raised both his thumb and pointer finger. Exactly the gesture you'd make when you told someone, “it was small . . . you know about an inch . . . this big.” I started looking around the bottom for a little Scorpaenichthys marmoratus. I could not find one.
Ken smacked me on the shoulder insistently. He repeated the gesture and I shrugged. I was mildly annoyed. I knew what he was saying. I was trying to find the damn fish. Ken poked at me again. I held up a clenched fist to tell him to wait. Ken wrenched me around and made a gesture with his right hand with all five fingers repeatedly contracting into his palm and flexing out again. He pointed up at forty-five degrees. The biggest blue shark in the whole damn world (at least the biggest of the few I had ever seen) was coming straight for me! At slightly more than arm’s length it pitched up, went over us and languidly disappeared at the limit of visibility.
Well … thump, thump … thump, thump … I could hear my heart ... and now I knew exactly what Ken had meant. We dropped to the bottom, kneeling back to back amongst the purple, bryozoan encrusted rocks, scanning the water above. I pulled my really knarly ScubaPro brass pressure gauge out from the small of my back and glanced at it ... a thousand PSI ... about half a tank. It wouldn’t last me ten minutes unless I calmed down. I took three slow deep breaths. There we go … now … maybe I had thirty minutes at that depth. How long should we wait?
I caught Ken’s eye, offered a raised palm and pointed to my Doxa. Ken gave me back a raised palm with a hint of a shrug. There had always been a bit of resentment when it came to this watch. Lloyd had a Rolex, but then that was appropriate; after all he was the Diving Safety Officer. I had (and still have) this beautiful Doxa, but I was just a lowly undergrad, sure … it was a present, but … you get the picture. All the other divers in the program used "Waterproof Sports Watches" from Sears that went for about thirty bucks with a one year guarantee. When the watch eventually flooded, the paperwork from a new diver in the program would get them a warranty replacement. Anyway, Ken tried to “flip me the bird” at least that’s how I interpreted the upward jerk of his forearm and the raised three last digits.
Then we heard the rackety whine of an outboard motor. The noise stopped. We looked at each other, simultaneously shrugged; we each raised a thumb and nodded our head. Back-to-back we surfaced. Lloyd and Carole were right there in the boat. Ken shouted, “shark!” as we clamored into the boat. That was the first time I'd ever committed the heresy of entering the Zodiac with my tank and weight belt in place, rather than tying them off on the tag lines first. On the way back in I asked Lloyd and Ken, once again, what the “3-finger mitt” signal for “dangerous fish” was. They laughed and told me not to worry about it, I'd never see another.
Back in those days you still got dressed up to go out to dinner. I wore a double breasted blue blazer with Explorer Club buttons, an button down oxford shirt, a blue gold stripped Cal tie, grey slacks and loafers that were no where near as nice as the handmade Italian shoes that Lloyd favored; but Carole was spectacular, there are those moments where the classic little black dress outshines everything else. Anyway, supper at Le Coc Dor was tres magnific! Lloyd had speared a pair of Lings (outside the reserve of course) and they were lightly poached in wine with a little fennel. We drank a really amazing fume blanc and chuckled over the day's contretemps. Back at the motel we got a good night's rest since we had to teach class the next day.
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continued)
