Last Wednesday, July 15, I felt that I was ready to go back diving again after an oral surgeon had removed one of my wisdom teeth a couple of weeks earlier. My buddy and I decided to go to Keystone Jetty. It was my first opportunity to try my brand new High Tops Canvas Shoes with my Force Fins.
We looked up at the current and tide predictions and discovered that we had already missed slack time!
We decided to go head and drive there anyway to see with our own eyes what the conditions were like. If the current was ripping at the surface we would had driven to Driftwood Beach, few miles east from Keystone, and do a drift dive.
When we got there the blue water looked calm and charming from the beach but we knew that underwater and at depth could have been a different story. However we felt confident that in one way or the other we would have been able to handle whatever the current was doing (after all the tidal exchange was not as big as during the morning tidal cycle). We were the only divers at the marine park and without any other ado we geared up.
I really hoped that my canvas shoes and Force Fins would have worked together without problems. This time my buddy and I shared the camera. I took pictures at the beginning and end of the dive, he in the middle. It was an incredible beautiful sunny late afternoon and fortunately a cool breeze (that may have been just an annoyance for sunbathers) prevented us from frying inside our dry suits.
After a buddy and bubble check we began to surface swam towards our destination: the middle of the jetty on the outskirts of the bull kelp forest.
My feet felt comfortable, despite a little squeeze, inside the canvas shoes and the Force Fins
Great! Thats promising! I thought. We submerged into a visibility of 30 Ft, maybe even more. .. UUUAHHH! The soft westerly sunlight was filtering through the blades of bull kelp making us believe that were in some fairy-tale like place.
Schools of fish, mostly shiner perch, tubesnouts and Puget Sound rock fish, were leisurely lingering inthat golden water. When we reached a depth of about 50 ft. we began to feel the current. It was pushing us southward towards the end of the jetty. It was not too bad, though. My feet were securely locked inside the shoes and the fins. They did not slide sideways like when I worn the Bare Rock Boots.
A L L E L U J A H !
We were able to hang around at that depth without too much effort and began to goof around with the camera.
My buddy signaled me to swim higher above the wall of white plumose anemones so he could take a picture from below into the light. When I was posing for the shot I turned my head around and HOLLY MOLY! I could not believe my eyes! What I was looking at was the unmistakable shape of a shark and it was swimming down towards me!
I got so excited that I forgot where I was and I turned my body around without realizing that I was literally sitting on top of the anemones with my belly up like a hopeless turtle!
I extended one of my fingers and pointed it to another shark hoping that my buddy looked in that direction too! And a third shark swam by then another
and another
one, two, three, four, five
ten
fifteen
They kept popping out from the green water, circling us. I think we must have been surrounded by at least 20 sharks! They were all Spiny Dogfish. What a miracle! In one year of diving I had never seen a spiny dogfish alive in the wild before!
Man! I am in the Bahamas! in one of those sharks feeding sites that I have read about in scuba magazines and websites! I thought! Then I realized that Good Lord NO! I am in the cold green water of Puget Sound and there is not a dive master dressed up like an underwater medieval warrior feeding the sharks next to me! There is no need for scuba shark feeding! These animals came to us without any tricks! Nature will reward you if you let yourself go to her rhythm!
They were very curious.
They would swim really close to us. At one point I thought that they were going to crash their snouts into my mask, but when that impact seemed so inevitable they would suddenly twist their body and swam away only to swim back as soon as their internal red alarms went off again.
Spiny dogfish dont reach the length of kayaks! So what this fuss is all about? They grow to a max. length of a big female ling cod, which is 4/5 ft only! Despite their small size the fact that I was in the middle of a circle where the sharks kept swimming around me with their inquisitive, yet impenetrable eyes, 'emanating' a mixture of boldness and weariness and their gracious innocuous-looking body movements induced in me a sense of respect and humbleness. They made me aware that size doesnt matter. They were in charge of the water that we have decided to immerse ourselves in.
I will never forget this first encounter with Spiny Dogfish while testing those canvas shoes with my Force Fins.
