Getting there is five hours of driving through flat,
endless desert from my Colorado home. Why go?
Because if you plan your dive well, you can be one
of the first to pierce the early morning surface
there. Before the silt has been kicked up, and with
no current to break the stillness, huge shafts of
sunlight penetrate into 80 feet of liquid crystal
cavern. Blue Hole Cenote is, in a word, magical.
One particular July day, our group was packing
up after some dives. Twenty divers scurried around
a parking lot shaking out wetsuits, stuffing masks
and fins into bags and throwing weights into the
backs of cars. “Burgers and beer at Joseph’s in about
an hour,” I heard. I was hungry, I was wet, and I was
happy. Over the sounds of slapping high-fives and
tank valves being released, an interested voice in
the parking lot said, “Hey, that guy over there has a
rebreather.”
I had read about rebreathers, but I had never
actually seen one. Curiosity made me drop my
gear to go check it out. Sitting on the tailgate of
a white pickup truck in the sweltering heat was
a fully suited-up young man with a boxy-looking
contraption strapped to his back.
“Cool!” I blurted out. “Is it tough to learn? Does it
change your buoyancy? What’s the longest you have
ever stayed down?” I felt like a kid standing in front
of the Batmobile.
The diver admitted that he had not actually used his
rebreather in five years. Today he was refamiliarizing
himself with his gear. Beads of sweat popped off his
brows and dripped into his eyes. I could see he was
getting overheated, but I rambled on.
“So, no bubbles, huh? I hear you can take great
pictures with those things. What’s inside that
upside-down white bottle?”
Now we all have our reasons for love of this sport.
One of my dive buddies, John, is a gearhead. If it’s
the latest or the coolest, John has already preordered
it. It was John who extended the life of my regulator
hoses by putting rubber protector sleeves over
the joints. Others scuba dive because they rise to
the thrill of pushing limits. My buddy Terry is a
firefighter. Hands down, Terry embodies the most
outstanding combination of underwater adventure
and situational awareness of any dive buddy ever.
Diving with Terry is a joy. Then there is Jerry, my
buddy the engineer. Fascinating physics is what
draws Jerry to the sport. I cannot get Jerry to assume
the added risk and enjoy a night dive, yet he designed
and built his own hyperbaric chamber.
At that moment, standing for the first time in front
of a rebreather, I was in invested in scuba diving for
one simple reason: I wanted to be a mermaid.
Kicking up gravel, I tried not to look too eager.
“Looks fun. Who is your dive buddy?” I asked,
secretly wishing it were me.
The young man told me he was waiting for our
group to clear out because he was going to dive
alone.
Huh? My throat clenched.
“Alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Um ... dude. You are wearing unfamiliar
equipment. You’re kind of overheated. You are
about to jump into 62-degree water. It’s murky from
divers kicking up silt all day. It’s 80 feet deep, the
sun is going down, and you are going to dive it ...
alone?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
As with so many moments in my life that I later
regret, my mouth started speaking before my brain
could catch up.
“Fine? Do you want to be another statistic in a
DAN report? Dude, you do that, and we will be
reading about you in an Alert Diver article called
‘Ten Steps to How I Died Diving.’”
The young man was justifiably cold. He turned
away, and I walked back to my car. “I am an idiot!”
I thought to myself. “No, I’m not. That guy is an
idiot!” I wrestled with it. “He probably would be
fine. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.” After
39 years of scuba diving, gut instincts to protect my
fellow diver firmly overrode any need to be pretty
or polite.
One week later, I received this email from a dive
buddy who turned out to be a mutual friend:
Hi,
I just wanted to tell you thanks very much for
encouraging my friend to scrub the dive at Blue Hole.
He fixed three minor problems with his rebreather
last week, and today we tested it in a pool. While
setting up and doing the predive prebreathe (which
conditions the scrubber medium) he experienced a
serious computer glitch, and it took a while to figure
it out. Not a big deal in the pool, but it would have
been very serious at Blue Hole in combination with
any one of the minor problems. He says to tell you
that you are very wise and your advice prevented a
serious problem, since he had more or less decided to
dive before you talked to him and discouraged him.
So you did a good deed.
AD
|
57
