The joys of going under: what it's like to scuba dive
The joys of going under: what it's like to scuba dive
Suiting the reader up, dropping them in the water, and breathing life into both the wonders and rhythms of diving down below and what stays with you after you surface.
What is it like to scuba dive? The best way to show that is to suit the reader up, drop them in the water, and hopefully breathe life into both the wonders and rhythms of diving down below and what stays with you after you surface. This is not a story about the glories or hardships of a particular trip. Rather, I’m slipping into the second person and imagining a close friend and directly immersing them underwater: how you fall beneath the surface and descend; what you see in the distance and inches from your face; how you move and maneuver in all dimensions; who you’re with on a dive and how your hand gestures speak silently; what it’s like to dive at dusk and ascend back later in the liquid night; and what diving leaves you in the minutes and months after you come back on the boat.
Diving, like skiing, is a sport that may get warmed away to exist in the future mainly in memory. Closing the summer in the year with the world’s hottest water temperatures on record and as we crowd the beach, I think it’s a good time to lead imaginations a bit deeper and farther out to sea.
What’s it like going under?
Going down
You’re floating on the water’s surface, the inflated buoyancy control device (BCD) vest lifting you up out of the water, regulator in your mouth, eyes open to the world and sky above the water, but your breaths coming from the tank now bobbing below it. You lock eye contact with the rest of the dive group, flash the okay all good sign, give a thumbs down to signal descent, and then raise your left arm to press down and deflate your BCD. Air comes out, and your BCD slackens a bit against your body. When properly weighted with small lead bars strapped on a belt around you or tucked into your BCD, you don’t need to release that much air for you to start slipping down. For a moment, maybe, you wonder if you’ll keep sinking or if you’ll linger with your head lapped by the waves. But then your head definitively slides down beneath the surface that it won’t breach for an hour.
Later you’ll float suspended in the water, but for now, you’re falling slowly. You can cross your legs or go prone and spread out your body, fully releasing to the weight that will take you down. The wetsuit and equipment that may have felt bulky or uncomfortable as you scooted and tugged into them on the boat, shuffling amidst the other divers, now feel light, the wetsuit smooth and pleasantly tight against your body.
As the bottom comes into view, twenty or a hundred feet down, you settle a bit and slightly inflate your BCD to get to buoyancy. That’s the magical state of neither falling nor rising but staying suspended at that depth in the water, with only your breaths in and out moving your body up and down a foot or so.
From here, you’ll be prone and often bring your hands lightly together. If you’re good, you may not use your hands for movement or propulsion for the rest of the dive. Your hands in this position reinforce the feeling of meditative calm, of clear competence, of readiness for awe, that you’ll try to hold. Your gently kicking legs give you force and some direction, with your upper body moving sometimes to help reposition yourself. You’re ready to glide.
What you see
You start to move around the rock and coral, your head slowly scanning around you. You’re taking it in but also searching. If possible, the searching doesn’t feel like hunger or collecting highlights but an attentiveness to the world around you, a humility to not miss its capacity for wonder.
On some dive sites, you’re floating over coral or rocks or wrecks in shallow waters, only thirty or forty feet below the surface. Other times, you’re falling along the rock and coral wall till it meets the sandy bottom fifty or a hundred feet down. Or the wall could descend into a blue grey blur far out of sight, and you just glide out from the wall sometimes to hover over unseen depths.
It’s blue and blue, and then every so often a larger animal appears: a spotted eagle ray, eight feet wide, its meaty wings rising up and falling down. It’s shocking to see a creature like that materialize out of the hazy expansive background. It becomes manifest in its living specificity, singularly alive just as you are. The eagle ray slowly approaches, and while it keeps the same speed as it passes you, the way its gray coloring fades quickly into the ocean’s background makes its departure always a bit hastier than its arrival.
Most of the time, though, you’re close to rocks and coral, in the world of fish and lobsters and shrimp and other wonders. If you can, you’ll try to be about a foot or two above the coral, your body straight and parallel to the bottom, floating above the life. You see larger fish swimming around, but then you can hover over a particular rock and let your eyes take in the miniature world in its full glory: small shrimp with thin, almost translucent bodies clinging to rock; seahorses curled on spreading coral; nudibranchs in their neon patterns condensing vibrant color into their bodies; tiny fish swimming slowly, then darting and zooming quickly when something else gets too close, a wary entangled dance.
You’ll develop favorites. Your brother loves the juvenile spotted drum, a tiny black fish a couple inches long with this fluttering fin that extends three times as long as its body, the rhythmic gymnast of the seas. Your mother loves turtles, wise and graceful, flapping through the water, cruising on gentle angles of ascent as they come up for their occasional breaths. You’ll fall for the spotted cowfish. It has a flat bottom and triangular shape with dots of color on its skin, pursed lips and two small gentle horns above its eyes. Its tiny, near transparent fins flutter, letting it maneuver quickly, turning and rotating on a dime. It’s a mix of improbable motion on an unusual trunk-like shape, beauty and hints of devilishness, so different from what you thought fish were like before diving down below to meet them.
How you move
You move with your legs. There are two main approaches. You may see people doing a breaststroke like kick, a frog like motion where you lift your knees up and to your sides and then come back close again into a straight line, your squid propulsion complete. The other approach which you may be partial to is a freestyle crawl kick, your legs straight back with a gentle bend in the knee, your hip and quad pulling your leg up and down.
Either way, the main thing is to keep your body prone and your head level with your toes. What you do not want to be is in a suspended, angled cycling position, your head and torso pointing up and your leg kicking partly down. Kicking down is a waste of energy and a sign that you’re not properly buoyant, your kicking needed to counteract the weight dropping you down. It adds more resistance as you push through the water.
Most importantly, though, it leads your feet to hang far below your head, and the final tips of your fins another foot below that. With your fin tips dangling so far below, you’re a moving wrecking ball bound to bang up against the coral and rock you’re trying to swim close to. Or as you’ll pass over the ocean bottom, you’ll kick up sand blurring the view for those around you.
Instead it’s head first motion, and using the self-interest of avoiding banging your forehead to keep the rest of the world around you contact-free.
Sometimes, though, the ocean moves you. Current can run at the surface and under it, pulling you along. When the boat hooks up to a mooring line in current, you can grab onto that line as you descend, the rest of your body pulled horizontal into an on your side kind of stretched-out Superman pose as you slip down the line to hopefully more protected waters deeper down. Other times, calm waters are tougher to find. On those dives you’ll aim to hide behind a shipwreck or coral walls or hug the bottom to avoid the strongest pull in more exposed waters. Occasionally, you just use hooks to clip into sturdy rock, slightly inflate your BCD, and then slide back taut as the current keeps flowing against you. Maybe you’re waiting for sharks to pass by or an oceanic manta ray to soar overhead. Either way, you’ll likely have company alongside you as other fish ride out the current, their swift small motion keeping them steady against the push of the ocean. And you’ll linger there, a calm slowly breathing presence, and you’ll feel grateful to share the water and the current with them.
When it’s time to move again, even as your legs kick, you won’t use your arms to pull yourself through the water, or at least you’ll try hard not to. You mostly keep your arms hooked together, either hand on the opposite forearm or fingers from each hand gently interlocked, or occasionally if you’re getting cold, hands to opposite triceps. You may become partial to interlocked fingers: there’s a suggestion of calm and lightness and thanks, space for water to slip through even at the center of your embrace.
With practice, you’ll aim to hover close, maybe two feet above or away from the coral. Sometimes it’s a tighter fit. In a shipwreck, the doorways may give just enough room for you to slip by. You may have to keep your head straight and eyes down as you move to avoid banging into the corroding metal above you. You’ll just keep gently kicking – avoiding tossing up sand in front of the view of the person trailing behind you – and try to keep track of when your body is fully clear of the door. Other times, you have to rotate around. Nocturnal nurse sharks can curl under rocks and cracks during the day. The opening may be small and not large enough for your body to slide near it. Instead, you’ll gently move your body around so your head is facing down and your fins are vertically above you, pointing to the surface. And you’ll navigate in this handstand down to the opening of the rock to take in the fullness of ancient creatures on their rest.
As you maneuver like that, you’ll feel closer than ever to the comparison (which you won’t ever get to test) of scuba diving to a spacewalk, these rare chances to move your body calmly in these otherwise inhospitable floating zones and play fully with the three dimensions of life.
And it is play. When you’re doing the safety stop for three minutes at around fifteen feet down on the end of your dive, and you can hover cross-legged in a yoga pose. Or when you rotate on your back and keep moving sea otter like, your eyes fully taking in the volume and the life between you and the sun’s rays shining at the surface. Or when you’re filming your brother, and you’re both somersaulting and rolling around, camera and subject spinning in the blue.
Who you’re with
Underwater, your brother may also be your buddy. That means something when diving.
The classic and still best pattern for diving is one scuba instructor leading a small group of four to eight guest divers, with each guest diver paired off one with other person as their buddy. Like any term you start to use in a specific context, when you use the word buddy in diving you can just think of it in that setting. But when you catch yourself in moments where that outside meaning can slip confusingly into your head – why am I referring to this 57-year-old French man I’ve just been paired with as my buddy? – it can bring a smile to your face. Because buddy is a perfect, now anachronistic word here: catching the spirit of outdoors teenage joy that buddy evokes where strangers on the block can quickly join in fun, where the crew is excited to be outside and playing, where a safe spirit of adventure takes hold with the hint that something wild may happen, and with some solid, unspoken reassurance that if something really did go wrong, this person, this buddy would do a lot to help you.
Traditionally and still in the teaching tips, buddies would be responsible for checking each other’s equipment before jumping in the water and for staying close to each other on the dive, the first point of help. In practice, with varying diver skills and styles underwater, the professional dive guide functions for most groups as the super buddy, checking on everyone, counting people are there, and the real source of help in a pinch.
There’s no talking underwater. It’s one of those obvious facts that does not register fully until you live it. Instead, communication mainly takes place with your hands. Two right fingers on the upturned left palm is asking how much air you have left, the dominant concern on most dives to pace the dive so everyone gets back to the surface with enough air in their tank. Newer divers can be guided to manage their buoyancy by gently lifting or lowering palms – “hey buddy, come down or come up a bit.” Navigation plans have obvious signals, right and left, and charming ones, such as index fingers behind each other to signal “I’ll lead and you follow.” Any problems get an outstretched hand rocking side to side, as if by the waves, and then a point to the source of the problem, typically your ears (when they’re not clearing and pressure is building up) or your goggles (if they’re fogging or leaking).
Near the end of the dive the leader gives a gesture of three fingers from one hand covered by the flat palm of the opposite hand: “let’s do our three minute safety stop at fifteen feet.” And to signal you are done with the safety stop, it’s a gentle sweep of one hand back and forth over the palm of the other as if you’ve finished dusting the time away.
Most notably, hand gestures are a way to share and help each other understand nature. Starting with the universal forehead-splitting signal for sharks, there are a range of others. Some are obvious – the overlapping hands and extended thumbs for a turtle – while others take a bit of practice, but with a quick to learn logic about them. To sign for an eel, you stick your forearm up at a 90 degree angle and close your pressed fingers against your thumb, doing your best sock puppet impression, and mimicking how they are often spotted in nature, head protruding from the rock and mouth opening and closing to breathe. For lionfish, invasive scourge of the Caribbean, you interlock your fingers as if replicating the Oculus hub at the World Trade Center site and gently move your fingers back and forth, mimicking the floating poisonous spines on the fins on the fish.
You’ll follow the dive instructor’s gestures to see what they see. Over time, you’ll get good at spotting things too and be able to share your discoveries with others: with your buddy, with other divers in your group, sometimes with passing dive groups.
There’s a pleasure in sharing those gifts of discovery, but that doesn’t fully explain the delight in communicating via hand gestures. Maybe it’s partly a harkening to secretive childhood adventures – there’s my buddy again! – or an echo of the camaraderie of team sports and their hand signals. Or there’s sliding into the ease of communicating via nearly universal hand gestures that smooth out the choppiness of mixed languages back above water on the dive boat. But it can also be the thrill, found on the dance floor or among spies or lovers, when an economy of gesture conveys so much.
Hands are not always needed. You’re not just watching the fish, but also keeping an eye on your other scuba-diving mammals and what their bodies are doing and saying. At its most basic, the dive group swims in a spaced out line following the dive guide, so you need to pay attention to the leader’s path and their pace. As the group meanders together, heads are slowly turning, taking in and searching the water world. But if someone starts to hover on a spot and their head steadies and their breath slows, they may have found one of the wonderful tiny creatures of the deep, and you may kick over to see what they’re absorbed by.
Sometimes as you approach the fit with other bodies is tight. Rocks or coral can be pressing in, and you may need to get very close up. This is particularly true when it’s one of the rare, miniscule marvels of the ocean like a two centimeter pygmy seahorse curled into near invisibility on color-matching coral and where the dive guide needs to help direct your gaze. In those moments, you become parking attendants with your fellow divers figuring out how we’ll maneuver together. Is this a one at a time situation, where you’ll go in, try to forget the other bodies around you and fall into grateful contemplation, and then later carefully back out for the next diver to take your spot? Or maybe you’ll come to their right or above them, intending for them to keep their position. In these close, high-stake quarters, there’s no real hand signal language, and you’re just slowly moving your bodies around each other.
Part of what you try to anticipate is what the other divers can’t see. Are they, and their heavy tank, turning around in a way that suggests they’ve missed or forgotten you are close behind and could be smacked by them? Luckily, such tank taps are rare, but fins – extending past our normal body awareness of our length – can frequently flap into you. Fins don’t move that quickly, so you can often get your forearms in front of your head to protect your face, goggles, and regulators from being slapped.
You’ll learn different types of divers underwater, partly out of self-interest, a bit out of curiosity, hopefully always with empathy. There are divers who don’t know what they’re doing, and whether they know that or not. Do they have poor buoyancy or movement control and are best given lots of buffer? Are they zooming about and have oxygen coming out of their regulator like a free flow gas leak, and likely to either end the dive early or, in the extremely rare but less rare for them situation, run out of air underwater and need to grasp someone else’s emergency regulator? Or do they have a good eye and are worth following when their body stills and they’re taking something in?
Into the dark
Sometimes, you’ll follow them into the dark. Night dives begin at dusk. Coming back to the docked boat at that hour will be warmed up with recognition of divers you saw earlier on the daytime dives, but you’ll likely be missing at least half of the divers who dove earlier. The darkness, the number of dives already in the day, and the beers that can’t be drunk until diving is done lead most to skip the night dive. With more space to spread out on the boat, more expertise on board, and with almost everyone having dove earlier in the day together and equipment and skill levels all sorted out, the boat has a casually more competent feel. It’ll be cooler, maybe with a breeze in the late afternoon’s glow, and as you stand with your wetsuit up to your waist, your hand holding on the boat as its low profile bounces on the water out to the site, you’ll hopefully feel loose too.
The one piece of equipment you do need now is a flashlight, which is delightfully called a torch. You’ll have it on as you jump into the still lit water and descend. And then slowly night will fall as you’re under water, and when you rise again it’ll be into the dark.
During the night dive you’ll move around less than during the day, but even the short distances covered will loom large and slightly disorienting in your exploration. As you scan your torch across the bottom or the rocks, you’ll see the world materialize briefly before slipping back into darkness. You’re hoping to see animals out exploring: lobsters on a walk, octopuses hunting, the daytime sleeping nurse sharks now out for food. You’re careful with your torch: you don’t want to startle fish or temporarily blind them (or your other divers), so if you see something interesting and alive you’ll keep the torch pointed close but not on the animals so it’s just a soft glow that illuminates them.
While most colors will be more muted at night, some are lit up and reflective. Particular corals will glow in the dark, with vibrant fluorescence helping them stand out against their plain companions. A few fish shine too, and the eyes of crustaceans hidden under rock overhangs will glow back red at you.
Towards the end of the dive, if there’s a shallow sandy bottom, you may deflate your BCD to rest your knees on the ocean floor. You’ll bury your torches or press their light against your wetsuit, and you’ll slowly let your eyes adjust to the deeper darkness. You’ll turn around for a bit, facing just the ocean around you. With no kicking, only your breathing will move your chest slightly up and down.
In some places, you’ll be able to streak your hands through the water and get flashes of bioluminescence from algae and plankton. And rarely, you’ll see bioluminescence naturally in the water around you. But over time, what’s most striking and soul-changing is gazing for minutes into the dark liquid night, feeling briefly on the same level and in the same space with the wild world shielded from view, and slowly having your eyes adjust and catch the light that’s out there.
What it leaves you
How much air did you come up with? You’ll hear that asked around the dive boat, and like any competitive measure, maybe a bit more often compared by young men. The safe standard is to come back up with at least of 500 pounds per square inch (psi, a measure of pressure that’s the way divers – at least in the non-metric world – refer to how much air is left in their tank) from a starting place at the beginning of the dive of around 3,000 psi (and hopefully a bit more if they topped your tank off generously). Because dive instructors lead groups of divers with varying abilities, what happens typically is your dive group will come up so the person with the least air left still has 500 psi when they surface. So in any dive group and on a boat with many groups, there will be divers coming back with a range of air pressure.
What leads you to use less air? Before starting diving, you may have the picture that it’s like underwater swimming. And when diving you are kicking in a way that can call to mind laps at the pool, and new, poorly buoyant divers can do a kind of slanted doggy paddle under water. But diving as you get good is much better visualized as controlled floating under water. And while air consumption is influenced by background body dynamics, slow rates of air consumption are also a reflection of how calm and controlled your floating was, how peaceful was your breathing, how comfortable you were under water. So coming back with more air than your buddy is a small little competitive biomarker of zen, the suggestion that you could have stayed down and lingered longer in this world that you (perhaps just a bit more than your buddy) belong to.
Moving with comfort is tied to an aspiration of diving: to be a welcome guest of the water world you dive down to enter. Being a good guest means moving carefully but comfortably through a space, like you would in your grandmother’s house: it should feel like home, but it’s not yours to mess up. Moving comfortably gives you time and attention to soak in the world you’re visiting, to catch its rare wonders but also its more common delights, and the presence to give all the nature you come across the respect of your attention and interest. As you move in that way, you also let the world around you keep carrying on and living well as you become just another creature of the deep. And the hope for yourself is that the equipment and gauges you’re using and monitoring can come to feel just like your senses and breaths above water, indispensable systems for life but ones you manage automatically and easily.
What did you see? Or what was that thing?
As tanks come off on the boat and affirmations of a “great dive” get shared, you’ll ask and be asked what you saw by divers in other groups on the boat or the crew that manned the boat while you were underwater. But it’s a casual exploration: the crew has seen everything before and mostly just wants to endorse your experience. And divers across groups are generally mindful of avoiding gloating about something special they saw underwater that others missed.
More rewarding are the questions to your dive instructor about something you saw that you didn’t recognize. Their eyes will often gleam with delight to share more about something rare and unexpected. Or it’ll lead to grabbing an inevitably well-thumbed guidebook to fish and coral of that region for some research and identification. And as they flip to pg. 273 and share the book back with you, you’ll mouth out this new name and learn a bit more. And you’ll be lucky to have first met the creature alive and nameless and singular, so that while what you’ve learned will help you understand it more and remember it a bit better, hopefully it’ll stand out in your mind not as a stamp but by its living spark in the wild.
Where else have you been? Relaxing between dives, you may be asked or share, but it won’t carry as much meaning as the comparisons and signposts of above ground tourism. Even if you’ve also been diving in the same area, there are so many different dive sites - and you’ll forget their names – that it’s hazy to compare much. Some divers use underwater cameras, but it’s a tough, distracting art so it’s a bit less common to trade or post photos of particular highlights, and thank goodness. So even as diving is global, and you may get hooked to travel across the Pacific for it, its actual practice in a place is still very local and not that legible on sharing screens.
But what being underwater does make clear is that the world is changing. Even over a decade of diving, you can see the corals bleaching and dying off, catch days when the water is way too warm. Diving orients you both to particular challenges in an area – pollution, overfishing, lack of waste management facilities – but also the global work to do.
And maybe diving will remind you that the water is your world too. So much human life is near but not in the water. Buildings and towers can march right to its edge, bridges take you over it, boats move you on top of it. The ocean is a border or a conduit, but it’s not a world we’re in. Even many days at the beach often stay stuck in the sand, the water something only some few jump into for more than a bit. But with diving you’re going out to sea, sometimes far, and descending and lingering present in that world. And then later, maybe when you’re flying back after a diving trip or on a plane many different journeys later, and you see the ocean glistening and pristine from a distance, the surface will seem less like a barrier and more like a welcome.