Surface interval

There is no use in trying to hide amateurism in diving. On a night dive off the Similan Islands, trying to impress my doe-eyed but stoic Swiss dive leader, I used my light to indicate a fat, five inch long grey speckled fish that sat perfectly still in the sand bank, so as to seamlessly blend in to the bottom. Some serious aquatic Where's Waldo shit, I thought. She gave me the affirmative sign, and then used her own light to point several of the fish's relatives that lay within a square meter. Oh. Five minutes later, she dug a black and red striped nudibranch out of the sand, lifted it up, and let it fall back to its nest, yawing and twirling; a tiny living ribbon, all but indiscernible in the dark water.

I stopped trying to point things out during subsequent dives, because I realized this is not a game for the inexperienced. Nudibranches are a good example of why "underwater naturalism" is an executive game: the things are rarely longer than two inches, and no thicker than fettuccine. To the naked and untrained eye (through a semifogged mask with sea water leakage pooling in the bottom), they could well be fish poop. But no, a macro photo will reveal these things to be quite alive, invertebrate slug-like creatures with an undulating skirt on the anterior which propels them along. Colorings clash like a peacock and vary like a parrot: snow leopard white with dark spots, iridescent yellow with orange stripes, blue on green on purple. But again, being smaller than a baby toe, at the bottom of a teeming coral reef, they're virtually undetectable, yet time and time again, the dive masters produce them like magic out of the sandy floor, or hidden in the crevasse of a rock, whilst giant (but inferior) schools of glittering tuna undulate overhead like a belly dancer's skirt, and fat, rainbow-striped, two foot long parrot fish hunt, parting the sparkling living curtain.

So my best guess in that, after touring the same site a dozen times or so, the dive masters make a game for themselves by ignoring the plentiful hordes of sea life at eye level, and hunting instead for the tiniest, most obscure shit possible. Just to show each other up. Indeed, the dining deck of the Flying Seahorse dive boat was plastered with gorgeous laminated 8x10s of close encounters with nudibranches, like pinups in a soldier's locker. This, I realized, is diver porn, and like street porn, it is there to remind the average punter that there is a whole world out there that he is never going to be a part of.

Who knew a dive trip could foster such an inferiority complex? Dive masters also like to hover weightlessly a foot from the sea floor, legs artfully splayed and bent at the knee like a sky diver, able to levitate and simultaneously launch forward with hardly any discernible movement. I'm starting to get the hang of the hovering, but my lower limbs want to float down like the landlubbed biped that I am, and I have to keep my form with little spastic frog kicks. And inevitably, when a dive master beckons me over to take a gander at some microscopic shrimp or impossibly camouflaged rockfish, I start to inadvertently seastrafe towards my motionless leader, and so my view must be interrupted by doing a half barrel roll or something to avoid a collision (sickeningly announced by the uncouth tin clunk of two air cylinders making contact). I tend to give the affirmative ok sign, indicating "cool--I, too, now see that tiny monocellular mollusk, which I wouldn't have spotted myself with three hours worth of air", however often I can't see a damn thing in the patch of rotting seaweed she's pointing to. But I hate to disappoint.

Honestly, I tend to view the diving experience as a stoner: my internal monologue whilst underwater is less "zounds, a spotted pelagic mackerel fry!" and more "holy fuck, that purple fish has teeth!" It's all a trip for me. I could see nothing and just do vertical flips, or blow air rings towards the surface. Life is better underwater, because you get to plot a course through 3D space with the wonder of a toddler first attempting the dry 2D plane: go upside down to peer under a coral ledge, then chin up and do a 3/4 roll to go back into the sky diver pose, etc. Checking on your peers is like external space shots in the smarter sci fi movies: everything is hanging at rakish pitches and yaws to each other, gravity be damned (gravity still rules underwater, but aspiration makes for a significant challenge, causing an otherwise heavy, unwieldy diver to float up like a cork).

The silver lining of this lack of experience, like so many things in life, is that each time feels like the first. Balancing at the end of the dive platform, weighted dizzily top-heavy by a harness full of octopus lines and compressed air, we are permitted, at the appropriate time, to step out into the ocean, wherein balance and control are a hell of a lot easier. With a final OK to the divemistress, we deflate our terrestrially lifesaving jacket, and descend slowly to a world where we categorically don't belong; where speech is useless and we communicate with crude hand signals, and our stamina is determined ironically by a commitment to being relaxed and comfortable thirty meters below the surface. Sixty minutes or so later, we inflate ourselves back to buoyancy above a richness below that really doesn't stand to be recollected on land (I always remember what I saw no earlier than the next dive), and hauling one's armoured-up self back to the boat always seems wrong. The struggling evolution knows he has to go back to dry(ish) land, but isn't entirely sure he wants to. Get me back down there ASAP. And show me how the fuck you spot those nudibranches.