The Dive Evangelist

Pensacola has great museums. There’s an art museum that is currently hosting a German Expressionist exhibit and a Matisse exhibit. There is also the Museum of Naval Aviation, which I highly recommend visiting. It’s one of the most well put together, moving, and interesting museums to which I’ve been in quite a while. My favorite bit of information gleaned there is that I do not fit into the cockpit of an F-14. Evidently, you need to be a midget to be a naval aviator. Or Tom Cruise. Same thing, I guess.

I have such knowledge of the Pensacola museum scene because, despite having lived, slept, eaten, and worked on a dive boat there for two weeks straight, we actually never went diving. I probably would’ve been better off having never unpacked my gear. Or best yet, just not bothered to bring it with me. Just a couple of t-shirts and a book in my messenger bag and I would’ve been dandy. Would’ve even avoided yet another recurrent over-weight charge on my luggage.

I’m exaggerating, of course. We did go diving some. Sadly, we wound up trying to go diving more often than we made it.

“The seas are like glass here,” said the fella who had mated the two weeks before I got there, “There’s a little bit of a current, but it’s great, because it keeps all the silt off the wreck, so visibility is huge!”

Naturally, this jinxed us. The next time I see him, I’m going to cut his hoses.

The very first three-day trip out, we casted off at about 7AM. Seas were expected to build over the course of the day, so we figured we could get out early and get a couple dives in before having to come home with our tail between our legs. The hour or so trip from Pensacola through the harbor was a little bumpy, but nothing terrible. The mouth of the harbor, however, may as well have been a teleporter to the Cape of Good Hope.

After 45 minutes of motoring straight into 5-6 foot seas the captain turned us around. I went to wake the guests to deliver the bad news, but the seas had done that for me. They all agreed the captain made the right call. We went out late the second day but had to come back to dock for good that night. No third day.

The next trip we had slightly better luck. The first day we were blown out completely. The second day, we headed out a little late, as the seas were predicted to lay down. We actually spent our one night out there to stare at the stars and get a couple of dives in the next morning before finally being blown home.

The third trip was an amplification of the first with much, much bigger seas. The one day we made it out, we got our asses handed to us pretty roundly and only a few of the guests actually made the dive. I wouldn’t have dived myself if it wasn’t my job to jump into those angry, eight-foot, two-knot current, monster waves to tie in and unhook. I could go on for a couple of hours about that whole debacle alone.

Maybe I’ll talk about it some other time, once the PTSD has healed. Or you can ask me about it, at which point I’ll probably chew your ear off. It sucked. That’s all.

The fourth trip: they canceled. The guests read about the coming conditions and listened to reports of what conditions had been like and (wisely) decided to postpone the trip until next year when we go back.

7. Can you believe it? 7 dives. I’d hoped to get something in the range of 30. Stupid weather.

BUT!

When the diving was good…

First off, it is the biggest damned thing you can imagine. I mean, the Oriskany is an aircraft carrier. A whole one. And they’re big. Real big. Mind-bendingly big. The island alone is worthy of scores upon scores of dives.

I had fancy-pants plans, before getting down there, to find my way down to the engine rooms. I’d scoured giant printouts of the deck plans and figured, over the course of three or four dives I’d be ready to make that drop. Uh-uh. Maybe I would have had the chance if the seas weren’t so mean to us, but having made only a couple of dives over the course of the weeks they were barely enough to take in just the island.

The wreck starts at about 70 feet and the flight deck is at about 140. Let’s see… carry the 1.6… divide by FSW… that makes about a million feet of island to explore. The rooms are all empty, having been stripped and cleaned for the reefing. Well, they’re stripped and cleaned of desks and controls and maps and other such shipwrecky objects. But there’s something unexpected about this year-old wreck.

It is covered, and when I say “covered” I mean COVERED in life. We had all figured that it would just be a rusty, metal hunk to be dived as a historical artifact at this point. The transition from historical artifact to reclaimed reef was something I was looking forward to watching as I’d dive it over the coming decade or four. The beginning of that transition took the sea no time at all. This, with interesting results and an interesting future in store.

Best I can figure it, the algae moved in at once. The Gulf of Mexico is extremely nutrient-rich and I guess the algae must’ve taken hold instantly. Shellfish followed the algae. On any given dive, one would see as many Arrow Crabs as exist everywhere in the whole world. These little guys, who are usually small, sparsely populated critters, were crawling all over everything. No one on any of the trips that had gone out (and some of these are extremely experienced divers, some of whom quite literally wrote the book on diving) had ever seen so many and such big Arrow Crabs.

On one night dive, while watching a couple of blennies jump around in their typical, neurotic blenny way, I noticed a small bit of coral moving in an odd manner. On paying attention I realized it was a Decorator Crab. I’d never seen one before or, shall I say as a nod to their expertise at camouflage, I’d never noticed one before.

Then there were the urchins. I hate those things. They were one potential-for-pain per two square feet. I started using my canister light head to punch them. No, not to smash them to bits you sadists. Just to knock them off doorways so I could swim through without getting stabbed in the neck. Those things are dumb as a sack of wet White Castles so they probably never even notice they’re falling.

They also taste terrible. You ever had Uni sushi? That is one of about three things I actually dislike to eat. Then, I may only be about as smart as a sea urchin myself since, every two or three years, I’m sitting at a sushi bar and I think, “It can’t be as bad as I remember.” And I order a piece. And it is. Uni is gross. Period.

Scallops cover the flight deck. Thousands of them, about 2 inches across, abundantly blanketing the football field of an iron floor, all facing into the current and feasting on that rich water. Though every here and there, surrounded by seemingly happy live ones, you would find a patch of dead scallop shells, maybe five feet in diameter. Everyone was noticing them, but no one could figure it.

I hovered over one, wondering on the cause of these little killing fields, when something in my peripheral vision moved that wasn’t a scallop nervously swimming away from the big, noisy intruder. When I looked there was nothing there. Just shipwreck. No scallops, though. No live, no dead… nothing at all. I swam over to inspect when it moved again. The shipwreck itself started to undulate and shimmy around like August heat refraction over asphalt. When I got too close, it took off and the dead scallops instantly made sense to me.

The algae brought the shellfish, and the shellfish brought the octopi. Those piles of scallop shells are where the octopi were sneaking up and devouring whole armies of them like peanuts, tossing the empty shells over their… do octopi have shoulders?

When we started looking for them, they were everywhere. Under every metal seam, wedged into every crack. One particularly brazen dude was repeatedly spotted sitting right in the middle of the hanger deck with all eight arms crossed standoffishly in the center of a nest made of his scallop husks.

I’d only ever seen one octopus on a dive before. On the Oriskany right now, you can easily see three or four on every dive. Positively amazing creatures. I love octopi, to the point I’ve got one permanently inked onto my arm.

One thing I didn’t see on any of my dives were moray eels. They, being the next link in the food chain, are sure to show up sooner or later, and those pusses will get to being just as rare and retiring as they usually are. But for now, man, what fun.

On the topic of cephalopods: there was also the night dive I made after getting all the guests safely back aboard where I scared the ink out of a couple dozen squid. They may have the biggest eye in proportion to their body of the animal kingdom, but they certainly aren’t the twinklingest gaze in the sonnet, if you know what I mean. They’d come poking around, attracted by my light, and hover just out of actual beam looking for… tentacle-faced Cthulhu-knows-what. The instant I’d shine the light directly at them, they’d squirt their counter-measure and vanish into the inky depths. Just to be replaced by another dopey looking calamari to hang there thinking squidy thoughts of, “Oooooo, pretty.”

Rereading that last bit, I see a tone of disdain that may be coming across for these animals. Please don’t get me wrong. They may be dumb, but I love ‘em. And not just the squid, but all of them. To the point where, only a few years ago, I made the decision that I couldn’t, in good conscious, eat something like fried calamari, knowing that the chewy yumminess came from something that died panicked and choking for oxygen. I’ll never again taste my mom’s delicious garlic-roasted porgies after having spent a dive with two of them curiously watching me as I pawed at the sand.

I don’t want to sound like some jerk, vegetarian missionary, I just want to make clear that despite my amusement at their stupidity, they are each and every one the sweetest, little creatures and they’re a pretty strong percentage of why I dive.

Except the sea urchins. They’re bastards.

Knowing that it was going to be one of my last, I made one particularly long dive. I swam down an escalator that leads from the flight deck on the starboard side of the wreck to the hangar deck. I swam through the hangar deck over that nesting octopus, who I just wanted to hug and tell him, “It’s OK. You don’t have to be scared of me. Here, have an arrow crab.” But instead, I swam off relatively quickly, as I was obviously making him nervous, then out the port side flight elevator door and back up the mooring line.

While I was doing my mandatory decompression stops on the line, I saw a group of divers jump in, swim around the top two or three decks of the island a few times, then climb their line back onto the boat. During this entire time I was just hanging there, looking down longingly at the wreck, getting rid of nitrogen. I felt bad for them.

“You guys didn’t even see it!”

Then I frowned to myself. Because, all told… neither had I.

When was your last dive?

Does it really matter?

If you haven't been diving in a long time, you're probably jonesing to dive. Maybe you're even on the verge of wearing your wetsuit to work.

If you've been diving recently, you're probably even more eager to get wet again. There's nothing like a dive to make you want to do another one.

So either way, you probably can't wait to breath compressed air. If you're like me, you're not too picky about whether your next dive will be on a coral reef in warm salt water surrounded by reef fish, or on a disintegrating school bus in cold fresh water surrounded by... well, not much. Sure, I'd like to swim with a whale shark in 150-foot viz on my next dive, but I'd rather dive in a murky quarry than stay dry. That's why I'm diving Dutch in less than two weeks.

Are you with me? Or would you rather stay dry?