The Dive Evangelist

Why didn’t I take up jogging?

I don’t mean to denigrate the plight of the jogger and I’m sure they have a whole set of concerns around their sport: antagonistic road construction crews, new developments in lace technology, that sort of thing. But we divers are in a real bad way due to a particular constraint of our sport. Except for a happy few, we need to travel to where the water is, and with the cost of travel these days we can’t even make our way up a certain creek, paddle or not.

I live in New Jersey. Go ahead… laugh all you want; I’ll bet you anything my pizza is better than yours, though. From my house in North Jersey to a dive boat in the Atlantic is only an hour’s ride. Every once in a while that ride is a risk. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will predict seas around 4-6 feet, which is really the outside of edge of most divers’ ability to get back onto a boat after a dive.

But 4-6 feet alone doesn’t tell you enough. Is it slow interval (where the waves come at you with long, rolling predictability) or is it fast (where you get hammered in every direction at once without any rhyme or reason and an ill-timed grab for the ladder will hurt… badly)? The only way to truly know what the sea is going to look like, is to go look at it.

More than many times I’ve gotten all my gear into the car at 4AM, driven the hour to the dock, loaded onto the boat, and stood around while the captain radios all his friends to find out whether Poseidon is in the mood for visitors that day. Sometimes the boat goes out and you get to enjoy the Atlantic at its most challenging. Sometimes you unload all your gear back into the car and get back into bed even before the sun comes up. Getting blown out right at the dock is just part of acceptable risk of diving around here.

Yesterday NOAA was making just such a prediction about conditions. A handful of friends and I were supposed to go out in the afternoon, but by noon we had to make the call one way or the other. It was different this time. No one wanted to drive to the dock so that we could call the dive or not having actually laid eyes on the ocean.

$4 per gallon for gas. Almost $5 for the boat’s diesel.

This is just local diving and we’re getting waylaid by travel cost. I’m lucky to be as close to some of the best diving in the world as I am, yet the price of a relatively short drive ensured my dryness yesterday as we agreed that the cost of everyone’s potentially wasted gas was prohibitive.

Even well beyond the borders of the Garden State (State Shell: The Knobbed Whelk) one of the reasons many dive shops are seeing a dramatic drop in business is that so few people are traveling to lovely, blue destinations and want to get certified beforehand. As jet-fuel prices rise airlines struggle to keep ticket costs down. They have tried to balance the books in contrarian to outright lunatic ways, such as charging for even the first piece of checked luggage, charging for the privilege of sitting in an exit-row seat, and, of course, putting thousands and thousands of people out of work.

We devoted divers will probably continue to sit on the over-booked flights and endure the missed connections due to outdated plane pieces breaking, but we certainly don’t do so happily.

We vow never again to fly this or that airline. We argue with the harried counter clerks, with whom we find it hard to empathize as people afraid to lose their jobs when we see them as an obstacle between us and a paid-for, thousand-dollar dive vacation. And so: a bitter, self-replicating cascade effect of rising costs and lowered service makes travel a misery.

I don’t know the precise answer to the problem of fuel costs. I’m a diver, not an energy expert. Ask a hippie and they'll say, “Why aren’t we exploring alternative energies as aggressively as we’re bombing countries?” Ask someone who doesn’t give a crap about the long-term effects to both the rising atmospheric CO2 levels and the short-term impacts on the ecosystem surrounding the vast, industrial footprint of an oil drilling plant and they’d say, “Tap ANWR.”

Either way, it just sucks.

If only there were some way to harness the energy of our own exhaust bubbles.