The Dive Evangelist

Check out the video as Oceanblue Divers travels to one of the final frontiers of diving in Komodo, Indonesia aboard the Archipelago Fleet Adventurer II liveaboard!

Oceanblue Divers presents: The Great Escape from Oceanblue Divers on Vimeo.

The other day there was a customer on the boat who had a great deal of trouble descending. She was pressing both the dump and inflate buttons on her BC's power inflator at the same time. This is not a posting about proper training or the importance of familiarity with one's gear, though I suppose it could be had something far more interesting not happened only a few moments later.

I called up to the boat with the shout of lazy Divemasters everywhere, "MORE WEIGHT!" and stuffed a couple of 2lb-ers into her pockets to overcome that initial five feet of descent. Once underwater, she dived like a champ and I was happy to see that my having overweighted her didn't result in constant coral crashing, or any coral crashing, for that matter. Nor is this a posting about responsible Divemastering. Not really.

We had been on the surface for about 10 minutes mucking about and by the time we'd dropped down the anchor line and established both neutral buoyancy and happiness the group had gone on its way to explore a lava tube. We set off in their direction and after only a few minutes came upon them making their way back to the boat.

"There's a turtle over there," the other DM that day motioned to me and, checking to ensure that both my diver and I had enough gas, we set off in that direction to look for him. Not that we really had to see another turtle. Instead of spotting one rarely and briefly, as is often the case in the Caribbean, in Hawaii it is rarer to NOT see a sea turtle during a dive. They seem to love these waters and to spot one napping on the bottom or happily munching away on sponge is a fairly regular sight.

Sadly, another fairly regular sight is what we saw next.

The big, male, Green Sea Turtle came flapping his way through the water straight towards us... with monofilament fishing line wrapped around his right, front flipper and trailing out 10 - 15 feet behind him.

I turned to my diver and motioned that she should stay right where she was and she gave me an OK to indicate that she understood. Dropping a few feet in the water column to be right at his level, I slowly kicked towards the turtle just to put a little space between myself and the other diver. The turtle didn't seem to care much and didn't change course at all; we were swimming right at one another.

As slowly as I could and with body language that I was hoping beyond hope spoke, "I mean you no harm" in Turtle I pulled my z-knife from my belt.

When the turtle was about two feet away he started to bank to the left to avoid collision. It was perfect, exposing his right flipper completely to me. He obviously didn't like that I started to reach for him as he started to fin just the slightest bit faster. But I'm good with a z-knife.

In just a few seconds I'd cut much of the line away, including the length that was trailing behind him.

He gave a good, strong flap and was clear of my reach a moment after that. There was a bit more line on him, but I didn't want to make him uncomfortable by chasing him. My chances of catching him even if I tried were slim to none anyway. So I let him go on his way while I stuffed the plastic line into the pocket of my wetsuit. He gave me a last, essaying look over his shoulder as he resumed his previous, lazy pace. And he was gone.

When I pulled the line out of my pocket back on the dive boat everyone knew immediately where it had come from.

"You got it off!!" a kid diving with his parents exclaimed happily.

"Yep," I did. It was a good day.

Now knowing the abundance of sea turtles in these waters, my dive briefing very quickly gained a good segment on respectful behaviour around turtles. Don't touch them, don't chase them, try not to block their immediate access to the surface, etc. The turtles may be better than us in the water, but no one is better than us at coming into an foreign environment and making things uncomfortable for the locals. So, constantly giving a briefing like this, obviously I don't advocate everyone swimming around, chasing turtles, trying to "help" them.

That this particular turtle allowed me to approach him as closely as he did, and that when I reached for him with my knife hand wasn't gone like a shot was a fluke (no pun intended) and a very lucky one at that.

That said, the number of turtles I'm seeing with fishing line wrapped around them somehow or -- far worse -- with hooks in their flippers or their necks is making me crazy and I was happy to finally do something about it. I don't know any simple solution and am open to suggestions.

In the meantime I am going to wish and dream that I get a chance like that at least once more in my life to make a direct difference beyond the education about these sweet animals I try to offer my divers.

If you'd like more information on the challenges that sea turtles face globally check out the sight The Sea Turtle Restoration Project. It's an excellent organization that does a lot of good work for these endangered animals.

And come to Hawaii. See some turtles. They're cute as hell.

The world was crumbling. Banks were folding, mortgages were being foreclosed on, people were out of work, and so many organizations around the country were tightening purse-strings around their employees' necks.

My company was no different. The desk where I'd squandered many a happy afternoon of the company's time, blogging away about diving was becoming perpetually dreary. My coworkers and I were sold and outsourced and many other corporate-speak things that I barely had the attention to understand. Little seemed to change for the better, including the numbers on the paychecks and our internet access. I could no longer blog. I could no longer see any of the good, diving websites. The firewalls blocked everything and, to risk melodrama, tapped me of the will to live... there anymore, anyway.

So, it was time.

I quit.

I moved to Hawaii.

I became a professional dive instructor.

It certainly sounds easier than it was or is in those clipped sentences, but anything worth doing is going to be hard, right?

In those last few months of working for a company whose corporate goals I barely knew, and with which I probably disagree, a mighty yet simple truth revealed itself to me: One must care about what they do and do what they care about.

In two years of working with the New York Aquarium both as a volunteer diver and a volunteer keeper's assistant I got to spend a bunch of time around people who make their living at the betterment of the ocean. I admired and continue to admire the dedication both to the animals in their charge and the education they have the opportunity to bring to the public. I got to hear them gripe about having to come in on Christmas and on New Year's in the dead of icy, New York winter to feed the animals, but I also got to see the pride and the affection they have for the creatures and for the place.

I also got to pet a walrus one day. That was really, really cool.

Having seen so many people caring about what they do and doing what they care about, I confess, I got jealous. Seeing people that dedicated and passionate about their work is compelling and I wanted to be one of them.

Without having to think too terribly long, I heard my calling clear as day. I care about the sea. Lacking a degree in marine biology or oceanography I had to resort to something other than aquarium keeper. I can dive, I can teach people to dive, and (occasionally) I can string together words into a (somewhat) cohesive order: there was my entire list of abilities. Dive instructor it was; and due to a strange series of coincidences, a move to Hawaii assembled itself.

So I told my boss to get stuffed and hopped on a plane.

I like to think of the move as bringing the Dive Evangelist gig on the road; bringing the good news to the middle of the Pacific.

You see, the people of Hawaii have depended on the sea since before even the beginning of the native, oral history, yet there are still horror stories such as sea turtle poaching in the islands. Vacationers travel across thousands of miles on thousands of dollars to come see the unique and rugged beauty of this place, yet Waikiki Beach looks mostly like a glorified ashtray/litter-box.

Divers tend to love the ocean and tend to care about the challenges that our beloved sea faces and I like to think of well-educated divers as ambassadors to their own race from the sea, ready to offer suggestions on how the people around them might practically help their world.

Most people really do care about the environment and would like to make a difference, but tend to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems. What if we can make the problems manageable and day-to-day, if we can show people how big a difference they, personally, can make in only small decisions and actions... At that desk in New Jersey I decided it was time to take a leap.

From here on in, each diver I certify or guide will know EXACTLY why their buoyancy control is important so as to stay off the reef. My divers will always owe me a beer for every piece of garbage that they leave in the water or on the boat (conversely, I'd like to buy them one for every piece of junk they bring back with them to be properly disposed of from the bottom).

Woe be unto dive boats I see following poor environmental guidelines. I reckon everyone deserves a warning, but I can't be held responsible for anyone's fouled anchors after that.

I care about the ocean very, very deeply. And it was with the realization that I wasn't doing nearly as much as I am personally capable of doing to help that led me here.

The world is crumbling, not the world of imaginary finance or that stupid intra-network I was responsible for the maintenance of, the real world. The world of life and death and renewal. This blue world of seas upon which every living thing is dependent is crumbling. And I can't sit idly by anymore.

I know that teaching people environmental responsibility as they learn to dive is not blocking the explosive harpoons on whaling ships, nor is it inventing a sure-fire way to prevent petroleum spills; but it is what I can do, and it is what I will do.

Maybe organize a beach clean-up from time to time, just to mix things up.

Perhaps you don't want to tell your boss to sod off then move to Hawaii. Or perhaps (more likely) you do. But why? To do more, or to do less?

The only advice I can give you if you are going to join me on Oahu as an eco-pirate is this: be careful about hiring movers to come way out here, there's some shady operations out there.

Summer has historically been my favorite season; it’s a time for exploring activities one generally doesn’t have the opportunity to pursue during the rest of the year. School’s out, companies operate with summer hours, things slow down. It’s a perfect opportunity to roll back the normal routine and enjoy alternative pursuits (some of which you’ll read about in this issue). Some people use the time while the weather is warm to vacation; the Hampton Jitneys are packed with the summer-share crowd and weekend beach warriors. Some decide that it’s a good opportunity to get more educated.

To that end, I decided it was finally time to undertake the challenge of the NAUI ITC (Instructor Training Course). I’d been thinking about it for number of years, and finally, the stars and my instructor aligned, and I began the course in April. Participating with me are two Oceanblue veterans, Avra Cohen and Vincent Maida, and at some undetermined time in August, if all goes as planned, we should be newly minted NAUI instructors. While some people are at the beach, we’re studying physics and physiology, the NAUI presentation formula and effective use of training aids.

The ultimate advantages of being an instructor are many. As the president of a large dive club, it obviously makes sense on many levels. There are business implications and a whole host of other practical reasons that make it worthwhile. Most of all, though, for me, it’s been a personal journey where knowledge and limits are constantly tested and expanded.

The NAUI program has several facets: in-water skills, classroom and in-water presentation skills, physics, to name some of the prominent ones. It’s all been a learning experience, and I would recommend it to anyone that wants to increase their knowledge of diving. But of all the things I’ve learned during the course of the program, the greatest value has come in the form of greater self-knowledge. During all the proficiency exercises and presentations, you become more acutely aware of how you react to different sorts of stresses, and hopefully look at yourself with a fair amount of perspective. It’s like putting yourself in a behavior lab and observing yourself from the outside. You go into the program thinking you want to be an instructor, but if you do it right, you come out a better person as well. I can say the same about any dive class I’ve taken since the very beginning. This one’s no different.

In mid-July, Oceanblue Divers presented our first course, an intensive Rescue Weekend given by Lifeguard Systems. I know that when all the participants drove home from the class, they not only left knowing a lot more about how to rescue someone while diving, they too learned a lot about themselves in the process. Can’t think of a better way to spend a summer!

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.

A year ago the New York Aquarium was blessed to help bring Akituusaq into this world. On Sunday the joy of the bouncing baby walrus was counter-balanced by the loss of his father, Ayveq. Sunday, a week ago, he was suddenly struck down by some mystery illness and despite the best efforts of the Veterinary staff, so far, the cause has not been diagnosed.

It had been Ayveq who brumfed snot all over me during my initial orientation walk, demonstrating that working at the NYA was just about the coolest thing possible. My fondness for him grew with every visit. Each time I passed in front of his enclosure to get a bucket of food for the fishdudes or to get to the cylinder shed I couldn’t help but stop to vie for the attention of that hulk.

In the quiet of the park before all the school trips and families show up it was easy for a single person calling his name to rouse his curiosity. Often he would swim up to a spot in the tank where he could amble onto a bit of structure and lean close up to the fence to inspect this anomaly of a person. His behemoth face only a few feet away, inspecting this tiny thing before him. Now, for those of the three readers of this blog that don’t know me: I am not a small dude. Chances are very good that I am significantly taller than anyone you know. But reflected in Ayveq’s eyes was humility. At more than two tons the gravitas of his gaze made me feel very, very small.

One morning, as I was cooing to him and asking him who was a handsome walrus, as though he might answer… he did. Ayveq started to whistle. Sure, it would have been neat if he started whistling that part from Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, but the long, mellow tone he let out of those massive lungs stunned me just the same. Did you know a walrus can hold their breath for about ½ an hour to make better-than-200 foot dives? With pipes like that, it was a long, impressive whistle.

“The walrus can whistle!” I reported excitedly to the keepers, as though I had just made an extraordinary breakthrough in marine science. They laughed.
“Yeah,” explained one, with a wry smile, “It’s mating behavior. He likes you.”

While I was and am flattered I’m sure Ayveq knew that it just wouldn’t work out.

It’s hard to imagine that each and every one of the volunteers lacks some sort of story and similar affection for the big fella; and I don’t want to imagine the grief that the staff of the Aquarium are going through. The animals at the aquarium become very dear to you very quickly when you are among them so often. They aren’t displays, they aren’t even like pets, they are friends.

They don’t even have to be gigantic and furry to capture your heart as they do. For example, a few months ago a big, ancient green moray named Eli finally went off to the reef in the sky. Not knowing it wasn’t yet common knowledge I stupidly blurted this fact out, causing instant tears to be shed. Similarly in Glover’s Reef, the main reef display, there is a goatfish who, at some point, got an o-ring wrapped around his little head. As he’s grown, the o-ring has started cutting into him. I admit the goatfish, so far as I know, does not have a name, which makes the sight no less heartbreaking. Unfortunately, he has thus far proved impossible to catch and free of the ring, but the divers will keep trying.

I am going to miss Ayveq badly. I am sure he will be missed badly by very many. It is going to be hard for a good, long time to walk past his underwater windows and not get to smile at the denizens of excited, little kids marveling slack-jawed and wide-eyed at his truly awesome girth. I don’t even know what I’m going to do about walking past the front fence.

The ray of sunshine is still little Akituusaq. I say little, but that isn’t really so. He already outweighs me by more than double and is only going to keep turning mackerel and clams into more walrus. Ayveq’s tank may be a big one to fill, but one day it will be Aki’s immensity that the visitors marvel at. He’ll make kissy-faces at them with a head the size of an ottoman. Kids will reflexively step back from the window as two and a half tons of animal swims straight at them and presses his blubbery cuteness against the glass. The volunteers and the staff alike will have stories upon stories about him.

I am sure more than one will include, “You shoulda seen his dad.”

Tomorrow I'm going on my first local dive of the season to the wreck of the USS San Diego and I'm giddy as a bottle of bubbles. Oceanblue Divers chartered the trip which quickly filled with a as many old salts as there are folks who are tentatively giving local diving a chance to impress them. The weather reports are as groovy as the crowd with predictions for seas like glass and wind blowing just enough to keep you cool in your drysuit.

Just as I've never gotten to dive the San Diego before, so is the dive is from a boat I've never jumped off before, the R/V Garloo. This is the boat that once was the legendary R/V Wahoo, arguably one of two boats that defined Northeastern wreck diving over the course of the 80s and 90s.

This is the exact dive which I woke up at 3AM about a year ago to make. I packed my gear in the car and drove the 70 or so miles out to the dock.

I'd gotten there early, before the folks who had slept on the boat were up. So, instead of getting on board for the first time without the captain's permission I went back to the car to set up my rig. I opened up the crate I tote everything around in and stared. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes I slowly admitted to myself that what I was looking at was the sad truth... I'd forgotten my BC.

Well I'm not making the same mistake this time. I'm all packed up, checked, double-checked, and redouble-checked. Everything is where it belongs and I'm ready to rock and roll.

Now there's just the bit about having to wake up at 3AM.

Wish me luck.