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| The shipwrecks of Coron. |
I looked back at the six Israeli divers in our group. It was lucky for us that they were novices - more experienced divers would've understood what had happened, and gotten rightfully pissed off. But they just stared blankly at us, regulators gurgling in the darkness, clearly wondering why their two professional dive guides were now sharing air like teenagers in a 1950s milkshake parlor. Then one of the Israelis made the 'low on air' signal. Then another. And we found ourselves in a bit of a clusterfuck.
An average scuba tank holds 200 bar of air, and 'low on air' usually means 50 bar. Under normal circumstances, running low on air isn't a life-threatening problem for scuba divers. You just look up, ascend slowly toward the surface, stop for a few minutes to let the nitrogen bubbles dissipate from your bloodstream, and then pop out of the water. Most of the time, you get back to the boat with plenty of air to spare.
Our circumstances, though, were not normal.
We were floating in the bowels of the Morazon Maru, a World War II shipwreck near the island of Coron. Once a Japanese cargo ship, it was sunk by an American airstrike from the USS Lexington in 1944. As shipwrecks ago, the Morazon is relatively easy to navigate. Most dives consist of swimming through large cargo holds with easy access to open water, or checking out the marine life on the top of the wreck. It's considered a great dive spot for beginners and large groups.
For some reason, we had deviated from this usual route. The Filipino divemaster had led us into some much smaller chambers - judging that our divers were capable of managing their air supply and buoyancy in close quarters. They were, for the most part, until he himself ran out of air. Then their muscles tightened, their breathing increased, and we found ourselves in the middle of a rusty shipwreck with half the party low on air.
The other divemaster with us, a Korean girl named Jianna, swam up from the back and transferred the Filipino guide onto her alternate regulator. It was clear that we had to abort and return to the mooring line, a long rope running from the shipwreck to a buoy on the surface where the dive boats wait. There we could gather the group together, monitor everyone's air supply, and ascend safely to the surface. So off she went, the Filipino guide hovering above her, attached by a gravity-defying umbilical cord. She'd dived this wreck a dozen times before, and he'd dived it a hundred, so I wasn't concerned about us getting lost.
To clarify, I wasn't concerned about the divemasters getting lost. The customers were another story. I was responsible for keeping six newbie divers together as we navigated out of the wreck, a job only slightly less difficult than herding feral cats across a river. The ability of some divers to become momentarily distracted, then hopelessly disoriented is remarkable. One of the Israelis had run so low on air that he was now using my alternate regulator. I thought optimistically that at least I had one diver I couldn't lose.
After a few agonizing minutes we reached the mooring line, rising up from the stern like a literal lifeline to the surface. As I triumphantly guided the five Israeli divers to the base of the line, I remembered to my horror that we'd started the day with six Israeli divers. Jianna floated above us, having successfully delivered the Filipino guide to an emergency tank of air dangling from a rope five meters below the surface. She looked at me quizzically, sensing that something was wrong. The Filipino guide touched his eyes, then waved his hand in a circular motion around the top of the wreck.
Shit. Search and rescue for a missing diver. I'm sure that I have had more horrifying moments in my life, but I can't remember any. I glanced back at the Israelis clinging to the mooring line. I was sure they realized that their friend was gone. One of them touched his air gauge and pointed toward the deck - he wanted to go back down. Then another, and another. And one more. Shit.
I calmed my breathing and checked my air. I still had more than half a tank - enough for maybe twenty or thirty minutes of searching, less if I had another diver to support. The four Israelis all had slightly less than me; the fifth was so low on air that he had attached himself to Jianna, bobbing in the current as they waited to ascend. The Filipino guide wasn't going to be of much help. So it was up to me - a pathetically inexperienced divemaster trainee leading a group of pathetically inexperienced beginners on a hopeless search for one lost diver. Kafka would have found the whole thing hilarious, which shows you what a prick Kafka was.
In the end, I was saved by the laziest deus ex machina ever devised by teenage fanfic scribes. As I took one last look at the surface, praying for divine (or at least more-competant-human) intervention, I spotted the unmistakeable potbelly of our missing Israeli diver. He was nestled in a bunch of other divers about ten meters above us, all of them dangling from the mooring line like lumpy black bananas. I pointed toward him, my eyes brimming with joy. Excitedly I looked at the Israelis, who stared blankly back at me. As it turns out, none of them had realized their friend was gone.
Neither had the Filipino dive guide. He was still signaling at me, and now I realized that he didn't want me to conduct a search and rescue mission. He just wanted me to take the Israelis back down to the top of wreck for a ten minute lookaround to use up their excess air. Nobody likes coming up with half a tank of expensive, unused air - he was covering his ass against customer complaints.
There is no scuba sign for 'go fuck yourself', but it would've been mighty useful then.
~
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| It's a pretty strong sales pitch. |
The first time I took a breath underwater, I knew I wanted to be a professional scuba diver. I had the moment of clarity I suspect surgeons have when, as a child, they successfully extract the funny bone from that poor smiling bastard in 'Operation'. The thought process goes something like this, 'Hey, this is fun. Why don't I do this for a career?'
The easy answer, with regards to diving, is that you make practically no money. Being a professional scuba diver means continually replacing equipment (which is expensive), upgrading and maintaining certifications (which is also expensive), and existing largely on the tips of customers (who are stingy bastards). Experienced, highly qualified instructors earn less each month than most elementary school janitors.
'But at least you're doing something you love,' say people I'd love to punch in the mouth. Which isn't really fair, because they're right. Still, it's very easy to forget this at 6:30am when you're loading an endless stream of heavy scuba cylinders onto the deck of a slippery boat, or elbow-deep in dirty rinse tanks searching for a lost bootie, or stuck with an obnoxious group of loud Chinese tourists for days at a time. It's even easier to forget while grinding through the piles of paperwork and inventory-keeping needed to keep any dive center semi-profitable/functional. And on 'shop days', where you're stuck behind a desk with only a vast list of housekeeping chores and the occasional obnoxious customer to keep you company, it's almost impossible to remember why diving seemed like a good idea in the first place.
~
'Oh no oh no oh no oh no...'
It was our last dive of the day, around the Lusong gunboat wreck. I was guiding a nice Finnish woman named Jona, an outgoing woman with blonde hair and an easy smile. She was doing a scuba refresher course - the course certified divers take when they've been out of the water for a few years. We'd spent most of the day practicing skills and doing a little easy exploration, and now it was time for her first 'real dive',
The dive site was fairly shallow - maybe 17 meters at the deepest point. The ship itself was covered in corals and aquatic life, but it's quite small. There's not much to penetrate - one big cargo hold in the stern, at the bow a little bridge area hardly big enough to fit two divers. Around 25 meters from bow to stern, you'd be hard pressed to spend more than fifteen or twenty minutes there without becoming powerfully bored.
We usually took divers out to the nearby reef valley first, sometimes purposely swimming into the current to get them breathing nice and hard. They'd run low on air, and then we could get out of the water and go home. Leading divers on Lusong was like halfheartedly playing 'Monopoly' against your kids - they're having a great time, but there's no challenge or excitement in it for you. You've seen it a million times before.
Which is why I couldn't fucking believe I'd lost the diver.
I'd done a mapping project of the Lusong, carefully (if inexpertly) mapping the depths and contours of the site, noting the placement of interesting creatures and noteworthy reef patches, creating a fairly vivid picture of the site in my mind. Of all the dive sites in Coron, it was the one I should have known best. And with only one diver behind me, the dive should have been easy peaches.
Which is why I couldn't fucking believe I'd lost the diver, too.
For almost twenty minutes, she'd been right behind me. Literally, centimeters behind me - she was so close I kept kicking her with my fins. I'd pointed out some nudibranches, a jawfish, a few puffers...the usual residents of the Lusong site. She was an unfortunately light breather, so I was taking her on a long circuit around the coral outcroppings before returning to the wreck.
Halfway across the sandy bottom, I realized she was no longer behind me. I was baffled - there was literally nothing to see here but sand. What had distracted her? How long had she been gone? I could've sworn I had seen her seconds before, but doubt quickly crept into my head. Had I spaced out for a few minutes? There was no way to be sure, and in any case it didn't matter. My breathing grew deep and ragged as I realized how seriously fucked I was.
The first step to finding a missing diver is to look for air bubbles. I gazed up at the blank blueness above me, squinting at the distance for the telltale signs of a breathing diver. Nothing. Then I waited for a minute, thinking that maybe I'd been swimming too fast and she was trying to catch up. She didn't appear.
I began swimming search patterns, at first with some confident sense of purpose, then with increasing desperation. There was no sign of my diver, nor of any other humans in the area. 'She might be dead,' I thought unhelpfully. 'You were responsible for her safety, and now she's dead. This isn't like skipping a meeting or forgetting a report - she trusted you with her life, and you failed.'
I began retracing our path to the dive boat, continually scanning the surface for a floating diver or air bubbles or loose equipment, anything besides the blue nothingness. As I drew closer to the dive boat, I began to see other dive groups and snorkelers, finning obliviously through the water without a care in the world. I have never wished I could trade bodies with a stranger so badly. I kicked furiously through the water, desperate to reach the boat and call for an emergency search-and-rescue operation.
When I saw the rasta-painted hull of the dive boat in front of me, I quickly surfaced and tore off my mask. I spotted Jianna, the Korean divemaster, standing on the deck of the boat next to Thomas, my German instructor and the greatest diver I've ever known. I was ashamed to admit my failure to him, but this was not a moment for pride. If anyone could find a missing girl in the middle of an empty sea, Thomas could. As I filled my lungs to call out to him, I saw that he was laughing at me.
'You are looking for something?'
And there was the Finnish woman, sheepish but perfectly alive.
'I'm sorry - I looked around at some fishes and I lost you. So I went up and returned to the boat. I still have 150 bar...can we go back down and look at the boat? I want to see the Nemos.'
I have never been so happy to see anybody in my entire life, including my mother.
Sorry, Mom.
~
Working at a dive shop is not a dream job, at least in the traditional sense. It involves incredibly long hours for surprisingly low wages. It attracts some of the most annoyingly demanding customers outside a Porsche dealership. It requires working with guys who are literally illiterate yet Machiavellian in their political maneuverings amongst the crew. It is a myopic world full of petty bickering, mind-numbing routines, and physically exhausting labor.
And I wouldn't trade a minute of it, unless you offered something really, really awesome in return.
Like a yacht.
~
Happy diveshops are all the same, unhappy diveshops are miserable in their own interesting ways. If you put a gun to my head, I'd say that my diveshop was unhappy. But once you put the gun down I'd try to explain that life there was too complicated to be summed up in neat platitudes.
I'd say that I met some of the strongest, most intelligent, most unexpectedly compassionate and insightful people I've ever known - people like the shop owner Karin, a German woman with the loudest bark and softest bite of any boss I've ever had (and the biggest heart). Or Thomas, the Bavarian instructor with approximately ten billion dives and more wisdom about life than a dozen lamas. Or Angy, another Deutsch instructor whose gruff manner and intimidating appearance was almost successful in concealing her speargun-sharp wit and humor (but not quite). Or Jianna, my onetime nemesis who later became my dear friend and personal underwater photographer on our last dive together. Or MJ, an unshakably cool Filipino version of Mr. Miyagi who taught me how to tiptoe through the minefields of diveshop relationships.
Then I'd say it's possible to be happy and unhappy at the same time, and nowhere proves this better than a diveshop. I'd suggest that chasing your life's passion is much simpler than figuring out what to do with that passion once you've caught it. I'd say that some of the best moments of my life happened in the same places, with the same people, as some of the worst. Time makes all the difference, as it always does.
And once all that metaphysical bullshit was out of the way, I'd try to sell you a new set of fins.
The easy answer, with regards to diving, is that you make practically no money. Being a professional scuba diver means continually replacing equipment (which is expensive), upgrading and maintaining certifications (which is also expensive), and existing largely on the tips of customers (who are stingy bastards). Experienced, highly qualified instructors earn less each month than most elementary school janitors.
'But at least you're doing something you love,' say people I'd love to punch in the mouth. Which isn't really fair, because they're right. Still, it's very easy to forget this at 6:30am when you're loading an endless stream of heavy scuba cylinders onto the deck of a slippery boat, or elbow-deep in dirty rinse tanks searching for a lost bootie, or stuck with an obnoxious group of loud Chinese tourists for days at a time. It's even easier to forget while grinding through the piles of paperwork and inventory-keeping needed to keep any dive center semi-profitable/functional. And on 'shop days', where you're stuck behind a desk with only a vast list of housekeeping chores and the occasional obnoxious customer to keep you company, it's almost impossible to remember why diving seemed like a good idea in the first place.
~
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| Hello? Anybody? Bueller? |
'Oh no oh no oh no oh no...'
It was our last dive of the day, around the Lusong gunboat wreck. I was guiding a nice Finnish woman named Jona, an outgoing woman with blonde hair and an easy smile. She was doing a scuba refresher course - the course certified divers take when they've been out of the water for a few years. We'd spent most of the day practicing skills and doing a little easy exploration, and now it was time for her first 'real dive',
The dive site was fairly shallow - maybe 17 meters at the deepest point. The ship itself was covered in corals and aquatic life, but it's quite small. There's not much to penetrate - one big cargo hold in the stern, at the bow a little bridge area hardly big enough to fit two divers. Around 25 meters from bow to stern, you'd be hard pressed to spend more than fifteen or twenty minutes there without becoming powerfully bored.
We usually took divers out to the nearby reef valley first, sometimes purposely swimming into the current to get them breathing nice and hard. They'd run low on air, and then we could get out of the water and go home. Leading divers on Lusong was like halfheartedly playing 'Monopoly' against your kids - they're having a great time, but there's no challenge or excitement in it for you. You've seen it a million times before.
Which is why I couldn't fucking believe I'd lost the diver.
I'd done a mapping project of the Lusong, carefully (if inexpertly) mapping the depths and contours of the site, noting the placement of interesting creatures and noteworthy reef patches, creating a fairly vivid picture of the site in my mind. Of all the dive sites in Coron, it was the one I should have known best. And with only one diver behind me, the dive should have been easy peaches.
Which is why I couldn't fucking believe I'd lost the diver, too.
For almost twenty minutes, she'd been right behind me. Literally, centimeters behind me - she was so close I kept kicking her with my fins. I'd pointed out some nudibranches, a jawfish, a few puffers...the usual residents of the Lusong site. She was an unfortunately light breather, so I was taking her on a long circuit around the coral outcroppings before returning to the wreck.
Halfway across the sandy bottom, I realized she was no longer behind me. I was baffled - there was literally nothing to see here but sand. What had distracted her? How long had she been gone? I could've sworn I had seen her seconds before, but doubt quickly crept into my head. Had I spaced out for a few minutes? There was no way to be sure, and in any case it didn't matter. My breathing grew deep and ragged as I realized how seriously fucked I was.
The first step to finding a missing diver is to look for air bubbles. I gazed up at the blank blueness above me, squinting at the distance for the telltale signs of a breathing diver. Nothing. Then I waited for a minute, thinking that maybe I'd been swimming too fast and she was trying to catch up. She didn't appear.
I began swimming search patterns, at first with some confident sense of purpose, then with increasing desperation. There was no sign of my diver, nor of any other humans in the area. 'She might be dead,' I thought unhelpfully. 'You were responsible for her safety, and now she's dead. This isn't like skipping a meeting or forgetting a report - she trusted you with her life, and you failed.'
I began retracing our path to the dive boat, continually scanning the surface for a floating diver or air bubbles or loose equipment, anything besides the blue nothingness. As I drew closer to the dive boat, I began to see other dive groups and snorkelers, finning obliviously through the water without a care in the world. I have never wished I could trade bodies with a stranger so badly. I kicked furiously through the water, desperate to reach the boat and call for an emergency search-and-rescue operation.
When I saw the rasta-painted hull of the dive boat in front of me, I quickly surfaced and tore off my mask. I spotted Jianna, the Korean divemaster, standing on the deck of the boat next to Thomas, my German instructor and the greatest diver I've ever known. I was ashamed to admit my failure to him, but this was not a moment for pride. If anyone could find a missing girl in the middle of an empty sea, Thomas could. As I filled my lungs to call out to him, I saw that he was laughing at me.
'You are looking for something?'
And there was the Finnish woman, sheepish but perfectly alive.
'I'm sorry - I looked around at some fishes and I lost you. So I went up and returned to the boat. I still have 150 bar...can we go back down and look at the boat? I want to see the Nemos.'
I have never been so happy to see anybody in my entire life, including my mother.
Sorry, Mom.
~
Working at a dive shop is not a dream job, at least in the traditional sense. It involves incredibly long hours for surprisingly low wages. It attracts some of the most annoyingly demanding customers outside a Porsche dealership. It requires working with guys who are literally illiterate yet Machiavellian in their political maneuverings amongst the crew. It is a myopic world full of petty bickering, mind-numbing routines, and physically exhausting labor.
And I wouldn't trade a minute of it, unless you offered something really, really awesome in return.
Like a yacht.
~
Happy diveshops are all the same, unhappy diveshops are miserable in their own interesting ways. If you put a gun to my head, I'd say that my diveshop was unhappy. But once you put the gun down I'd try to explain that life there was too complicated to be summed up in neat platitudes.
I'd say that I met some of the strongest, most intelligent, most unexpectedly compassionate and insightful people I've ever known - people like the shop owner Karin, a German woman with the loudest bark and softest bite of any boss I've ever had (and the biggest heart). Or Thomas, the Bavarian instructor with approximately ten billion dives and more wisdom about life than a dozen lamas. Or Angy, another Deutsch instructor whose gruff manner and intimidating appearance was almost successful in concealing her speargun-sharp wit and humor (but not quite). Or Jianna, my onetime nemesis who later became my dear friend and personal underwater photographer on our last dive together. Or MJ, an unshakably cool Filipino version of Mr. Miyagi who taught me how to tiptoe through the minefields of diveshop relationships.
Then I'd say it's possible to be happy and unhappy at the same time, and nowhere proves this better than a diveshop. I'd suggest that chasing your life's passion is much simpler than figuring out what to do with that passion once you've caught it. I'd say that some of the best moments of my life happened in the same places, with the same people, as some of the worst. Time makes all the difference, as it always does.
And once all that metaphysical bullshit was out of the way, I'd try to sell you a new set of fins.
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