Dive Log

The first breath you take underwater is a miracle. Having been hiking, backpacking, travelling and moving excessively, since I left home as a teenager, I have carried many heavy things on my back, but never breath. Never my own air. You feel how much weight water holds: when you stop wading out and fall back into the waves, then go to your knees, as if asking for forgiveness or marriage and look up at the molten, rocking surface far above you.
 
Yesterday, I went to the bottom of the sea. Not for moments and glimpses. Not for as long and as far as a single breath. For almost an hour I skimmed the bottom and sank and mistakenly surfaced and sank again and swam through the traffic of fish. I felt as slow and deliberate as a paintbrush. We were children all afternoon: myself, my friend and our two dive masters. Both of them have the presence and delight of people who have found exactly what they want to do in life and found a way to do it. One instructor, Jack is an equanimous man with exceptional taste in loud shirts, who recently set up his dive college here in Tenerife. Our other trainer, Lee - is tattooed from ceiling to floor, painted with the sea, his body is a dedication to diving and marine life, with inked octopus tentacles twisting around his arm from elbow to wrist. Both are full of kindness, consideration and mirth, and have a deep respect for the sea and how its inhabitants should be treated - not as tourist attractions or circus shows to be petted or fed - but as autonomous creatures who are not there for us to witness, or interfere with, but who we can help protect. They are my kind of people: Peter Pans on this Never-Never Island.
 
This evening, I have been mostly at the surface instead - snorkeling around some of the coast, diving down momentarily and dangling upside down, bat-like to get closer looks at adult lizard fish, splayed star fish and crabs nibbling and circumnavigating a buffet of rocks. Lots of naturalists have a patch, a beat which they survey and walk throughout the years. I feel like this about my little stretch of coast - I note the seasons under water, what’s abundant when and where. Sometimes the water is almost greasy, sometimes foggy, sometimes foaming with spume - tonight, it was as if someone had just cut their lawn after a long absence: strands of sea grass clogged the surface. I swam a little further out to avoid them, to where the rocks look more like they’re covered in ash and the water gets darker, colder, deeper and my kick stronger. I was rounding one of the peninsulas when I saw something large heading toward me. My autonomic nervous system choose fright. I stopped, breath held, statue-like. It was swimming higher than the stingrays I’d seen in this area. As it got closer I saw what it was: Caretta caretta - a Loggerhead Sea Turtle, tortuga in Spanish - with its griraffe-patterned head and flippers, its slow, undulating motion, as if brushing the water away from its sides. It is the first time in my life I have seen one underwater. It is not an area where I’ve ever known divers see them. They are a vulnerable species here, endangered and threatened elsewhere. Watching it made me think of the advice shared with David Lindo in The Urban Birder, which I have followed ever since I read it: to look at everything that moves, to look at it intently - even if it seems familiar to you and to not have preconceptions of what you will and won't see in the field - simply to go out expecting to see anything.

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