Once upon a time I looked up and a school of perhaps 100 spanish barracudas were all looking at me. Another time, a squid smaller than my thumb looked up to me and buried herself in the sand.
The first scuba setup I used was my father’s, bought in the USA and just arrived to Venezuela for him. I was about nine years old, but managed to wait for him to hit the shower at the end of the swimming lessons he and my mother were giving. They gone, I geared up in a hurry and jumped in the pool as if to swim out, head onward. The tank hit the back of my head and I got a bruise that hurt for weeks. I did manage to stay under for few minutes, until somebody rated me and my parents came and took me out of the water.
After not have dived for more than a decade, my wife wanted to learn, so I decided to go diving again. I borrowed a bottle, and attached to it the same regulator I used that first time. I submerged in a lake close to Utrecht, on my own, a sunny afternoon, this time without jumping. Looked around for some twenty minutes, got almost frozen under the thermocline, and wondered why it took me so long to be back.
A beginner diver that I helped start wanted to dive in the North Sea very much, but was very scared of waves. So we waited for a windy day, and went diving in a lake close to Amsterdam. The waves might have been half a meter high. We stayed at the surface, to get the hang of it, and intended to dive at a spot about 100 meters out. Half way he panicked, and before I could help calming him down, he fainted and stopped breathing. That was the one time that my education as paramedic and all the courses in first aid and rescue paid back. Gave him assisted breathing meanwhile towing him to shore. At land he was still not breathing on his own for all what I could see, but went back to life when I hooked him to oxygen.
When I started studying biology, our first field trip was to a rocky sea shore. As a last minute thought I brought my diving gear along, so when the class was eyeing a tidal lagoon I geared up and went out to sample some other algae at depth, or tried too. Afterwards I got to talk with A. about diving. Eventually we became a couple for about four years, by then my longest relation ever. Before our status was settled, we went camping together to the seaside. I wanted to show her how nice was to swim between soft corals, so we snorkeled together until we were on top of them, and I went down first to swim through their fans and wave to her. I had not seen that they were the kind that we call “fire corals”. Afterwards she told that she choked on water when laughing at my spasms, believing they were a silly show for her. At the beach she took pity on me. I suppose she got to like me because my stupidity aroused her caring instinct.
Ever since that dive in a lake in Utrecht back in 2010, I have logged 1025 dives, many of them in NL. Perhaps half of them have been in the lake Vinkeveen, at the same entry point. Not one of the dives have been comparable to the other. There is always one thing I did not expect. A fish that I have not spotted in years, a turf block with different plants growing, a new combination of light and waves in the place were we stop to decompress, pretty much the same spot always. And never the same.
In the North Sea I dived the HMS Hogue, a casualty of a german submarine. She sunk with her sisters HMS Aboukir and HMS Cressy back in 1914, when the British navy still did not know how to fight submarines effectively. Their loss is credited with having changed the way the British organized their convoys ever since. A few years later I dived the SMS Karlsruhe In Scapa Flow. In 1919 this, and many other ships were scuttled there, by their crew. When the war was over and the German High Seas Fleet was interned, they had their ships rather sunk than in the hands of the victors.
Once, swimming in the Argentinean sea, my mother was drowning. A guy came out and rescued her, and went away before anybody else noticed, or thanked him. A year later, in some other oceanic beach, the same thing happened. Until today my mother says that it was the same guy.
I have never seen a shark.