I'm in the Florida Keys! The plan is to spend most of my time below the water, in as many different towns as I can muster. I got off to a bit of a whirlwind start that i'm only just now beginning to recover from.
Day 01 - Alarm goes at 3:30 am as I awake from two hours' sleep. I can never sleep before I go away but this one was particularly lacking...fortunately most of what I needed was packed and ready to go, so I threw my book and toothbrush in my bag and was off to the races.
Airport at 4:30am was a lot more crowded than I was prepared for. A few years ago I flew to Honduras in the early AM, and when I arrived 3 hours before my flight, it was a dead zone. Not even Tim Hortons in the airport was open. Disaster. I figured this time i'd learn from my mistake and budget 2 hours for early international travel instead of 3. I wound up cutting it pretty close though :S
After a cheery security guard ushered us through with a word and a joke, I powered down a sandwich and a yogurt and got on board the aircraft. I was lucky enough to fall asleep immediately. One of those great sleeps where the whole trip goes by in a blink. I love that! Suddenly, we were descending! Allright.
I tweaked my neck sleeping awkwardly on the plane...not a great start. Tack that on to being so tired and I didn't have a winning combination, but I had a dive scheduled for 1, so I figured i'd better mush on.
Picked up the rental car, fired up the GPS and I was out of Miami and into the Keys. I started getting nervous...thick clouds were rolling in and the sound of thunder was booming louder and louder. Before you could say "I think it's gonna rain" it was coming down cats and dogs on the overseas highway.
Florida rainstorms are a thing of their own...it can go from bright and sunny to thick pellets of hard rain so dense you can't see the car in front of you in a matter of seconds. They strike fast and hard, but usually they soak themselves out pretty quickly, so you're never in it for too too long. Definitely felt like it though, now that it was afternoon and the travel fatigue was really sinking in. As soon as I rolled into Key Largo though, I perked right up. Dive flags flying outside every establishment...every other place was named "Sharky's"...this is what I'd come for.
I was in for a bit of a bad surprise though, when I learned that the place I'd thought I was booked at for diving, not only didn't have my name in the computer, but was completely full today and tomorrow. I was let down...I'd been so meticulous about following up! I don't know how I managed to miss the place I was diving the first day. The were going to take me on one of the highlights of the trip too, the Spiegel Grove, a 500 foot ship in about a hundred and thirty feet of water. I was crestfallen...but not deterred.
A quick pull into the nearest McDonalds parking lot to scoop the free wifi and I found another dive centre more than willing to take me out to the Spiegel Grove the next morning...AND they could take me on a night dive that night! I'd quite literally missed the boat on the afternoon dives, but so much the better as now, I could take a much-needed afternoon nap.
Checked into my hotel a little further down the road, modest and a little dark but I was too tired to care about anything other than the bed it offered me. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
Woke up in the evening, which is always a weird sensation. Not entirely sure where I was, took a moment to get my bearings and get back on track. Night dive! Tonight! Time to go!
The biggest thing for me on these dives is to test out the housing I got for my camera. I'm really excited to be able to shoot with something more than a GoPro underwater! But I don't have strobes, or lights, or anything like that...it was just too much money, and I do most of my diving in daylight anyway. So I figured, okay, it's my first dive in about a year, it'll be my first dive with the camera, and I won't be able to see anything with it anyway. Might as well leave it for the morning.
How silly of me.
In truth, i'm glad I left it behind. It was good to get a feel for being underwater again, good to not have to balance a flashlight and the camera, and I wound up taking a bit too much weight on my belt, so I was working just to stay off the bottom. It was for the best. But MY GOD!!! The THINGS I SAW!!!
I've done one or two night dives before, but this one surely takes the cake. They don't send the divemaster into the water with you here in Florida, you just buddy up and hop in. The give you an idea of what you want to see, and where to go, and then they drop a big strobe light on a line from the bottom of the boat so you can find your way back in the dark. My buddy was a guy named Tom, also diving alone, and he was even so kind as to give me his flashlight halfway through the dive (the one the dive shop gave me was weak as a baby bird). But we hopped in the water just as the sun went down, and all the nightlife came out.
Big spiny lobsters a foot or two long came poking out from under ledges, needling their feelers around in the dark. Their eyes shined like a cat's in a photo taken with the flash on. We saw a huge crab scuttling over the coral, blending in perfectly to the rocky bottom whenever he stopped moving, big pincers snipping and snapping. We passed a few big overhangs where we'd hoped to see turtles, but didn't have any luck. Everything changed when we started back toward the boat.
Tom and I knew there was something up when we saw five or six flashlight beams in the distance all sighted on the same thing. We hustled over to see what had grabbed everyone's attention. It was starting to look like a helicopter landing pad or something.
We pulled up alongside the others, next to one of the big overhangs of coral we'd swam past...and sitting there on the bottom was a huge, 7 foot shark.
I'd only ever seen a shark once while diving, and only a small one at a great distance. This thing was only about 6-7 feet away, and it was massive. Its eyes were glowing in the flashlight beam, and its gills flexed in the mild current, breathing hard. We all thought it was a nurse shark, because that's what nurse sharks do...sit on the bottom and filter-feed. But as I learned on the boat, it was a reef shark, more specifically I believe it was a Dusky Shark, judging by its tail. I remember asking "But wasn't it a Nurse Shark?" and hearing "Nope. That was a real shark. If you'd gotten any closer you would've seen a mouthful of teeth."
It sat nearby, benign, ignoring the swath of LED light playing over it from all of our beams. It seemed content to catch its breath until it was time to move on. When we passed the overhang a second time later in the dive, it was gone. I tried not to think of that 7 foot predator as we finished the dive...somewhere beyond the reach of my flashlight beam, out there in the dark. It's hard...even knowing you're not on the menu...it's hard to shake that feeling...that apprehension. A little chilling.
We surfaced at the end of the dive without incident, a few folks got brushed by jellies and were lightly stung, but these jellyfish just give you a little pins and needles, and maybe a wee bit of redness. It's milder than a bee sting. Every star in the western hemisphere came out to see us back to the boat. Seeing the night sky from the water is something special...it make you think of people on ships crossing the atlantic, people hundreds of years ago navigating by the stars at night. Seeing stars out in the country is one thing, but on a boat, with no ambient light to pollute your view...it's really something. You can see how space must really go on forever. A few of us chatted about what we'd seen, but the conversation kept faltering as we all gazed skyward, into the infinite stars.
It was a fine finish to a great start - back in the water, comfortable, and ready to get serious tomorrow. I made friends with two folks from North Carolina and we ate at the bar by the dive shop before heading home to bed. I tucked myself in, set an alarm, and got ready to dive my heart out in the morning.
-Jeff
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