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the big awoosh
It had been a good holiday at my parent’s cottage. The weather was perfect, but I could feel autumn lurking around the corner, as surely as the leaves of the first-to-drop-their-gear trees whispered the coming of September.
The days spent with the kids puttering on the beach were brisk. And the nights, while we perched cocooned in our sleeping bags in the little mesh dome tent on the wooden dock overhanging the water, were cooler than July.
Still, we snuggled in and listened to the symphony of the ocean lapping and caressing the sandstone beach and the sounds of sea lions frolicking and fornicating in the velvety silent night. But, those roamy nights on the dock must have scrambled my brain a bit, and somehow I hatched a plan to arrange a dive as a surprise birthday gift for my buddy, David.
We’re talking cold water diving here. Pacific Northwest. The Abyss. The Emerald Sea. With me.
I was a reluctant cold water diver. We had logged over a hundred dives each, but, except for a few brief, numbing incursions into the cold water of British Columbia, most of them had been in the blissful blue embryonic waters of the tropics where it’s like diving in a virtual swimming pool. That, compared to the chowder I had experienced here during my few dives in cold water. And, except for one or two frigid forays into Porteau Cove diving park, the rest were all required as certification dives for our Open Water, and then later, Advanced Open Water courses. It was diving where the maximum visibility I had enjoyed had been about three feet
Diving here is cold. Mindnumbing cold. Chilled-to-the-core kind of cold. Cold hands, cold head, cold body, cold feet. The kind of cold where the only warmth to be found is by peeing in your wetsuit in the most frigid moments of a dive and by flushing hot water from a thermos down your suit after it. Not particularily gentille, but heck, as any diver will tell you, most gratifying.
Dave was alot keener about getting cold than me, and had been hinting he wanted to go for a dive during our holiday at the cottage. So, as a surprise, I contacted Peter, the local dive guy on our island, to set up the birthday dive for Dave and me. Peter is an abalone and salvage diver who we heard would take a diver or two out for a fee. We had looked him up once or twice, but we had never connected.
After many tries I finally got him on the horn. It’s a pretty sleepy sort of island, where voice mail is not yet mainstream. He’s the only game in town, and so we were at his whim: “Friday (Dave’s actual birthday)...no gut for me, ve vill dive Saturday mornink”. Oh, okay.
He asked where we wanted to dive. I asked him what he thought was the best site. His ponderous rambling reply, offered in basic baltic english, was "that vood be da Pass...but you gotta do it right, right at slack, or you're gonna be in trouble". I thought about it for about five nanoseconds and then asked if it would be possible to hire a local dive guide to go down with us, this cold water diving thing still being pretty new to us and all. He thought that I was nuts, mumbling...”costs sixty dollar jus’ to get a guy to come out and do dat”. I mean, I may be brave, but I’m not stupid. Except to my kids. And then, only sometimes, I hope.
The weird thing is he never really asked about our level of certification, or type of dives, or number of dives we’d done. I guess divers can just tell that about one another from a conversation.
The Pass is right around the corner from my mom and dad’s little cottage. It is a significant narrowing between two large islands, through which a huge volume of Pacific Ocean passes every time the tide changes.
From the gnarled sandstone point that leans out over the rushing, swirling, charging waters of The Pass, where I have ventured countless times since the early 1970’s when my parents bought their little slice of heaven in the gulf islands of British Columbia, it looks more like turbulent river than ocean.
I have perched there for hours, contemplating and daydreaming and soaking up the raw beauty of this place. The power of the flow of water can be so strong that I have watched many large sailboats under full throttle do the I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can heave-ho against a force much greater than their own. I’ve watched as one takes the fatal, knockdown punch. How her bow dips left or right. How the boat is pulled broadside on her keel by the onslaught of the tidal ripped and eddied water. How she gets hefted and heeled over by the tide, her mast almost horizontal to the water and her bottom bared for all to see. How all that is left is to beat an embarrassed, hasty, awoosh of a retreat, fueled by the eight knot plus swift-kick-in-the-ass current, into safe harbor to await the next slack. Even big beefy muscular motor boats have a hard time beating the tide. This is where we were going diving.
When I looked it up in a local dive book, it is a site rated as ‘Advanced’, made difficult because of a combination of current and steep wall. But, wherever there is current here in The Emerald Sea, there is life, fed by the nutrient rich waters that flow and nourish with each change in tide. Or so I had heard. And if I wanted to see it, I was going to have to get wet.
We met Peter at his little dive shack in The Bay on the day after Dave’s birthday where we arrived early to pick up our gear. It took us over an hour to weed through the stone age inventory of his diving museum to find some gear that would fit and still worked. We still hadn’t committed to buying our own, and had always rented when we travelled.
It was a sunny morning, but still early enough in the day for us to want to pull on the bottom half of our borrowed 7 mm johns. We laid on our bellies like beached seals on the slivery worn wooden dock beside his aluminum skiff and soaked up sun while we scrutinized the silty bottom of the canada dry bottle green sea of the marina through the peepholes formed by the gaps between the boards. We tried to figure out how deep the bottom was. We tried to assess the visibility. We tried to get psyched. And we were awaiting the late arrival of Chris, the sixty dollar per dive guide, and watching the time to slack slip closer.
When we were all finally aboard, Peter gunned the outboard Merc and we roared out the south arm of The Bay. When we cleared the narrow channel, he pointed his snubby boat southwest, past my parents’ cottage, past the park and towards The Pass.
The scenery of this place, even after thirty-odd years of experiencing it, never ceases to wow this city girl. It is sandstone and giant cedars and firs. And huge pendulous arbutus trees that hang their knobby and gnarled, scaly and smooth, gold and green appendages out over the beach. These beauties soar off the shore, their sculptured branches, crowned with both new glossy green and matted old ochre leaves that fall from the trees on no apparent schedule, mirrored by the glassy waters of a high tide. The gritty grey sandstone beaches, washed and worn by time into funky formations, divide the land from the sea -- their short-leaved seaweed beards revealed only in the deshabille of low tide. There are reefs and little sandstone islets and sea and sun and seals and eagles and deer. It’s dog heaven for our big, brawny waterboy. Swimming. Beach walks. Deerchases. It is a retreat. It’s a place where a family can be a family for a while, without alot of ‘conveniences’ and ‘diversions’. And it is a haven for a harried harridan housewife.
The boat skidded past the reef that marks the beginning of The Pass and down into the turbulent waters, sometimes shimmying sideways in the eddies and whirlpools created by the bulk of an ocean funneling through the narrow opening. Peter maneuvered the boat into a little bay that borders The Pass, close to the sandstone ledge that defines the shore, while Chris, Dave and I geared up. The sound of water rushing past the hull of the little aluminum fishing boat, even in a semi-sheltered bay, which Peter was struggling to hold static against the pull of the current, was disconcerting. And Peter was issuing orders in his heavy germanic patois, which did nothing to calm my butterflies.
With no warning he moved the boat out into a back eddy at the entrance to the passage, right next to the spot where I have perched so many times -- a place where I have contemplated many things, even my own death.
I guess Peter had decided time was up. He fought to hold the aluminum boat in place while we lumbered up on to the side of his slippery boat for a two foot high backroll off a skimpy two inch aluminum rim and into the swirling, dark water. We hadn't been diving since May, and it always takes a couple of minutes to get my head around the impending dive and equipment check. And then, when I get in, I like to linger at the surface, maybe put my mask in the water for a minute or two and get my bearings. But, before I knew it, before I was really ready, I was told by Herr Hitler to hit the water and drop straight to the bottom. No inflating your bc on the surface here -- the currents would whisk you away like a cork in the rapids. And he had told us to overweight ourselves. If you're underweighted, he said, you will miss the entire dive site just by doing a slow descent, and might be ‘visked avay’. That was all he prepared us for. The briefing was, well, brief.
I backrolled in and started my hyper-descent. I had thirty pounds of weight around my waist. Thats a lot of lead, even when wearing a full body jacket and john. I would normally wear twenty-four. I thanked the dive gods that I had taken a Sudafed as I cleared my ears continuously during my freefall. I sank like a proverbial stone and bottomed out on a rocky ledge at about sixty feet, where I finally got a moment to look around through a leaky mask which was filling almost as fast as I could empty it. Somehow, in the rush, I had mistaken it for mine. It was actually Dave’s, the same style as mine, but looser, so I spent the whole dive clearing the thing. I was too afraid to take it off entirely to fix the problem for fear that the current would grab it and it would be gone. Besides, I was wearing big, clumsy, neoprene gloves, so there wasn’t much opportunity for fine adjustments.
When I finally got things under control, I looked up and around. Wow. Gorgeous. I had landed on a pile of sandstone boulders that cascaded from the surface, littering a steep embankment that tumbled towards an invisible bottom. When I looked up, I could see the water moving, rocking and rolling and boiling above me. The watery ball of a smoky emerald sun. Little schools of minnows and shiners whisked along by the rushing water.
The current was big. I thought maybe too big. We cemented ourselves to the bottom, thanks to the extra weight, and watched as our dive guide demonstrated how to use the rocks as mooring points, how to go with the flow, how to let the current take you. And how to grapple on to the wall that dropped below of us, out of sight, when you want to stop. Even when we were grabbed on, squatting on the rocks like big, black, neoprene crabs, the tug of the current threatened to pull us off and away. But, once I got the buoyancy thing under control by easing air into my bc with my inflator, I started to really see. Viz was surprisingly good, from 30 to 40 feet. And, because there is so much current, and therefore nutrients moving through the site, everything was incredibly abundant. And, due to the refractive nature of water, larger than life.
And then it was like someone hit a switch, and the water stopped moving. Slack tide. It was an invitation to let go of the adrenaline of the dive and start getting into it. I did. And so did the fish. They emerged from their safe havens and scooted and darted and frantically fed while the going was good. Spending less time managing the current and the leaky mask gave me more time for oggling the scenery. I felt comfortable wandering 12 or 15 feet from Dave or Chris, the dive guide, and just being me on my own for a bit. It was an out-of-time interlude in the rich, green, smoky waters lit by a distant summer sun that made me realize how much I had been missing in my debut cold water dives.
Every possible surface was covered with some form of sea life...amenomes, urchins, gigantic barnacles, sea plants, kelp, snails, you name it. The barnacles were so big that their shells were the size of my fist, and when I stopped long enough to watch them feed, I saw the long, sinuous tendrils that emerged from their half-opened hatches sweep the water for flying-by-snacks. The spiny urchins were huge, and when I shone my light on them, I saw caribbean colours: purple and pink and magenta. A kaleidoscope. The enormous multi-legged sunfish were a flourescent orange. Sea stars were grape. The snappers bright red. There were nudibranchs -- little sea slugs of impossible coloration and design. And everything dun-coloured in the cloudy winter’s day light of sixty feet of plankton-rich water came to life with the ray from a torch. I played a guessing game, and tried to imagine what colour this little fish or that little crab might be, and then shine my light to see how wrong I was, how they were even more incredible that I could have dreamed of.
There were big fish, too: ling cods, the largest of which would feed a small village, and rock fish and greenlings and sculpins that hid in the little ledges and crevices and gullies between the big boulders, out of the current. Funny looking guys, with big bulbous eyes and spiky spines and aztec markings, some sporting big, rubbery, pouty lips.
Chris ended my reverie as he touched my arm and signalled that it was time to go back. It was pretty peaceful for the first few minutes of our reciprocal heading as we continued poking and penetrating the crevices between the big, life-encrusted boulders. But then, almost imperceptibly at first, we could feel it starting up again. Fronds of sea weed and other underwater telltales changed their direction with the aboutface of the current.
As the ocean's engine cranked itself up to running at full, we picked our way along the wall, leap-frogging from boulder to boulder as the tidal tailwind propelled us back up to the entrance of The Pass. By the time we were making our ascent ten minutes later, we were scaling up boulders using the big, beefy barnacles as handholds for our climb to the light, buffeted by a liquid gale. Once near the surface, we grasped the small, compact kelp bulbs that were anchored gingerly in the crevices below and that somehow survive being yanked to and then fro by the rip-roaring tide four times a day. We were being dragged horizontally in the water by the cranked-up current, the big awoosh only a precarious handful of kelp away. And I was literally having to hold my mask onto my face to stop it from being blown off.
When we broke the surface, Chris signalled for the boat. Peter nosed it in closer, downstream in The Pass. We pumped up our bc's a bit and then, one by one, we let go of the life line of the kelp bulbs that was tethering us to the shore and we were carried by the swift current away from the safety of the rocks, only to be smacked into the squared off bow of his skiff, where there were two meager little ropes slung along either side to grasp. Once all three of us had made it to the boat, Peter killed the engine and we river rafted in the rushing silence down The Pass, as each of us in turn climbed the little aluminum tv antenna of a ladder and into the safety of the boat, while the others hung on for the wild, spinning ride and awaited their turn. As we headed back to the marina, little was said. The whine of the Merc precluded a conversation, and so instead I soaked up the sun and the scenery of the ride home and savoured the sensations still echoing in my body.
It was months later when I came to realize how altering this experience had been. I was no longer afraid of cold water diving. The confidence gained from not only surviving, but actually enjoying a dive as exhilarating as this would be a stepping stone to many future adventures, warm and cold, above or below.
We bucked up for the dry suits and the computers and the bcs and the regs soon after this dive. Because I knew I would be going back to The Pass again. I want to inhale the life there. I like the big awoosh.
And at the end of my day, I would like my ashes to be scattered into those rushing waters from the place where I have clambered and dreamed since I was a child, never suspecting that the poetry of the world underneath the surface could match the breathtaking beauty of the world above it.
© Judy G 1999