Dive Buddy Adultery
I think I’m enjoying diving with other men a little too much.
Don’t get me wrong; I love diving with Jeff. We communicate well, I get to feel useful if I can help him get a great picture, and there’s nothing snugglier than a dive boat bunk after three freezing cold dives.
But I’ve done three or four shore dives with my dive club when Jeff’s been out of town, and I have to say that there are some serious advantages.
First, no camera. This may seem like more of a downside since it means I don’t get any beautiful pictures to remind me of the dive. But you don’t get a lot of beautiful pictures out of shore dives anyway. And if my buddy doesn’t have a big, fancy camera, he makes fewer stops (read: I stay warmer from moving) and has an extra hand free to help me get through the surf, about which I am a huge sissy.
Second, guilt-free bailing on dives. Although I always wind up doing just great on shore dives, I have a hard-wired, gut-wrenching fear of surf stemming from my first certification dive attempt, and I spend most of the drive to the dive site stressing out about what the conditions will be like. When I’m with Jeff, I have the additional stress of worrying that my deciding to bail at the last minute might ruin his day – he has, in the past, gotten just a wee bit grumpy about cancelled dives, especially after driving all the way to a dive site. (To his credit, he’s gotten better about this – the last time we had to cancel a dive, he didn’t mope at all.) When I’m with a big group of random Sole Searchers members, I worry a lot less about what my surf-sissy attitude will do to any potential dive buddies, and only have to worry about myself.
Kaz and gang seem relatively amused by my sissy attitude, since I then march right in everytime and do just fine. But unlike Jeff, they haven’t had to listen to me stress out about it verbally for the entire week leading up to the dive.
Last night, Lars, Kaz, Jimmy and I all drove down to Laguna together in Lars’s monstrous 4Runner. This thing holds four people and all of their dive gear comfortably – at least for a shore dive, when you don’t have to pack for several days on a boat. We met up with three other guys around 6:30pm as it was getting dark, and the mostly-flat ocean put my internal surf-sissy to rest.
I triple’d up with Kaz and Jimmy, but all seven of us pretty much stayed together throughout most of the dive – a pretty amazing feat for a night dive, and a beach dive at that! The visibility was decent, probably better than most daytime dives I’ve done at Shaw’s Cove. We scared up an octopus, an enormous (and totally unafraid) lobster, lots of scorpionfish, and half a dozen small stingrays in the sand, plus a larger thornback ray and one bat ray that cruised right over Kaz’s head.
As night dives go, it hardly compares to diving in, say, Kona. But it’s still always pretty darned cool. There’s something incredibly peaceful and surreal about wading into the ocean at night, identifying your dive buddies by the types of lights they use, watching the bio-luminescence in the water stirred up by your fins.
(The part where you’re wading in is made a bit additionally surreal for me thanks to the fact that I have poor vision, so everything’s a bit blurry until I descend and my HydroOptix mask kicks in.)
At one point about three-quarters of the way through the dive, I was getting extremely cold and uncomfortable, and starting to wish we’d be done already. I started to stress about keeping an eye on Kaz and Jimmy, about not running low on air (those two are both air conserving machines), about whether the surf might have picked up between our entry and exit. And I realized how ridiculous it was to be down there stressing over essentially nothing, instead of appreciating the experience completely. Such a small fraction of the planet’s population ever gets to explore underwater like we do; an even smaller fraction gets to see it at night, or bothers with southern California diving. It’s such an incredible privilege to be down there, shining my light on the anemones that are opened up to feed at night, getting my face inches from a nearly-translucent stingray, seeing fish trying to sleep in their crevices.
Of course, it also helped relax me when we rose back above the thermocline and I wasn’t freezing anymore.
Post-dive, I started to miss having my usual dive buddy around. We all went to have dinner at Ruby’s, and it kind of felt like cheating. Here I was, having a great evening of diving, followed by cheeseburgers and milkshakes, while Jeff was probably at some sort of work-related function. (Or possibly eating at a delicious Italian restaurant and getting drunk at a fancy New York club. But hey, that’s still less fun than diving.)
When I made it home at 11pm, I really missed Jeff as I began to rinse out the dive gear. Of course, there’s only half as much to rinse, but it just feels like more work when only one of us is doing it.
Well, maybe Jeff can tag along on the next Sole Searcher’s beach dive.
The rest of Lars’s pics, if Jeff would like to see what he missed, are here: Shaw’s Cove 10/22/05.