Category Archives: Diving

Day 60: 8/24/13: Channeling Richard Dreyfuss

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It’s no wonder I dreamed of Richard Dreyfuss the night before my first dive lesson. The weirder details of the dream escape me, but I remember Richard Dreyfuss saying how tired he was of people yelling out lines from “Jaws” when they saw him on the street. This prompted me to say something helpful like, “Maybe if they said more obscure bits of dialogue it wouldn’t be so bad.” I then recited  a few fragments from the autopsy scene like “partially denuded bone remaining” or something like that, but this didn’t seem to improve his mood.

Today I channeled Hooper/Richard when we learned how to handle our air tanks. “If you screw around with these things they’re gonna blow up!” etc. When I spit in my mask, I remembered Hooper descending in the shark cage, with a nervous dry mouth, “I got no spit!”  Trying to adjust to the weight of the tanks and controlling my buoyancy, meant that  I tumbled ass over tea kettle (as they say in New England) in the deep end trying to achieve that elusive floating sensation.  Breathing underwater sometimes felt natural, and other times, as when I tried to clear my mask and ended up with water up my nose, I had to surface and gather my wits.

Above the pool, framed by an old rusted brass porthole hung a picture of a great white’s gaping jaws.

I don’t know why, but the image comforted me.

Day 59 8/23/13: Into the Murk

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Thought I might get some snorkeling practice today before my first dive lesson tomorrow. As  tranquil and sun-filled as La Jolla had been, Leo Carillo was murky and treacherous. Endless, rolling, silty green. The kelp still looked gorgeous, but those waving sea grasses, so mesmerizing a month or so ago, now seemed menacing, filled with potential predators.  I felt utterly insignificant in the vastness. My friend Renee and I had to scramble out on the rocks where waves smashed us into other rocks and each other. When we finally found a high crag covered with bivalves and star fish,  I sat there, chest heaving, staring at the crabs in their obscure passages, spitting out salt and thinking maybe I needed a swimming lesson since I took my last one in 1974.

Equally obscure, murky and dangerous were OCEARCH’s replies to critics during a live Facebook chat.  When I asked them what “450 million mystery” could be solved by killing sharks, (which they do in the name of research), they conveniently avoided addressing the killing and focused on the mystery: “We want to find out where they go! How they breed!” When other activists asked them to justify their method of tagging which severely limits shark mobility and leads to infected, ragged fins, they replied that sharks brutalize each other all the time.  When the questions became too rational or scientific, they simply blocked the activists and real researchers and answered questions from 8-year-old kids and sports fishermen.

No matter. Every movement starts small. I do believe OCEARCH will be exposed. How long can people be fooled by shark researchers wearing backwards baseball caps and flashing those heavy metal devil fingers? Ugh. I don’t want to contemplate the answer to that question.

Day 56: 8/20/13: Art House Sharks

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Spent the first half of the day dutifully studying dive manual and watching short YouTube films about positive buoyancy, proper fin selection, and how to clear a  flooded mask. In the afternoon I attended two movies: Museum Hours at the Royal and Cutie and the Boxer at the Nuart with my dear friend Helen. Both were great–Cutie and the Boxer is a documentary about two married artists—Ushio and Noriko Shinohara–and depicts the art life with all its perils, poverty and messy devotion. At one point, Ushio and Noriko are eating supper in their chaotic loft, talking about “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and 80-year-old Ushio, an action-pop artist who paints with boxing gloves,  notes that  “Jaws” was Spielberg’s best film. While Noriko chastises her husband for his reactionary early work=best work credo, I had to agree with Ushio that Spielberg never topped “Jaws.”

Museum Hours is a meditation. It’s a movie about loneliness, life, death and relatable to anyone who has wandered around a strange city with very little money and become privy to all the ordinary alien miracles of empty urban spaces, the detritus of street markets, the odd beauty of trains at certain hours and the sanctuary of museums that both reflect and heighten the ordinary world. I loved seeing paintings fill an entire movie screen–scenes from Brueghel, beheaded Medusas,  ancient statues with sheared off noses.

I started imagining a new kind of shark movie–not a documentary or a silly exploitation film, but an art movie with winter light, museums and coffee.  Maybe a story about two dedicated shark researchers who lived together like artists, each with their own particular obsession–one devoted to lantern sharks and the other only caring about charismatic “man eaters” and their love threatens to illuminate or devour them at different points in the film. But in my art house picture, the sharks wouldn’t exist as  convenient metaphors for human frailty, beauty or power.  They would exist as subjects in their own right, filling the screen, so we might contemplate their mystery and gravity, as we gaze upon the statues of Gods with missing heads or wings.

Day 55 8/19/13: 10 Things I Did Instead of Studying My Dive Manual

by in Activism, Diving, Environment, God, Humor, Marine Conservation, Meditation, Shark Attack, Shark Conservation, Writing | Leave a comment
Shark!

Shark! (Photo credit: guitarfish)

1. Read about the swift but gruesome death of abalone diver Randy Frye in the waters of Northern California.

2. Watched a mini-documentary on technical diver David Shaw who died trying to retrieve the remains of another diver from the depths of a dangerous cave.

3. Meditated for 20 blissful minutes that were occasionally invaded by thoughts of decompression chambers.

4. Felt less alone after reading several articles criticizing OCEARCH’s machismo and brutality.

5. Marveled at Denise Levertov’s briskly paced poem The Sharks. 

6. Tried to do the dishes mindfully, but spaced out and started worrying about August almost being over, a reverie broken occasionally by hummingbirds.

7. Ate fruit

8. Thought again about Thom Knoles–of the failure of the stressed out intellect and how the expansive silence of meditation feels so nurturing, so full of presence.

9. Wondered for the trillionth time about the basic goodness or evil of mankind.

10. Marveled at the ability of writing to redeem boredom and to reveal the miraculous within the ordinary.

Day 53: 8/17/13: Ruminations on the Dive Manual

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The good news is Sharksavers has responded to initial inquiries from concerned activists confirming that they don’t have any plans to collaborate with OCEARCH. I have my letters at the ready just in case.

When I am paranoid about learning something, I tend to over study. I am reading my diving manual like some gripping but arcane novel, whose premise pulls me in but whose language is at times elusive and complex forcing me to backtrack. I tend to remember the morbid facts: that a tight-fitting dive hood can cause a person to faint, or the symptoms that indicate that my lungs have expanded beyond their human capacity.

My lessons start a week from today and my mind is a tumult of childish anxieties: Will I ever look as ecstatic as the toothy, neon-suited dive friends high-fiving each other on the cover of the book? What if my “buddy” hates me?

As I said in a previous post, what I like about diving is the emphasis on breathing–which is what I like about meditation. An activity that keeps me in the moment.  Many people have assured me that the initial anxiety of diving in the ocean for the first time is soon eclipsed by the beauty of the water, the kelp forests.

It’s extraordinary that I am even considering doing this. Kayaking in New Zealand several years ago freaked me out so much that my legs shook and banged inside their plastic prison and I could barely navigate the little lagoon. Everyone laughed at my shark paranoia, but the next morning the cover of the newspaper featured a picture of a giant fin following  a man in a kayak. The picture had been snapped just up the coast from where our group had leisurely paddled.

I loved the ocean as a kid back in the 70s, even in the shadow of “Jaws,” but my paranoia grew as my shark dreams increased. Yet now I see those dreams in a different light–as assertions of kinship, not foreshadowings of my grisly demise.

(BTW: That last sentence would make a bittersweet and ironic addition to my obituary or any news article following my untimely death by shark attack).

Day 23: 7/18/2013: Dreaming of Sharks in the Desert

by in Diving, Horses and tagged , , | 1 Comment

Today I went for a trail ride/riding lesson out near Sunland. My awesome teacher Keri and I rode in this interesting desert oasis where the sounds of the freeway grew distant. As we crossed small brooks and negotiated narrow pathways between cacti, Keri told me about her experience deep sea diving. Sharks and horses are my favorite animals, and I felt the particular geeky thrill that happens when obsessions collide—riding a horse through the desert and talking of the ocean.

My biggest nerd-fusion fantasy is to ride horses in the sea–a desire born during repeated adolescent matinees of Coppola’s “The Black Stallion.” Keri mentioned that some horses become mesmerized by the motion of the water and a bit startled by the white caps. Understandable. We ask horses to do a lot. They have a right to be daunted by the vast might of the ocean. Keri and I talked of the natural awe and respect one should have for sharks, for the power of the ocean and for the strength, mass and decidedly independent nature of horses.

Action: Yesterday I posted about helping the great white gain protected status via a three-prong approach of phone calls, e-mails and letters. I confess in the tumult of the day, I only conquered “one prong,” so today I am calling and writing the folks at California Fish and Wildlife Department to tell them to give California’s great whites endangered status.

Day 18: 7/13/2013: A Perfect Day for Leopard Sharks

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My first thought when I saw the sea floor off La Jolla is how much it resembled the rocks, sand and waving grasses in the opening of “Jaws.” I half expected to see title credits materializing in the water. But I didn’t feel afraid. I loved the otherworldly silence, the muted sense of the undersea world, the endlessly waving kelp and eelgrass, that newfound awareness of my own breathing.

I’d come to La Jolla to see the annual gathering of leopard sharks.  Altogether I encountered about 20 of them–lovely, shy and graceful creatures. At one point I feel like I interrupted some sort of shark conference—about six leopard sharks hovered together in the water, but when I came almost close enough to touch them,  they suddenly split apart disappearing into the silt.

Sometimes it’s nice to be new at something—to have that Zen beginner’s mind “full of possibilities.” What to a seasoned diver would be a roster of common fish, to me were utterly exotic creatures. I saw at least a dozen Guitar fish, a couple Bat rays, Rockfish, Garibaldi, Sheephead, Perch and Sand bass.

I loved the canyons and the rocks, getting swept up in the magnetic push of the tides, sometimes bumping into my patient friend Renee who gladly volunteered to drive to San Diego and even loaned me some extra fins and a diving hood.

At certain particularly silent moments, the name Robert Pamperin would pop into my head, but thoughts of doom were as fleeting as the nameless silver fish darting at the surface.  I admit “action-wise” that I only came back from this trip with 5 new signatures, but I also returned with a kind of slack-jawed-born again-awe for the ocean and its creatures. I can’t wait to go back.

Day 16: 7/11/2013: Fear

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Today I started refining the central idea of this shark project.

I also studied my diving manual.

As I memorized facts about water pressure, I realized that my fear of encountering sharks in the water had been eclipsed by a terror of my lungs collapsing like a pair of dispirited accordions as fountains of shiny blood burst from my ears.

Then I realized the whole book I am writing is about fear. Beyond the fear of sharks, beyond drowning, beyond fear of my lack of athleticism or lung capacity, is the fear I feel that this book won’t sell or that while I am still grieving my father’s death, my mother, who is in frail health, will die and leave me incapacitated with grief, unable to continue.

When descending into the depths, the diver learns techniques to “equalize” the pressure of the sea, to survive in an alien place. It’s a powerful metaphor for our own daily descents, our singular journeys into the unknown. I thought of these lines from  Adrienne Rich’s famous poem “Diving into the Wreck”:

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

Diver on the wreck of the Hilma Hooker, Bonaire.

Diver on the wreck of the Hilma Hooker, Bonaire. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Day 13: 7/8/2013: Diving Lessons

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English: A great white shark approaches divers...

English: A great white shark approaches divers in a cage off Dyer Island, Western Cape, South Africa. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I told Greg at Aqua Adventures that I wanted to learn to dive because of sharks, he popped in a film he’d made on one of his annual great white excursions to Guadalupe Island.

Great whites with names like Lucy and Cal Rip Fin (whose dorsal had been nearly shredded—probably from a boat propeller) darted, swerved and snatched bait. One shark leapt over the cage and actually landed on top of it. A thrilling and rare accident, I assured myself, as was the story of the great white that caught his snout in the opening between the cage bars and thrashed around so much that the front panel of the cage collapsed.

Greg and I talked for two hours mostly about sharks and shark conservation. He told me Cal Rip Fin, once a reliable figure at Guadalupe, hadn’t been seen since 2011. He also told me some crazy shark breaching stories, and all the many beautiful and dangerous places he’d gone diving. People that lead such adventurous lives always floor me. I feel privileged to hear their stories.

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