29th. December 2013 – 13:30: The agony of failure.

There are some who go through their training with the effortlessness of gods. I think we call these rare specimens of humanity: “naturals”. Others, no less rare, read a book, sometimes only once and it all makes sense so they don’t have to even try. I think we call them nerds. For the more common omega types like me, learning is just hard work.

The physics of buoyancy is common knowledge. The instructors have patiently explained and demonstrated it so many times and it looks so easy when they do. Yet, it all falls apart when it’s your turn to demonstrate that you have acquired the skill. You start to blame everything from the weights locked onto your weight-belt, to the capacity of your lungs to your BCD.

When you breathe in you rise too high and when you breathe out you find yourself flat on your face at the bottom of the sea before you recall that you have to breathe in again. You try to remember your confined water training but only this time there is the current to contend with, which rolls you around, carelessly tossing you like a sponge.  You notice your instructor with envy: calm before you, neither rising nor falling, as though sitting in an armchair, watching you as though you were in a fish-tank struggling to control that elusive neutral buoyancy. Times up, time to surface; even STELLA has abandoned you.

At the heart of all agony that has to be endured, the de-brief exposed a painful but essential truth that needed to be acknowledged especially when the critique came from a person in a far more objective position to assess that the final practical assessments were not going to happen at Tulamben that day and that we would have to burn our L plate engines for a little longer than planned.

Thus decided, the consensus was that we just enjoy ourselves on the second and last dive for the day. It was at that point I understood how good our instructor was. This was not the first time that he had noticed that we were just not getting it. On previous occasions I had noticed that he would take us on a little tour to appreciate why it was that we took up diving in the first place. We would then return to the task with a fresher approach and pass the assessment with flying colours. It was a mark of a true teacher.

This being such an occasion, we followed our instructor in a slow arc down towards the stern of the USAT Liberty.

On the way we chanced upon a Surgeonfish (Acanthuridae):

the perennial Clownfish (Anemonefish):

and of course, what dive would be complete without a school of Blue Chromis (Chromis cyanea):

Soon, the rudder of the wreck loomed ahead of us, like a large, flat reverse D shaped sculpture, fresh out of Picasso’s studio, sticking out of the stern of the now quiet ship. As we went past the rudder, the bottom of the sea disappeared beneath us, giving way to a darker blue that faded into nothingness. Commander Longbottom would have been proud of where we stood. My depth gauge said 18.5 meters. For a nanosecond it dawned on me that I had subconsciously attained neutral buoyancy. The feeling was quite euphoric because weightlessness feels as though all there is to you as a person was a sort of mindlessness because the subconscious has subordinated the mundane tasks necessary to sustain your physical self. Breathing under water was no less natural than breathing on land. It was too late to savour the moment as it was time to return to the surface. Without knowing it we had passed another assessment of going down to the maximum allowable depth for the course. Therein lies the true value of a great instructor; running the practical components of a course without you even knowing that that was what you were in fact doing.