30th. December 2013 – 17:30: Rookie finds his sea-legs

The sun was setting, its golden light cradled the surface of the pool where it all started so tenuously three days ago. Only now, it trickled peacefully onto the faces of those that remained leisurely paddling their feet in their reflection.

More paperwork, a photograph and that was all there was to it; time to savour the moment and understand that you are now a member of that rare species; discontent to walk among the ranks on terra firma, we had returned to the sea as our ancestors did, to live, if for a brief moment, amongst creatures of the depths.

A cliché perhaps, but you hope that you will be fortunate enough to bask in the magnificence of the last remaining wilderness within the limits of what the technology will permit. You want to stay longer, go deeper, hone your skills to perfection and push farther into where few have dared, but you here that whisper over your shoulder from the past:

At Delphi it roars

“Know thyself” and “thy limit”

But I speak fish now

30th. December 2013 – 16:30: Ode to Question 42.

The ocean as your syllabus, three days of battle was to be settled by the pen as it now rolled like thunder across the pages of the final exam, vague, random, wet and devastating, enumerating your shipwrecked and sequestrated misfortune with every answer that emanated from a scattered and troubled brain, dripping with a fear that never dies, even with experience. Last night's cram was now a forgotten fugacity.

After two hours of trapped creativity, stripped of all imagination, you finally lean back in your seat, gnashing your teeth. You see your last answers jump out screaming at you, then exhaling in a sigh. You know that you've made a mistake in question 42. Will that be the question that you need to get across the line?

Your instructor marks your exam. At question 42 an eyebrow raises, terrorising your heart which leaps against your chest. Another eyebrow pointing skyward. "Hmm! you got question 45....right, nobody gets that one". Stay of execution eminent. He reaches for his calculator; this can't be good. What 88%? Why not 100%? That's what I got for the last test. Oh! Question 42. Now if I were sitting on the pavement at the side of the road at Candidasa instead of a chair beside the pool...

30th. December 2013 – 12:30: Roll over Archimedes.

It’s quite simple in theory. According to Archimedes:

“Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up

by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.”

But before we can say "Eureka" and go diving it gets a bit more complex. Neutral buoyancy is not just about Archimedes’ principle alone because his physics only applies once the “body” either sinks fully to the bottom or is on the surface; which is exactly not where a diver wants to be.

So in fact for the object (the diver) to be neutrally buoyant, it has to be expressed as:

Mass x the force of gravity =  mass density of the fluid x volume displaced by the body actually in contact with the fluid  x the force of gravity = 0

Now if that’s not an eyeful then imaging what it must be like to try to control it in 9 metres of sea-water, little to no visibility and in the face of a current .

Down we went none-the-less. The focus on this dive was to concentrate on the one skill that we needed to control but would take a lifetime to master – neutral buoyancy. It was here that we saw yet again the value not just an instructor but that of a true master. The difference is that instructors teach the science of diving; masters take it to a whole new level where it is no longer a science but an art form. Even though I had seen it before, I watched the demonstration mesmerised and somewhat envious of how easy it all seemed.

Then it was my turn. With the memory of what I had just witnessed fresh in my head, I knelt on the sea-bed. Because of the weights I was carrying, I was negatively buoyant. I filled my lungs to capacity – nothing happened. I pumped a tiny bit of air into my BCD – nothing; a bit more – nothing. A tiny bit more and there it was: my knee lifted off the sea-bed. I filled my lungs to capacity. Too much, I was rising too fast. I exhaled and sank back down. A tiny bit more air in the BCD and shallower breathing did the trick. I got it to a point where I could control my rising and falling just by the amount that I was filling and emptying my lungs with. Mastering how much air you breathed in and out for the given conditions in order to remain suspended in the water; neither rising and falling is what the complex formula is all about.

The next step was to do the same thing but in the horizontal position. Enter, stage left, the fin pivot. Again a master stroke: my instructor noticed that with so much weight tied to my waist, it was almost impossible to remain horizontal as the weight was distributed unevenly. He instructed me to move the weights higher up to just below my rib-cage. Problem solved.

For a stroke of pure genius:  our instructor wanted to reinforce the fact that we did not need to keep fiddling with pumping air into or letting air out of the BCD to manage neutral buoyancy. You could achieve the same thing by breathing alone. After all, he told us on the surface, the lungs had a capacity of seven litres of air whereas the BCD, for the purposes of neutral buoyancy has just one.

To demonstrate the point, he exhaled, removed a weight that he had stored in his BCD and placed it on the sea-bed. Normally that would automatically result in positive buoyancy as soon as he breathed in. Quite the contrary; purely by controlling his breathing he remained perfectly neutrally buoyant. He then got us to do the same.  Initially, the moment I removed a weight, I started to rise. Soon however, I got the point. With shallower breathing I was able to not only maintain neutral buoyancy but also to rise and fall at will purely by controlling the amount of air that was going in and out of my lungs. The “secret” was that you should never have to fill your lungs to capacity just to get positively buoyant. Nor should you have to totally empty your lungs to go the other way. It is in shallower breathing that you ride the fine line that we know is neutrality.

What a moment that was and what was more, it was a very liberating experience. The dive became more enjoyable and closer to what the sport is all about when you did not have to concern yourself with the technology.

Once we were back on the surface, we practiced removal and replacement of the BCD and everything attached to it and then it was back on the boat for the last time in the course.

Here’s the Dive profile for the day:

29th. December 2013 – 16:30: Shark?

At about 9 meters into our slow ascent towards the surface, I was, as usual, preoccupied with buoyancy. Our instructor had gone on ahead, leading the way out. My buddy was about 2 meters above me and to my left. I looked up and signaled to him to come back down as he was too high, when I could see a shadow cover him.

I looked for the source of the shadow as it moved forward and saw the bottom of a broad mouth of what I first though was a Manta-ray. As the shadow lengthened so did the image. It became clear from the size of the image and that distinctive dorsal fin, that it was a shark and a large one at that. My signal to my buddy became more urgent and included pointing to the shark above his head. He looked up, saw what it was.

Before he had time to react, the shark turned its head and I could have sworn that I caught its eye. When it turned I could see its side. More importantly, I could not see a clearly defined mechanosensory lateral line system, so distinct on more aggressive species of shark. Instead I noticed the dot pattern that identified this creature as a Whale Shark (Rhinocodon typus):

The fact that it was only around 4 meters in length concerned me. I thought for a moment that if this was the baby, then where was its mother? I learned later that Whale Sharks are solitary creatures and leave their mothers at quite an early age. Its curiosity satisfied and as quickly as we had seen it, the Whale Shark drifted effortlessly out of sight.

At the time, we were the only ones left underwater. Everybody else was on the shore. All they saw was the dorsal fin on the surface. When we reached the shore, they told us that they knew that four of had gone down and were wondering how many of us would surface.

Later, we learned that Whale Shark sightings were extremely rare. No recreational diver at the site that day had ever seen one in its natural habitat. Our instructor said that he had only seen one after about 1000 dives. Our assistant instructor said that it was high on her must see list and she could now tick it off.

The day was not, after-all, a total failure. We had seen the worlds largest fish, as up-close and as personal as one could ever get. Dewa Baruna had indeed smiled upon us.

After the drama of the day, the dive profile seemed rather uninspired; but here it is anyway:

30th. December 2013 – 10:00: Go West young man.

We were back at Dog’s Point for our final day and assessment. Getting there and down to 8 meters was routine and textbook. Then it was straight to business. The focus was on navigation. Visibility was poor, so conditions were ideal for the task.

Our instructor pointed to our heading. Mine was 5 degrees off West. I set my compass, aligned the lubber and headed out from the anchor point. When I reached 50 metres out from where I started, there was a tap on my shoulder to turn around.

When I did, I could see absolutely nothing ahead of me but my compass strapped to my wrist. With visibility so poor and trusting nothing but the theory, I set a reciprocal bearing and headed back. I felt as though I was alone but knew that my instructor was there as always. The theory turned out to be right. Now why did that not surprise me? The anchor rope loomed out of the fog and I touched the exact point that I had left on the journey outward. 

As always there was that familiar hand-shake from my instructor; another task assessed; navigation passed. Time to surface.

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.

29th. December 2013 – 11:00: Cross Legged on the side of the road.

The day started in quite the same way as the previous two; ground-hog like and uneventful. What was different was that we were on the way to a dive at the USS Liberty in Tulamben on the East coast of Bali.

Our instructor had advised that our assessment on the theory based on Chapter 4 was going to need to be conducted either on the way to the dive site or as soon as we got there  because without successfully completing the assessment, we could not start the dive. This in turn was because Chapter 4 was all about dive planning; in particular the RDP. The van pulled over into a service station and we elected to do the assessment right there and then.

Never in a million years and all the exams I have taken, did I ever imagine that I would find myself sitting cross-legged on the side of the road doing what I considered, at the time to be the most important theory test I have ever undertaken. Yet there I was. Note to self and readers: The next time you want to get a hundred percent on an assessment, insist on taking the test cross-legged on the pavement on the side of the road.