Descent into Darkness - Part 2

originally posted November 12, 2017

A week had come and gone. Guy had come and gone. Low level panic was setting in. Why did I have to do a deep dive?? I don't want to dive deep as a general rule. I'm not trying to be the next Sylvia Earle, for f***s sake. I just want to have fun and swim with fishies and maybe see an octopus. Maybe AOW isn't for me. Maybe I should just stop where I am and enjoy my 60 foot limits. 

Yeah, I guess you could say I was a little anxious about the deep dive. Nevertheless... if you've followed me this far you'll know that I don't give up easily.

I went to the shop to pick up my rental gear and found Will manning the store. After handing off my wetsuit and regulator set, he said, "okay, we'll meet up at Blue Grotto about 4:00 to get you checked in and set up our gear. We'll do the deep dive first, take a little break and, once the sun goes down, get back in the water for the night dive."

"We? Not Chris?"

"Nope. You're with me."

Oh shit. 

"You're not gonna make me do scuba math are you?"

I'd already had this conversation with Chris. One of the potential side effects of deep diving is narcosis - a feeling of disorientation or euphoria caused by the effect of breathing compressed gases at depth. It's not uncommon to have students perform simple math problems or other tasks while at depth to check if they're suffering the effects of narcosis (aka narced), things like counting backwards from 100 by sevens and other madness. 

"I can't math on land. Please don't make me do it underwater." Will laughed and promised no scuba math. The following afternoon, I was on my way to Blue Grotto to meet for what would  be, theoretically, my final Advanced Open Water dives.  

Unloading my gear at the dive site, I expressed my trepidation to Will. He said all the right things to calm my nerves and boost my confidence, but it wasn't really working all that well. The fact that he kept using words like "trench" and "abyss" didn't help.

We would drop into the water from a floating dock, then down to a submerged platform about 20 feet below. Then we would head down into the spring, taking our time.

"We don't have to go down any deeper than you want, you're in charge, okay?" he insisted. 

There were a few other divers around but we were the only ones getting in the water at that moment. I was ridiculously nervous. All I could think of was the depth, that I would panic, that there was no way I could do this. I was setting myself up to fail before we'd even made our descent. Will could see the state I was in. A blind man could see it. 

"Okay, you need to relax," he told me in that authoritative but reassuring way he has. "Put your face in the water and take a look around. You're not going to get any more comfortable hanging out here on the surface," he advised.

I put my reg in and looked down. It didn't all that look scary from here. I could see the training platform right below us. We both deflated our BC's and headed down. I had a moment of difficulty equalizing my ears but stretched my neck out straight and tilted my head to one side, clearing the problem ear. 

"Okay?" Will asked, making a circle of his thumb and forefinger.

"Okay."

"Let's go down."

I looked over the edge of the platform. There was another drop down of maybe ten or fifteen feet. I froze. My brain was screaming "HELL NO I'M NOT GOING DOWN THERE!" I felt like I was on the ledge of a tall building, gazing over the precipice. My brain was telling me I was going to fall. The problem was that my mind was applying a lifetime of land-based reflexes and conditioning to an underwater environment.

Wait...I'm underwater. I'm not going to fall. Gees. 

"Come on, let's go down," Will signaled. 

I took a breath, in and out, and told myself to calm down.

"Okay." 

Down we went. And down. And down. Blue Grotto is a spring, a series of wide open passages carved into the stony subsurface of Florida bedrock. Every time we came to a new opening, Will would coax me along, signalling, "come on, just a little further down" and we'd drop down a little further. Ryan was right about it not feeling any different, being down deeper. 

We got down into one area where there was a little statue of a dolphin (which I almost knocked over because I'm a klutz). I went to check my air and Will pushed my hand away. What the hell, dude? He took my gauge and looked at it himself, not letting me see it before signalling, "come on, this way, just a little more." Ugh, fine. We swam further into the deepening dark. 

A brief moment later, we stopped and Will showed me our depth reading. Eighty feet. He pointed down into yet another opening in the rock. "So, you want to go down more or you want to go up?" he asked. With zero hesitation, I signaled back, "up up, I wanna go up." Eighty feet was enough to meet the Advanced Open Water level and plenty for my anxious heart. 

Once I knew we were heading back, I felt the panic ebbing away. We ascended slowly through the spring, making our deco and safety stops along the way, and got back on dry land. While we were swapping depleted tanks for fresh ones, Will explained why he hadn't let me look at my gauge. "I didn't want you to see how deep you were," he said, knowing that I could make it deeper if I didn't think about it too much. He'd checked my air pressure when he looked at my gauge so he knew I had plenty left. I'd finished the dive with 1200 PSI.    

We headed back to the prep area where we could warm up in the outdoor showers (hooray for hot water!) and wait until it was fully dark. There was a couple at the table next to ours and Will whispered to me, "See those two? When we go down for the night dive that guy's gonna propose to his girlfriend."

Ugh. Romance. Whatever. 

Up next... into the darkness we plunge.