Breathe

Research diving is crazy.  You have to enter a completely foreign medium, one breath of it (seawater) makes you black out.  But you are breathing air through a “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.”  Don’t forget to breathe that SCUBA air.  Just like Yoga.  Keep breathing. Keep breathing.  Make the rhythm of the breathing flow through everything you do. 

Now, finally, you are in the water, hooked up to your tank and all the various items you’ve tied to it.  Ready to go down.  Down you go, letting air out of your buoyancy control bladder (BC).  Your embedded weights pull you down.  Breathe.

Once you start to descend, you descend faster (the bladder volume is reduced more and more as the water pressure builds; smaller BC means less lift).  You know this because you’ve experienced it over and over in the daylight.  But now it is black.  Where’s your light?   Attached to a ring on your BC.  Grope till you find it.  There it is.  Breathe.

John’s ahead of me with a sea hare in his hand, bubbles streaming out .  Where’s the camera?  I’m supposed to be filming.  Attached to the BC.  Grope till I find it.  Turn it on.  Aim it at John’s light.  What’s that crazy light flashing all over the place.  Oh.  It’s my light.  I’ve absent-mindedly let go of it and it’s dangling on its rope.  Breathe.

Found the light, found the camera.  Then bonk, I hit the bottom.  Forgot to push more air into my BC, and here I am rolling on the bottom.  I let go of the camera, the light, push off the bottom, grope for my power-inflator button, and force air from my tank into my BC.  Off the bottom I come.  Breathe.

How the hell did I get so tangled in this kelp?  Can’t even see how tangled I am.  I notice, as I slowly writhe and tug on the kelp, the little voice inside me saying “you don’t belong here Billy.  Time to get out.”  I ignore the voice.  Now it isn’t pitch black anymore.  Bioluminescence lights me, and everything I touch.  But I still can’t see cause there is nothing around me but kelp.  Breathe.

Slowly unravel.  Take your time.  Ok.  Finally free.  Now where the hell did John go?  There he is, just a couple of body lengths away.  His sea hare is in his hand, he’s bearing down on a lobster, ever so slowly.  Moving like kelp, he gently lets go of the sea hare, and it drops perfectly onto the antennae of the lobster.  The lobster bats it away with its antennae.  John retrieves the sea hare and tries again.  After three tries he moves on.  This lobster doesn’t want to eat sea hare.  John comes to another lobster.  Same story.  These lobsters are really tame.  John can basically touch the sea hare to their short first antennae on the front of their head, and push a little, and they just sit there.  They don’t eat, but they don’t back off.  20 presentations John makes before running out of air.  These lobsters hate sea hares, just like everyone always said.  It is becoming clear that the WMSC preserve makes lobsters into sea-hare eaters!