How Do I Blog?

Tha·lass·o·pho·bi·a — n.
1.  The fear of seas and oceans.

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I am afraid of the deep. The thought of being in the middle of the ocean in water over a mile deep at the complete whim of nature… it almost paralyses me if I sit and visualise it. My palms get sweaty and I get intensely uncomfortable.  I will never go on a cruise into deep seas or oceans because fuck that shit, there are waves and storms and no way, I won’t do it. It’s probably an early childhood memory of a pleasure cruise in Scarborough (in the UK, I was maybe six years old) during a bad storm, with water coming in over the sides of the boat, and a fascination with the movie Jaws from my very early youth, but in any case: fuck the ocean.

My fear of the deep is matched only by my fascination with it. I was given The Blue Planet many years ago and try to make time to watch it once a year. I love watching cameras go where it’s either too inhospitable for man to try or where I’ll never get the chance/have the guts to try. Deep sea trenches; rogue waves; the creatures of the ocean, big and small; bioluminescence; all of these interest me and in another life maybe I would’ve been some kind of marine biologist… an aquatic version of Indiana Jones. Hell, that’s probably why I’m writing a horror/thriller set in the ocean right now…

Being strapped with weights and having a cannister of compressed air tied around your back to be plunged into the deep is a weird enough feeling, if you then strap on fins and force your breathing to a binary in/out through a mouthpiece and we’re talking alien-levels of weird, then add to that confronting one of your biggest fears.

Just last weekend we were at Hamilton Island in Northern Queensland and a short Catamaran trip away from Reefworld, a floating building parked on the edge of the Hardy Reef, where you can do glass bottom fish viewing, semi-submersible trips to the reef *, helicopter rides, snorkelling and professionally supervised scuba-diving.

I’m never a person to shy away from a challenge when it’s something I think I can do. So I decided to go on a dive and after getting suited up, we got taken down to this underwater platform, the metal grille kind, and the instructor had us prepped then go under and sit on the edge of this metal lip over an abyss of ocean. As we got down on our asses, the heavy cannisters clunking on the catwalk behind us, I looked down and saw the massive anchor for Reefworld, suspended in the distant murk.

Then came the “fun” part, losing your regulator and retrieving it, and filling your mask up with water then clearing it. These were the parts I was most nervous about and so, of course, I was the first asked to perform the tasks. After completing them both twice with a minimum of effort, my confidence started to grow. As I sat there and watched others struggle with the same , I focused on normalising my breathing and slowing down my heart rate. As the bubbles rushed past the facemask I kept thinking the mask would get blown off, I was still taking massive gulps of air and my stomach was a knot. I could only focus on the chain that floated in front of us now, the life-line that led us to the reef and back again.

All of a sudden, I became calm. I started to really soak up (lol) the underwater world. I was more nervous about not getting enough time out there on the reef as people continued to struggle with their regulators and masks, I would check my air gauge periodically to make sure I wasn’t sucking on too much air, not that I had much of a choice anyway.

Finally the time came to leave our place on the platform and I was last onto the chain. There was a brief moment of terror as I got pulled toward the chain and felt as though if I somehow missed the chain, I’d just sink like a stone to the bottom of the ocean, the pressure building until my air cylinder exploded violently, the space between my sinus and ears shrinking until it imploded in a wet pop and the whole bloody mess left from my crushed head and body would slowly work its way down into the inky depths of the ocean…

Of course, I did mention that I am fucking terrified of the deep, didn’t I?

Instead, as soon as I got on the chain, it was fun all the way. Unfortunately we got held up again as someone struggled with the pressure after about 2m and myself and another fellow were held up at the end of the chain as this guy got taken back to the platform by another instructor, however this ended up working in our favour as the instructor returned and took us away from the larger group, giving us much more freedom to move around and encouraged us to do crazy stuff like sinking looking upwards, looping the loop and so on. He took us to see an anemone filled with tiny little clownfish (yes, Nemo!), those guys are tiny and so cute! Plus we got to hold a huge starfish and seaslug and got within arm’s reach of the big fella, a Maori Wrasse by the name of Wally:

But the most unique part of the experience, apart from being surrounded by fish of every colour of the rainbow and touching flora and fauna of another world, was the whole unearthly sensation of simply being underwater for that long. After the twenty minute mark, once we were 9m underwater (properly equalised to the pressure), given free reign to explore the reef and let go of the chain, I just started to look up at the surface and it dawned on me that I hadn’t been up there in a while… and the longer I was down here, the more comfortable I felt with not being anywhere near the surface and indeed, as the needle approached red and the 50psi “time to head home” level, I wished I had more time.

And time is all I have from now on, I suppose. This newfound hobby is only mine to either forget or pursue. I’ve started looking at the cost of PADI certification and we’re already talking about going up to Bundaberg in late October to visit Lady Elliot island to see the sea turtles in spawning season. There’s also coves down in Byron Bay worth visiting. Even locally there’s diving to be found off Moreton Bay… talk about overcoming your fears, now I’ve got to overcome my desire to blow a ton of cash getting certified and buying equipment and doing dives all the time!

So while I may have conquered my fear of the deep where I can get in there with a tank of oxygen and have a professionally trained diver close at hand… I’m still not getting on a fucking cruise liner.

* - The captain of our submersible was a rather ironic sort, once we reached our stretch of the reef for a closer examination and our tour guide was giving us the preprepared speil about how the reef is protected, all care is taken to avoid touching the coral, the reef is so delicate and fragile, blah blah blah, plus it only grows a mere 2cm per year… just then one of the rear rotors was piloted directly into the highly protected reef, shearing a huge boulder of coral from the reef wall, undoing about a century or so of hard-earned growth. Nice work.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under babble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.