Sea the World!

Today I went diving again and all ( or at least some ) of those things I had meant to say about it before came flooding back. As much as possible I will limit my use of words like beautiful, gracefulness, magical, breathtaking etc. It's difficult though.

The colours of the fish are pretty much indescribable, the variety and seeming randomness of it all has no doubt bolstered many a man’s belief in God. I instead will postulate the existence of a little man in a cave under the waves, who decorates the fish using only a bottomless pot of rainbow paint and an intimidating imagination, whilst surviving on a diet of magic mushrooms. For me it is the only logical explanation.

The most impressive colours belong to the smallest in the sea whereas sharks, deliberately grey and background, impress instead with their size and potency. I’ve seen four of them aligned on the bottom, sitting out a strong current in formation, like fighter planes grounded by high winds. And these were reef sharks, the most pedestrian of sharks, but with white tips on the end of their fins like wing markings. On the same dive, while tacking across the current to avoid being slingshot off into the blue, I crossed over a green turtle. He passed a foot under me, his shell as big as a coffee table and the urge to reach out and hitch a ride was overwhelming, but we are schoolchildren touring a reactor, do not touch. The turtles are probably my favourites, they do not swim, they glide, taking off and landing. They look wise and patient, the owls of the underworld.

There are obviously a lot of species which deserve a mention. There’s the famous little clownfish who to be honest seemed a little cranky to me, guarding their little underwater shrubs so jealously. They zip out to meet you and audibly (if you listen close enough) bark at you and then disappear back into their shrub like a small dog back between its owners legs. The juvenile harlequin funnylips is like the clownfishes flamingly flamboyant, carefree cousin, his frilly fins whirling and spinning into each other so that you can’t tell where one starts and another begins. He bounces around upside down, no doubt humming a tune to himself as he nibbles his way along the sea bed. There's the not-so-fun banded sea snake, the black and white stripes of Danger! conveniently identifying him as containing enough poison to kill 15 of us mere men. And yet he is 3 feet from us and we are trying to get even closer as he weaves gracefully through the coral. Then there's the little cowfish with his big eyes and a body shaped like he's swallowed a building block. He doesn't so much swim as put-put around on his hover fins. Crocodile fish, the overdressed lionfish, the speckled leopard sharks, the angry and stout not-so-little titan triggerfish, the tripped out sea slugs, the list is already too long.

At one of the dive sites you swim out a mere 5 metres from the shore and a sea cliff drops away under you, ultimately to a depth of 2000 metres, imagine taking your kids there for a dip. Another time I snorkelled along the top of a slope where the shallows ended and the seabed disappeared downwards. Sand passed steadily under me and down the slope into the darkness and I felt as if I was perched on the rim of a giant egg timer which was gently willing me into its depths.

Going into the blue is to swim away from any features, in our case the sea wall we had been handrailing, until all around you is a blue infinity. With only your dive buddy as a handle you no longer have any relation to anything concrete, you are suspended in an empty void. It strikes me as one of those human sensations unencountered anywhere else in our existence, as with free falling from a plane perhaps. Once I’d drank my fill, I fixated on my buddy’s back and willed myself not to fall into the hysteria that was nibbling at the edges.