Monday, 7/26/04 - 17:28
The best dive we took on our trip to Florida for the family reunion was to the wreck of the Spiegel Grove near Key Largo. The Grove is a 500' long military transport / landing ship dock, commissioned in 1956 and decommissioned in 1989. It was sunk as an artificial reef in 2002 and is already covered with a fuzz of algae and coral. The ship is sitting on its side on sand at 130' (i.e. pretty much just at the limit of recreational diving depths), with the uninteresting upper part of the wreck at 50'-60'. The sea was clear enough that we could see almost the whole thing from the surface, but it took two dives to cover it: the first dive was from the bow to the midpoint and back; the second dive was a drift dive from the stern to the midpoint and then up.
Floating along on the top-become-side of the Spiegel Grove was something incredible. The ship's vastness itself was disorienting, like an underwater city. The superstructure was still there and recognizable, but the angle we were approaching it at wasn't. It was a kind of vertigo; we had an impossible perspective, floating sideways along part of the vessel that your head says should be on top, with deep blue to the side, sand somewhere far beneath, and no other visual reference points besides the immense ship. Lots of metal bars, hatches, big cranes, and a plaque with the names of people who'd sponsored sinking the ship. We also saw its screws on the second dive and looked into its broad landing bay where all the fish were now.
I wish I could say more about how cool this dive was, but my memories of it are fragmentary. When we got back up on the boat, the divemaster helping me out of the water asked, "So, mostly work or fun?", and I could reply with unstinting enthusiasm that it was great. Nevertheless, it was a lot of work. Especially on the second dive, I felt like I spent as much time keeping track of Ted, the current, my buoyancy, the depth, my air, my nitrogen, and so on, as I spent looking at the ship itself. It was a bit like the times when I've driven Route 1 down the coast to LA -- I'm really not very good at driving -- and incidentally happened to see scenery along with the road.
This was also the most challenging dive we've been on so far: deeper, more current, no bottom. Well, before I worry our mothers, it was only 10 or 15 feet deeper than we've been before on several occasions, and it was not the first time we've swam without a bottom, either. We do that in California sometimes, because it turns out that if you're in a kelp forest that's 70 feet deep with a thermocline at 35 feet, you see more fish if you swim at the level of the thermocline, and also stay warmer and use less air.
So the only part of diving the Spiegel Grove that actually bothered me was the current, partly because I don't have much experience with that and partly because my mom always told us horror stories about it when we were little. Mothers leave you with the oddest hang ups -- not scared of sharks or anything like that, but I find it alarming to go anywhere near a lawnmower being run by anyone else, because it might spit up rocks that could hit you in the brain, and I'm alarmed by the currents and big waves in the ocean. If you go any deeper than waist or chest level, they might rip you away from shore without warning, much like Jaws.
Nevermind that this was probably sensible advice to give to 3 little children who were blind without their glasses, weren't strong swimmers, and couldn't see whether the ocean was coming to get them or where their mother was. I still think there was more to it than that, something about the ocean as, say, primal and powerful. My grandfather apparently told his kids that when you first see the ocean, you're supposed to run up to it and spit for luck, then run away -- that's one of the ways I picture my mom's relationship with the ocean, even though I've never seen her do it. Grandpa himself was a Navy man, and I doubt he did it much, either. He used to jump off the Rosie boat (a.k.a. the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Midway-class aircraft carrier) and go swimming out at sea.
Anyway, before long I'd taken to thinking of the bands of current on the wreck of the Spiegel Grove in friendlier terms, as acceleration strips from F-Zero or some other racing game. The acceleration strip is more closely analogous to this kind of movement than anything else I can think of, the difference being that the current is well nigh invisible, so I kept finding myself accelerating unexpectedly.
This became a problem exactly once. There was a strong upwell along the upper edge of the wreck as we were crossing over to the top. Making quick ascents when you're diving is a bad idea; if the nitrogen in your blood comes out of solution and turns into bubbles that get caught somewhere, that's how you get the bends. It's not a huge deal if you accidentally go up a few feet quickly, especially when you're deep.
You just need to be careful because the air expands in your BC, i.e. your "buoyancy control" or your flotation backpack. Quick explanation of some basic mechanics of diving: You jump into the water with a weight belt so that you can sink and a BC so that you can float, which you do by adding air to it once you decide to stop sinking. Of course you keep a lot more air in the tank attached to your BC, but that air is compacted under such high pressure that it's actually negatively buoyant for much of the dive. As I was saying, the air in your BC expands as you ascend, because with a shorter water column above you, the weight of the water on the BC decreases. That means ascending tends to cause you to go up at an increasing rate unless you let air out of your BC as you ascend.
A couple years before I started diving, I played in a set of Call of Cthulhu games at GenCon which involved Maenads in Miami and diving with Deep Ones in the Keys. I was staying on the boat the whole time anyway, but I still listened to the GM's explanation of diving. One of the dramatic points of horror in his account was that when you're diving, it's unwise to ascend too quickly, even if...
Anyway, there was an upwelling current at the edge of the ship, but I thought that I'd somehow lost control of my buoyancy and I grabbed the closest thing available, which was a rung on the side of the ship, while I desperately depressed the button to let air out of my BC. Nothing was coming out. Sometimes it does that for a moment or so, but I kept pressing the button and I wasn't getting less buoyant. I kept holding on and gestured for Ted to stop, my face undoubtedly a mask of horror. I guess I could've pulled my dump valve, but before that thought occurred to me, I realized that the small, non-buoyant particles in the water were also ascending here and that Ted was gesturing to me to just come forward a bit. So it was just a current after all, and it stopped quickly once I went over the edge. Now I know.
Remember how I said the wreck was covered in coral? Now my hands were all cut up. As I lay on the top of the wreck reassuring myself that I was in fact negatively buoyant, I kept staring at them, because they hurt. Lots of little cuts everywhere my hands had grabbed, couldn't tell how deep they were, but they stopped bleeding surprisingly quickly, possibly due to water pressure. Ted had already torn one of his fingernails in half earlier in the week, and that had stopped bleeding quickly, too (the fingernail was indirectly my fault -- and if that had happened to me, I probably would've directed a jab or two at him later, but Ted didn't do that because he's the best).
We finished the rest of the dive, had fun, and were starting to ascend back up the line to the boat. Then my weightbelt came off -- but I caught it. The scary thing about this is that I have no idea how or why I caught it. I don't remember reaching down; I don't remember feeling it slip. But suddenly I was holding the lime green rental belt in my hand, so I took a little air out of my BC, kept hold of the line so that I didn't wash away, and started putting in back on one handed. Ted saw me fiddling with it and came down to help finish the rebuckling. Before you start worrying -- even if I hadn't caught it, things would've been in all likelihood fine (because I still would've had hold of the line and the half of my weight that's on my BC) but ascending would've been a bit more dicey. Still, no more rental weight belts for me from now on; I'm too small for most of them. I think what happened was that the belt was loose enough that the buckle caught on the line and got opened.
Back on the boat while we were changing tanks for our second dive, the hose for my computer burst. Again, glad it didn't happen underwater, but I would've been okay if it had, because Ted and I were pretty much within arm's reach of each other the whole time and we could've shared air. There was an additional margin of safety added by the seven very nice, bad-ass Canadian ice divers / cave divers we were with (I have to keep reiterating these things because Moms B and S read this). Ted switched me to our backup air gauge for the second dive and left the computer hooked to my BC strap to keep track of depth and nitrogen. Ted is exceedingly clever to have such a strong repair kit with us; we wouldn't have wanted to miss the second dive.
My hands kept hurting. At dinner I wrapped them around a Thai iced coffee, and that helped a bit, but only until we left the restaurant. Probably some of the coral I grabbed was fire coral, since there were a few red blotches that still stung like a paper cut at bed time, after everything else had calmed down. Ted said that peeing on fire coral stings makes them feel better because of the ammonia -- you can see where this is going. I'm the credulous sort, but I also figured that urine is sterile and I had nothing to lose. At first I was rather peeved that Ted had just gone to the bathroom himself when he told me, but then I remembered that I have my very own bladder, plus I know how to use it. Not sure if it helped or not. I felt a little better, but it could've just been the soothing warmth of placebo pee.
Long live Diaryland!
The five most recent entries:
More Naval Gazing - Saturday, 8/13/05
Anniversary Diving - Friday, 8/12/05
Academic Tip of the Week - Tuesday, May. 17, 2005
How to tell a Midwesterner - Sunday, 4/24/05
Academic Feelings - Thursday, 4/21/05
Ted's most recent entry:
Monday, May 12