PROVIDENCIALES, Turks and Caicos (1 Jan 2006) -- The light I'm clutching cuts a path into the shadowy depths below. I swing it one way, then the other, searching out the reef I know is there, somewhere. Slowly, I sink lower into the blackness. In a moment, I'm hovering just above a scattering of coral heads that look fluffy as feather boas. Twenty yards behind me, I know the ocean floor plunges into an abyss more than 1,000 feet deep. I reach for my husband's hand and concentrate to keep my breathing steady. It's the middle of the night, and we've voluntarily jumped into the Caribbean Sea with a group of fellow scuba divers. But even with more than 100 dives under my belt, night dives make me nervous. You don't know what's around you. You see only the things illuminated by your dive light. The spookiness factor is magnified when you've seen 5-foot Caribbean reef sharks cruising the reef wall, where the relatively shallow ocean floor plunges off sharply, on nearly every daylight dive in the preceding four days. The sharks are here, it's just a matter of whether you'll see them. But you'll know when you do. The eyes of most fish and crustaceans glow red when you shine a light on them in the dark. Shark eyes glow green. I cast my cone of light in a jagged circle and realize that the sea floor is alive. A trio of spindly lobsters lines up like cars of a freight train and chugs across a sandy expanse. An annoyed king crab, claws hoisted upward, scuttles sideways. A hundred horse-eyed jacks, each silvery fish more than a foot long, zip in and out of my line of vision. Scuba diving is one of my passions. I love the water anyway, but when I'm immersed in it, 50 or 70 or 100 feet below the waves, it's sheer bliss. Coral reefs look like madcap gardens, overrun with colorful lumps and ropes and branches of plant life. They teem with some of the oddest-looking creatures you can imagine: the porcupine puffer, a foot-long, club-shaped fish with big blue eyes that my sister and I have dubbed the ''drumstick of the sea.'' The spotted eagle ray, a kite-shaped, blue-spotted sheet the size of a tablecloth that flaps serenely through deep water. The shy trumpet fish, as long as a yardstick and not much wider, that hangs vertically in the coral for camouflage. These and an ocean full of their equally bizarre relatives inhabit the reefs that surround the Turks and Caicos, a string of scrubby, barren islands about 90 miles northeast of Haiti. My husband and I, along with my sister and her husband, booked a week-long trip aboard a 124-foot live-aboard dive boat that skirts the islands and moors periodically so its passengers can explore the depths. This is diving at its most convenient. We are among just nine passengers and a staff of five, who keep us happy. On the first day, we set up our dive gear on the main deck at the back of the boat, where it will stay all week. Our two tiny cabins, complete with bed and bathroom, are on the next deck up. We live for the sound of someone blowing on a conch shell, the signal that it is time for the next dive. In all, we can go down five times a day if we want -- 8 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 2 p.m., 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. The dives last about 45 minutes to an hour, and the reef starts, in most places, about 50 feet below our boat. From there we swim out to the wall, where it plunges into the great blue abyss. Most of the people on board are veteran divers, with hundreds of dives recorded in their log books. When we aren't diving, we lounge on the sun deck or play Yahtzee on a table on the fly-bridge. When the sun sets, we peer into the inky skies in search of shooting stars. The seas have been so smooth, so silky during our stay, that we get to go to some places dive boats don't often venture -- among them, West Sand Spit, a tiny, uninhabited lick of sand with nary a plant on it. | | Night diving with sharks We're used to the routine of nearly nonstop diving -- floating over the homes of rippling green moray eels, coral-crunching sea turtles, purple-fingered anemones, pulsing jellyfish and silver, bullet-fast barracuda. At night, our boat rocks gently, swaying us to sleep in our cozy cabins while we dream of the nonstop battle for life being played out on the reef below. Night dives don't always go according to plan. This is the eighth dive of our trip, and after only a few minutes (time goes so slowly when you're drifting about in the pitch-black ocean!), I realize this one will be far from noneventful. I raise my light from the bottom, where it has been illuminating the parade of crustaceans -- enough to feed everyone on our boat for the next two days, I think to myself. My blade of light sweeps over to my sister, who is holding her hand on her head like a fin, in the universal scuba diver's signal for ``shark.'' I don't dare look up. Sharks are one thing during the day; an entirely different one at night. And we've been encountering them constantly. One instant they are dark shadows in the distance, the next they are circling curiously around you, staring out of cold, marble-sized eyes. It's unnerving, even though I rationalize to myself that these sharks would rather make a meal of a smaller, more tender fish. My brother-in-law, using hand signals, asks my sister if she wants to return to the boat. I interpret the silent question as a signal to surface, even though they were going to stay. I look to my husband. We agree to ascend. We rise quietly (at 50 feet under water, no one can hear you scream) above the flurry of bubbles and sea creatures. Now we just have to get through the cloud of stinging sea wasps drawn to the light at the back of the boat. We let out blasts of bubbles from our air tanks to clear the way as we hoist our bodies out of the water and onto the platform at the back of the boat. We are unscathed. My sister and her husband surface a few moments later. They had planned to ignore the sharks and stay down with the rest of the divers, but changed their mind when they saw how nervous I'd gotten. Back on board, we shuck off our dripping gear, grab hot-from-the-dryer towels, wipe our faces and burst out laughing in relief. So much action in such a short dive! We'd been under only nine minutes. We fill cups with hot cocoa and spike it with a shot of liquor. The images of dorsal fins fade into the misty recesses of our minds, dispersing with the steam from our cups. Sharks? No problem. We'll deal with them tomorrow. SOURCE - Miami Herald |
