"You are a beginner big time!", loudly proclaimed Efra Figueroa looking at the plastic sticker still attached to the front of my shiny new mask.
I couldn't deny it. My diver certification card was still the temporary kind and I displayed the eager nervousness of the novice diver when it hits that this is really the Big One, out in the middle of the vast ocean surrounded only by horizon. What was more, we were going to hit 80 feet -- four times deeper than I had ever been before.
I was in the picturesque little seaside town of La Parguera in Puerto Rico. Two weeks earlier I had shivered through my open water certification dive under gray skies in a scummy lake near Columbus, Ohio. The thermocline there was 15 feet deep, I could feel the water seeping into my wet suit all the way to the bone, and the visibility was all of two, maybe three feet. The instructors practically had to huddle next to us to evaluate our diving skills. In sharp contrast the sparkling Caribbean here warmed body and soul at 85 degrees and visibility ranged up to 100 feet.
My journey to this little known part of Puerto Rico began four years earlier when I fell in love with the blue magic underneath tropical seas while snorkeling in Hanauma Bay near Honolulu. Just snorkeling was pure enchantment, so as I watched angelfishes dart effortlessly through caverns in the coral I resolved that the next best thing to being able to sprout gills and follow them would be to learn scuba diving.
The only real obstacle was myself. I had to fight a major fear of ear problems and a mistrust of my own athletic abilities. Four years elapsed before I enrolled in a course at a local dive shop. My instructor was reassuringly competent and I encountered no real difficulties. But even after certification I was a mixture of enthusiasm to do a real ocean dive, and anxiety that something would go wrong. After all I had so far descended only 18 feet.
La Parguera is on the diagonally opposite corner of the island to San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico. The day after we arrived my wife and I drove leisurely over a mountain range, the Cordillera Central, the backbone of this enchanting island. Underneath an azure sky all of Puerto Rico was verdant, with flowers flaming in pinks, oranges and yellows everywhere. We arrived at a resort in Guanica, about ten miles from La Parguera. Our next two days would be spent in a charming cottage beside a turquoise lagoon.
I couldn't sleep that night, even though I wanted to be fresh and alert the next morning. It was a strange state -- calm on the surface but tense on the inside. Mercifully it was soon time to arise and drive to La Parguera where I met my first guide to the marine mysteries, the divemaster Efra Figueroa.
Efra's innate cheerfulness expressed itself in a ready smile, teasing quips, and a rough-spun but amiable demeanor. When I admitted that this would be my first real ocean dive, he emphasized that I was to stay close to him. I had every intention of doing exactly that, since Efra exuded the comforting air of absolute confidence which characterizes the master of any discipline. An instructor at a local college, his expertise was easily evident. Single-handedly, he had located and named about 50 great dive spots around La Parguera. After announcing to everyone just how much of a greenhorn I was, Efra cleaned my mask with toothpaste and washed it with a thick amber liquid to ensure that it remained clear. Later when I discovered how well the liquid worked I asked him what it was. "Baby shampoo, no more tears!" Efra laughed. He had discovered that the residual film left by baby shampoo worked much better than "Sea Drops".
A few minutes later we sailed out into the Caribbean through channels between mangrove islands. In the mellow morning sunshine with a cool breeze blowing, the journey to the 'Black Wall' passed pleasantly. Glauco, Efra's assistant, is the strong silent type and I was somewhat jittery, so the others did most of the conversation. Jim and Lydia had started only a year ago and had already logged 31 dives, mostly in Florida and the Virgins. According to them diving in Puerto Rico easily matched these destinations. They talked to me often to allay my nervousness. Efra loved to laugh and relate diving anecdotes. A friend of his was photographing a somnolent octopus at close range with a new two thousand dollar underwater camera. The octopus, startled by the flash , instinctively wrenched the camera from the photographer's startled hands and vanished at high speed! The camera is now presumably in use recording significant events in the life of the octopus family and the photographer could only splutter impotently, "An octopus stole my camera!"
After about an hour we arrived, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It was a perfect day to initiate diving -- a calm sea, bright sun, and a gentle breeze. Forty feet below I could just see the beginning of a wall which, Efra said, fell a further forty feet down to the sea bed. We would back roll into the Caribbean and I would be first!
And now it is time for me to enter the water. I throw myself backward and the Caribbean welcomes me with inviting warmth. Efra signals downwards. I release air from the BC and sink head first into a deep cyan light. Fishes in shapes and colors I have seen only in photographs right before my astounded eyes. Midnight blue Creole wrasses, French angel fishes sporting electric blue, orange, and neon red. A trunkfish looking for all the world like a white and black polka dotted stealth bomber. A school of yellow jacks importantly heading towards a private destination. A barracuda, silvery and lean, eyeing me with the grumpily suspicious expression of a farmer who doesn't quite know what to make of this intruder on his property. Fan coral, swaying back and forth in an undersea breeze. From crevices and openings in the wall fishes gape at me in fluttering alarm. Only five humans in this underwater vastness. Our ascending air bubbles have a metallic sheen. Playfully I try to touch the fishes with my fingers but they dart away easily with contemptuous fin flicks. Efra breaks up chunks of bread and instantly large numbers of bucking and lunging wrasses and parrot fish appear. I hold my finger out in the melee and for a magical instant touch the side of a Creole wrasse. It feels mottled and strangely dry - like rough leather.
I discover that with my arms tucked behind me and my legs kicking gently from the hips I can glide like an eagle over the mountains and through the valleys of this alien planet. This is probably the nearest to bird flight that we humans will ever experience. The scuba equipment, so awkward and cumbersome on the surface, feels weightless as I soar through canyons in the rock and coral. A green moray eel, four feet of slithering muscle, gapes its toothy jaws warningly at me. A thrill to touch the ocean's sandy bottom with my bare hands at eighty feet.
All too soon Efra gives me the thumbs-up signal -- no, it can't be forty five minutes already! It's time to rise towards the ragged circle of sunlight directly above. We ascend and I constantly look downward at the blue magic, unwilling to leave. And finally emerge into the air replete with the ecstasy of knowing that the doors to a new infinity have just opened up for me, all my fears are gone, it is more beautiful than I could have ever imagined, and I am truly and completely hooked into scuba diving.
- Madurai G. Sriram, Columbus, Ohio, USA
