The day actually started yesterday, preparing, checking, and packing gear. This morning, final checks before starting the car and driving to the boat ramp. Aboard the dive boat, gear is set-up and pre-dive safety checks are performed. Everything I will need for diving is here, before we leave the dock. The transit out is beautiful, and I feel very alive. The July temperature is tropical, the vista filled with the emerald green waters of the Gulf of Mexico below pierced only by the snowy white wake we leave behind us, and bright blue sky patched with granite cumulus clouds on the horizon, above. Leaving the channel, one’s attention is stressed to focus on the crew’s dive briefing as a family of bottlenose dolphins plays in the morning sun at the surface in Clearwater Pass.
An hour later, anchored up and armed with the current conditions and dive plan suggestions by the crew, my buddy and I enter the water from the stern in a giant stride. This immediately changes my perspective as my eyes are now inches above the surface and the gulf water invades my wet suit, relieving the mild discomfort of the Florida summer humidity and intensity of the sun we endured in the last few minutes on the boat.
It is time to go. My buddy and I signal our intention to begin the dive, mark the time, and dump air from our equipment to achieve a slightly negative buoyancy. For the moment, we are heavier than the water and we begin to sink. As my eyes go under, I marvel as I always do at the multi-faceted complex underside of the nearby surface and how like a diamond it reflects the sunlight in a thousand different reflections, all at once. I watch as the boundary between seawater and sky falls upward, and away. I hear my own breathing through the regulator and with each exhalation I see my breath race to the surface in a hundred bubbles.
Both my buddy and I are able to clear our ears, adjusting for the rapidly changing pressure that works on them, so we continue our descent. Ten feet down, twelve, fifteen. Breathing normally through my equipment I have a look at my gauges. My tank is full, and my computer is working normally.
Looking up, the ripples of the surface are beginning to fade, and the light from the sun is too. I look down and think I see a pattern of dark splotches, but no details yet. I look at the anchor line that we are using as a reference, and I sense that I am picking up a little speed. My wetsuit is being compressed with the increasing pressure and so I have become more negatively buoyant, so I add just a little air to adjust and keep my descent controlled.
Twenty-five feet, then thirty. The bottom is coming into focus, the surface is discernable now just as a different, brighter shade of blue-green. Looking back down I can see the natural limestone rocks of the reef known around here as “Table Top.” I can see from a bird’s eye view many fishes of all size and shape conducting their constant business of looking for food or hugging the nooks and crannies for security. I make a mental note that visibility is looking to be about thirty feet, and I think that this is going to be a great dive. Off to my right, a massive cloud of small baitfish morphs into and out of shape while all swim mysteriously in the same direction and then darts in a new direction in a millisecond, all individuals working together with no detectable lag. How do they do that?
We arrive near the sand, making adjustments to our equipment to achieve neutral buoyancy. We are weightless. Breathing normally is so doubly important now, because an overly deep breath will increase the airspace volume of my lungs enough to make me rise. My depth gauge reads sixty-two feet. We check our starting air quantities, and monitor for any current. My buddy signals that we should swim to our right into the gentle current, so that once we turn the dive the same current will help to carry us back towards the anchor line. I concur, and we begin.
Following our plan, I mentally calculate that with 2,800 pounds per square inch in the tank and wanting to return to the anchor line with no less than 800, that if I am the one to turn the dive first it will be when I reach 2,100 p.s.i. We are planning to use a third of our available air less reserves for the trip out, a third to get back, and a third to hold as a contingency, just as we discussed on the boat. I know that he is performing the same calculation that I am, using his air quantity as we begin the outbound leg. We will breathe at different rates, and so one of us will reach our turn limit before the other. When one reaches his limit and signals the turn, we will both turn.
As an added margin of navigation safety, I note the time. My computer indicates that at this depth we have a little under an hour before the increased nitrogen poses a potential issue from the compressed air in our tanks. I think to myself that air quantity will most probably be our dive’s limiting factor on this drop, but I also know that I need to monitor the nitrogen saturation time of my body tissues as indicated by the model running on my dive computer, and the dive time the captain specified before announcing that “the pool is open!” and allowing divers to enter the water.
All initial housekeeping chores complete, we both turn on our underwater lights. Up to this point all of the underwater features have blended into a singular color, different shades of blue green. As we have descended, the seawater has begun to absorb the seven visible color wavelengths that make up the sun’s white light at different rates, beginning with red, then orange, then yellow, and so on. Turning on our lights only a few feet from the terrain and its diverse inhabitants restores the true color of this seldom seen part of our world in the small and very obvious circles touched by our lights.
The colors are vibrant and as varied as the animals that come into view as we swim horizontally along the ledge, careful not to disturb the sand below which would kill today’s very good visibility. We stay close enough to support each other in case of a problem, but we independently explore the ledge, examining creatures and features that have evolved and thrived in the harsh undersea environment for millennia. Corals of bright reds and yellows, soft greens and purples cover the limestone rocks. Small, colorful tropical fish like damselfish have laid claim to their own little pieces of coral and made them home, and aggressively dart out to protect it from me before retreating to a hollow in the living coral. Small arrow crabs shine in the light as I slowly swim by threatening me with their tiny blue claws mounted at the end of spiderlike limbs the thickness and length of a toothpick.
About five minutes into our swim, we come up upon a massive Goliath Grouper on the far side of a rock outcropping. This giant is about three hundred pounds, and initially he stands his ground. But after a few seconds of our intrusion on his rest he thinks better of it and with a flick of his tail he darts ahead fifteen feet and now is a dark blue-green shape disappearing around the next rock. I check my air, I have a little above 2,400 pounds per square inch in my tank remaining. All is normal. I indicate my status to my buddy, and he answers back using hand signals sharing his quantity and status. We continue.
A little further on I look ahead and to my right, away from the rock ledge, I see a barracuda hang motionless about eight feet off the bottom. He is facing us and just staring. As we swim by I can see his gaze fixated, curious. He is a floating statue. Except for a small quiver of his strong jaw, he is unaffected by our presence.
We see all manners of fish. Grouper, rockhind, and so many snapper. Lizardfish lying in the sand and atop rocks. Toadfish and flounder. Little sea cucumbers and blennies. Hogfish.
I check my air quantity again, and I have reached 2,100 p.s.i. I check my watch and nine some-odd minutes have passed since we started our outbound leg. I get my buddy’s attention and communicate that I have reached a planning limit and it is time to turn back. He checks his quantity and indicates a little more air than I have, and then returns the signal to reverse course.
Our outbound leg focused on the zone of sand where the ledge meets it, including under-ledges and rocks offset from the ledge, so on our return we ascend a few feet to more closely explore the top of the ledge. Again we see many different species bathed in the light. About halfway back to the anchor, we are lucky enough to spot a juvenile sea turtle lounging on top of the ledge. We are careful to approach him slowly and enjoy watching him from just a few feet away for a minute or so before he alights from the ledge and starts swimming around, looking for a new place to land.
We continue our trek on the inbound leg and a few minutes later we arrive back to the anchor. I have 1,550 p.s.i of air remaining which is still a little less than my buddy. We communicate our gas quantities and begin to explore in the vicinity of the anchor line, under-ledge and on-top, for a while. While there we see other divers from the boat swim past us and we all wave to one another and smile.
As I get to less than 1,000 p.s.i, I advise my buddy that we need to make our way back the short distance to the anchor. We do so, and I give the signal to begin our surface procedure, which he acknowledges. Using the anchor line again as a reference, I note the time and we begin to kick to initiate upward motion. We monitor our ascent on our gauges, being careful to stay in control of our velocity. We use our equipment to let air escape in small bites as we ascend. The decreasing outside pressure allows air that we have trapped in our Buoyancy Control Devices to expand, increasing our positive buoyancy so manually releasing it keeps us ascending slowly. We ascend over the next minute or so, stopping when we get to fifteen feet.
There we pause, very finely adjust our buoyancy back to neutral, and we stay hanging nearly motionless for three minutes. We have carefully planned our dive and executed it within recreational limits, but this stop is a precautionary practice to well extend our safety margin above the possibility of a decompression injury. We keep an eye on the surface and we listen for boat traffic overhead.
At the end of the safety stop, my buddy and I confirm that our computers have cleared the stop, and he signals to resume the ascent. I return the signal in agreement. We slowly cover the last fifteen feet, taking twenty seconds or more to reach the surface, turning in full circles to keep the area clear. Color is returning to normal and I can see the underside of our boat as we make the last few feet to the dive’s completion.
We breech the surface, and my buddy and I both give the crew the ‘okay’ signal. We fill our BCDs with air, now they act as life preservers, holding us effortlessly on the surface. The sun is still bright but a small rain squall has opened up less than a mile away, and I can smell the freshwater as I float with little more than my head and shoulders above the surface, with seawater on my lips. I set the bezel on my watch to provide a convenient measure of the surface interval that has just begun.
We swim back to the stern and one-at-a-time we climb back aboard. We secure our dive kits, and we talk excitably about the dive as we swap over to new tanks and start counting the minutes until we can repeat the process, at another nearby site. We record the basic dive data we will need to complete our dive logs later, and we get some water to stay hydrated.
As the rest of the passengers board at the end of their dives, we all share our experiences from Table Top, and invariably the talk ends up with sea stories—how this dive measures up against past excursions around the world, what we have seen before and what we have just now seen for the first time. There is plenty of envy to go around.
