A diver learns how to fly

How I almost drowned before turning into Seal Team 6

One of the many things I wasn’t allowed to do during my relationship was diving. After we were divorced, I had to try it.

This was written a few years ago. As usual, there’s more to the diving story that I’ll tell over time…

Yesterday I learned how to fly.

That is, yesterday I became a real diver.

I had four dives. For my first dive I was out of air after 30 minutes. Pathetic, and about the longest I've ever managed to stay under water. I always am the first to surface, sometimes long before anyone else. Yet my afternoon dives both went for an hour, with air to spare. How did I double my time underwater from one dive to another?

It didn't start out well. The first dive of the day has always been crap for me, especially the first five minutes. I did a "giant stride" off the boat into the water, but I'd forgotten to inflate my vest a bit, so I was going under and having control problems right away. In the middle of that, one of my fins came off. Crap. If I didn't grab it fast, the guide would have to go hunting for it at the bottom. I dove under and managed to grab it, then struggled to get it on. If the fin had come off now, was it going to come off randomly during the dive? Shit shit shit.

"Here we go again," my brain was saying. Somehow when it comes to diving I'm always the incompetent fuck-up from minute one.

The guide told me to swim on my back toward the group at the front of the boat. Since I hadn't inflated the vest, this was a bit problematic as I wasn't really floating (I don't float naturally, and especially not with an unusually large steel tank on my back, which I chose to have extra oxygen available). And when on your back, you can't see where you are headed, so the guide kept having to correct my direction.

Finally I reached my guide, Mike, panicked and stressed and breathing heavily. The exact wrong combination for diving. Mike is a Russian-born guy with body tattoos all over and not an ounce of fat who had already chided me for leaving a McDonald's bag on the bumper of a trailer, and he could have been a jerk in that moment. I've had that before, instructors yelling at me to try and talk sense into me. I expected it now. But he took a different approach.

"Calm down," he said. "Stop moving so much. Everything is okay. You are going to be okay. You have oxygen in the tank, it's not going anywhere. You'll be able to breathe. Nothing bad is going to happen."

Later he told me that in that moment he was sure I was about to quit the dive on him.

But he'd shown me some humanity, he showed me he was on my side. I calmed down, and agreed to start descending. This is the important part, because in the moment of panic it feels like descending will make things worse, but in reality nothing is worse than being on the surface. As soon as you are under water, everything gets better.

The rest of the dive was my usual stuff. Trouble maintaining neutral buoyancy, flailing around, kicking up dirt on the bottom, the amateur stuff...but the thing I really enjoyed was a small "lava tube" that we travelled through. For the first time as a diver I was in an enclosed space under water (non-certified divers are not allowed to do this), and it was amazing. In this tube lived a huge lobster perched on a shelf. I was on a three day lobster-hunting trip (the one where I fucked up my ear last year) and in the entire time only one lobster was encountered, and nothing close to this. On the way out of the tube I needed to go under an overhang, and I banged my air tanks on it. Dammit.

All through I was "panic breathing" -- worrying that there'd be not enough air, so sucking in everything I could, exhaling a bit, then sucking in more air. This is how I've always breathed while diving. It burns oxygen like crazy. Much as I'd try to change that, it was hard wired.

As a result, 30 minutes and I had to stop. Typical.

Next dive was at "Cathedral 1", one of two sites with these large lava constructions with blue light filtering through holes in the lava. Mike briefed us thoroughly in advance about this, as once inside it's important that you are able to get out. The usual way out is "the shotgun", a hole where the tide surges in and out. You have to approach from the side, then grab onto the lava/coral, and let the surge pull you out through the hole, like a bullet (thus "the shotgun"). He told us how to approach the hole and what to do, and said he'd test it first to make sure it was safe; if not he'd take us out another way.

He also told us we'd experience a lot of back and forth of tides on this dive, and we should "do what the fish do" and just go with them, not try to fight them. Eventually we'd get to where we'd need to be. It was odd looking down at my fellows divers and watching us all swaying three feet one way, then three feet the other. We'd become part of the natural process.

When we entered the Cathedral, I was in awe. It looked exactly like it does in sexy photos, with shafts of "God rays" filtering down through the holes to make spotlights on the floor, except I was here, floating in 3D space, moving through it. Incredible.

I've noticed that what excites me about diving is different than the typical dive guide, at least in Hawaii. Guides in Hawaii are obsessed with spotting rare fish, eels, etc, even after years and thousands of dives. They talk constantly about what creatures they spotted in the last dive, and get really excited when they see something unusual. I get that, and I get a little from it, but for the most part I'd be just as happy to see that on a nature documentary. Seeing it in person doesn't do a lot for me.

But the architecture of the sea...that's a different matter. Put me in a tube or tunnel or "cathedral" and let me float through like an astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey and I'm in awe. It triggers special feelings that I can't achieve on land or by looking at a picture. It makes me want to do this thing.

Mike took a couple of pictures of me in the Cathedral (I was paying him extra to get photos), but I was having trouble staying buoyant, as usual, constantly adding air to my vest then dumping it in an attempt to stabilize. Mike signaled something but I didn't understand; finally he wrote on his slate, "Use your lungs". I nodded, okay, I remember reading about that in training. You could inflate your lungs to rise, and deflate them to fall, but it never seemed to do much. Whatever.

So I was lowest on oxygen (of course), so Mike was going to have me exit first through the Shotgun. He positioned himself in front of the hole and I followed the previous instructions and approached along the left wall, grabbing onto the rocks to ready myself. For a moment everything seemed good, then immense surges started blasting through the hole, toward us. Mike was thrown back several feet. I hung onto the rocks with everything I had as a mass of oxygen bubbles streamed over and past me. Then the surge reversed and I was slammed into the lava wall as the water pushed back through the hole. Mike, the tough Russian guide who usually says, "Ah it'll be fine, let's do this", immediately called it off. This was way too dangerous. I'm glad this wasn't one of my first dives, because I'm sure I would have totally panicked. It was freaking scary. But here I was confident in Mike so I rolled with it. I actually enjoyed feeling the motions of the sea.

He guided me to another hole on the side, then took a picture of me as I exited.

I was out of oxygen after 40 minutes. A nice increase on the previous dive, and I think they longest I'd ever been under, but nothing special.

That was to be my last dive of the day. On the way back to the landing spot, we debriefed on the animals we'd seen in the two dives, with Mike and the other guide pointing them out in a picture book and telling us details about each animal. Okay, nice, but I really wanted to talk diving technique. I listened politely, but I really wanted to know, how could I improve?

After the animal talk was done, as if sensing my desire, Mike turned to me and spent several minutes talking to me about technique. He said some things that changed everything. He talked to me about buoyancy, and how to use my breath to control it. He explained that once I had the right amount of air in my vest, I shouldn't need to change it, I could inhale and exhale to control my level. That I should stay flat and not vertical, and that I needed to stop moving all the time. The instinct is to constantly kick and move your arms and try to control yourself that way, but he told me movement should be minimal and rare, to preserve oxygen. I should never need to move my arms.

"Reach a zen state," he said, "or think of being super-high...whichever works for you. Try to do nothing. Just be there. Then you'll get to where you need to be."

I took it to heart. Then as we reached the dock, Captain Raquel told us there were openings on their next trip, scheduled to leave in 45 minutes, and we'd get a discount if we signed up. It turned out I had the time, so in spite of being disappointed in my performance so far, in spite of feeling like nothing was going to change, I signed up. Mike looked at me and said, "After this morning, you are going to be a Ninja now!"

Yeah, right. They suggested I go to a nearby spot for lunch, which was beautiful.

I wondered if I was making a mistake, that my ear problem would come back with this many dives, that I'd get two more times of fucking up and cementing my fate as a mediocre diver.

Our next dive was supposed to be a wreck site, which I was looking forward to, but when we arrived on the spot it turned out the underwater visibility sucked, so the Captain decided to go to another location 45 minutes away. I was disappointed, but this turned out to be the best thing for me.

The next site was kind of boring, at least on this day. We were in a nature preserve, going to see a "cleaning station", where little fish hang out and clean up bigger fish when they come by. Often you get to see some really cool fish being cleaned, but this time the cleaners were there but they had no customers. So we did lots of swimming without much to see.

Which turned out to be perfect for me. The approach of this dive company, Extended Horizons, is to take things slow and really appreciate the views and the wildlife. They don't rush. So I got some 10 minutes where we were just swimming toward the destination to put Mike's lessons into practice. After getting set up initially, I decided not to adjust the air in my vest at all. I'd put this breathing thing to the test. As we swam along, I clasped my hands in front of me as I'd seen the best guides do, and I worked on descending and ascending using nothing but my breath. To descend I'd exhale—turns out there's a lot more to exhale than you'd think!—to ascend I'd inhale, sometimes several gasps at a time.

How cow, it worked!

I could look at a rock below me and be determined to reach it, and by exhaling more air than I thought I could possibly have, I'd descend. I'd look at an outcropping a few feet above me, and I'd gulp in a few gasps of air, exhaling very very slowly, and I'd rise up and pass over the outcropping, without any movement of my arms.

I was flying.

As my brain internalized the algorithms, I could look at a spot and just end up there, as if doing nothing. This reminded me of the turtles I saw in my first dives the previous year in Kuaui—floating effortlessly to their destination without the slightest movement of their legs. They were doing the same thing I was now doing.

In the process of playing with this, a flip switched in my brain. I wasn't "panic breathing" now because I wasn't breathing. That is, it's a nice side effect of breathing that you get to live, but for me now the actual purpose of using my lungs was to move where I wanted to move. Once that became the game, I stopped worrying about getting air...my use of breath was strictly tactical. It turns out the lungs are indeed the ultimate Buoyancy Control Device. No more gasping big gulps of air to survive...now it was small gulps followed by long exhales to get me where I wanted to go.

Mike ended the dive at 57 minutes, and I had a third of my oxygen left. I could have gone another 20-30 minutes. Incredible!

In the boat, Mike said, "What happened? You were Seal Team 6 out there!"

The next dive was more of the same, though with some very rare sightings, including an eel fully out of the coral, sliding along like a snake. The guides had never seen an eel like this before.

I was zen. I didn't flail. I never moved my arms, and barely moved my legs. I breathed, and I flew to where I wanted to go.

This time we ended it at 61 minutes.

On the boat on the way back to the dock, Mike said, "I can't believe where you got to after this morning. Ninja! Seal Team 6!"

Captain Raquel said even from her observation from the boat that my progress was "incredible".

I'm a diver now.

I can fly.