Here’s a blog-posting I started late on 31 May 2009, fell asleep, and never got around to finishing. I am going to include it nevertheless because I think it conveys a joy:
9:38 PM. The day ends with a final call to prayer broadcasted from the minaret. It has been a day of music. This morning – Sunday – the church bells rang us out to sea. And several times the conversation on the boat returned to the value of having music running through one’s head while diving, as a way of calming and/or focusing one’s attention away from breathing. It’s a tip I’ll try to remember in a situation where I need to think about breathing but fortunately that has not been an issue for me.
Just one week has made a big difference in my diving skills. I am much more deliberate in my actions preparing for the dive and in the water, my navigation skills are getting so much better, and so is my ability to scan the seabed. I have always felt the world drop away from me when I enter the water and I have relished my time underwater but today for the first time I had the time and ease to fall in love with my time in the blue. Working deep (120-150’) on shipwrecks, I was always too constrained by the task at hand and the limited dive time. Until today, this summer, the challenges of learning to survey dive have kept me occupied. And otherwise I have never been able to spare the money to pay for scuba-diving for fun. My only recreational dives have been the two that Faith presented me, at Sharm el-Sheikh in the Red Sea. Those were spectacular in a 4th-of-July-fireworks kind of way. Today stirred my soul. It started with a swim through: a fissure in the seabed-rock large enough for a diver, holes at the top dotted the tunnel with shafts of light, in which the bubbles of the diver in front of me danced. I swam through the deep-water sparkles and followed the lightstream out. From there we traced our way over a rockscape dotted with boulders whose …