Youngs Around the World

Departing early from Manila, we took a bus south to Batangas and then a bangka or pumpboat (a small wooden boat with bamboo outriggers powered by a recycled automotive engine) to Sabang, a tiny town near Puerto Galera on the island of Mindoro. The island was thickly covered with palm trees and the face of Sabang was a cluster of waterside resorts and restaurants curving around the crescent moon-shaped shore. As the bangka approached the shallows, a group of young boys climbed onto the sides of the boat and asked passengers to throw coins into the water so that they could dive for them. We threw a few and watched the boys excitedly scurry after them.

We checked into the Sabang Inn Dive Resort, a Spanish-inspired villa with spacious sea view rooms, and purchased a diving and accommodation package for four nights. Less than two hours later, we were underwater at a dive site just one hundred meters from the oceanfront resort. The site was impressive for its diversity. Aaron found an octopus hiding in a pipe on the sandy ocean floor and we watched as it changed color from a camouflaging shade of gray to dark red. The Philippines is known for its macro diving, or “muck diving” – scavenger hunts through the otherwise unimpressive sandy sea floor looking for tiny, unusual sea creatures. I prefer pretty coral reefs to sandy bottoms but I had to admit that the octopus was amazing. We explored a beautiful wooden wreck covered in multi-colored algae and teeming with schools of small shimmering fish. It was a great first dive and we were excited about the prospects of the next three days.

The next morning, we lingered over breakfast and then pulled on our dive gear for a 10:30 dive. Aaron was immediately distraught because he had been given a different set of equipment than he’d used on the previous day’s dive and it had definitely seen better days. Usually when you do all of your diving with the same shop, you use the same rental equipment for each dive so that it becomes familiar. To some degree, diving gear is all the same, but getting comfortable with a new set up still takes time. I told him not to panic, that this shop just doesn’t operate that way. “It isn’t ideal”, I said, “but it is what it is.” He was still clearly unhappy about the situation but resolved to dive anyway.

Most of the Sabang dive sites are within a five to seven minute boat ride from the shop by motorboat. We climbed into the small dive boat and sped to our drop point. As our group began to slip into our pre-assembled (by the shop staff) gear, Aaron’s first stage had a malfunction. Our dive master Nilo worked on it for about ten minutes, utilizing a dive knife in place of the tool kit that should have been on board, and finally declared the equipment to be sound. Aaron had been giving me the “I told you so” look throughout the repair process. He slipped into his gear, still shaken from the malfunction. I asked him if he felt comfortable enough with his equipment to go down and he said yes.

On the count of three, we all flipped backwards off the sides of the boat, traded “okay” signals at the surface and began our descent to our maximum depth of 25 meters. As we neared the bottom, Aaron signaled me to check his first stage. At first glance, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary and since you cannot normally communicate beyond hand signals underwater, he could not verbalize his issue. He signaled for me not to worry about it and I assumed that he was fine. Two seconds later, I looked over at Aaron as he was attempting to remove his BCD while hovering a few meters above the ocean bottom in a slight current. Removing your BCD underwater is possible as a last resort to fix a problem but it is certainly not recommended, especially while hovering in 20 meters of water. While the act of hovering, which is controlled by a combination of breathing and the air in your BCD, can seem effortless to an experienced diver, it can prove challenging when you become distracted and/or stressed.

Just as he got his first arm out of the vest, his weight belt came loose and fell to the ocean floor. This was a problem. Without his weight belt, the buoyancy of his wetsuit would propel him toward the surface – a very dangerous scenario at sixty-plus feet. I grabbed his arm to keep him down and he swam down, completely out of his BCD now, to retrieve his weights. With his regulator in his mouth and me holding his BCD, he attempted to reassemble his weight belt while maintaining buoyancy above the coral. As he closed the clasp of his weight belt and reached for his BCD, the clasp came loose again and the weights fell back to the floor. By this time, Nilo had seen our struggle and come over to help. At the same time, another diver in our group eased me back to give Nilo room to work but my wild eyes were glued to my struggling husband. Aaron went for his belt a second time and managed to secure it around his waist. Then, somehow, in the tangled situation, the mouthpiece of his regulator (air source) became dislodged from the regulator itself, causing him to inhale a startling gulp of seawater. When I saw Aaron desperately signal for Nilo’s spare air source, I grabbed my secondary reg and started to kick over but, thankfully, Nilo reacted before I reached them and gave his alternate air source to Aaron. He then helped Aaron back into his BCD and popped his mouthpiece back onto his regulator. Aaron quickly regained his composure but my mind and heart were racing uncontrollably. When I saw my husband under sixty feet of water with no regulator in his mouth, I thought, this is it…this is how quickly my world could implode. One accident or error in judgment, even on the part of my seemingly infallible Rescue Diver, and life as I know it, with all of the associated dreams, simply disappears.

For whatever reason, maybe out of stubbornness or a need to prove his resilience, Aaron chose to continue the dive despite my plea to abort. Naturally, the first thoughts that entered my mind were of the immediate, indisputable discontinuation of my diving career. However, when you are suspended weightlessly in the serenity of the ocean with no sound except that of your own mental rambling, your thoughts become extremely rational and clear. I decided then that, if we are to continue diving, I must also become a Rescue Diver as soon as possible so that I will be properly skilled to rescue my buddy the next time he does something that arrogant and stupid.

During the last forty minutes of the dive, I stuck to Aaron like glue, despite his repeated assurances that he was okay. I would spend three seconds looking at coral and the next three watching Aaron, making sure that he was breathing and staying within two kicks of my clutches. He was still visibly frustrated with his equipment setup, but everything seemed to be fully functional. I could not relax and enjoy the dive site because all that I could think about was getting Aaron back safely to the surface. I know that I drive him a little crazy when I go into Mother Hen mode and, in a beautiful underwater paradise, stare worriedly at him while ignoring the spectacular coral and fascinating variety of fish. I love scuba diving – it has become a true passion and a significant funnel of our fun money – but the reality is that when it comes to guarding the safety of my family, that magical underwater paradise disappears outside the figurative walls of my tunnel vision. For me, there are simply no other fish in the sea.

Aaron’s Footnote: What began in my mind as a seemingly simple, even routine underwater maneuver went terribly wrong in a matter of seconds. Reflecting on and reliving the experience, I realize that I really was in grave danger. The simple problem was that my BCD was connected too low on my tank causing me to keep hitting the back of my head on the first stage at the top of the tank. My equipment was problematic and uncomfortable, but functional. I should have endured the dive and fixed the problem later. Overconfident in my abilities and frustrated with my second rate equipment setup, I attempted to remove my BCD and adjust the tank strap myself. This of course set in motion a series of events which could have ended badly. I’m certainly thankful for our first class dive master Nilo and his help in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. But my wife is an excellent diver and I truly believe that had it just been the two of us on that dive, Tina would have acted quickly to help her foolish husband. Sometimes it takes a close call to remind us that regardless of competence or experience, we’re still fallibly human.

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