Another Diving Story Involving Cary Practically Soiling Himself

Time for another quick diving story.  This one is about another one of those moments when I almost soiled my wetsuit.  It ended up being something I’ve never experienced since but would love to again.

I’ve written about Catalina Island in these pages before.  It’s a fantastic place to dive and one of my favorite spots in Southern California.  It’s also a place where the conditions can change drastically from day to day.  I’ve been underwater and seen the visibility go from 30 – 40 feet to less than 10 feet  in the space of a single dive.  I’ve also been under the surface and come up to find waves much larger than when I went in and wind that made getting out difficult at best. 

Catalina Island has recently had its share of Great White sightings.  I’ve never seen one while diving there, but there are more than a few reports about them being sighted along the coves around the island.  In a Discovery Channel special on the return of Great Whites to Southern California they actually got footage of one cruising the bottom while one of the show “hosts” was swimming on the surface next to one of the cliffs.

Keep that in mind as you read this story.  One day, a friend and I went diving in Catalina and it ended up being the clearest that we’ve ever seen it there.  Visibility was literally 80 feet or more.  It was beyond amazing!  We swam along the bottom, through the kelp beds and then as things got deeper, we decided to come up to the surface and get our bearings.  We ascended up to the 15 foot mark and hovered while we waited for our bodies to decompress a bit. 

As we sat there, we noticed a giant school of bait fish at the same level we were at.  They were about 20 – 30 feet away and just hovering there like us.  The light from above was reflecting off them and it was kind of like watching a giant ball of squirming tinfoil flashing in front of us.  It was incredible.

All of a sudden, every single one of them left!

In fact, the school split in two, with one half shooting off in one direction and the other half going the opposite direction. 

The time between that happening and what happened next was less than one second but it was one of those instances in my life where time slowed to a stop.  In my head, I knew two things.  First, the only reason those fish would scatter like that was if there was danger.
 

The second thing I realized was that they could swim way faster than me.

My thoughts went to the obvious.  I immediately looked for sharks.  Later, when we were on the surface, my diving partner would confirm that he thought something similar.  Instead of coming from below though, the threat was coming from above and it was awesome.  

 

Like a jet fighter, a streamlined shape came streaking through the water leaving a trail of bubbles behind it.  It took a moment for my brain to register what I was seeing.  It was a cormorant.  It had hit the water at full speed trying to pick off one of those flashing, silvery fish but they’d been too fast for him.  We watched as it made a graceful arc and headed back to the surface.  That’s when we realized we were surfacing also.  We’d been caught up in the excitement so much; we’d failed to maintain our neutral buoyancy.

The closest I’ve seen online to what we actually saw that day can be found about :28 seconds into the video above.  It was incredible.  I’ve been on almost 100 dives and one of the greatest things I ever experienced came from the sky.  Go figure. 

This is the part of the blog where I usually say something about my book The Wash and how you should pick it up.  I don't see any reason to change that strategy now.  You can find it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  You can also find a handful of other things at my Amazon Author's page.

Until next time, enjoy!

Southern California Vol. 15: The Wild Buffalo of Catalina Island

I’ve written about Catalina Island a few times on this blog.  Mostly I’ve mentioned it when talking about diving as it’s the home of some of the most beautiful diving spots around.  However, it’s also home to something kind of weird.

A herd of buffalo.

That’s right, there’s a herd of wild buffalo on a small island out in the Pacific Ocean. 

 

Now I know what you’re asking yourself.  How did they get there?  Were they grazing when a massive earthquake separated the island from the mainland and they’ve just existed all these years?  Perhaps they were picked up by aliens and deposited in the wrong place!

No, there’s a much simpler and obvious reason they’re on the island. 

Hollywood.

In 1924, a Hollywood production company sent a film crew to Catalina Island to film a silent version of Zane Grey’s western The Vanishing American.  It was to be directed by George B. Seitz whose other film credits include The Black Secret and The Iron Claw.  It was to star Richard Dix who later would be nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in Cimarron.  The costar was Lois Wilson who lived to age 93 and appeared in over 150 films.

Apparently no expense was to be spared because the budget allowed for the transport of a small herd of bison to the island for use in filming.  Once production wrapped though, the crew found it impossible to round up the herd to get them back to the mainland.  After some frustration, the decision was made to just leave them to fend for themselves.  Over the years they thrived.  At one point the herd was 600 strong but now it’s maintained at about 150 individuals.  They are periodically moved to the mainland and in some cases even transported to the Great Plains where their ancestors originated.

Here’s the kicker to this story.  If you watch The Vanishing American, can you guess what you don’t see?

Buffalo.

Every scene that featured the buffalo was eventually cut from the final version of the film.  According to Jim Watson, a columnist for the Catalina Islander Newspaper, there’s not even any footage from the Catalina portion of the shoot in the final film at all.

The good news in all this is that the bison are actually good for the island instead of being a detriment like most invasive species.

There are tours that will take you to the islands’ interior and allow you to get a look at the bison for yourself.  I highly recommend you get out to Catalina at some point and spend the money to take a tour. It’s a fantastic place to visit whether you’re under water or above it.

Patience and the Hunt for the Giant Black Sea Bass

Time for another quick diving story and this one comes with a lesson of sorts.  First, some background though.  In my experience, divers can be broken down into a couple of groups and finding the one you fit into can be particularly hard if you’re like me.  One group of divers is in it for the thrill.  These folks tend to try to go deeper, swim farther and look for the “big stuff”.  The other group (and the one I tend to belong to) is the opposite.  They’d rather do a dive that’s twice as long in water half as deep and look for all the creatures hanging out in the nooks and crannies of the reef. 

 

My old diving partner, Donna, was exactly like me.  We were happy as hell to just wander the reef and look for octopus, nudibranchs, eels, etc.  Occasionally though, we’d dive with someone else who would be exactly the opposite and while you’d think that since we outnumbered them they’d dive to our standards, usually they just did their own thing.

Which brings me to my story.  Catalina Island sits off the coast of Southern California and offers some fantastic dive sites.  There’s a whole area cordoned off as a dive park and nature preserve.  It’s a wonderful place to dive and at certain times of year, you get an added treat of seeing giant black sea bass.  These fish are really, really big and they’re protected so seeing them is a real treat.  They tend to hang out in various places around the island so it’s not guaranteed that you’ll see them in the dive park, but they’re there more often than not.

Enter my friend Barry.  Here’s a guy who is an instructor and understands the importance of patience when diving.  He’s also very much a member of the “go deeper, go faster” group.  Barry was actually staying on Catalina Island for a week when Donna and I went over to dive.  The three of us met up to dive in the preserve and he dropped a bit of a bombshell on us.

As many times as he’d gone diving in Catalina, he’d never seen the black sea bass. 

Donna and I had seen them a few times so we decided to head over to the side of the park where they were most commonly sighted.  No sooner than we’d hit the bottom and all given the “okay” sign, Barry took off toward the far end of the park.  At first, Donna and I tried to keep up, but soon we decided to just let him go.  Eventually, we thought, he would realize we weren’t there and would come back.

Right about that time, as Barry swam further and further out of view, a large shape appeared out of the blue.  Yep, it was a giant black sea bass.  It hovered near us for a while, obviously curious about what we were doing.  I was able to snap a picture (below) that isn’t the best in the world but it’s the only one I have.  We hung out with it for about five minutes or more when it slowly swam away.

Of course, when the sea bass left, Barry came back.  He motioned to us that he hadn’t seen anything.  Donna and I didn’t know how to tell him what we’d just seen so we motioned the shape of the fish, stretched our hands out to show the size and then pointed in the direction it swam.  Barry’s eyes went wide.  He immediately started swimming that way, although slower than he’d swam before.  He was easily ten yards in front of us when Donna tugged on my fin.  I looked back and she pointed above us.

Right there was the sea bass, still just hanging out.  It kept pace with Donna and I while Barry continued to swim ahead.  We watched it for another two or three minutes until it finally turned around and swam off.  A minute or two later, Barry turned around and came back to us motioning that he was done.  He’d struck out while we’d seen the sea bass twice.  For most of that second sighting, Barry had been within 20 yards of it but never bothered to turn around to look.

There’s a moral to this story.  I think you can figure it out, but in case you need help this is it in a nutshell.

Take the time to enjoy the journey, whether you’re diving, hiking or just getting through life.  It will almost always pay off.

If you're looking for something else that pays off, check out my novel The Wash, available in ebook and physical form through Amazon.  It's guaranteed to be a satisfying journey whether you rush through it or take your time.

Diving, Zen and How to Tame the Beehive

Another quick post about diving and this time also about meditation and the power of the mind.  Years ago, I did a cage dive with my friend Will Mason.  We got dangled over the edge of a boat with some aluminum bars between us and some pretty big sharks.  It’s something I’ll remember for the rest of my life and when I got back, I wrote a long blog post that actually served as the very first entry in this whole blog thing.  Will wrote about it also and when I read his account, I realized something about myself and diving that I hadn’t realized before.  It was that diving was the closest thing to zen meditation that I've ever successfully experienced.

Since then, diving has become more than a hobby to me.  When I get to go (which is rarely these days), it's become an almost religious experience.  However, since my diving opportunities are not  what they once were, that opportunity to "reset" my overactive brain can sometimes pose a problem.  I've occasionally let stress get the better of me, so I began looking for ways to replicate what I experience underwater without having to strap on fifty pounds of gear.

One of the most successful things I've found is listening to ambient noise or white sound collages.  A good friend of mine named Eric San Juan (whose books on Hitchcock films, The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad are a must for any film fan)happens to be an excellent musician in his own right.  He makes albums of this kind of music under the name M2 and his latest release, Coming Up For Air, is available for download free on Bandcamp.  The cover image (below) is actually a photo I took from about forty feet down while diving on Farnsworth Bank on the backside of Catalina Island.

This music is not for everyone, but Coming Up For Air is the most accessible of Eric's albums in my opinion.  I’ll venture to say that many people may not get it because M2's music lacks the normal verse/chorus/verse structure and it’s entirely instrumental.  At the same time, it does have structure and the builds, crescendos and receding waves of sound remind me of bands like Godspeed You, Black Emperor or early Mogwai.  

In the interest of exposing more people to what Eric does, here’s a link to his bandcamp page.  I find that kicking back and listening to this album, puts me in the same mindset I had years ago in that shark cage.

Also, below is the original post about my headspace during shark dive so you don't have to go looking for it.  I hope you enjoy both.

Personally, I haven’t been diving long, but I’ve embraced it like few other things in my life. I took to it immediately and until now, I’ve never given much thought to why that is. Reading Will's excellent take on the shark dive over at sharkfinhat made me pause and think.

Two things in particular struck me. First was that he actually seriously considered we may die and secondly, that he felt the experience of being underwater was therapeutic.

Throughout my life, I've been fortunate to have something I like to think of as good intuition. Sometimes it's a feeling, sometimes it’s an actual voice in my head but either way, it's not something I get all the time. It’s not something I can count on as always being there but when it is, I heed it. It's served me well in these first 40 years.

Unlike “Spidey-sense”, this isn’t a feeling of impending danger (although I’ve gotten that a couple of times). Many times, it's more like a reassurance. It's a feeling that says, "Yeah, this is weird, but you're going to be just fine."

 I don't want this to come off as some macho posturing because anyone who knows me knows, I'm not "that guy", but from the moment I stepped onto the boat on the shark dive, I knew we weren't going to be in any danger, ever.

It wasn't like I felt that way thanks to any safety lectures or anything (because God knows, James left out some pretty important shit in the 'safety lecture' we got… for instance, how to avoid sharks if they get in the cage). Still, there was never a doubt about our safety in my mind. I KNEW we were going to be just fine. Call it overconfidence. Call it stupidity. No matter what you call it, though, I want to reiterate one thing.

I didn't think we'd be fine... I KNEW that we would be fine.

I've had that feeling of, "no matter what, I'll walk away from this" more than a few times throughout my life. It's a good feeling to have and it's one that has come to me in the weirdest and most stressful of situations. A good example is back in 1990, I got lost on a day hike in the Angeles National Forest and had to free climb 300 feet in the dark while wearing Vans slip-ons to regain the trail. I never once felt uncertain about what I had to do or questioned whether I’d make it to the top. It was a certainty in my mind that I would get there and I was right.

In the last two years, that feeling has hit me underwater more often than not.

So after reading Will's post and realizing that I definitely had that "Everything's Fine" feeling all day, I started asking myself why. I mean, it's not like we weren't in some of the most dangerous waters on the West Coast. Every minute spent in that cage was spent looking for sharks. Giant, seal-eating, "the things movies are made about" sharks, no less.

After some whiskey and serious reflection, the best answer I can come up with is this.

From my earliest memories, my brain has been like a beehive full of trivial information. Song lyrics, work deadlines, movie quotes, the magna carta, the fact that Playboy’s Miss July 1977 didn't like selfish people… any and all of these things swirl through my head on a minute by minute basis. I'm the guy people call up at work and ask, "Who was it that ran against Clinton in 1996?" or "Who was the producer on Def Leppard's Pyromania album?" or "Who was the cinematographer on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?"

(the answers are Sen. Bob Dole, Robert "Mutt" Lange and Daniel Pearl, respectively)

And personally, I don't mind it. I've never wanted to stop it. It's like my head plays a constant game of referencing and cross-referencing the world as I experience it and that's something I revel in. However, every time I’ve had that feeling of "Everything is fine", it’s been in a situation where the beehive has stopped buzzing; when my attention and focus became laser sharp.

The one place where my brain never strays is underwater. It's such an alien environment that it demands my attention. When I'm down there, I have one job to do: enjoy a safe dive. That takes up so much of my concentration, that I tend to be at peace most when I'm beneath the surface. The pressures of deadlines, mortgage payments, school costs and everything else can't follow me down below sea level, where my focus is on my breathing, my gauges, the environment around me and my dive buddy. Many times, my stress can't even make it past the beach. I don't think about the meetings I have on Monday. I don't think about the negotiations I'm behind on at work. I don't think about how I'm going to find a way to surprise Karen for her birthday or how I’m going to juggle my schedule so Lily can get to piano class. It's like from the moment my feet hit the surf, I begin to achieve a Zen-like state of mind that I don't get anywhere else. For the length of my dive, all that exists is that moment, that place, and instead of a beehive in my head, I get a very calm, rational series of observations, choices and lists of options, none of which involve pop culture, politics or the preferences of 1970s Playmates.

The best dive I ever had was one that was for all intents and purposes, a wash out. I accompanied a friend who was teaching a student. The two of us went out and set the dive float. Then he went back to shore for his student. While I was there, the float pulled loose from the sandy bottom and I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon on the bottom, holding it in place while the two of them went off to do their underwater examinations.

I was alone except for the four purple sand dollars half buried in front of me.

I heard the clicking of dolphins. I heard the sound of my breathing and those breaths breaking the surface 20 feet above. I felt the push and pull of the tide and heard the waves pounding the shore 100 yards away. I heard the creaks of all manner of creatures climbing the reef nearby, and I'm pretty sure they heard me as I just lay there on the bottom and breathed.

I wasn't diving. I was 'being'… I was simply existing… and everything was going to be perfectly fine. It wasn't narcosis. I didn't feel euphoric. I was focused, but I was relaxed.

Being in that cage with Will, I felt the same way. It was cold as hell. The cage was rolling. The sharks were out there and my nerves were crackling, but it was okay. The beehive was quiet and there was no doubt within it that everything was fine.

I've never really thought about it before now, but for me, it's that time underwater, where my brain and I can be selfishly alone, that I cherish. I don’t get to dive as often as I'd like, but I have no doubt that when I do, it makes me a better father, husband and person. So yeah, Will’s right.

That’s way better than going to an actual therapist… sharks or no sharks.