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!

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.

The Night a Lobster Tried to Kill Me

Those of you who know me personally have probably heard this story.  Either way, in the interest of being jolly and having a good laugh I'll tell it here for those who haven't heard it.  

One of the things that my old dive partner, Donna, and I used to love doing was going hunting for lobster during Southern California's lobster season.  It's something you can't do any longer as they've closed the season in recent years due to over fishing.  There was a time though where on any given night, you could pack up your dive lights, throw your gear in the trunk and go out for a nice long swim in the dark with an option to bring back some extremely fresh dinner.

Now, most Americans think that lobsters are slow.  That's because many of us only see them in tanks at seafood restaurants, however if those same animals are in the open ocean it's a different story.  That tail that everyone loves to eat is actually one giant muscle and when it contracts, a lobster zooms out of sight sometimes faster than you can follow.  If you don't believe me, check out this video showing a lobster swimming away from the clutches of a diver.

Now what you see in that video is exactly what Donna and I used to do.  The whole process of hunting lobsters involves being deceptive and quick.  First you sneak up on it by shining your light away from its eyes but near enough that you can still see what it's doing.  If you shine your lights directly on a lobster around here, nine times out of ten it will bolt right away.  However if it thinks you're looking somewhere else it may stick around.  

Then, once you get close enough to it, you have to very quickly grab it and the trick is you have to pin its tail down so it can't contract that muscle and shoot away.  It takes some practice to get it down but once you do, you find you can catch them almost every time.  When Donna and I would go out, we both had measuring devices on our lights so we could easily grab a lobster, check its size with one hand and then either bag it or let it go with the other.  

That's exactly what we were doing the night a lobster tried to kill me.  See, we were diving off the southern end of Laguna Beach in an area with a lot of small rocks and grass.  It was a good night.  The water was clear and there was a bright moon.  As usual, we had the whole place to ourselves.  As I recall it was December or January so most people were scared away by the cold.  We'd happened on a few lobsters but all of them had been undersized so we released them.  

As we came up on the next patch of grass, Donna spotted one standing stock still and trying not to grab our attention.  She maneuvered close to it and quickly got hold of it.  Once she had it secure, she dropped to her knees on the bottom and got the measuring device on it to check the size.  I had come up to the right of her and let myself settle to the bottom on the sand.  She looked up at me, shook her head "no" to tell me it was too small and then released it as she turned to go look for more. 

As it shot away, it hit me...

directly in the balls. 

The immediate urge to spit out my regulator and scream was thwarted only by my jaw clenching in pain.  Tears came to my eyes.  My stomach clenched up in agony.  Meanwhile, Donna was moving on.  There I was doubled over thirty feet below the surface and she was looking for more lobster.  She hadn't seen any of it.

In the end, I caught up with her and we continued the hunt but came up empty-handed.  Looking back on it all, I can't really do anything but laugh about it.  Score one for little guy, right?  However, I'd kill to see a video of it.  I'm sure it would have been a YouTube sensation.

If you're looking for something that's more fun than being hit in the genitals by a wild animal, you should check out my book The Wash.  In fact, there's a scene where someone gets hit in the nuts with a frying pan.  I know you were wondering how I was going to tie this post back to my book.  I've got mad skills.

Southern California Vol. 2 - Ancient Chinese Explorers

There may be nothing I love more than hearing about an odd discovery or a weird mystery that either hasn't been explained yet or has turned accepted facts upside down.  There have been plenty of times that I've used those as jumping off points for a story.  More often than not though, I just love to think about them and wonder just how much we don't know about the stuff we think we know.

One of my favorites comes from my adopted home state of California and it happened to be discovered less than an hour away from where I live.  It also involves diving, which is always a big draw for me.  

Back in 1975, a couple of guys who ran a scuba equipment shop were diving off Palos Verdes.  The area is a beautiful place to dive.  There is plenty of reef available to find lobster and abalone which these two gentlemen were doing at the time.  Instead of finding dinner though, they found one of these.

Now, obviously Mother Nature doesn't usually make donut shaped rocks and she definitely doesn't make them over 300 pounds each.  The two men got one of the rocks to the surface and back to their shop and over the course of a few weeks of diving found many more.  It was a pretty strange phenomena and as word of it got around in the diving community it was eventually brought to the attention of Professor James Moriarty III at the University of San Diego.  He and an associate Larry Pierson studied the rocks and determined something groundbreaking.  

They were approximately two thousand years old and were part of a shipwreck.  That's right!  Somewhere around the time of Christ a large man-made sailing vessel had cozied up to the shoreline near Palos Verdes and gotten a little too close to the reef.

This was a major find, mostly because the accepted history up to that point was that no ancient civilization from another continent had ever set foot in what is now Southern California.  In fact, the commonly accepted theory was that the Spanish were the first non-native people to explore this area of North America and that was only about 500 years ago.  

So who were these ancient sailing explorers?  A lengthy study of the stones revealed they were anchors and ballast and that the sandstone they were made from originated from Southern China.  

History books still don't recognize that Chinese explorers visited California centuries before the Spanish but there are other clues that point to that being the case.  Aside from these stone anchors and others discovered along the coastline, there have been rock carvings of Chinese origin discovered in Nevada and even a small idol with Chinese characters uncovered in Colorado. 

Fascinating, huh?  

It gets better although this next part is heavily disputed and should be read with an open mind.  Twenty years before the anchors were discovered, a well traveled attorney named Henriette Mertz wrote a book called Pale Ink: Two Ancient Records of Chinese Exploration in America.  

In it, she dug into the writings of Chinese explorers who documented their visits to a mysterious land called Fu Shang.  The texts are extremely old.  One is from 500 AD and the other from 2200 BC.  Mertz drew some interesting parallels between their descriptions and major landmarks in the western United States. Now, be aware that Mertz made some mistakes in her research, mostly by misidentifying some texts and making a few assumptions when she probably should have let the facts speak for themselves. 

However, if you just look at the facts presented, she makes a strong case.  For one, she converted the old Chinese units of measures into miles and when she did, she found that they indeed would have placed the Chinese explorers in California. She also pointed out descriptions of landmarks that sound very much like Mount Shasta and the Grand Canyon among others.

We may never end up knowing for sure who came to California originally and perhaps recorded history will always stick with the Spanish being the first explorers, but it sure is fun to think about there being a hidden history behind the accepted one.

If you're looking for other fun stories, check out my author page over at Amazon.  There you'll find my book The Wash and a couple of other items.

Enjoy! 

The Day I Found The Dead Man

First of all, this is a true story.  I have a witness in my dive partner Donna Sievers.  For a few years, Donna and I would meet up at some point around Laguna Beach, CA every other Friday (conditions permitting).  We were diehards.  We'd walk to a place where we could check the waves, make our decision whether to go out and then suit up and get in.  If we actually made it to the location by 7:00, we were usually in the water by 7:30.  

I've made almost 100 dives in my life.  Over 80 of them were with Donna.  She was the best dive partner I've ever had and I'm only speaking in the past tense because she abandoned me and moved to Hawaii.  There she posts dive pictures and photos of spectacular sunsets on Facebook in an attempt to make me jealous.  

It works, but I digress.

When I say we met every other Friday, I mean it.  It didn't have to be a sunny day or even a warm day.  We did as many winter dives as we did summer ones, maybe even more.  The Pacific is cold anyway so there were actually days when getting in the water felt better than being out of it.  

The day we found the dead man, it was overcast as in the picture above.  There was a fog that wouldn't burn off until later that day and our official photographer, Debbie Sullivan, wished us a fun dive while she hung back on the shore drinking coffee and patiently waiting for us to get back.  We were at Crescent Bay and conditions were just about perfect to make a dive on my favorite location in Laguna, Deadman's Reef.

The picture above is a 3D rendering of the reef that lies below the surface.  Deadman's Reef is a large patch of rock that juts up from the bottom and comes about ten feet or so from breaking the surface.  On the side closest to shore, the depth is around 30 - 40 feet depending on the tide.  As you head around the back side you'll find yourself in 40 - 50 feet of water and there's a good chance you'll see big animals like seals and sea lions as well as colorful small ones like the Spanish Shawl Nudibranchs who loved one particular section of rock.  

As you can see though, it's a bit of a haul to get out to Deadman's. When we first started diving there I asked about where the name came from and I was told it was because boat traffic in the area had caused a death or two from divers who'd surfaced in the wrong place at the wrong time. In my experience there, I never saw a lot of boat traffic, but when I dove there and had to surface for some reason, it was something that stuck in my head.  

Donna and I had swimming out to Deadman's Reef down to a science though.  We would hug the protected reef area as we swam on the surface.  Then we'd align ourselves with a certain house on one of the cliffs and kick straight out until we were about 150 yards or more from the shore.  Then we'd drop down and be within easy reach of Deadman's without using a lot of air.  That method also kept us out of any potential boat path for the most part.  

Usually, I would bring my underwater camera with me on almost every dive.  There came a point though when I decided not to any longer.  I found I was spending more time fooling with my camera than enjoying the dive and on this particular day, I left it at home. So of course, this would be the day that we saw something I'll never forget.

Donna and I began our dive by circling the base of the reef. The visibility wasn't the best.  Like I said, I don't have any photos from under the surface that day, but here's one from a different dive that shows how murky the water can be here on what we call a "good day".  As I remember it, the day we saw the dead man was about like this.

If you're lucky you get about thirty feet of visibility.  It takes some getting used to for those that are more familiar with diving in the Caribbean or somewhere the water is pristine.  You spend a lot of time looking around wondering just what may be out beyond your sight line.  

We had spent about forty minutes on the reef and had gone around the base once when Donna suddenly pointed to our right.  At first my brain couldn't process what I was seeing.  It wasn't a nudibranch but it was colored a weird black and aqua.  Slowly my eyes adjusted and I realized it was a hand.  A gloved hand was sitting immobile and raised just a foot or so off the bottom of the ocean floor.  The hair on my arms stood up under my neoprene wetsuit and a crawling fear climbed into my stomach.

What had we just stumbled on? Did someone do a solo dive out here and get in a jam?  

Donna and I swam closer and then I made out an air tank and feet with fins attached.

It was definitely a body and there were no air bubbles rising to the surface.  Whoever this guy was, he was dead.  Or was he?  I started thinking back to my rescue training and wondered if we could get him to the surface and administer rescue breaths.  Maybe he'd only just now succumbed to whatever it was.  

That's when I saw the coffin.  That's right.   A coffin.  

What the hell was this? A weird mafia hit?  Did someone get rid of an enemy here at my favorite dive spot?  

Wait a minute.  That coffin looked a little thin to be holding a body.  And the air tank was actually fused into the lid.

It was at that point that I realized what I was looking at was a piece of underwater art.  As soon as I got home, I sketched what I'd seen.  Here's what I drew.  Apologies for not being much of an artist.

I can't express the relief that flooded through my body. As we examined it closer, we found the fins were strapped on with metal stirrups and the gloves were simply fastened to the sides of the concrete coffin.  I immediately began mentally kicking myself for leaving my camera behind.

After that dive we had a string of weekends where the conditions weren't good enough to dive at Deadman's.  The next time we went out, I brought my camera but the coffin had already been overtaken by kelp and anemones.   You could barely even make out the shape.  The ocean claims things very quickly around here.

Still, I'm glad that I got to see the dead man in pristine condition.  Sure it scared me enough that I almost soiled my wetsuit, but it's something I'll never forget.

If you are in the mood for something scarier than a story about an art installation on a California reef, why not check out my book The Wash?   Or maybe my short story A Debt to the Dead?  You can find links to both on my author page at Amazon.  

Until next time, have a safe and happy Halloween!

The Voice of the Beehive

"It's weird what goes through your mind in such a foreign situation. Here I am, as far away from my everyday life as possible, literally thousands of miles away from almost everyone I know and submerged in the ocean. Speech communication with any other human being is impossible, so it's pretty much just you and your thoughts. My thoughts and I aren't always on speaking terms, so it can be kind of tough to be stuck with no one but your inner monologue to talk to. My mind drifts around from a laser focus for sharks to wondering what I could have/should have done differently in life and back about a thousand times every time I'm in the cage. It was kind of therapeutic and certainly more helpful than going to an actual therapist was. I may still be a disaster as a human being, but at least now I have an insane story to tell." - Will Mason


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."

You know, 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 guages, 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.

Sharks or the lack thereof...

Here's the question. Your wife asks you, "So what do you want for your 40th birthday? You can do whatever you want. Just name it."


Do you tell her about your fantasy involving a midget, one pound of powdered rhino horn and her dressed as Wonder Woman singing Oingo Boingo's "It's Just Another Day"?

The answer is no. Thirteen years of marraige have not prepared her for that revelation and another thirteen probably won't either. Instead, you tell her about the second thing that pops into your head... as long as it doesn't involve midgets, powdered rhino horn or Wonder Woman.

For me, it was, "I want to dive with Great White sharks!"

The look of subtle worry was instantly more gratifying than the look of disgust the other option would have elicited and after a quick look to see if death by stupidity was covered on our life insurance policies, arrangements were made.

That was back in April which left six and a half months between laying down the deposit and actually climbing aboard the boat. Six and a half months of anticipation. I almost didn't make it. The thought of climbing into that cage was so exhilarating that it lit me up like a firecracker. It was six and a half months of wanting to go "NOW".

So, a little over a week ago, I finally climbed into that cage. Did I see sharks?

Yes, I saw a shark.

Did I get a picture of the shark?

No. However I regret nothing... except maybe not buying my wife a Wonder Woman costume while in San Francisco. That would have been the coolest.



Though you may think from the first part of this post that I'm all about drunkeness and insanity, I'm not. In fact, I'm a mild mannered family man. That's why the first part of the trip was spent with up in Clearlake (about 3 hours north of San Francisco) with my wife, daughter, sister and parents. Here's Karen and I at the Coast Guard station in Sausalito.

I actually succeeded in not thinking about the dive at all during this part of the vacation even though my sister, Kelly, constantly talked about it (she was going also). I think the copious amounts of wine and beer helped my cause and believe me, you can't be in the middle of the Napa and Sonoma valleys without partaking in some wine and beer.

Either way, the laid back part of the trip was officially over on October 15th, when we headed back down to San Francisco to pick up Will Mason. We found him standing outside the Hotel Boheme looking suspiciously like a tourist. Sure, he was all suave and casual in his trendy japanese jersey, but holding onto a gigantic friggin' suitcase in the middle of the sidewalk sends out an "I'm not a local" vibe like you wouldn't believe. He threw it in the Prius and we were off to find my sister who had disappeared in the direction of Pier 39.


Feel free to insert any jokes you'd like about my sister, Piers, sailors, etc. at this point. She would expect it and likely appreciate the opportunity to one-up you. I'll be glad to forward all comments her way.

We found her down by the harbor seals and grabbed a bite to eat before doing some sight-seeing. If you haven't seen the Penny Arcade down by the S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien, you really should. Lots of cool machines from the 1920s can still be found there. My favorite was The Opium Den which featured skeletons, demons and a dragon that slowly popped out from doors surrounding puppets smoking hookahs. There's just nothing like getting your daily dose of morality via an animated puppet show. Sure beats the sock puppet sex-ed class I got when I was in 3rd grade. I've never looked at knee-high basketball socks the same way since.

Here's a shot of Will corrupting my daughter by letting her look at an Adults Only peepshow.

It was showing women of the 1920s exposing their bloomers.

GASP!

Eventually, I kissed my wife and daughter goodbye and they headed back to the safety of Clearlake while Will, Kelly and I started thinking about sharks. Actually, that's a lie. Kelly went to the hotel and went to sleep. Will and I hit a bar called Vesuvio's (next to City Lights bookstore) and met up with a friend of mine from Boston named Mike. By complete coincidence, he also happened to be visiting the area so we had to share a few beers and discuss important matters, like movies and Tom Waits albums. After a few, we decided it would be a great idea to get our pictures taken in front of Larry Flynt's Hustler Club. Our train of thought was a tad clouded no doubt.


The conversation went something like this:

Will: You know, Larry Flynt's Hustler Club is right around the corner from here.

Cary: Holy shit! We should get a picture taken there.

Mike: Sounds good to me.

Fifteen minutes later, Mike was on his way back home and Will and I were in the car headed back to the hotel:

Will: What if that's the last picture taken of us before we're eaten.

Cary: Crap. Karen will want to kill me and we didn't even go inside!

Many conversations along these lines happened over the next 12 hours. This is the kind of logic that comes about when you combine a cheap buzz with emminent shark doom. Upon seeing this photo, Karen turned to me and said, "I know you didn't go in because you still have money in your wallet."

That's what I love about my wife. Logic rules all.

In any case, after a night of restlessness, Will, Kelly and I all headed down to the pier at Emeryville (outside of Oakland) and boarded the Superfish. Here's Will and I by the cage at 5:30 a.m.



While it was early, we were pretty pumped as was everyone coming on board. At this point, we were just hours away from becoming bait. The ride out to the Farallons is about 3 hours from Emeryville. They sit 26 miles out from the Golden Gate bridge, however the currents are horrendous. This is a shot of the coast near San Francisco as we headed out to sea.



This was a relatively calm day so we were lucky, but we lost a few people (including some divers) to seasickness. More on that later. However I do want to relate a story that had Will, Kelly and I shaking our heads in disbelief on the way out to the islands. In the days when lighthouse keepers were still on the island, one keeper, his wife and two kids made the trip from the Farallons to San Francisco in the dead of winter, at night... in a rowboat. The older kid was sick and with no radio to call for help and weeks before a supply ship would arrive, they felt they had no other choice.

I can't be bothered to walk down the hill to the grocery store most days. Can you imagine rowing a boat in rough seas for 26 miles? Add to it that 26 miles only gets you to the cliffs. There was no Golden Gate Bridge at the time so it's more like close to 30 before you hit a pier. It boggles my mind that they all survived the trip (the sick kid died a few days later in the hospital).

Now that I've succeeded in brightening up this entry, let's talk about the islands themselves. They came into sight about 9:00. The island on the far left is called Saddle Rock. The big peak you see in the middle is Southeast Farallon and the round rock you see on the right hand side is actually a separate island called Sugarloaf. This is some of the most inhospitable land imaginable.



The Farallons are really part of a mountain range that broke off millions of years ago and are gradually moving toward Alaska (about 1 inch per year). In the 1800's a lighthouse was established out here to help ships avoid being caught in "The Devil's Teeth" as the islands were nicknamed. It's automated now but you can still see the original structure on top of the peak in the picture below. One of the best stories about the building of the lighthouse is that after it was initially built, they realized it was the wrong size for the lens and had to demolish it and start over.

As Will pointed out, "I'm pretty sure someone lost their job over that."



These islands are about as rough a place as you can possibly be and on top of that, they have a long history of violence and agression, not just toward the animals but between the people exploiting them also. In fact, during the Gold Rush that thrust San Francisco into being more than just a roadstop on the California coast, actual gunplay broke out on these islands between rival factions warring over the equivalent of chicken eggs. It's like being at this place automatically short circuits your common sense. I can't blame that myself, because I wanted to go diving with Great Whites long before I ever heard of the Farallons, but being there didn't cause me any reservations either.

Around the southern tip of the island you can get a peak at two killer looking caves. On the other side of the island is an amazing arch but we never got around there for a clear picture. On that side of the island, the rollers were worse and with so many people about to lose their breakfast, Captain Mick wisely decided to remain on the eastern side.



In the old days, supply ships would have to come out and bring food for the keeper and his family since you can't grow anything edible on the island. That's still the case today. There are only about 6 - 9 people on the island at any one time and all of them work for the U.S. Forestry Service. No one else is allowed on shore without express permission from the government. The islands are the main breeding grounds for a number of birds (including endangered Murres) and also sea lions and elephant seals. For the people on the island, this is no picnic, however all but one of them are unpaid volunteers. That's right, people actually volunteer to live and work here.



Here's a picture of the boat launch. As you can see, there's no sandy beach around here. The only way off the island is either by helicopter or by lowering a boat by crane. If conditions are poor (which is all too common) that's just not possible.

We anchored between Saddle Rock and the east landing on Southeast Farallon. This is an area that had been a hotspot for sea lion kills recently. Which brings me to the subject of chumming. At the Farallons, chumming doesn't work. The reason is that mature Great Whites make a switch in diet when they get to be over a certain size. That switch means that they begin eating elephant seals and sea lions 100% of the time. It's like the Atkins Diet from hell. In fact, it's because the shark has become so big that it needs to eat enough fat to get the energy it needs to continue swimming and hunting. The only things with that much fat are seals and sea lions... and Will but he's slimming down.

Anyway, they can tell the difference between mammal blood and fish blood so chumming is pointless. What you have to do is look for a fresh sea lion kill and get your boat and cage in that area to see sharks. If that's not possible, then you have to park in a good location and employ your decoys in hopes of drawing one in. That's what happened with us. With no fresh kills around we picked a promising spot, the crew put the cage in the water and it was time to suit up.



The trick to getting in the cage was simple. You sit on the lower step with your feet on that "ladder" connecting the cage to the platform. The crew drapes about 30 pounds of weight around your shoulders in a special harness (not a BC vest like in scuba, just a bunch of webbed straps with lead weights). You pop a regulator in your mouth and then you crawl feet first out to the cage opening, spin around and drop in.



It sounds simple, but the boat was being hit all day by some good-sized rollers. Since the cage was connected, that meant everything shifted and rocked, even underwater. That seasickness I mentioned earlier? Yeah, it took out five of the nine divers on board including my sister. She only lasted for part of one session before popping up and hurling. She said she was so ill, she just surfaced from her position in the center back of the cage and started vomiting. She'd been at it about 45 seconds when she finally heard the divemaster yelling at her to either get back in the cage or back in the boat because she was completely exposed and throwing out an interesting profile to any whites swimming below.

Speaking of profiles, here's a picture of the decoys.



They're kind of hard to make out, but they are both seal profiles. These were tossed out and reeled in occasionally as groups of sea lions departed from shore or headed back in from the open ocean. There are probably over a thousand sea lions here so this was happening a lot.

Back to the cage. When I jumped in the water, it finally hit me that I was not in my element. I have always enjoyed that feeling (whether it be culture shock living in Japan or deciding to move to California on a whim), however this is the only time in my life that I can remember thinking, "Should I really be doing this?"

There are three big reasons for this. First, the visibility was only about five to six feet. That's about one third the size of the sharks we were looking for so by the time you were going to see one, it was going to be nibbling on your ear. Secondly, I've dove in cold water before but this was 54 degrees of smack you in the face cold. Finally, the cage was rocking hard! Big rollers were moving it all over and while I don't have any problem with motion sickness ever, it was just hard to keep all your limbs inside the cage at first.

That's something I thought may actually be important to do considering what was swimming below us. Which brings up something else I should mention. When the cage is rocking and sharks are outside, how exactly does one hold steady without wrapping your fingers around the bars and exposing them to the sharks? Well, I improvised and tried to hold my hands flat against the corners when possible. If not, I squeezed my knuckles around the inside of the bars. Others didn't seem to be so worried. My favorite was a fellow diver who stuck his entire torso out of the cage and rested his arms on the "viewing window". It took him about 15 seconds to realize what he was doing and he pulled himself in very quickly.

Anyway, back to the cage. I've jumped in and stabilized myself and I can't see a damn thing. I decided to take a picture of the back of the boat when I got my wits about me because I figured no one was going to believe how bad this visibility was. Here's what that first picture looks like:



Remember, the back of the boat is only about five feet from my camera at this point and there are two propellers under there. I dare you to find them in that picture. A couple of hours later conditions cleared up some and I took another one. Here it is for comparison.



As you can see, the chances of my getting a picture of a shark, even in comparably good visibility, was pretty slim unless it came right up and posed for me. Unfortunately, that never happened. It didn't stop Will from posing though.



All of these horrible conditions did lead to one powerfully good thing in our favor. So many people declined to go back in the water that I got to spend almost a full three of the five hours we were out there in the cage. Will was with me for most of that time and that's why we were the only two people who actually did see a shark.


So here's the story.


The decoy had been going by repeatedly with no luck at all. You can see it in the picture above. Will and I were on our very last turn in the cage when both of us saw a large shape move slowly under my side of the cage. It was about 10 - 12 feet below us, dark and had a conical snout so there was no mistake about it, but she was too far away to make out details. She swam from the direction of the boat out past us and we followed her until she disappeared from sight. Then a moment later, she came back, this time moving past Will’s side of the cage. I surfaced and yelled to the guys on the boat that we had one below us and they immediately started working the decoy hard trying to get her to come up closer.

It never worked though. She made one more pass a little deeper than before, this time moving again from the boat side of the cage to the open ocean. I stayed down another 45 minutes waiting for her but she just wasn’t interested. I keep calling it a she, but I’m not sure of the sex because we never saw the underside of her. I just figure if she wasn't interested in checking me out, she's probably a female.

(insert rimshot here)

Will and I estimated that she was between 12 – 15 feet long which is actually small for that area. Still, I can say I’ve seen my first Great White and I did it off the Farallons, something relatively few people get to do. In fact, here's a picture of me after seeing the shark.



Other than that, we saw about 50 Sea Nettle jellies. These were between 4 – 6 feet long and passed directly below our cage throughout the day.



It's hard to judge scale in these pictures but these were about 12 feet below us. We also saw humpback whales completely breaching and crashing down in the waters beyond Southeast Farallon. We saw porpoise, a ton of sea lions, some gray whales and some good beer on the ride back.



All in all, it was a great time and we’re already talking about doing another trip only this time to Guadalupe where it's all but guaranteed you'll dive with more than one Great White.


Of course, that may have to wait for two reasons.

1. money.

2. Bigfoot expedition.

More on that one some other time.