Scuba Diving Down-under

When I was a teenager, quite a long time ago, I was asked by a mate of mine to accompany him to do a scuba diving course, and I thought this would be great. I was unemployed at the time and at least it would keep me occupied and give me some good diversion on the weekends etc. The course was going to cost some $150.00 or so at the time and I thought this was money well invested, so it was set, that week we would start and do the course. Two days training in a back yard pool, some classroom work, and then two open water dives in 30 ft of water. One would think that being in Eastern Australia as we were, and surrounded by beautiful clear beaches and waters , that it would be relatively easy to become a scuba diver, and one wonders how come there weren’t more divers around. Silly me. I underestimated the power of the fuddy duddies on impressionable youths.

The following week I was all reared up to go under water and my mate turns up and tells me somewhat forlornly that he is not going to do it.

“Whaddya mean not gonna do it, it was your idea in the first place!” I blurted out incredulously. And to this he gave lame reasons and he asked me to have a chat with his older more ‘mature’ friend who raised a pile of logistic questions about the usefulness of such a venture underwater. Firstly he made a budget of how much it would cost to do the course as well as time-wise. Fair enough I thought. And then he budgeted for each time we would go diving, and he said, “And it will cost you $50 here and $50 there and have you accounted for the boat, and the car, and the fuel, and where will you go to do the diving.” and as we would say, in post-Seinfeld days, yada yada yada. Anyway, the upshot of this was that he talked my mate out of doing it and I didn’t have the money or the transport to undertake it right then so the whole idea was shelved. I figured, maybe one day I’ll do it, maybe.

Fast forward now many years down the track, and I am an accomplished cab driver and a senior at university. While driving cabs in the evenings we would all stop off at Harry’s Fine Foods for our evening constitutional of meal and chin-wag, as cabbies are wont to do in any age. As it turned out, or as fate would have it, one of our mates there decided to get himself a scuba divers license, and he would tell us about the course and his weekend diving exploits every night during the meal, you know, trying to spark some excitement in us all. By this time of course my desire of ‘some day’, what with the prevailing studies and degrees I was doing, had been relegated to ‘probably never’. Little did I know how events would conspire to take me down, literally.

My long unseen cousin visited us from Italy and it was my delegated job to accompany her on a tour at her request, of the ‘Barriera Corralina’ or Great Barrier Reef as it is more affectionately known off the coast of Queensland. I decided to cut classes on Friday and again on Monday, I had had a good record up till then, and we arranged to go out to Lady Musgrave Island from the port of Bundaberg and have a squiz at the Great Barrier Reef, as you do. We boarded a touristy cruise boat for the trip out to the island which would take some two hours, so you can imagine how far out to sea it was, considering it was moving along at a high rate of knots all the way. The boat was about 75 ft long and we were pretty much packed with tourists from all over the world, so my cousin from Italy didn’t feel so bad, being a non-Aussie there.

Now, being a red-blooded male, and single, at the time, my straight-dar (as opposed to gay-dar) was in fine working order. I perchance to encounter two, not one, but two Dutch backpacker girls and they were wearing reasonably skimpy seasonal clothes around their more than reasonably voluptuous forms. They were University students from Amsterdam also so we chatted about courses and studies, all the while I’m thinking, what a shame we are on a boat with 50 other people. After chatting for an hour or so they tell me that they are going scuba diving out at the island. This arouses my long lost ambition, basically for want of a common thread to assist my winning–on stakes, and I mention that I always wanted to go scuba diving as well, well once anyway. They eye me up and down and nod to each other then one of them, Yolanda I think, well that’s a good Dutch name, she asks, “Do you like to come scuba divink viss us?” So I think, wow, yeh, but I tell em I haven’t got gear or anything, and I am not qualified. To which they reply, “Neiser do ve haff license, ve do de dive viss instructor, but only to 18ft down.” Well, to make a long story short, they cajoled me into paying the $85 to hire the gear and wetsuit and have a short lesson and off I went.

Needless to say my cousin was feeling very neglected at this stage and I told her I was going scuba diving with the two Dutch girls. She was quite miffed at me of course, as she had envisaged a nice cosy stroll along the beach with her cousin whom she hadn’t seem for 15 years or so. Unfortunately my hormones got the better of me and I followed the mating instinct instead and donned a wetsuit and tank. After our short lesson on signals etc we descended to 3 ft and did ‘all-OK’ signs then down to 6ft and so on down to 18ft. The dive was going well and I was totally amazed that it was like being in another world entirely. We swam about together and with those fins on you only had to gently move your feet and you flew along quickly. Man, it was like flying. I held my arms out like Superman and flew over the coral reefs taking in all the bright colors of the polyps and the fish. Dang, the fish ya see when you don’t have a spear gun, but in Australia you’re not allowed to spear fish with a scuba tank, something about being fair or something.

I thought that breathing underwater would be a chore because of the water pressure but it was surprisingly easy, the air is under pressure in the tank and all you do is open your mouth and it flows in and the regulator valve lets it out so Bob’s your uncle, as we say. The dive was 45 minutes of great sightseeing underwater, communing with all the fish and underwater sea life. I wanted to make cucumber sandwiches with the sea cucumber, but the dive master shook his finger at me and said no, actually it’s an animal not a plant, it looked quite edible though. After the excursion underwater we all surfaced and rejoined the others on top. I found my cousin who was positively fuming at this stage as she was lonely from having to explore the coral island by herself. Well what is a single horny guy to do, especially when the straight-dar goes off, it was a choice of cousin or… Anyway, we made up eventually, and the dive club issued us with little certificates as tokens of our first dives. Incidentally, if you were wondering about my outcome with the backpackers, well, that was a bit of a fizzer. When the dive was finished they kind of, dematerialized like, “Enterprise, two to beam up!” and they were gone, I suspect that they were ‘plants’ from the dive club, to lure unsuspecting guys,oh well stiff biccies.

When I arrived back in Brisbane I went straight to Harry’s Fine Foods one night and proudly presented my certificate to my mate Tony, as you do, with a sort of ‘in yer face’ grunt. “There you go Ton’, now you aren’t the only scuba diving cabbie!” He was very gracious and congratulated, and encouraged me to complete the training, and a short time later I had my Open Water license to a depth of 33 ft and we dived together on the Gold Coast, Australia. A few months later I went out on the overnight cruise and completed ten move dives to qualify as an Advanced Open Water diver. Now I can go down to 100 feet, but I tried it at Myrtle Beach and the water was not very clear, what with the melting snow coming down the Gulf Stream making visibility about 1 foot. I can’t wait to try the Caribbean though. Scuba-diving may seem unnatural to some, what with all the gear and precautions we take but it is the greatest feeling of freedom of movement in the environment I have found. I must have flown a few million miles around the world in airplanes, but scuba is the closest I have come to experiencing the freedom of flight.