4.14.10

A long post about SCUBA Diving.

Yesterday was Katie and my first excursion to Playa Giron to go diving and it was INCREDIBLE. I had been impressed with the corals just on the other side of the wall surrounding Havana city, but the sceneries below the waves at Punto Perdiz and by Cuevo de Los Peces were mind-blowing.
Katie and I got up early and drove with Eduardo (our chofe) to CIM where we met our diving instructors. We packed up the van full of air and wetsuits and set off...only to get a completely flat tire thirty minutes away. After searching for a tire-fixer (a ponchero) we replaced it with a spare but returned to the city to secure another spare. Admittedly, I was impatient to be back on the road; we had been hoping to fit two dives into the day and we seemed to be wasting much of the morning. It was past nine by the time we truly left the city. But, as promised, Eduardo drove quickly and we arrived just before lunch time. When we got off the main road we began to notice more and more large crabs by the road. A kilometer later, it seemed to get pretty bad. Eduardo had to jerk the van out of the way of the crustaceans. We tried honking at them to get them out of the way, but soon determined crabs have a poor sense of hearing. There were several casualties. Katie had driven in the region the week before and told us how it had been much worse for her, she had taken many crab lives and felt very bad about it. On the bright side, we didn’t seem to make a dent in their population numbers. When we arrived at our dive site we were told to watch out for the crabs- ‘what crabs?’ I joked. They crawled around and over our stuff, waving at us in a mean warning. I could not have been more excited to leave them behind and see the creatures in the inviting blue water beyond them.
We suited up, jumped in and swam out a bit. It was difficult to wait. The patch reefs came all the way to the rocky shoreline. Close to shore we saw beautiful parrot fish males and were surrounded by sturgeon fish (I think!). Finally, we were ready to dive. I have had some problems with equalizing my ears so we agreed to take an especially slow ascent but still planned to go down about 20 meters. Down we went, I followed our instructor Coco, and Katie and Orlando weren’t far behind us. We swam through some of the mixed -reef patches towards the terrace edge. It was spectacular! Abruptly the plate seemed to drop away to deeper than I could see. Open Ocean was before us, and a colorful forest behind us. We swam along the edge. It is impossible to take it all in. it is such a strange situation. Normally I hate heights, but here, there is no falling. You float on one plane that is controllable - in a way it is like flying. But if you look up to the surface you might have the same sensation. We dove down to 22 meters and from there the surface is a far away ripple of light. It is best to look forward however (isn’t that a truism for all of life…).
Coco got my attention and pointed ahead. There was a large fish (will look up English name when there is internet). It could have been three feet long (though evidently everything looks bigger underwater). It is a species that swims into the reef to be cleaned of parasites by other fish that live there. And just as cool, beyond the fish there was a submerged ship that we swam right up to. It is hard to know if the boat was used in the Bay of Pigs invasion (because some of those boats did sink) or if was placed there as a diving attraction. It felt straight out of a movie though, and I kept one eye open for a treasure chest just in case.
We surfaced to find another flat tire (the other side of the van) so we hooked up an extra air tank and temporarily filled the flat.
In the middle of our late lunch we joked around (mostly about very serious things like nitrogen asphyxiation giving the feeling of drunkenness) and talked about the plan for the next dive. In the middle of the lunch we spotted a Tocororo! The national bird of Cuba! I saw it first and felt very proud when a passing tour guide made a grand motion of pointing it out to her tour, pretending to be the original spotter.
After lunch we went to a different diving spot. Eduardo, who dove with us the first time, left to repair the leaky tire. As unbelievable as the first dive was, the second location was arguably better. I had a moment of unease when the clouds passed overhead, creating a giant shadow and sudden darkening in the water. I thought it might be something wrong with my vision… but in a few seconds the sun reappeared and I realized it was quite a natural thing. There was a shipwreck at this site as well. We swam over and I stood on top of the side railing. I was really surprised by what I didn’t see: there weren’t many anemones, I saw NO sea stars, and very few plain colored fish. We did see a sea cucumber, but it was not like the one in the touch tank in the children’s museum at home, no, this one was roughly a foot long. It felt pretty much the same.
The one creature I don’t like sharing the water with is the jellyfish. For some reason, perhaps because I have no experience distinguishing stinging jellies with non-stinging ones, jellyfish scare me a bit. We saw a few small ones but no stinging types. When you know they can’t sting and you look at them more closely, they are almost like snowflakes in intricacy. One minute I was examining the workings of the jellyfish that floated suspended above a beautiful parrotfish that explored some colorful coral below, and the next, I heard Coco signaling for our attention. I turned to see (to my astonishment) a sea turtle swimming not far off. We swam in the same direction as the turtle for a little while until Coco signaled that we were approaching or time limit. Time to ascend. ‘I’m not sure I believe in reincarnation’, I thought, as I followed Coco up a short distance to the sky and sand and sea breeze, ‘but if it does work that way, I don’t want to be a crab, but I certainly wouldn’t mind being a fish’.
We got out and waited for Eduardo to return with the van and all of our stuff. Katie and I went to the bathroom of our luncheon spot to change. Crabs had crawled into the stall. This, my friends, is how you get crabs from public toilets. It seemed, in fact, that crabs had pretty much taken over the town.
We walked back to the van and piled in. The crab-in-the-road situation had worsened. There was no longer the possibility of swerving out of the way. We let a larger bus pass us and it whipped by, scattering crabs and splattering crabs. It was really pretty gross; Crabs are scavengers that eat dead meat. We created a mass burial and an all-you-can-eat-buffet all at once. Eduardo believed the second flat tire was from hitting the crabs so when the bus in front of us turned to drive a different direction we had to be innovative. Eduardo asked Katie to drive and he and Orlando and Coco hopped out of the car and started walking down the traffic lane, kicking, poking and scaring off the crabs. At some points it was hilarious: there was a crab smack dab in Katie’s path. It was half squished already and Coco approached it with a staff-like-stick and brought it down upon the crab. ‘poor-thing was suffering’ he said. ‘Crunch crunch’, went the van over the dead shells. Eduardo saved one crab by kicking it like a football. We made it through the worst of the crabs and hopped back into the van. Every few kilometers we would debate whether we should get out again, and also joked about how the crabs wanted revenge for their lost relations. They got it in the end. A few bouncy minutes later we were stuck with yet another flat tire. We drove to the Panchero and had the tire repaired. ‘Lots of people coming in today’ he said, ‘Lots of crabs’. Lo and behold- two crab claw fragments were retrieved from our tire. We didn’t get to the hometel until 930 or so; we hadn’t been expecting so much extra-species traffic.