Today was a stark reminder that diving is a dangerous sport, and that you can just as easily return to the surface dead as you can alive. When you dive, you need to be prepared, you need to go with a buddy and you need to have back ups. Generally your buddy works as your back up. If you dive alone, you are risking all kinds of disaster.
The last dive we did this day had a potentially lethal situation brewing. But we'll talk about that later.. So we had 4 dives planned for this day, I've told you about dive 1, here are the next two dives. Both were reef dives, the first site being called Maaya Thila (thila is maldivian for reef) and Fish Head. Apparently its called fish head because there are so many sharks there that fishermen used to only ever pull fish heads out of the water when fishing (as the sharks would get to them as they were being reeled in).
Our second dive of the day at Maaya Thila was pretty sedate and featured your regular marine life offering including the above lobster and some Octopuses. Interesting side note: the plural of Octopus, is either Octopuses, or Octopodes (derived from greek) or Octopi which derives from the latin rules for pluralisation. All are correct, although Octopodes is the most correct as Octopus originally is a greek word. Then Octopuses and then octopi is considered the least correct. Octopodes sounds the coolest in my opinion though Octopi rolls off the tongue the easiest.. but you know what's even cooler? You know how a group of cows is a herd, or a group of birds is a flock or how a group of fish are a school? Want to know what a group of Octopuses/podes/pi are? No? I'll tell you anyway.. Its a TANGLE. As in .. 'hey, look at that tangle of octopuses.' I think that's a great word and so fitting.
So where is this digression going you ask? No where. All the octopuses we saw were hiding in crevasses and holes so you only saw the top of their heads. lame. sorry about that.
The second dive site showed more promise and interest. After all its named after its most defining feature.. SHARKS DECAPITATING FISH. Everyone was excited for this one. The dive with the sharks the day before was very exciting and everyone was disappointed with the lack of sharks on the first dive. This site had some great geological features, like this ominous tower of coral in the distance...
Or the reef wall which had some very cool overhangs (not pictured) that you could swim under. There was a lot of coral life growing underneath those overhangs, probably the most protected areas of the reef which means they at least survived the great storm of 2004 that killed most coral life in the Maldives. Yes, that happened .. it was a disaster. Truly a natural disaster. Slowly the reefs are growing back, but it takes decades so a lot of the reefs there are still looking like a barren wasteland.
Luckily there are still clown fish to enjoy.. So lets talk about the lethal situation brewing... it all happened on the third dive, the dive at Fish Head. This one (despite the chill tones of the video posted below) was a challenging dive for pretty much everyone on the boat. There were a lot of currents to deal with. One minute you are being pulled along with the current having a jolly time and then all of a sudden you get hit by a new current that you have to fight every centimeter of the way.
This gets tiring pretty quick, and you don't want to let up because the current can always pull you away and into the open ocean where they'll have a hell of a time finding you .. or rather your body (by the time they get to it). That wasn't so much the issue for me, it was more my air consumption. Its easy to forget that air is a finite resource when its in a bottle on your back. I'm no longer the fit young athlete I was in my teenage years so I got tired pretty quick and my air consumption skyrocketed.
This is the tricky thing, because when you run out of air underwater its not like you can take smaller and smaller breaths like its a gradual thing .. no its instant and shocking. You take one breath .. then you take another but it stops dead, no matter how hard you suck on your mouthpiece nothing comes. Then you realise you are still 50ft from the surface and you need a good 10 minutes to surface...
Well that didn't happen, I was way under my limit at which I am supposed to go do the safety stop and surface, so my Dad and I went to do our safety stop .. what is that you ask? .. well no matter what your dive profile was, you always stop at 5 meters for 3 minutes as an added safety measure to help prevent decompression sickness.. which manifests as tiny air bubbles in your blood stream that expand as you surface, blocking arteries, veins and nerves.. They can cause embolisms, aneurisms, paralysis and eventually death .. So yeah, you wanna have that extra safety margin.
So there we float.. one eye on my dive computer, the other on my pressure gauge as I watch it creep closer and closer to Zero. I was getting ready to grab my Dad's spare regulator (always have your back ups) but the clock ticked down and we surfaced before my tank emptied. I came up with about 150psi (10 bar) left. The divers among you will understand how close that is to the margin. Normally you surface with a minimum of 500psi or 50 bar (which is more like 750psi but whatever) left in the tank. This was NOT planned.. and slightly embarrassing that it got that far. We should have surfaced much sooner.
It could have been worse, another diver that surfaced around the same time as us came up with a numb arm... which after he sat down on the boat progressed to being numb all down one side of his body. Remember the paralysis in decompression sickness I was talking about earlier. Yeah.. holy crap. This means a 4 hour sail to the nearest decompression chamber if things really are as they seem - up shit creek without a paddle.
We gave him oxygen and consulted the doctors back on dry land, and after and hour or so his symptoms retreated and he was banned from diving for 48 hours.. which means missing out on 6 dives! That rattled a few folk I tell you!
After all that drama we had one more dive to go. A night dive.. and despite the close calls this afternoon, everyone was excited about this one. Basically the plan is to suspend a huge light over the water from the back of the boat to attract plankton which would in turn attract Manta Rays. We would dive to the bottom under the boat and spend however long the Manta Rays are there watching them swim in loops feeding on the plankton. No guarantees though.
In a reflection of our luck that day the mantas never appeared, though people were still enthralled by the marine life that did make an appearance.
A shark came by to say hello..
And a school of smaller fish also came by in a swirling mass. They weren't saying hello of course more like, 'Hey! Thanks for the free dinner!'. But no Mantas, so we didn't dive. But then, things don't always go to plan.
Check out the previous posts in this series:
1.Maldives Trip - Day 1: The Epic Journey Begins!
2.Maldives Trip - Day 1: The Boat
3.Maldives Trip Day 2 - Looking for Manta Rays
4.Maldives Trip - Day 2 - Shark Encounter
5.Maldives Trip Day 3 - Reef Exploration
!steemitworldmap 4.099383 lat 72.856059 long Maldives Trip Day 3 - Things don't go to plan D3SCR
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