I wasn't back from my trip to the Midwest a day before
my friends talked me into scuba diving off the Waianae Coast. Conditions
were not ideal. It was raining, the choppy water made my companions
seasick and I felt sluggish from the five-hour time change. Still, I
really wanted to dive.
Why, I don't know. Oh, of course I wanted to see the
animals.
What I wondered was why, once again, I was going to jump into deep water
with a steel tank on my back and lead weights around my waist. It feels so
wrong.
It's like jumping off a pier carrying a car battery.
I conquer this recurrent fear by not giving myself time to think about it.
I'm usually the first one geared up and first in the water.
A second later, as I'm bobbing on the surface like an inflated pufferfish,
I feel great. Diving is wonderful, I think. And I haven't even seen a fish
yet.
The key to successful diving for me was becoming familiar with my gear and
getting the routine down pat.
But I dive for the exact opposite reason: thrill of the unknown. When I
drop down into that water, I never know what I'm going to see.
This time I saw a huge horned helmet snail, a first for me, nearly covered
with sand.
Helmet snails have large, nobbed shells, pink inside, that are sold here
in roadside stands.
These shells are the only ones big enough in Hawaii to use as a trumpet,
and indeed, helmet shells are what people blow when going for the ambiance
of old Hawaii. Horned helmet shells grow to about 15 inches long.
Helmet snails search for, and eat, heart urchins and sea urchins, whose
spines somehow don't hurt the snail. When a helmet snail finds an urchin,
it knocks the spines off an area, drills a hole through the urchin's shell
and sucks out the urchin's insides.
This explains the purple sea urchin skeletons, called tests, I found in
the area, each bearing a round hole in its side.
Near the helmet snail, an alert diver spotted two scorpionfish sitting
near one another as active as two brown rocks. Scorpionfish can be hard to
spot even when looking directly at them and the pantomimes divers use in
pointing them out are always the same.
"Look!," one will gesture. "Where?" shrugs the other. "Right there!"
motions the first. "WHERE?" gestures the second.
This goes on until finally the second diver sees the well-camouflaged
fish. And like those trick posters, it's then impossible not to see the
fish.
Scorpionfish is a family name that includes lionfish and the creatures
many people call stonefish.
Stonefish have a nasty reputation in the South Pacific for killing people
who step on them, but this reputation is greatly exaggerated.
Hawaii has no stonefish. The fish here that look like stones are called
Titan and devil scorpionfish.
The stings from these fishes' spines hurt a lot but are not medically
dangerous.
The helmet snail and scorpionfish were good finds but what made my dive
was the 3-foot-long trumpetfish that sidled up to me, apparently using me
for camouflage. The fish positioned its face next to mine and hung there.
As I stared eye to eye with this big beautiful creature, I felt thankful
I'd once again made that leap of faith from the boat. Diving will always
be a little scary for me, but I'll always think it's wonderful.
