Neptune

I went on my first night dive a short while back. I accompanied the wife with Kris to use the facilities at Sandals, instead of my usual dive haunt at Jack Tar, one of the other resorts in town.

It was a nice set up, really. Their nine meter boat was new last season, and is equipped special as a dive boat. Two benches run down the sides of the deck, with little cups mounted to the back of the seats to hold your tank in place while you assemble your equipment and suit up. Actual steps, lowered into the sea, make it much easier than a ladder to exit the water. Once back on board, there are fresh water showers and a trip to seats on the flying bridge to take in the sights of Jamaica’s Second City as you motor back to the pier.

If only the captain could get the thing to plane. Instead, we plowed through the water, nose way high, stern way low, engines straining to move the water aside to allow us passage. He must not know any better. I imagine that someone pointed to the boat and said, “drive this and don’t hit anything”. In that, he seems to do a fine job.

Besides the Captain, we had two divemasters with us, plus a newlywed couple from Montana. The newlyweds were newly certified, and were diving two or three times a day (aside: freaks). Victor was scheduled to accompany us as well, but his wife chickened out and yanked him at the last minute.

The most exciting part of a night dive is entering the water, black as pitch, with neither sight nor indication as to what may lie beneath. You make a giant stride of faith, and trust that the water will be deep and the sharks asleep. I had been on this site a couple of times before, and being there after dark was like strolling through a familiar city in the wee hours before dawn, with few lights and no traffic, when only the insomniacs are moving about. In this case, the squirrelfish, all big-eyed and orange and less skittish than usual.

We use flashlights, of course, and with seven of them blazing, plus the small beacons tied to our rigs, visibility was not dissimilar to a daytime dive after a storm has churned up the bottom of the sea and polluted the view with all sorts of crud and particulates. The lights easily picked up the red eyes of shrimps, the translucent bodies of fry, and the glint of another diver’s flipper just before it tries to unseat your regulator. When we turned off the hand lights, it was not quite cave dark, but it was dark enough to see the previously unseen individual glows from untold numbers of tiny phosphorescent critters.

Since the wife is currently off island working on the Hart campaign, I did not hesitate to partake in another night dive this last week. For amusement’s sake, if naught else.

This time, we (Hank, Rita, and I) went through Jack Tar, using Divemaster Dwayne from the Holiday Inn. The dive boat at Jack Tar is about the same length as the Sandals boat, and they are both boats, but any further resemblance stops there.

Wilbert, the Rasta captain, told me once that it used to be part of the Royal Navy in the 1930's, as some patrol boat or something. It is open decked, with the only cover coming from a retrofitted canvas shade. There are no lights, running or otherwise, so we use our dive lights to ready our equipment. There is no head or running water, only the sea and a bucket of slightly briny tap water. The boat is sometimes loud, on this night crowded, and generally full of character.

With us were two Cockneyed Brits, who usually dive in dry suits in the northern lochs. Dwayne’s wife, a Canadian and marine biologist for the Montego Bay Marine Park, came with us, as did the Marine Park ranger and his girlfriend (du jour), a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to the Marine Park. The purpose of this dive was to witness coral spawning.

Watch enough Discovery Channel and I am sure that you will see this. The camera is really close to the coral; all is still, when --poof-- the coral spew their gametes. This rises as a milky cloud and flows to the appropriate receptors. There is little romance, just raw sexual activity, just like on the Playboy channel, only the spawning coral are more traditionally educational, … and somewhat smaller breasted.

Unfortunately, we must have come at a bad time, as we failed to see the coral spawn (perhaps they had a haddock).

Actually, I was not looking very hard. Sure, coral is interesting and all, but it usually just sits there, and there is always the hope when you are diving that there will be something bigger, more colorful, more tentacled, or more active just over the next rise. So I would scan the coral for a time, but then be drawn by whatever was just out of sight.

There is much out of sight, of course, because it is a night dive, and even with lights, visibility is still limited to five to ten meters, less to the side of the beam. So you tend to concentrate on what is immediately before you - bright red prawn, sponge, sexually inactive coral, sleeping jackknife fish, sponge, sexually inactive coral, tiny undulating red starfish (ruby brittle star), sponge, sexually inactive coral, purple mouth moray (a strikingly purple eel) - back up, hover, try to get as close a look as possible while staying clear of those very sharp teeth - sponge, sexually inactive coral,....

In one sandy area, while contemplating sea urchin trails, a small movement beneath the sand captured my attention. I moved in slowly and could only see two small plumes, four centimeters apart, blowing little puffs of sand into the sea. I waved my hand close to the disturbance to remove the cover. As the cloud moved up and away, I saw part of an unidentifiable (and ultimately unidentified) creature who immediately worked to rebury itself.

All I could see, despite numerous attempts, was part of a round head, and while I exposed a spherical head segment some fifteen centimeters across, the diameter of the sphere could have been twice that or more. This head had a visible mouth as straight as a string across the entire exposed portion, almost muppetlike, with two nostrils of sorts, the source of the plumes. Each time I exposed it, it reburied itself.

I could not tell if it was a crustacean or just a really ugly fish, and had no idea how much of it was still buried. For all I know, it could have been a monstrous sea creature, twenty meters in length, with huge gnashing teeth, able to sink our small boat with a casual flick of the tail, ravenous and hungry for divers.

I pestered it for five minutes. If it was a giant sea monster, at least it could show some restraint. Most everyone except the Brits saw the thing, and no-one, not even the ranger or biologist, could identify it.
The dive was shallow, just nine to twelve meters, so we got to spend over an hour at the bottom, surrounded by the familiar and the strange, intruding in the bedchambers of polyps.

It was fascination at five fathoms and, with apologies to Chris Cornell, a dive in the superunknown.