I am writing this from the safety of my room so don’t be alarmed – I decided to do a night dive while here in the Andaman Islands, and it was the most incredible experience ever!! Everyone I’ve told seems to be very worried that going in the ocean at night is very dangerous because it is when the sharks feed, but the people I went with have been diving for the past 8+ years, and they do a couple of night dives per week, and they are still alive with no shark-bite related injuries. I knew that if I left the Andamans without doing it, I would regret it forever. So I decided to suck it up and just do it. We hadn’t seen any sharks yet, and I hoped my good luck would continue, plus if I was scared there was always my cute dive instructor to rescue me ☺
As it turns out, diving at night is a lot like diving in the day, in that once you get down there, you are so enthralled by the magic that is going on around you that you are not even thinking about sharks. It is a more slow-paced dive than a daytime dive because you are mostly looking for macro-life, and things often hide from the beam of your flashlight so you have to move more slowly. It is so incredibly dark under the water, and at this time it was new moon, so there was literally no light coming from above the water. The visibility is low and all around you is darkness and the weird noises of the ocean; if diving during the day is like being in a different world, then night diving is like being in an alternate universe. When you take your flashlight and shine it upwards, you realize that dancing all around you are little under-water aliens! There are hundreds and thousands of tiny little planktons, all different species, with translucent bodies and little glowing orbs floating inside them. Some have tails like sperm, some look like centipedes, some with rotating propellers on their tails – there are so many varieties you are constantly in awe of this little thing swimming around in the spotlight. If you catch them in your fingers they can fragment as a defense mechanism and then the pieces go on living. Shining your flashlights on coral also bring out the colors in a new way – pinks, purples, reds, orange, blue – they were so beautiful! The fish were mostly sleeping, or they would see the light and hide, but we did see some amazing lobsters and shrimp, and I had to try my best not to think about how delicious they would be grilled and dipped in garlic butter.
We swam for about an hour looking at all these amazing creatures, and at the end of the dive we swam over to the anchor line, grabbed a hold, and turned off our flashlights. All around us the sea was lit up by the glow of a thousand tiny lights – the zoo plankton emit a glow as another form of self defense, to warn other plankton that there might be danger near (in this case in the form of our large, moving bodies), which is a phenomenon called bioluminescence. All around us the plankton were glowing like a universe of stars, and there we were suspended in complete darkness and the only way to tell where someone else was floating was to look for their outline in the bioluminescence around them lighting up whenever they moved. It was like magic – the weightlessness that water gives you made you feel as if you were floating in outerspace, with the stars swirling around you with every move you make. It was breathtaking, so startlingly beautiful. I couldn’t believe that my life had led me here, to see this, to do this; how so many turns of events set into motion months ago had brought me here to this place to be hanging in the darkness, illuminated by life. When we finally ascended and broke the surface, the water was dark, glassy, calm and cold. We got into the boat shivering and had chai and cookies (one of my favorite diving rituals, but even better at night because you are so cold). As the boat started to move and we made our way back to the island, the water was lit up by the bioluminescence created by the movement of the boat through the water and sprayed back to trail us in lights. From the bow of the boat to our wake, the water sprayed back behind us in one continuous sparkling stream, undulating with the ripples of water created by the rhythm of the motor. I don’t even think I can adequately describe how beautiful it was to watch, just perfectly mesmerizing; sitting on the edge of the boat watching the glow dissipate in the water behind us, I felt alive in a new way, like I had been woken up from a long sleep. I knew that at that moment, I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing, moving in quiet darkness through the effervescent water.
No comments:
Post a Comment