Diary of a Dumbass Diver

By Jim Murphy and J E Murphy

The ocean is one of the last remaining wildernesses on our planet. It is also a wilderness where anyone can go. In this wilderness, we find animals that did not evolve along with humankind, and therefore allow a kind of proximity that terrestrial animals have instinctively learned to avoid. This book is about how my love for this wilderness awakened on my very first saltwater dive, and how it continues to grow with every dive I make.

 

This book is for those who love nature, love animals, and love adventure. It is for those who have an interest in the sea, or for those who have an interest in SCUBA diving, either because they are divers, or would like to be divers, or would just like to know what it is like to be a diver.
All the stories in this book are true, but they are not all typical dive stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portraits of Earth Press
• Release date: May 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201598495

Jim Murphy

Jim Murphy has written two Newbery Honor books: An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 (which was also a National Book Award finalist) and The Great Fire. He lives in New Jersey. Visit his Web site at www.jimmurphybooks.com.

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Diary of a Dumbass Diver

by

Jim Murphy

Copyright 2021 by J. E. Murphy

DIARY OF A DUMBASS Diver

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.

PUBLISHED BY PORTRAITS of Earth Press

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Why read this book

PART TRAVELOGUE, PART adventure story—this book is for those who love nature, love animals, and love exploration. It is for those who have an interest in the sea, or for those who have an interest in SCUBA diving, either because they are divers, or would like to be divers, or would just like to know what it is like to be a diver.

All the stories in this book are true, but they are not all typical dive stories, which is why they are in the book. Most dives, while full of wonder, are far from hair raising.

In the places where I have inserted technical explanations, I have done my best to be accurate. However, where this information conflicts with what your instructor tells you, listen to your instructor, or do your own research. Regardless of your source of information, I am not responsible for your safety.

Jim Murphy

Special Thanks

I would like to thank everyone who encouraged me to write this book. I am especially grateful to those who helped me create a finished product. Many thanks to David Henry, Kayte del Real, Terri Bernard, Jim Montgomery, and Carolyn Edwards.

J. E. MURPHY

May, 2021

To Lisa Sparrow

I WANT TO ESPECIALLY thank you, Lisa, for the comment you made about taking you to church.  It reminded me of why I love going into the sea. Not everyone sees it as a church, but to some of us, it is as close to God as we can be. I seldom have writer’s block; I have more ideas for stories than I will ever have time to write, but I have been trying to write this book about diving for several years without ever finishing a single chapter. This was because I knew there was something missing in the telling, but I could not materialize what shaped the void. I was thinking to write about the adventure of diving, and the stupid things I have done while learning to dive, which I am still doing. The intent of the book would be to show the mistakes I have made so that others might not make the same ones. I still plan to do this, as it seems worthwhile, but your comment brought me an epiphany. I realized there was so much more I had to say, and perhaps what now fills that void will be even more important to those who can only read about the sea, but can never go there.

Contents

Copyright 2021 by J. E. Murphy

Why read this book

Special Thanks

To Lisa Sparrow

Lines on a dive boat (a generic drawing)

Diving In

c-1 A Garden of Flowers

c-2 The Crocodile Islands

c-3 Islands of Gold

c-4 Lost in the Land of Darwin

c-5 The Revillagigedo Archipelago

c-6 The Land of Swallows

c-7 The Useful Island

c-8 Islands in the Stream

c-9 Under the Volcano

c-10 Shark Lagoon

c-11 My Saddest Day

Photo of the author by Kayte del Real

Lost in the Deeps

Appendix A - Dangerous Animals

Appendix B – Underwater Photography

Appendix C – Frequently Asked Questions

Appendix D – Understanding Buoyancy

About the Author

Other books by Jim (J E) Murphy

Lines on a dive boat (a generic drawing)

Diagram, shape, rectangle Description automatically generated

Diving In

They say I’ll live on the other side—

That beyond the veil, the heavens hide

As distant fairy dreams from those

Who press the earth with heels and toes

And will not go where an angel goes.

What keeps us from that heaven near

Is various types and kinds of fear –

Fear of what we do not know,

And fear of loss of self-control –

More fearful, we, of yes than no.

Perhaps the fears most fearful be

That there's an end to me and thee.

But as the soul needs to be free,

I put aside my fears and me,

And leap into the fairy sea.

c-1 A Garden of Flowers

THE FLOWER GARDEN BANKS and Stetson Bank are unique in many and various ways.  The dive sites range from 70 to 115 miles from the nearest land, which means they are out in the middle of the deep ocean and out of sight of civilization and its pollutants. Well, that is except for the distant oil rigs, which are everywhere. The bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is approximately 500 feet deep in this vicinity, but the banks themselves sit on gigantic salt domes laid down millions of years ago and which have been pushed up by geologic forces, raising the sea bed on top of them. The banks rise up to within 55 feet of the surface but slope off from there in all directions. At these sites, you can easily dive deeper than you really want to, or even deeper than is survivable.

Divers have not only seen almost every well-known Caribbean fish at these banks, but some varieties of fish are endemic, and found nowhere else. In addition, the Flower Garden Banks have been discovered to be a birthing ground and nursery for the giant oceanic manta ray, Mobula birostris, and possibly for a yet-to-be-verified new species of manta. Where else are you going to see that? On one dive there, I had a juvenile manta come up and nuzzle me—a memory for a lifetime. This youngster had wings about six feet across, but could easily someday grow up to have a wingspan of twenty-three feet and weigh six-thousand pounds. I wonder if she will remember me as fondly as I remember her.

The Flower Garden Banks are covered with acres of hard coral, more abundant hard coral than you can see just about anywhere else in a single dive. It is a beautiful and awesome vision, and one that I take try to see as often as I can. However, Stetson Banks is my favorite place to dive on these trips, and I have often wished to be able to spend an entire dive trip just on that bank. Because it is further north than the Flower Garden Banks, and a couple of degrees cooler, hard coral is scarce and limited to a few species. But the underwater landscape is eerily beautiful.

There is one site at Stetson that looks like a panorama from the old west, rugged but flat, with shear vertical rocks thrusting up around it, while angel fish the size of hubcaps swim surreally across the underwater prairie. These up-thrust rocks are twenty-four million years old, and among the crags, fish and other creatures attempt to hide with varying success. 

The MV Fling is a live-aboard dive boat, which, as far as I know, is the only dive operation that takes people to the Flower Garden and Stetson Banks. Divers cannot book directly with Fling Charters, as they require all bookings to be handled by dive shops.

I love the Fling and have now been on it many times, but it has its idiosyncrasies. It is not a luxury live-aboard. Some people say it is like a dive camp. The cabins typically hold four bunks, and the only one that can be reserved is the one that has an electrical outlet for people with sleep apnea and need a CPAP machine. The boat has three toilets to be shared by divers—two on the main deck near the dining area, and one below decks that is for liquids only. This means lines of people holding toothbrushes can sometimes form in the mornings.

I wrote the poem at the first of this book after my first saltwater dive, which I did on the MV Fling at the Flower Garden Banks in 2006. As it turned out, it was an epic trip, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Being that I was so totally new to diving, I thought everything we did on that trip was normal, and just something SCUBA divers did. So, if I was going to be a SCUBA diver, I just had to buck up and do what needed doing.

My first Flower Garden trip was also my final certification dive to make me an official open-water diver. To become a certified diver, one has to do a couple of dives in open water with a certified instructor. Open water simply means there is nothing overhead to block you from easily reaching the surface. It is the most basic certification for divers, but without it, most dive operations will not let you dive with them for reasons of liability. My first certifying dive was in a freshwater lake, and my second one would have been as well, but my instructor was about to leave on a trip to lead a group of divers on this trip to the Flower Garden Banks. Rather than switch instructors, I asked if I could go on the trip and certify in saltwater. He agreed, and so I conscripted my cousin to be my dive buddy, and the two of us made the drive down to south Texas to board the Fling.

We boarded the boat at Freeport Texas, at about sunset, and as it headed out to sea for its 115-mile overnight journey, we had a snack in the dining room while we listened to the captain explain the rules of the boat. One part of the lecture that I always find fascinating is the segment on seasickness. Essentially, the captain explains where not to vomit, how not to vomit, what to do when you do vomit, what to do when your roommates vomit, why you shouldn’t look at your vomit, and who is responsible for cleaning up the vomit. The vomit lecture can even make those of us immune to sea-sickness begin to feel a little green toward the end.

The seas got rougher that night as we headed through the darkness to our destination about a hundred miles south, and some people ended up sleeping on the dive deck so they could be closer to the only designated safe vomiting spot on the boat. I was airborne in my bunk through much of the night as the boat sped over the increasingly higher waves, bouncing us off our mattresses.

While being thrown around in my bunk, I thought to myself, So this is what SCUBA diving is like.

The next morning, while the boat was tied to a buoy at our first dive site, the captain explained that, because the seas were a little rougher than previously expected, he thought we might need some special instruction—especially about how to get back on the boat after getting off, but also about how to get safely off the boat in the first place. Diving from the Fling is done by giant stride off the side of the boat. As the boat was rocking and rolling and pitching and yawing, there was a technique to be learned. We would need to step off the side of the boat, he explained, when it seemed least intuitive to do so—that is, when the distance from the deck to the sea was at its greatest. This was so the sea would be coming up for us as we went down to it, instead of it retreating as we plummeted through the open air. I have since learned that on this particular day, conditions were borderline extreme for diving, but even on the best of days, when the sea is calm, the plunge from the side of the boat can be intimidating to new divers.

On this particular trip, early on the first morning of the trip, as I watched each diver step off the side of the boat like Marines parachuting into the sea, I thought, So this is SCUBA diving.

The giant stride is a common method used by divers to enter the water. It is executed by the diver standing on the edge of the surface to be vacated, and extending one leg out over the water until the diver is overbalanced and begins to fall forward. The purpose of this entry is to be far out into the water during the fall so that nothing strikes any hard surfaces on the way down. I was nervous about doing this really high giant stride, but as no one had apparently died yet, I stepped off into open air, holding my mask and regulator tightly to my face.

There was a line, known as the granny line, that ran parallel to the boat’s hull from the down line at the back of the boat to a point about 15 feet down the buoy line, and we had been directed to swim to the granny line to keep from being swept away by the strong current, then to give an OK sign to the crew and wait for our dive buddies. Because of the rough water, I had been able to see the coral from the boat, so putting my face under water gave me my first opportunity to see why the area was called the Flower Garden. The water was very deep, but far below me I could see acres of colorful corals—the flowers that fishermen had glimpsed when they came for the plentiful fish. Single-hook fishing is still allowed here, but the area is now protected in every other way.

My cousin jumped in after me and swam to the rope beside me. We began to pull ourselves hand over hand toward the buoy line, which we would use to pull ourselves down to the bottom. I soon looked back to see if my cousin was still with me, but he was not; he was still bobbing around on the surface, holding tightly to the granny line. I made my way back to him to see what was wrong. My cousin, who was experienced, and not the innocent novice diver that I was, said something like, Jesus! I don’t know if I can do this. I’ve never been diving this deep before. That should have been my first warning.

My instructor, who was already on the line ahead of us, sensed trouble, and came back to see what it was. He gave my cousin some words of comfort, which might have been to tell him it was OK to cancel his dive. This may have been what spurred Cuz on to do the dive, as we have always been a little competitive, and he suddenly realized that if I did the dive and he didn’t, he would never hear the end of it. He put his regulator in his mouth, gave me the OK sign, and we proceeded to pull ourselves down the 60 feet of buoy line to the highest part of the sea bottom around us.

By recreational diving standards, 60 feet and deeper is considered deep diving, and 60 feet was going to be the shallowest part of this dive. The deeper a diver goes, the faster the diver will use up the compressed air in the tank. Failure to take this into full consideration led to my first oh shit moment on my very first saltwater dive on my very first dive trip.

Typically, the water at the Flower Garden is very clear, with visibility approaching 100 feet. But on that day, the water was murky and visibility was poor, with visibility, approaching maybe 20 to 30 feet across the bottom where the currents had stirred up the sediments. We had been taught to swim against the current so that when we became tired, the current would take us back to the rope. That may have been the only thing I got right on that dive. We swam hard against the current for a bit, and then I remembered I was supposed to be monitoring my air supply. I took a look at the gauge and realized I was about to die. My first thought was, How embarrassing to die on one’s first dive.

While I had been fumbling with my equipment and trying to read my pressure gauge, my dive buddy had disappeared into the murk, so now, not only was I going to die, but nobody would ever find my body after the currents took it out over the abyss. I needed to find the buoy rope, but it was nowhere to be seen. While I considered my options, the current took me right past the rope. It was as if an angel had reached out a hand. I grabbed the rope, and began to ease upward, trying to slow my heart rate and not burn air any faster than I had been. I looked up the rope to see Cuz, already part way up. I suppose he thought I had just been turning around while I was checking my air. He had grabbed the rope while I swam past it.

I made it