My Home in the Sea: The Diving Memoirs of Norine Rouse

By Lawrence Wood, Ph.D.

In "My Home in the Sea: The Diving Memoirs of Norine Rouse," readers are immersed in the aquatic world of a true scuba-diving pioneer. As one of the first female scuba instructors ever certified, Norine co-founded the Scuba Club of Palm Beaches and devoted her life to exploring the mesmerizing realm beneath the waves.

Drawn from her meticulous handwritten journals, this memoir delivers a captivating account of Norine's multi-decade career. It showcases her profound love for sea turtles, her fearless encounters with sharks, and her insightful observations of countless marine species. It also offers a first-hand perspective on the impact of natural and man-made factors on coral reef environments.

Norine's entries, filled with the awe-inspiring wonder the reef instilled in her, provide a precious snapshot of the challenges and triumphs she experienced. "My Home in the Sea: The Diving Memoirs of Norine Rouse" is more than a book—it's a deep dive into an underwater world seen through the eyes of a woman whose spirit was as untamable as the sea itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350905625

Book preview

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My Home in the Sea:

The Diving Memoirs of Norine Rouse

© 2023, Lawrence Wood, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35090-561-8

eBook ISBN:-979-8-35090-562-5

For Norine’s Marines,

who keep the memories alive

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Resilient Reefs

Chapter 2: The Turtles

Chapter 3: The Eels

Chapter 4: The Sharks

Chapter 5: One With The Sea

Chapter 6: Tributes

Foreword

The course of our lives often deviates from the expected, or takes on a life of its own. This is very much the case with Norine Rouse. Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, and spending time with her parents on their small boat fishing in the bay, she evidenced little interest in the water or the nearby ocean. In fact, her dream was to become a pilot. To that end, she became a mechanic working to recalibrate instruments on B-24 bombers at a Savannah airport. In order to get closer to her goal, she became a stewardess who made one flight, and was summarily dismissed for being a half-inch too short. She was also engaged to be married, which made her an investment in training the airline was not prepared to make.

Eventually landing on New York’s Long Island, by then divorced with two little children, she took a life-saving course and became certified to teach swimming to children. This turned into a life changer when she saw a worker in scuba gear cleaning the pool and asked him to explain it and how she could put it to use. She became a certified diver at age forty, by climbing uphill in mid-winter to a freezing cold rock quarry where her endless determination paid off. This resulted in a move to Freeport in the Bahamas to take an instructor course, in which she was the only woman in the class, and went on to become only the tenth woman scuba instructor in the entire United States. Her first professional job was teaching scuba to the students of Palm Beach’s exclusive Graham-Eckes School. At that time, she met and pressured John D. MacArthur, owner of the Buccaneer Yacht Club, located just south of Palm Beach Inlet on the shores of Lake Worth, to finance a scuba club at the docks, and the rest is history.

I was fortunate to be a member of Norine’s first adult class, and was the only one to continue with the sport. On my required checkout dive, Norine took me to the Mizpah, a yacht purposely sunk as part of three vessels known as ‘The Palm Beach Wrecks,’ and I instantly knew that this was my future as well. Everything you will read in this book was at one time or other witnessed or shared by me, and more. Her reverence for living creatures actively came back to bite me when I brought up a beautiful knobby red seashell known as a live lion’s paw bivalve, and made the mistake of excusing myself by saying it was the only local shell I didn’t have. Norine, looking like a thundercloud, said Judy, I cannot compromise my principles. She proceeded to put her tank back on and place it safely back on the reef. It was a lasting lesson for me, and one that I now espouse even more than I did then.

One blue water day she and I were floating north along an eighty-foot reef edge when a large tiger shark swam right past us heading south. This same reef was the home of Norine’s famous love affairs with loggerhead turtles, Raja and Robert. Her relationship with turtles of all species inspired her to take a Brillo pad on dives so she could scrub off small barnacles from their shells before they dug in. In a small bay near Cozumel, she jumped into the shallow water to splash relief on a half-exposed hawksbill that was tied to a stake.

Wherever we were in the world and under whatever circumstances, Norine always wore her Yum Yum Yellow wetsuit, which was her instant identification and her image. Her ferocity in protecting underwater life extended to, and by whatever means necessary, collecting equipment from sometimes surprised divers with spearguns or their other deadly weapons, which were piled together at the Norine Rouse Scuba Club in a sculpture of bent and broken weaponry that she had collected. The Club was a mecca for divers from all over the world, and many celebrity divers as well. Cinematographer and Jacques Cousteau collaborator Stan Waterman of Blue Water White Death and The Deep was a winter regular, and one day seasonal Palm Beach resident King Hussein of Jordan caused quite an uproar by coming in for a wetsuit fitting. Some members of the Kennedy clan also dove with the Club, and on the day John Lennon was shot, a British diver added his bouquet to those piling up at the gates of his home.

My most memorable dive with Norine involved a 35-foot whale shark that angled down from the surface to see us on our favorite 110-foot reef. She and I were able to hook a ride, Norine holding on to its dorsal fin and I attached to its pectoral fin. Our eyes met in wonder over its polka-dotted skin as we reluctantly released our hold, and it continued southward to its spawning grounds off Belize.

You will read here much more of Norine’s philosophy and her acute awareness of the well-being of all creatures great and small. I consider myself blessed to have known her as a friend, a mentor, and a dedicated dive companion.

Judy Schrafft

Preface

An admired mentor of mine once said to me people need to find their turtles, whatever that may be for them. Ms. Norine Rouse sure found her turtles, both literally and figuratively. She is another wonderful example of what can happen when a person never gives up on a dream. Norine, as the story goes, became interested in scuba diving after seeing a Cousteau documentary on television, but never had the opportunity until she happened to meet an ex-military diver using a tank and regulator at a local swimming pool in Long Island, New York. After a few chilly dives up north, the then-divorced empty nester procured a chance windfall (from a gameshow, no less) that afforded her the opportunity to complete her training in the tropics. And the rest, as they say, is history.

There’s much more to know about Norine, her life, and her achievements, but it’s important to begin by saying that the following memoir is not, and does not intend to be, a biography of Ms. Rouse. Though of course we were acquaintances, we didn’t know each other well, and I can count on one hand the number of times I may have gone diving with her. She was well-known locally among the dive community around West Palm Beach as a somewhat eccentric, but extremely capable diver who had assembled a particularly loyal following of divers affectionately known as Norine’s Marines. Her personality wasn’t for everyone; any number of lost divers had to ditch their expensive spearguns if they wanted a ride home on her boat, but her passion for the creatures of the reef never wavered, and she earned everyone’s respect for it.

Our connection, instead, was the turtles. She was already known as the Turtle Lady among the dive community (much like a contemporary of hers, Mrs. Eleanor Fletcher, who earned the same moniker from her work on nearby beaches). I happened to be working as a local sea turtle biologist when I took up an interest in studying the hawksbill turtles that Norine and I were both seeing on our various dives around Palm Beach. When I started a tagging project, she was keenly interested in what I was doing, and eager to help in any way she could. After her passing, it was our shared interest in the turtles that inspired her daughter to entrust me with her collection of dive logs. All totaled there are 20 of them, containing nearly 10,000 individual, hand-written entries.

Originally, they were a source of data for me. So little was (and still is) known about sea turtle abundance, distribution, and behavior in Florida waters that her notes were some of the only references available to seek background for my own studies. After mining them for turtle data, however, I began to realize that these logbooks are much more than just the sum of their parts, and offer a personal and passionate window into a rarely seen world. Divers go diving for various reasons; some to work, some to hunt, some to take pictures, and some to just drift along and take in the experience. If home is where the heart is, then Norine went diving simply to return home each day. Not kidding; she referred to a ledge where I wanted a house underwater more than once. She found comfort, wonder, exhilaration, and long-lasting friendships on those reefs, and most importantly for us, she wrote her experiences down. There are a lot of divers with a lot of dives under their belts, but few that I know keep such fastidious records. Rest assured, there are virtually no references to any other parts of her life; the logbooks are not ‘diaries,’ so no personal secrets or private information were ever uttered. They are simply an unedited record of what was in her head as she wrote down the day’s memories. I’m not sure if she ever intended for her notes to be made public, but I came to think the stories were too good to be kept hidden away, and I hope she would approve of me sharing. I thank the many people who made valuable comments on this manuscript as it slowly came together, which greatly benefited from the excellent input I received. I especially thank my sister Anne for her hard work and dedication to this project in its final stages. Thank you also to Barry Parker, Jay Garbose, Gary Adkison, Doug Seifert, Jeff Trotta, and others for finding and/or providing tributes and photographs. Lastly, and most importantly, I thank Leslie Rouse for handing me that big stack of yearly planners so many years ago, and I hope you enjoy reading the highlights of their contents as much as I have.

Lawrence (Larry) Wood, Ph.D.

Introduction

Aside from her diving career itself, the most astonishing thing Norine Rouse did was record her experiences on paper. When I first contacted her friends and colleagues for information and/or insight about something she referenced, most didn’t know the logbooks existed at all. I can’t be sure what may be missing, but I was provided with a series of bound ‘daily diary’ books spanning the years from 1979–1995. In addition, there was a folder containing a typewritten set of notes from June of 1970, non-bound handwritten notes from March through May of 1974, and spiral-bound notebooks that partially covered 1976–77. These early entries were often long (multi-page) and very descriptive, I assume mostly because she wasn’t limited by page space. When she switched to diary-style notebooks with limited room to write each day, by necessity she had to keep her entries a bit more brief. Now and then, however, she still managed to squeeze in some pretty lengthy entries, sometimes finishing on an otherwise empty page.

Outside of a few entries in 1970, Norine rarely spoke of her responsibilities as a dive guide and/or instructor. From reading her logbooks, it could easily be missed that Norine’s formal job was to safely lead divers of all skill levels through an often harsh and unpredictable environment. The Gulf Stream is largely responsible for driving the prevailing nearshore currents in Palm Beach County, forcing scuba divers to practice a form of diving known as ‘drift diving,’ whereby they are dropped in at one end of a reef and picked up at the other. The boat captain knows where the divers are by following a ‘float line’ buoy that is held at the other end by one of the divers in the group. Throughout her logs, she often uses the terms ‘drift’ or ‘float’ near the beginning of the entries to reflect this kind of diving. As she later describes, early on, Norine and her group would also attempt to anchor dive, which leverages a ‘down line’ tied to the boat to provide divers with a reference point for their descent and ascent (thus, the dive site she referred to as Anchor Spot.) However, they realized the danger of this method should someone get swept away in a strong current, and largely ended the practice.

Each of Norine’s entries began with the particular location she and her group visited. Sometimes for their physical features, sometimes for the person who ‘discovered’ the area, or perhaps for the position in relation to a landmark, the dive sites of Palm Beach County are named somewhat arbitrarily, and over time, interchangeably. Nonetheless, the idea is to provide an easily referenced underwater location for a boat captain to take his divers. Prior to on-board GPS systems, boat captains would match the water’s depth with visually triangulated landmarks, such as smokestacks and columns of hotel windows to find the dive initiation site itself. No matter how they manage to get there, the challenge for a drift-boat captain is to