Night Dive
I was at Club Med in the Turks and Caicos Islands and signed up for a night dive even though the thought of diving into inky darkness, with sea creatures around me I couldn’t see sent a cold shiver up my sunburned spine.
Our divemaster was a former Navy Seal who said his knees had been blown out, implying that it forced him out of military service. For the dive he teamed me with Lyle Waggoner, the handsome straight man (not Harvey Korman) from the old Carol Burnett show whose beautiful Hollywood wife didn’t dive (probably because she worried that silicone might prove to be too buoyant). They were both very friendly, wonderful people.
That night, floating on gentle moonlit swells we all stepped off the edge of the dive boat, splashing into the black water with small flashlights tethered to our wrists. Leisurely drifting down we found the bottom and spent some time inspecting the coral and the different species of fish that come out at night.
After a while, the divemaster gathered us up and had us kneel in a circle on the sandy bottom, our bubbles forming a ring rising to the surface. Then I gulped (if you can do that with a regulator stuck in your mouth) when he signaled us to turn off our flashlights. One by one the lights went out and miraculously, as our eyes adjusted, we saw that moonlight was penetrating 40 feet of warm Caribbean water.
In those seas the bioluminescent organisms light up like tiny fireflies when excited so I quickly discovered that when I waved my hand, little sparks rolled off my fingertips, blinking off after a few seconds.
So, like in a delicious dream, and one of the most beautiful I’ll ever see, I joined the other divers as we slid through the deep, in the moonlight, with little sparkles trailing off our swim fins.
Video Clip - Obviously not from my night dive but gives a sense of the fun of scuba diving:
