When did you Learn to Dive? How many times have you been asked that? Here's one answer.....
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"When did you start diving?" The question was simple enough. I was riding on a shuttle van driving from my hotel to the resort diving operation in Nassau, while on a layover from my flying job. A young diver sitting next to me asked the question as a conversation-starter. "I just got certified last month", he told me. He was proud of his accomplishment, and wanted to compare his experience with another diver. When did I start diving? How could I answer? Do I start counting from when I was two years old, asking: "Where's Daddy", and being told "He's going diving to catch a fish for dinner"? From the very beginning I knew that what he did was different from what other kids Dads did, as he went out and followed the call to hunt, only he in the water. My Dad was a free-diving spearfisherman, no "Tank Diving" as he called it, only one lung full of air and the blue of the ocean. Patiently in a rhythm of breath, dive, surface, breath, dive, and repeat. He would wait patiently to see and sometimes even spear the prized striped bass, a beautifully streamlined fish native to the Atlantic waters. If an artist were ever to draw a perfectly proportioned fish and decorate it with just the right number of stripes in just the right places, a striped bass would be the result. Worthy certainly of being hunted. Especially worthy of the patient game of underwater hunting that my Dad engaged in. Do I start counting from when I was a three-year old child, watching and helping, in my own way, as my Father prepared his gear carefully to go spearfishing? The smell of the neoprene rubber and of the baby-powder used to slip into the old unlined wetsuits pungent and strong, never to be smelled again without evoking memories of plastic garbage pails used as dive equipment carriers in the beginning of the day, and hopefully as a place to carry the days catch back at the end of the day. Those garbage pails always smelling faintly of striped bass even as the gear was carefully cleaned and baby-powdered and returned into storage, no matter how hard the pails were scrubbed. I learned what the inside of a Striper looked like as I watched my Dad clean the fish with his diving knife, kept razor sharp for just such use. Most divers knives are blunt and dull, to act as a prybar. Not Dads: His was a Forschner fillet knife, carried in a divers knife sheath, used only to clean the catch. "This is the swim bladder, it helps the fish keep his buoyancy", "This is his stomach, let's see what he has been eating". I was never afraid to inspect the inside of the fish, after all the fish were honored, revered, as the reason for diving. In this day and age spearfishing is considered an anomaly, and diving magazines refuse to print advertisements for spearguns. But in the dawn of diving spearfishing was the very reason for diving, and I now wonder as I look at the reefs that have been killed by clumsy new divers touching the coral if we are better off now with SCUBA gear, or were we better neighbors of the ocean when we were free-diving and selectively taking only the choicest of fish, or passing the fish over as we desired. For spearfishing is the ultimate in selective fishing, and no unwanted fish are ever injured. I am reminded of the famous quotation "One does not hunt in order to kill, one kills in order to have hunted". And so it was with this generation of diver, and a diver who was not a fisherman first and a diver second was a strange diver indeed. Do I start counting from when I was a four-year old child, when was allowed to go with my Dad to the dive club meetings at the old Orange NJ YMCA? Mainly I remember looking at my Dads and his diving buddies knees, from the short perspective of a child, and watching hands fly and flutter as each story was told. How much now I realize they were like the pilots I know, always flying their hands to describe a maneuver and moment. I remember the names some of them, Herman Prinz prime among them. An older German tool and die maker, Herman tinkered with and improved spearguns until they were far more powerful than any that had been seen before, and then used them to regularly spear the largest Bass that anyone had ever heard of. Gerry Milton, who so intricately outfitted his gear and boat, and who my Dad honored by calling any complicated method of rigging anything "Gerry Rigging". Others, whose names I have forgotten. "When can I dive, Dad? When"? I would ask. "When you learn to swim" he said, "You need to learn to swim first". I tried and tried to swim well, but usually floundered and churned, and my Dad was never very impressed with my results. Dive club meetings always ended at Eppes Essen, an old delicatessen across the street. I felt the big man to be allowed to be at the same table as the other divers, eating my small portion as the divers talked and ate theirs. Maybe I should count from when I was five, and got my own diving gear for the first time. My Dad, ever economizing, needed to replace his worn out wetsuit. We drove around to all of the dive-shops in northern New Jersey (all three of them, probably, as diving was an infant sport), and I remember at one of them seeing a line of old diving helmets lining the floor. Dad wasn't going to the dive shops to buy a wetsuit; no, that would have been too expensive. He was going to the dive shop to buy wetsuit rubber, and wetsuit glue. Lying out the rubber on my Mothers kitchen table he cut apart his old suit and using it as a model, (perhaps with a paper pattern), he assembled a new wetsuit from scratch. The table suffered in the process and years later I would be doing what little homework I ever did on that table and be distracted by the marks of the rubber cutting on the wood. "We just cannot keep his concentration on his schoolwork", my parents said. No wonder: I was dreaming about diving even as I tried fruitlessly to memorize the multiplication tables. I still cannot multiply in my head, but I can change the piston leather in an Airmatic speargun! Such were my priorities. I bet I could find those rubber cutting marks on the table right now, were I to go back to my parent's home and look. At the end of the job of making the wetsuit, Dad found that he did not have the special press needed to set the snaps for the beavertail on the wetsuit top. We piled into his old VW Bug and drove to the Parkways wetsuit factory in South Amboy. There Fred Weiss, the owner of the company, took my Dads suit and walking into the back of the factory used a large machine to set the snaps. Finished, he looked at me and asked: "How old are you?" "Five", I replied. "Do you dive yet?" he asked. "Not yet, but I want to" was my reply. Mr. Weiss then took a long pole and reached up into the rafters of the factory, where racks were built to hold the production of wetsuits before they were sold. He drew down the pole and hanging from it was a tiny wetsuit, just my size, of black and red rubber. "Here", he said, "This should fit. It's a present". It did, and I wore it proudly around the house when we went home, and asked again "When can I dive". "When you can swim" again came the answer. But slowly over the next year my Dad found that he needed a new mask, and a new snorkel, and managed to find a tiny set of Cressi Rondine fins, just like his. He fired up the lead melting pot and cast some diving weights from scrap lead, and made a weight belt from nylon webbing held in adjustment with brass screws and nuts. I never took diving gear for granted, as most of what we used was home made, or home improved. Finally it seemed that the small green garbage pail that was for MY gear was beginning to become full. The time must be close I think, though, that I should count from when I was six years old. In 1965 (I know this to be a fact, as I have the parking receipt still in my scrapbook) my Dad took me to Rhode Island on a diving trip. This was not my first trip with him to Rhode Island, as I had already had gone on several others when he went with his diving club to go spearfishing. But this was the first trip where the promise was that it "might" be possible for me to go diving myself. We went to the Fort Getty campground, in a protected cove along the boat-launching ramp and there, after a struggle to get into the tiny wetsuit, I was taught to dive. "This is how you hold the snorkel in your mouth, between lips and teeth", "You spit in your mask and rub it in like this", "When you get water in your snorkel you blow like this to clear it", and all of the other small bits of advice. I ducked my head down, and a new world was revealed. Crabs, fish, seaweed, snails, clams, you name it. This cove was chock full of animals and activity and every square inch was covered with life. I spent perhaps an hour poking around with glee at the new things to see, and my Dad left me alone to explore. After some time he asked me if I wanted to go into the deeper water, and holding me by my small hand he led me along the side of the dock, where the water got deep enough that it was well over my head. As we swam along I could see the columns of sunlight streaming between the pilings of the pier, and saw some large fish, mackerel, I think. Leaving the water finally, with the new sensation of salt water streaming down from my hair and into my eyes, I knew I was a diver now-after all of the years of waiting. Dad took the Clorox bottle that he always carried fresh-water in and offered me a drink. "Spit it out", he said. "Rinse the salt out, and spit. Swallow the second mouthful". I did, and have done so on every dive since. I visit the cove every now and then, and I will one day take my little Daughter Stephanie there for her first dive. "Genesis Cove", nobody calls it that but me. For most people it is just the boat-launching ramp, not worthy of a name. But Genesis Cove is my name for it, as this was where it all began for me and where it will for my daughter too, should she decide to take to the deep. I hope that her hand in mine will feel as secure as my small hand did in my Dads large one, on that first day so very long ago. I don't talk to my Dad too much anymore, the hurts of a troubled childhood and young adulthood have scarred over and have never healed properly. He always thought I was a failure in school, never realizing that the most important classroom I ever attended was down in the ocean. But he did one thing that stands out: He taught me to dive. I realized that I was daydreaming, and that the other diver on the bus was looking at me sort of strangely as if he was not sure if I had heard his question. "How long have you been diving?" he repeated. How could I answer? A tear rolled down my cheek. "Forever", I replied. "I have been diving forever..."
Dave Sutton Nassau Bahamas, October 1997 |