Food Feature: Night swimming

Enchanting underwater encounters highlight night diving in St. John

There’s a juvenile excitement to a night dive. It’s like sneaking out of your window in the evening as a kid to play hide and seek in the moonlight. While the rest of the world is ruffling its pillows and calling it a day, you’re down at the docks preparing for a nocturnal adventure.
My first night dive was in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where I celebrated Thanksgiving last year with my family. Because things were slow, they were willing to offer a cut-rate deal at the dive shop: $45 for tanks, fins — everything.
When we got to the drop-in point, our dive master gave a briefing on safety and diving etiquette. I had been certified to dive the summer before on a trip to Belize, so there was still much I didn’t know about diving. My excitement for the dive was mixed with a fluid nervousness. Anything can go wrong underwater. Complete darkness only compounds the difficulty of correcting your situation if something should go awry.
After our briefing, I waddled to the edge of the boat and paused. The lights of the other divers could be seen swirling around in the water below. I took a deep breath, put my regulator in my mouth and jumped. The space between the boat and the water was the darkest place I’d ever been.
We started by swimming along the reef. It took awhile to find fish, but eventually they were everywhere. The dive master would bang on his metal air tank with a rock-climbing carbine whenever he saw something noteworthy. We saw an eel, several trunkfish and an octopus. The eel was small and angry, holding his mouth at us like a hissing cat. The octopus was frustrated. Our flashlights made him nervous. He began changing colors to reflect his tension: green to red to a neon turquoise.
Over a hill of coral, our dive master led us to a sandy spot where a single-masted sail boat rested on the bottom of the ocean, which we learned later had gone down during Hurricane Opal. It was tipped to its side with the radio flung out the window. The dive master pointed inside the open hatch of the boat. With our flashlights we could see the giant round head of a nurse shark sitting idly and quietly, waiting for us to pass. He was probably about 5-and-a-half feet long, but not to be feared. Nurse sharks are relatively harmless bottom feeders, recognizable by their snubbed noses and brown skin.
I swam around to check out the rest of the boat before being called back to the group. The dive master motioned for us to get together in a circle, having us “take a knee” on the ocean floor. When everyone was settled, he indicated for us to turn our lights off.
The darkness that surrounded us was complete. You could hold your hand an inch from your face and not even be aware it existed.
The dive master began moving his arms in circles and suddenly the area around him came alive with tiny firefly-like lights. It turns out that plankton is phosphorescent. The faster we moved our arms, the more phosphorescence there was, until the area around us became a churning, luminous whirlpool — our arms glowing with ghostly trails.
We turned our lights back on, but I wanted to see them again, so I swam away from the group where I made the place around me dark by putting my flashlight against my chest. I waved my arm, but the glow wasn’t nearly as brilliant as it had been with the group. After a short bit of waving, I pulled my light away and was surprised to see a dolphin! Less than 6 feet away, he had been headed straight toward me. Unfortunately the light scared him and he veered off in the opposite direction.
The dive was almost over. Everyone seemed to run out of air at the same time. Pointing our lights toward the surface, we began to swim up. Our lights were powerful, so everything in front of us was bright — a briny haze of green. We shot up blindly until we hit the surface, bursting out under a sky of twinkling stars. It was a magical, otherworldly feeling.
By this time the dolphin had also made it to the surface and was swimming around, about 60 feet from the boat, making noises. “Look at that dolphin!” Captain Bob said, pointing out to him. Everyone was envious when they found out he had visited me underwater. The captain explained that the dolphin had probably seen me and was on his way over to play. “Dolphins love to play with divers,” he said. “They like to nudge and poke at you.” Thank God he didn’t do that while I had my lights off under water. They would have been peeling me off the bottom of the dive boat.
We pulled ourselves on board, excited to tell about all the things we had seen, and Captain Bob raised the anchor and pointed the boat toward the shore. “Don’t expect a night dive like that every time,” he said. “But always expect something magical.”
In order to take part in a night dive, you must first complete your PADI diving certification. The program can usually be completed within three days at a resort or over a period of time at the YMCA. Certification costs about $250.
Low Key, located on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, has been in business for over six years. In addition to night dives, Low Key offers PADI certification, various reef dives and wreck dives to the H.M.S. Rohne (sunk in 1880) and the Major General Rogers (sunk in 1968). For more information, visit their website at www.divelowkey.com or call 800-835-7718.






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