Sometimes, if you do something long enough, serendipity, karma, or dumb luck works in your favor, or maybe the gods are smiling on you. So it was this summer, when I tried deep diving for the first time.
I've been a freediving spearo for a long time, but always shallow. The vast majortity of my fish came out of 5-15 meters. This forum and its contributers inspired me to try something deeper, so we rigged a line and a sea anchor and tried it out on our last Bahamas trip. The second time out, by pure luck, we dropped the line directly over the wall, where it rolls off quickly from 38 m to 46 m and then drops straight down to 300+ m. The visibility was about 40 m and we didn't know we were on the wall until the first drop. It was an incredible experiance. First drop there was something huge and torpedo shaped at the edge of visibility just off the wall. Didn't move like a shark, maybe a big tuna or billfish. Second drop, two very big sharks come off the bottom to check me out, then go on about their business. Huge schools of fish all around. The wind and Gulf Stream current together kept us right over the wall, seeing a different section on every drop. Third drop, a 20 kg grouper, then a 25 kg grouper. Schools of big jacks. Fourth drop, tremendous schools of jacks all over, swimming up through hundreds of them, wow!! It kept going until we were too exhausted to continue.
I got no deeper than 25 meters, but it was a truly fabulous visual experiance. In 38 years of diving, I've seen few things to top it.
So far, I'm down to 29 meters and will be doing a whole lot more of this. It is wonderfully different from diving shallow.
I've been a freediving spearo for a long time, but always shallow. The vast majortity of my fish came out of 5-15 meters. This forum and its contributers inspired me to try something deeper, so we rigged a line and a sea anchor and tried it out on our last Bahamas trip. The second time out, by pure luck, we dropped the line directly over the wall, where it rolls off quickly from 38 m to 46 m and then drops straight down to 300+ m. The visibility was about 40 m and we didn't know we were on the wall until the first drop. It was an incredible experiance. First drop there was something huge and torpedo shaped at the edge of visibility just off the wall. Didn't move like a shark, maybe a big tuna or billfish. Second drop, two very big sharks come off the bottom to check me out, then go on about their business. Huge schools of fish all around. The wind and Gulf Stream current together kept us right over the wall, seeing a different section on every drop. Third drop, a 20 kg grouper, then a 25 kg grouper. Schools of big jacks. Fourth drop, tremendous schools of jacks all over, swimming up through hundreds of them, wow!! It kept going until we were too exhausted to continue.
I got no deeper than 25 meters, but it was a truly fabulous visual experiance. In 38 years of diving, I've seen few things to top it.
So far, I'm down to 29 meters and will be doing a whole lot more of this. It is wonderfully different from diving shallow.
