The Psychadelic Dive

When I was a fairly new diver, we decided to go to Three Tree Point with several other divers to go looking for a Sixgill shark. Though Sixgills are seen with a certain amount of frequency in the Sound, you could still go a lifetime and not have any luck finding one. So, we decided to raise our odds! We took a plastic bag full of fish parts and guts with us to lure in the six gills. Where did we get the chum? The Korean grocery store, of course! They thought we were buying it to eat - eeeww. Anyway, Jeremy was slowest on the uptake when we called "not it", so he was voted to be the chum. Wait, I mean carry the chum... my bad! If you've been to Three Tree before, you'll know that there is a series of buoys that go out and from those buoys, you can get your bearings to a sunken boat on the south end, which is where we were headed. Well, that's where our troubles started. You see, if you go to the second of three buoys, you will drop down to a shallow 40 ft. That was our intention, but somehow in the dark, we dropped down at the third buoy which goes down to 70 ft. Well, my buddy and I decided to do the descent without our lights (this is late at night, mind you) so that we can watch the bioluminescents on the way down. We also wanted to go down fast, so we didn't add any air into our BC's. Well, we got our wish - we were screaming straight down so fast that we didn't have much time to do anything but plug our noses and blow out just to clear our ears. We turned our lights on about 10 ft off the bottom and laid on the air to stop from landing on our knees... So far, so good. The rest of the divers joined us and we got ready to go toward the sunken boat. I looked down at my computer to get my depth and realized that my computer is not working. I tried to turn it on again. Nothing. I showed my buddy and let him know that he would be leading since my computer is a no-go. Well, we started to swim south and I realize that I am narked. Now I'm not talking about a small buzz, I am talking about Woodstock, get naked and sing Beatles songs narked. It was FANTASTIC! Everyone continues on to the boat, me flying behind with a giant smile on my face. Before long, we get to the boat, which I know in my head (which has now cleared up unfortunately) is at about 75-80 ft deep. But we didn't go any deeper since we left the buoy. Without my computer to tell me that our original descent was to 75 feet, I have no idea that we weren't at 40 ft. Now, I'm feeling totally lost. Our chum bucket, Jeremy swam out a little ways past the boat and starts to slash the chum bag open with his knife. The rest of us are hovering a safe distance away with cameras and lights ready just in case Jeremy gets eaten. A minute into this, however, someone spots an octopus by the boat, so we all turned around leaving the chum, Jeremy, covered in blood and guts in the pitch black! You're welcome, Jeremy! That's what friends are for. You can imagine it didn't take Jeremy long at all to catch up with the rest of us. As we're watching the octopus and hoping that a shark will come swimming by, a Ratfish swims up close to me. Ratfish are in the shark family and have no bones, just cartilage. They also have an extremely poisonous spine on their top fin.

Now, I had been fairly warned about the spine, but no one warned me about how flexible these suckers are, so being the brilliant diver that I am, I decide to catch the Ratfish just behind the spiny part so that he can't get me. Well, I'll be danged if those little buggers can't fold backwards on themselves! I hope that God can't understand swearing under water any better than those close by, because I hollered out some French words when that spine hit my knuckle! By this point, my buddy and I were starting to run low on air, so we decided to start back in. I asked him how much air he had left as we paused on our way up and he signaled that he had 500 lbs left. The rule in scuba diving is that you should be surfacing with 500 lbs remaining. Are we surfaced? NO. We're looking at a starfish! So, again, I ask him how much air he has and he signals 500 lbs. "What is he doing?" I'm thinking. "Why are we not headed up?" Once you get to 15 ft of water you have to do a 3 minute safety stop. I'm thinking that my buddy is going to run out of air long before we even get to 15 feet, when all of a sudden he turns upward and swims straight up! Just as I reach up to grab his fins to stop him from shooting to the surface and getting bent or embolizing, I realize that he is floating on the surface. We were already at our safety stop, which is why we were looking at the stupid starfish! In the end, I learned a few lessons from this dive:

1) Nitrogen Narcosis is AWESOME!

2) Dive Computers are my friend.

3) Jeremy really stinks as a chum bucket.

4) Ratfish are more flexible than a gay Russian gymnast.

5) Ratfish stings are really quite painful and take a long time to heal.

6) Lastly, I learned that should you happen to grab a Ratfish by the tail and get stung, not only will you receive no sympathy from the other divers whatsoever, but they'll probably get a good laugh out of it and one might even fart on you - ROB. Nasty, man. Nasty.

- Swimmer Todd-