Cabin Fever

Winter here in New Zealand means the visibility in the ocean can vary from zero to 30m plus, and can slip from one extreme to the other in a day. Yesterday, the cabin fever reached new heights and I opted to take a dive off the coast despite the 35 knot northwester and rising swell.

With the rebreather on, I jumped into the scrotum shrinking 12C water (well it would have been scrotum shrinking, but luckily I had my toasty Fourth Element thermals on under my drysuit). After checking that the controllers were still operating, I descended to the seabed.

The 0.5m visibility water obscured almost everything. I even collided with rocks the size of a car... striking the exact same spot on my head where my surfboard clobbered me during a wipe-out the day before. Fifteen minutes passed and I was considering calling the dive, but as luck would have it, I found a patch of cleaner water with about 1m of visibility. Staying motionless, I hovered over a hole where I knew a large but friendly octopus normally resides, but it wasn’t there. Instead of the octopus in the hole, I found three seahorses huddled together at the entrance. Their tails were wrapped tightly around an old section of encrusted chain.

Because I was just staying in one place the whole time, all the local marine life was either coming over to check me out or just getting on with their busy daily routines. I spent the next 45 minutes just watching the social complexities of a 1m by 1m quadrant of reef. Word must have got out that I was there because all sorts of the harder to find species introduced themselves to me. The only thing I never saw were any red spiny lobsters, but I could hear them all around me, particularly the bucks as they clicked some kind of code at each other.

After the dive, I clambered out of my dive gear and got soaked in the process due to the horizontal rain blowing at me from all directions... but guess what, that has to be one of the best dives I had this year!