Last Thursday we all met at the Cheesequake rest-stop on the Garden Sate Parkway for our eagerly anticipated Shark River Inlet dive. Ryan was late because he was nabbed by the cops for speeding on the 440. Despite his impressive collection of badges and PBA cards the Highway cop gave him a ticket. In hindsight we should have recognized this as a harbinger of things to come. We proceeded to caravan down the GSP, past Asbury Park, exiting at 100b the exit for Ocean Grove. The best part of this dive is setting up tanks, weights and equipment right on the boardwalk where the wealthy summer people perform their after dinner saunter. You can see the envy and interest on their faces when we tell them that yes, we are not only going to dive where others are not even allowed to swim, but we are going to wait until dark before we enter the water.
We were suited up and ready at 8:30pm. The tide was supposed to be slack at that time but there was a noticeable inward current pushing legions of translucent jellyfish up the inlet towards the multi-million dollar homes that line the shore. We waited as the tide kept coming. Eventually we decided to splash in because if we waited too much longer, the tide would reverse, pushing anything in the water, including us, out to sea. I was the second one in and it became apparent to me right away that I was under-weighted. I had 24 pounds of weight on my belt but with the salt water, aluminum tank and 7mm wetsuit it wasn’t enough. I would get down to 20 feet and then immediately start to “cork” to the surface. Jane was having a similar problem. I had a fisherman under the bridge throw me an extra three pounds of weight which I stuffed into my BCD. It was enough for me to get down but just barely. Unfortunately, Jane was similarly underweighted and unable to stay under and she had to abort the dive. Once safely huddled on the bottom I realized that the current had indeed reversed and was pushing us toward the ocean at a rather rapid clip. This in itself was not much concern, we simply drifted along the bottom taking note of the lobsters, crabs, flounder, eels and other unidentifiable but prolific marine life trapped in the penumbra of our dive lights. Unfortunately, when doing an out-and-back dive the pleasant tumble in the direction of the tide eventually comes to an end and the return to the entry point is characterized by a vigorous attempt to swim against the force of the Atlantic Ocean as it rushes back from the inlet into the sea. This is difficult, to put it mildly. Add in five other relatively unexperienced divers and two dive-flag ropes which inevitably snared several of our limbs and pieces of our equipment, and a normally challenging underwater swim becomes a rugby-like free-for all with divers clambering over the rocks on the bottom and each other in a dash to get to the exit point and untangled from the ropes before the air runs out. Ok, it wasn’t quite that dramatic but it wasn’t the smoothest dive either. Louis lost a fin which immediately sank to the bottom and went skipping off down the sand in the general direction of Great Britain. Despite Ryan and I going in for another dive and trying to locate it, Loius ended the evening out a $150 set of fins.
Despite the mishaps, seeing the underwater life at night in the Atlantic is fascinating and quite humbling. You realize just how much else is going on in the world and how small a part of our planet we actually see from day to day. Every time I dive in the ocean I think of how privileged I am to be living in the 21st century and have access to the technology which allows me to remain under the sea for far longer than the millions of people who have lived on this planet through the ages. I never understand people who don’t find diving fascinating. To me it is akin to going into outer space, yet in a manner accessible to almost everyone. I highly recommend it to those of you who read this.
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