Winter diving

So it turns out that one can actually dive in the winter here, even during the tail end of January which is thought of as sub-arctic freezing by the locals, and as Spring by anyone who has lived in Minnesota. I previously had decided to suspend underwater operations for the duration of Winter, after going out on a cloudy day with typhonic wind somewhere in the middle of November and almost catching hypothermia on the boat ride home. But hey, the chance to be able to tell your snow-bound friends that you just spent the day 18 meters under is just too good to pass up. I had to try it at least once.

Most of the people who dive year-round on Kikai do so by utilizing the latest in dry-suit technology. A dry-suit is a custom fitted, completely contained, single piece, air filled suit. They are the underwater equivalent of plate-mail: high degree of protection, without sacrificing too much mobility, with a 3000 dollar price tag which a lowly squire such as myself has no possible way of, or desire to, afford.

Today I learned that there is a 2nd solution to the winter-water problem. A dry-suit is what you would get if you got some engineers together and explained that water is cold in the winter, and asked them for their best solution. A semi-dry suit is what you would get if you got a bunch of 4-year olds together and explained the same problem. If one wet-suit is good, well then like...4 wet suits must be amazing! To return to the armor metaphor, if a dry-suit is plate-mail, a semi-dry suit is taking several suits of chain-mail and wearing them one on top of the other. Cheap, dirty, about as mobile as a turtle in space, and with the added benefit of tearing nearly every hair off of your body in the process of putting it on, or taking it off. This particular semi-dry also had a hood, allowing me to satisfy several James Bond-eque fantasies, both mine and theirs.

The first dive was rough. The guys at the dive shop really aren't used to dealing with someone with my particular buoyant qualities. I tend to float like a cork even when I don't have a tank full of air, and a triple-thick full-body condom on. So even though I had...8 kilos? strapped on to me in various parts, I really had to fight to get below 6 meters. Once you get down below 6 or so the pressure smashes some of the airspace and you equalize much easier, but in the process of fighting my way down those 6 meters or so I failed to notice that Yoda-san was still on the surface until I was on the sea-floor...35 meters down. Oops! Apparently he couldn't get his ears to equalize forever, and had to keep going back to the surface. So I was kind of spinning in circles down on the sea floor trying to figure out if his hand signal meant "What the hell are you doing get back up here!" or "No no, I'm ok, don't worry!" Thumbs ups in diving parlance is just so damn misleading. Surfacing proved equally difficult, and I ended up shooting to the surface like a cork without properly depressurizing, which sounds dangerous, but is more embarrassing than actually harmful unless you've been under much deeper or much longer.

Dive 2 we strapped 12 kilos on, which I believe is what the clam-divers use when they're bottom walking.

Still, despite flopping around in several centimeters of rubber, and totally fucking up my first dive, it was a pretty good day of diving. Saw two sea snakes (one of which was sniffing another diver's boot), and my first turtle. Turtles are way cool, and I really need to get a camera so I can show you guys if I see more of them. I also should really look into getting some contacts, so I can stop having to choose between a) going with a normal mask and giving up vision over 15 feet, and b) going with the prescription mask someone else left behind and having vomit-worthy headaches every single time I get back on the boat.

Finished off the night with fresh caught sashimi, yakiniku, and several pounds of fire-baked oysters, while I sat around and listened to the local dive-rats and surf-bums discuss all the things they wanted to do when they went to America, probably the funniest conversation I have born witness to since I arrived on this island. Images of Japanese men hailing a taxi from LA to Las Vegas, where they proceed to don a cowboy hat and two pistols, walk into a bar and demand a Budweiser, while smoking Marlboros, then go find a strip club, ride around on a motorcycle, and I believe at some point both Robocop and Terminator were brought into the elaborate fantasy as well, punctuated by "アメリカいいねええ！” (A sentiment something like "Man I want to go to America!") every thirty seconds.

Ah the dive shop. How I've missed you.