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Joe Arcuni, a long time member of the club, has
been the secretary for many years. In fact, for a long time we referred
to him as the “Secretary for Life”. His version of the official meeting
minutes provided plenty of entertainment and always a good round of
applause as he related the business of the dive club in his own unique
way. Joe, and his wife Kay, were among a group of club members who
escaped the southwest Florida heat for a relaxing trip to the underwater
paradise of Bonaire this summer. Even divers as experienced as Joe & Kay
can meet with one of life’s unexpected events. After a little time to
reflect on their adventure, Joe decided to share the details by writing
this month’s article for Waves titled “Paradise and the Near Death
Experience”. It appears in Joe’s own words here.
The summer of 2005 came around in the usual way in
Southwest Florida with increasingly long hot, humid days followed by
equally long and just slightly cooler but still humid evenings. What
better excuse does one need to fly away from daily drip-drying, in Ft.
Myers, for some daily drift diving on the Island of Bonaire?
This wasn’t our first trip and most likely won’t be
our last; we love the people, the pace, the island attitude and most of
all the easy diving. You’ve heard that before – “easy diving”. Well… in
Bonaire you could walk from your condo, grab your gear from the drying
room and meet the dive boat at the dock at around eight in the morning.
The crew will stow your gear, help you onto the boat, give you a short
preview of what you will see, and let you explore one of the vibrant
coral and fish filled sites to your hearts content. Easier still, is
sleeping in till … 8:30 ish and stepping out on the balcony just in time
to see your long lost or just found friends leaving the dock. They are
probably headed for a dive site around Kline Bonaire (the little
uninhabited island that nestles in the crescent of the “big” island).
While you sit and snack on the local bread, cheese and imported fruit
and ponder the fold-up map that every visitor gets when they arrive, you
notice the almost continuous line of little red dive flags that mark the
more than seventy shore diving sites.
So, by experience or possibly happenstance or maybe
even the need for a new adventure you pick one of those flags to visit.
It could be the famous Hilma Hooker down south or the not so famous but
oddly named “No Name” site close to the north end of the island. The
drop-off into the water can be a gradual and rocky shoreline down south
or a sheer, rocky drop, from a low cliff like the site called Ol Blue as
you go north.
So, let’s say you and your best friend and dive
buddy (in my case, that’s my wife) pick a site with your condo mates
that is a little bit of an adventure and a little bit off the beaten
path, although this particular path has been very well beaten this year
and was a little more rocky than most. You start out early, in a
relative sense (this is a vacation after all), pack your gear and tanks,
food, water, and cookies into the feisty little four door truck “that
could” and head for the high end of the island and the national park.
Once there, you pay a small fee that goes to help preserving the park
and covers the cost of the guy that collects the small fee and opens the
gate. The guy told us that some of the roads were washed out by
overnight rains and we needed to take the “short trail” for our own
safety. We knew from experience that meant that the usual 1-hour ride
would actually be much longer and would feel like a long 2-hour trip.
Suffice it to say you almost want to kiss the sand
when you arrive on the beach at Playa Funchi (which loosely translates,
with island charm, to corn meal beach). The group of six experienced
“divers for life” planned the dive, pretty much by pointing to the water
and saying “this looks like a great place to dive”. The plan entailed
heading against the current for the first half of the dive, then heading
back – sounded like a good plan to me. This is a vacation in paradise
after all.
After you enter the water you notice another
feature of the island charm, the sense that here in the safety of this
warm, aquatic womb, the real world is somehow set aside and the
intensity of this very moment can engulf you; it can make you forget
everything at the surface. We watched, mesmerized, as a huge school of
blue tangs danced around us, allowing only undulating shafts of
flickering light to filter through to a backdrop made up of the most
dazzling and unlikely colors ever known.
As you turn away from the colors and look out on
the expanse, you see one of God’s bluest blues teaming with thousands of
individuals in dozens of varieties, some so small only a macro lens will
tell their story and some as large as the adult hammerhead shark that
passed ever so slowly below us. We watched this master of his domain in
awe from our self-implied position of relative safety. My buddy and I, a
little tired of swimming against the current, hand signed our intent to
head back and began our drift back to the starting point. As we did, we
passed more of the things that keep calling us back to Bonaire – schools
of juvenile fish of all types hiding from color changing young octopi
that reach out to touch your camera lens, and pairs of flamingo tongue
shells, riding fingers of gently waving Gorgonian coral.
At the point we thought was our exit channel, we
headed toward the slope that let us know the shore is “that away”.
Skirting just over the bottom we came over a steeper rise than we
remembered but headed over the top and down into what seemed to be a
fairly large, bowl shaped valley, made of very hard (and this should
have been the tip-off), very clean, rock bottom. At this moment, we knew
we were in the wrong place and as we tried to turn back, a very strong
bottom current, unlike anything we had ever experienced, pushed us
forward. As we tried to swim away, the surge continued to push us
toward the shore into what looked like columns of stone the size of
large pick-up trucks standing on their ends, rising from the bottom.
With the welling water pushing us up and into the stone pinnacles, we
tried, unsuccessfully, to grab onto them. Every few seconds, a new wave
came from one direction or the other, pounding us against the rocks.
Quickly passing thoughts of how much that would hurt later went through
my head, but only for a second. I felt a fin take off for parts unknown
and my breathing turned to panting. A quick check of my air gauge
indicated deeper do-do ahead.
There is nothing like the sound of your wife
screaming, and your heart beating in your ears, to put a fine point on a
bad situation. We looked around at the surface for a moment as an
outgoing wave wrenched us off the rock we had grabbed. We now knew we
were at the base of a jagged outcropping cliff 100 yards or so south of
where we should have been and 20 yards north of an almost inaccessible
cliff with a thin (make that very thin) edge of beach at its foot.
Knowing that information did not change our
predicament much; we were still bruised and exhausted, still low on air
and still stuck in one of nature’s agitate and spin cycles. The question
from my wife about dropping her weight belt was quickly answered in the
affirmative, but having integrated weights, I chose to sacrifice a
little more air into my BC rather than drop something I might not be
able to replace – well, we were on vacation after all. This in itself
makes one wonder what one’s own mind is up to in such situations. It had
(only moments earlier) expressed to me its genuine concerns that we
really might not make it back from this “adventure” while at the same
time running past the thought about how angry all the other people on
the trip with us, would be if we went and died on them.
We tried to wave to a passing fishing boat for help
and watched as they calmly waved back – and as islanders, they were
probably smiling too. We waved, and yelled to a pretty lady in a yellow
sun dress who was standing on top of a near-by cliff, but she just took
our picture and left. Then, at the last possible edge of our abilities,
one of those powerful in or out waves (I couldn’t tell which) pushed us
just a little more south. It was only a body length or two outside the
last rising chunk of ancient coral and we gladly allowed the next series
of waves to deposit our limp bodies on the beautiful, albeit small,
cliff-shrouded sandy beach.
As we sat for a moment to check our injuries and
settle our nerves, we both knew we had dodged the proverbial bullet. We
had passed a very hard trial by fire (and water), bloodied some knees
and elbows, bruised some flesh and some egos, but survived together to
do it again and to do what divers do – get up, dust off, buy replacement
gear and go diving again.
With the help of others in our group, we were able
to hand our gear up the cliff face and then climb up some of that
ancient coral. We headed back to our little truck, filled with food,
water and of course cookies. This trip was our seventh to the divers’
paradise that is Bonaire and we will return. I hope you all can go there
for some diving with your best friend.
Joe Arcuni, Diver for Life |
