Fort Rucker, Alabama, home to Army Aviation. Here is where I spent two years of my life. Not much to do in this area except to study and watch helicopters grace the sky day and night. Weather here can be hot and humid at times, but the green of the trees, the reddish orange color of the clay and the blue sky are bright and vivid. I never really minded the humidity much, and I always looked forward to the thunderstorms where I would sit on the trunk of my car in the car port and just watch the rain come down and wait for the lightning to light up the sky. It was peaceful and made for a great time. After all the study and rigmarole of the classes, the weekends made for a great time to relax. Being only two hours from the beaches in Florida, some of my friends and I would travel down and chill on the beach in Panama City. Yes, this included playing beach volleyball with other pilots from the Navy and sometimes Air Force while quoting lines from Top Gun. After playing volleyball, I would typically put on my snorkel gear and go swimming in the ocean. However, there really wasn’t much to see in the shallows of the Gulf so I brought up the idea of getting scuba certified. A few others thought it would be a cool idea, so we found a place that did scuba certification and bought the books. Now we just had to find time with all our other reading and assignments to read the books, take the test and then go learn to scuba dive.
It was May 7th, 2014 when we headed back down to the beach to begin our certification. The water was a light green and was kind of murky, visibility underwater that day was about 20 feet. We were briefed about what we would be doing before we hopped into a boat that would take us to the location where we would begin our actual scuba instruction. This included how to properly put on (don) the gear, how to properly fall into the water, and then once in the water how to control buoyancy. Before we went underwater for the next bit of instruction we went over the hand signals again and were given a briefing as to what would take place and in what order the training would happen. We were told that we would circle up once down there and give the sign for “okay” which is putting the thumb and the index finger together forming a circle, leaving the other three fingers up. We were informed not to give the thumbs up as that is the signal to go back up to the surface. Once circled up and everyone giving the okay symbol, we proceeded one at a time in a counter-clockwise fashion doing each of the tasks that the instructor demonstrated. One task was learning to take the regulator (the part to breath out of) out of our mouths and putting it back in and purging the water out of it before taking a breath. Another task was filling the mask with water and then purging the water out of the mask so that you could see again. Very helpful in the event you hit something that knocks your mask off, or for whatever reason the mask may fill with water. Instead of panicking, just calmly clear the water out and proceed. We learned other safety criteria, but the one that seemed most difficult was when we had to take off the gear (doff the gear) and then don the gear again while underwater and hooked up to the regulator. This is a very small list of the things that transpired on day one to learn to dive.
The next time we went for a dive was June 14th, in the jetties at Panama City beach. We stayed shallow around 20 feet for most of the dive just to get used to control with the gear on and again work buoyancy issues. Not too much happened here and there really wasn’t much to see in the location where we dove. But we spent 45 minutes getting better at our newfound skill.
The third and fourth dive were done on July 5th. The third dive was another 45 minute dive and we didn’t go much deeper than the last dive, only to about 28 feet this time and only spent 10 minutes at that depth. This dive was done over at the Shell island Jetties. There was a little more to see here than at the last spot and we brought underwater cameras to photograph what we would see. The fourth dive was also a shallow dive at 17 feet but had some of the best finds as far as seeing fish and urchins and other sea life in the rocks and reef that were below us. This dive also taught us about current and how to feel for the current and move in a manner to identify if the current was too strong to continue or if it was safe to keep going. Mike, our instructor told us that sometimes students would go off on their own and get swept up in a current that would take them out to sea for about 10 mins. They would be fine, just much further out at sea. We were all told that if this happened to us we should come to the surface when we can and inflate our buoyancy control device (BCD) so that we could just float on the water until he came to pick us up in the boat. Fortunately, this did not happen to anyone in our group and we were able to successfully pass this last course of instruction. Passing this last dive officially meant that we were now certified. This meant that the next dive after certification needed to be something cool. And what’s cooler than diving to see a ship wreck.
July 8th, we return once again. However, conditions were not the greatest. Visibility was low due a storm that had churned up a lot of the seabed and the current was a bit strong. We decided to go anyway, and let Mike lead the way. He was very adamant about us following his instructions to the T. We agreed. We dropped anchor and Mike set out to place a lead line for us to follow. He secured the line and came back up to let us know we were good to get in the water. We were on our way to go and see a small boat that was wrecked over 100 years ago. The instructions were to follow the line he placed and move down slowly. We were not to let go of the line as we might get lost with as murky as the waters were.
Once on the bottom we saw a bulge on the seafloor that didn’t look like much, but after taking a closer look we could see the outline of a boat that had been overtaken by sea life now. There were a ton of fish in the area so many that it was hard to see through them. Their actions were a bit unusual as they would be just floating there one minute and then all jet away a few feet the next. This happened a few times and then Mike pointed for us to look away from the shipwreck into the murky water. We couldn’t tell what it was, but it was big and could have been a dolphin or a shark. Most of the guys think it was a shark, even though it was a way’s out we decided to call it a day and headed back for the line to take us up to the boat. We had hoped for an hour dive, but due to the possible dangers that were down there we made it 29 mins before being back in a safe environment. As you can see from the pictures, visibility wasn’t the greatest, so best decision was to not stick around to see if a shark was really there.
What we didn’t realize is that that last dive would be the final dive for us in the Gulf that year as finals were coming up and graduation was only a month away. It now became evident that if scuba was to remain a part of my life I would have to figure out a way to get out again once I get back to Seattle. I wondered at times, is there even any good diving in the Pacific Northwest? Only time would tell. For now it was time for me to focus on graduation from flight school and then head home to re-enter the world of civilian life and adjust back to my normal day to day job.