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Pumpkins, Knives and Oxygen Tanks

Aquatic carver Laurie Deakin holds up her handiwork in bee costume (photo courtesy of Laurie Deakin). Just how hard is it to hold a pumpkin down under 12 feet of water? This is a question very few of us will ever need to know the answer to. A better question is “Why in the world would anyone take a pumpkin scuba diving?”

“It’s just fun,” said Rick Coats, a member of the Caribbean Reef Association of Bubble Blowers (Crabbs) dive club on St. Croix.

In honor of Halloween, ten members of the club challenged each other to see who could carve Sharon Grimes uses her jack-o-lantern as a floatation device (Justin Shatwell photo).the best jack-o-lantern while sitting on the sea floor. Working in teams of two, they jumped into the ocean off the Ann E. Abramson pier in Frederiksted armed with little more than pumpkins, oxygen tanks and knives.

Underwater pumpkin carving isn’t new. Dive clubs across the country have been testing their aquatic gourd carving skills for years. Yet it seems a particularly appropriate way to celebrate this iconic fall holiday in our land of perpetual summer.

If the water is still warm, why not go trick-or-treating with the critters in the coral reef?

Laurie Deakin said her experience effectively amounted to just that. As soon as she started carving, she created a cloud of pumpkin bits that sent the baitfish into a feeding frenzy.

“I was attacked by lots and lots of little, tiny, two- or three-inch fish that kept swimming in and out of my pumpkin,” she said. “And then I just had to keep my buoyancy and stay down on the bottom and not cut my hand off.”

Deakin only recently joined the club but she won immediate respect from the older members by becoming the only person in Crabbs history to attempt to carve a pumpkin underwater while also wearing a costume.A sea turtle jack-o-lantern.

She said her bee outfit definitely upped the difficulty level because her wings caught the current and constantly pushed her forward and back.

“I thought my wings were going to go ‘poof,’ but they stood up. They did pretty good,” she said.

Coats said the fun of the event, aside from the silliness, was to just do something different under the water. Normally on dives people just swim and look at the fishes. Trying to wrestle a pumpkin at the bottom of the ocean requires a completely different skill set.

“It’s kind of a test if you can multitask and hold a sharp object between your legs and try to carve,” he said.

When the carving was done, the group displayed their five pumpkins on Strand Street and handed out candy to the curious trick-or-treaters who stopped by to inspect them.

Most were carved with an aquatic theme in mind. Deakin’s pumpkin was the outline of a sea turtle. Another team carved their jack-o-lantern to look like a shark devouring a lionfish. One particularly resourceful diver carved a cucumber into the shape of an eel and had it swimming out of the ear of his pumpkin diver.

Asked if the club was planning a whole series of events based on the idea of doing mundane, terrestrial activities underwater (sewing, cooking, filing taxes perhaps), Deakin laughed.

“I hope so,” she said. “This was fun.”

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