Like anybody else who's ever gazed out at the sea and been filled with that strange combination of awe and longing, I've never been able to put my finger on what exactly it is that I love about the endless blue ocean. It is a world unto itself which still harbors mysteries and secrets we land dwellers may never know.
At Coral World recently, I was reminded that the ocean is a world within a world.
Sea Trek at Coral World is just a couple of months old. There I found myself, along with my Sea Trek guide, Jeannie Sealander (talk about perfect names), donning a heavy helmet attached to a pressurized air hose and descending a ladder to the ocean floor. At the bottom of the ladder, where the helmet's 70 pounds was transformed by its own buoyancy to a much more manageable 15, I gave Jeannie and Jeff, the safety diver who was present during the entire tour, the "okay" sign, as I'd been instructed to do during the 10-minute orientation.
And from there, I was on my own, walking along the surface of this alien world, exploring at my own pace.
I guided myself along by holding onto a chain strung at waist level, and just as I'd begun to get used to the gentle surge of the water and the feeling of walking almost weightlessly, I found myself surrounded by a flashing school of yellowtail snappers. It was, by coincidence, feeding time at Coral World. I tilted my head backwards in the helmet to look up through the teeming fish at the diver feeding them and saw, to my astonishment, a four-foot barracuda who'd joined up with the snappers for the meal.
As I was later told by Jeannie and Jeff, this particular barracuda was a Coral World fixture and therefore "safe." Or as Jeannie more accurately put it, "well fed."
So, within moments of the start of the tour, I was able to observe something for the first time in my life, a barracuda eating a free lunch in the water five feet above where I was standing. I watched for a while, delighted not only by what I saw, but also by the sense of safety I felt even while so close to a feeding barracuda, and then continued on the path down a gentle slope.
I saw brilliant red fire coral, brain coral, parrot fish, blue tangs, trumpet fish, fan coral, two sergeant majors, finger coral, a variety of different angel fish, a bunch of corals and fish I don't know the names of, and about a dozen people waving and taking pictures of me through the windows of the underwater tower I was walking next to.
To be completely honest, aside from the barracuda and strangers taking submarine pictures of me, I didn't see much more than I would see on the average afternoon snorkel out from Sapphire Beach, or Hull Bay, or, indeed from right inside the underwater tower they've had at Coral World for years. But there's something else out there aside from the fish and coral that was more than worth my trip down the ladder.
At the deepest place along the trail, about 15 feet down and maybe 30 yards from the ladder, I stopped, turned to face away from the land and out into the deepening blue. For a full three minutes I did nothing but breathe and stare and imagine the same thing I imagined at three years old, the first time I ever put on a mask and snorkel: What would it be like to live here?
I stood upon the floor of the sea, swaying as fan coral sways with the surge, and for just a few heartbeats experienced again the old humbling wonder and fascination of this world beneath our world; the great blue world in which we will never be more than momentary visitors.
