When I started going underwater, most of the time of those first years were expend with fins, mask and snorkel. Venezuelan waters need no depth to show all sorts of marvelous animals, and plants and the many things in between that grow underwater. I would go, first with my father and eventually with my friends, from the beach and the sandy bottom filled with rays and sand pennies and crabs, towards the malecon, a line of great stones laid into the sea. There we could expend hours and hours. Corals, morays, parrot fishes. The one jellyfish stuck in between the stones, the jellyfish that we would, carefully, try to rescue and push towards the open water.
Now, that was a scary moment.
Caribbeans waters are well known by their transparency and their deep blue. Yet those of you that have not dived can not imagine the fear that a kid of eight years had facing a wall of splendorous blue. One thing was to look at stones and fishes and plants and corals, all demanding attention, all fascinating. But a blue wall in front of your eyes? You know that you might be looking at ten, perhaps thirty meters. But after that? What is after that? A shark, a school of barracudas, a great manta? or the dolphin that you have been dreaming of seeing some day?
You don’t know. It’s blue and deep and unfathomable, and to me, it was scary.
And so, many years after I am still diving. Almost never with a snorkel, since the dutch waters are less friendly and their marvels are deeper and beyond the reach of only my lungs. But marvels they have. And still today, even knowing that there are no sharks anymore, nor manta’s nor barracudas, I am still tense at looking into the deep, as if the same voice of almost fifty years ago is still there, still calling and still telling me that there is something just beyond the reach of my eyes, something that just with a couple of fin strokes I will be able to see.
And there it is.
A shadow, a big shadow. As usual, the instant of doubt, of reverse the fins. of go back to the shallows. But curiosity and rationality, and long practiced breath control, so the calm. Approach then. Approach and see the shadow take shape, square and angles and definitively not natural. Approach, approach! Then there it is, there is the wreck that you have been looking for. A testament to our vanity, land mammals that believe that we can cross the waters unharmed. with our silly inventions. A testament and proof that now and then, sooner or later that is, the sea, the lake, the water! will regains what is hers.
The wreck.
To dive the wrecks is to face my fears, to regain that being a scared child, to overcome that fear, and then, only then, remember that we are the ones that belong to nature, not the other way around. I will be back again and again, and once, I’ll be back here definitively, as all of us will be. Another circle will have closed. For now I just enjoy myself, I smile at my irrationalities and my old fears, and make another turn around the still standing structure, disturbing a eel, smiling to a school of perchs in search of things to eat. I will surface soon, and I will change and the smile will remain. With a bit of luck, up to my next dive.