Illustration: Lauren Rebbeck
I’ll be the first to admit that there’s nothing like surfacing from a safety stop, breathless with excitement and ready to rave along with my dive buddies over the tornado of pelagics we were just finning through, the silhouette of a whale shark so massive it temporarily obscured the sun or that sudden flash of a manta that winged in from the blue.
Those are just a few of the encounters divers like me long to add to their lists of underwater experiences. They’re what keep us journeying to the ends of the earth for new sightings and emotions.
But can we all take a moment to appreciate the average, understated dive? The sheer wonder of merely being underwater?
The longer I’ve been diving, the more I’ve come to realize that there’s much to be said for the, dare I say, rather dull dive. You might know the ones I’m talking about. Those dives when the temperature is pleasant, everyone is having fun, the current is zilch and the viz average.
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When you’ve gotten to the point that you’re so comfortable with your buoyancy and being underwater—and you’re not constantly checking your gauges or adjusting your trim—there’s space for some mundane magic to happen.
After all, not every dive is going to have a wow moment. So, you might as well settle in and enjoy the journey.
There’s peacefulness in deflating your BCD and descending, filing into line behind your dive guide and finning around more like a curious gardener than someone with their head on a swivel for the next “wow” moment.
That’s when I find you can take a moment to remember what made you pursue diving in the first place—and find something to emote inwardly about in the ordinary, if you will.
Have you ever met a dive instructor too blasé to show you how they can flick their wrists and push their knuckles outward to make underwater rings to while away a safety stop? I sure haven’t. And as I’ve yet to master that skill I’ve seen a million times, I’m always impressed.
Try taking a closer look at something you’ve seen many times over. Maybe it’s a flamingo tongue snail swaying in the current atop a sea fan, or the way a goby stands guard outside its hole. Or you could practice being perfectly neutrally buoyant just inches above a silty seafloor, finning so carefully you barely ruffle a grain of sand. I’ve whiled away many a safety stop in the shallows, fascinated by the ever so slight movements of my body upward and downward that slowly inhaling and exhaling elicits in my own personal water column.
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Once, on a safety stop with my nieces in Marathon, Florida, I was so busy just admiring those mere centimeters I could rise and fall that when I surfaced, they told me I’d missed a giant barracuda patrol by.
I was happy for them, but I had no FOMO. I might have been there and done that, but there’s never a dull moment underwater.
