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Quotes: Hunting for a glimpse of genius in the words of others. No better time to remember that words are ideas, and ideas are things.

12
03
2009

First Deep Solo

 2001 - Club Med St Lucia

«Solo dives were a scuba diving instructor’s privilege. On our rare days off, if bored on land, we could always go on a personal dive, une plongée perso’ as we called them - if and when the boat dropped anchor. These taboo dives greatly helped protecting our interest and motivation levels that might otherwise have been blunted by the repetitive babysitting of clumsy Sunday divers.

At first, the concept had posed an ethical problem. Having solemnly preached against solo diving while teaching classes in the much harsher Quebec environment, I couldn’t conceive of it being so casual under the Tropics. Eventually, though, I realized that for all practical purposes, an instructor is always diving « alone ». No matter who they accompany or supervise, dive leaders are used to counting exclusively on themselves and certainly wouldn’t expect or even want help from beginner divers.

Solo hence represented a mere additional step down and since the thought of being alone underwater was fascinating and I was in Club Med where everything was forcefully easy and superficial, I stepped down. It was implicitly agreed that staff doing solo dives would jump in quietly before everyone else, not really to hide but rather to avoid attracting too much attention, which in the end was exactly the same thing; it is incredibly complicated to explain to beginners they must NEVER dive alone when you are doing it yourself. But jumping in ahead of the pack guaranteed freedom and perfect visibility, and it also greatly increased the likelihood of pelagic encounters. Solo dives were usually rather deep and short, allowing for an early – and unnoticed – return to the safety stop bar under the hull.

I decided to do my first deep solo on a night dive trip and to bring our bright yellow underwater scooter along. I had rigged the electric vehicle with two large halogen lights that made it look very futuristic. As soon as the boat was at anchor by the Arch, I jumped in discreetly while people were still fumbling with their gear and waiting for the briefing. The Arch, just north of Soufrières, was our only night site because of a large sand patch permitting us to drop anchor; all our daily dives were otherwise done adrift. Thoroughly familiar with the local topography, I left the rocky arch-shaped formation behind me and headed straight towards the drop-off.

The sandy bottom dropped down slowly to 50 feet and then broke sharply into a steep slope sprinkled with scarce coral patches. I hadn’t yet turned my lights on, careful not to attract unnecessary attention to my destination. Despite our strict night diving rules, I intended to drop down to 100 feet, maybe even 130 feet, I’d see how things went. In any case, and despite common belief, it is rarely completely dark down below at night and if by luck there is a moon, one can navigate just like in broad daylight. That’s what I did until I’d left far behind me the white flash of our safety stop strobe, which could be seen from much further away than a simple dive light.

Just to be sure, I glided down the top part of the drop-off, effectively disappearing from the boat’s visual range, and finally turned on the two spotlights. My universe suddenly shifted from a nuanced and infinite world of shadows and dark shapes to a harsh explosion of bright colors, limited to the halo of the lights beyond which now lay an impenetrable darkness. A shark could now have swam 5 feet away from me undetected unless it happened to cross my beam.

I dove downward as fast as my ears allowed me to. Passing 100 feet, I did a brief mental recap. I was approaching the sacred 130 feet no-decompression limit. My dive computer showed an elapsed 3 minutes and the pressure gauge was reading 2650 lbs/in2, out of the 3000 lbs/in2 of a full tank. I decided to bust my depth limit, taunted by the tales of French instructors who bragged about going very deep, and banking on the air economy the scooter undoubtedly would yield.

At 130 feet, I promised myself to be very careful and kept going down.

Depth: 160 feet. I noticed that I must have been a little narced1 because dropping from 130 to 160 feet had been a much lesser deal than going from 60 to 90 feet with a group of divers on my tail.

At 180 feet, I switched one light off, to keep a back-up just in case.

Depth: 200 feet. I marveled at the simplicity of this descent and told myself that I might as well keep going a little deeper since I’d only accumulated 5 minutes of bottom time.

Depth: 211 feet. I suddenly realized that my heart was pounding in my chest and pumping blood to my head in an incredibly loud fashion. Opting to stop, I kicked my fins a few times to right myself. No result. I crashed into the sloping reef and had to admit that I hadn’t added any air to my buoyancy compensator since I’d left the surface, trusting the scooter to control my movements and thus becoming as heavy as a prisoner’s ball and chain.

A little stunned, I had to wrestle frantically to free myself from a long soft coral branch that eventually broke and stayed in my hand, as I numbly inflated my vest, astonished at how much air fitted in it before neutral buoyancy was restored.

Blood was still rushing maddeningly to my head and breathing remained short from the battle with the coral. I gave one look at the computer: Depth: 234 feet. Close to 8 atmospheres. 7 minutes. An ascent ceiling and a mandatory decompression stop. In the middle of the night. Alone.

The air tasted funny, metallic and tingling. Waves of pins and needles were rampaging through my body and it felt like blood merely spun behind my eyes without leaving the head.

Too deep!

Depth: 235 feet. My thoughts were tumbling clumsily one on top of another. I restarted the scooter and let it drag me towards the surface. But a buzzer sound began ringing and eventually bothered me so much that I fought to find its source, my mind groggy.

It couldn’t be the scooter. Nor my dive watch. Ah, the computer. The damn thing was warning me that I was exceeding normal ascent speed. Of course, the scooter was much too swift for a safe vertical climb. I tried to orient it sideways in a diagonal but still couldn’t seem to manage my speed. So I stopped it and resumed kicking. But using my fins had become exhausting and the yellow machine, now a dead weight, was cumbersome and heavy.

Depth: 190 feet. The air tasted funny, metallic and tingling. Waves of pins and needles were rampaging through my body and it felt like blood merely spun behind my eyes without leaving the head. I was hitting the reef with my knees and fins but didn’t pay attention to that, concentrating on the two variables on which depended my fate: breathing rate and ascent speed.

Depth: 150 feet. The dizziness began to recede slowly and I finally regained control of my lungs.

Depth: 120 feet. I spotted faint light rays drawing shadows on the top of the wall, far to the right and above me. I had climbed straight back up and would come up too far from the boat. I corrected my trajectory and checked the computer: 11 minutes. The deco stop wasn’t increasing.

At 80 feet, I found some sand and followed a long funnel that I recognized from past daytime dives. I was almost out of trouble. The computer gave me a few minutes back.

Upon reaching 50 feet, I landed on the sandy bottom and took a minute to recap the situation, my thoughts now straight and clear. I had 1200 pounds of air left and according to the computer, no longer any mandatory decompression stops to be done. Bottom time: 14 minutes. I decided to stick around in the shallows for a while, to break the ascent even further.

Finding a group of divers under the boat in some 30 feet of water, I turned my second spotlight back on and aimed my scooter towards them, showing off. JM, the instructor leading the dive, immediately borrowed it and took it for a spin, leaving his group for me to watch.

Not really knowing what to do to entertain them, I found a cute little ray on the sand, of a pale beige color and softly rounded shape. I pointed it out to them and, breaking the absolute no-touch directive, tapped it with a finger to make it swim away. A strong shock made be back up with a jerk. I’d managed to pick an electric ray.

Disgusted, I recovered my scooter, showed the ray to JM vaguely hoping that he would touch it too and headed back towards the surface, defeated. I paused a good 15 minutes at the safety stop, suddenly quite worried about what I’d just done, and then climbed back on board and broke down my gear silently. I drank a few precautionary glasses of water to re-hydrate and laid down at the bow, not too sure if I was proud of myself.

I had just beaten – and by far – my own depth record. Solo. By night. Without any training or planning. Then there was the second record, much less glorious, leaving a sour taste in my mouth : never so close to a catastrophe, never so stupid.

I did, however, keep on doing occasional deep dives for about two years. Mostly, it was about the thrill of going places most people wouldn’t even dream of, and the privilege of swimming at uncharted depths, on unexplored walls and healthy reefs. But deep inside, I knew all too well that what was truly calling me down there was a very conflicting duo of emotions: the eternal wish to know myself better and the need to taste the very essence of life concentrated within a few dangerous minutes. It was the razor’s edge call. That devious, handsome voice that makes people climb incredibly hostile mountains or cross an ocean on a kayak or walk to the pole, risking everything for the sole gain of living harder, faster, higher, deeper or not at all.

I relied on my mounting experience and the two simple rules I had crafted for the circumstance: double the gear, half the buddy system. While diving with a partner on a recreational outing was absolute logic, it became quite the opposite at extreme depth. Down deep, where everything hung to a thread and anything could go wrong so easily, helping a distressed diver became incredibly dangerous because of one’s own weakened faculties. Another diver in trouble was a serious threat, and no one wanted to either face that threat or inflict it. So we dove alone.

An infinite spec of pure human silliness, irresponsible to the point of greatness, alone in the middle of a killer water mass of immeasurable crushing power

I did my last deep dive off the North Wall in Provo, in the Turks and Caicos Islands. That day, our boat captain had the same idea and so we went off separately, out of sight of one another, straight down the magnificent wall. At 257 feet, I leveled off. I had just wanted to pass 250. I was nervous and quite ready to ascend back to the sunlight, but I caught a glimpse of movement below me and looked down. There was my captain, some 30 feet below, following a graceful eagle ray, his bubble streams trailing behind him in gigantic columns of intricate texture, white slashes of human presence on the deepest ocean blue, rising all the way to the surface and the real world beyond it.

At that moment, seeing him as I must have been myself, an infinite spec of pure human silliness, irresponsible to the point of greatness, alone in the middle of a killer water mass of immeasurable crushing power, at the mercy of the slightest hiccup or mechanical failure, irremediably isolated from the surface by the physics of pressure and time and gasses, fragile mind, small footprint, deep commitment and blue coffin all around, something clicked in me that would never again be forgotten. As far as I was concerned, it was not worth it and would likely end in tragedy.

I never dove casually below 150 feet again.

Many years later, I was involved in a tragic recovery attempt in Little Cayman when a fellow divemaster disappeared underwater and I had to briefly scan Bloody Bay Wall down to 180 feet in a major, multi-dive-operator search and rescue effort.

The razor’s edge is everywhere. The missing diver hadn’t, it would seem, been able to resist the call of the deep. He might even have welcomed it. »

 1 Narced: Common diving expression, from the word narcosis. A diver breathes regular, compressed air, which is composed of roughly 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen. Nitrogen narcosis, also called rapture of the deep, is an insidious effect of that nitrogen when breathed at high pressure. It makes divers lose their grasp on reality while diminishing mental and motor faculties. Narcosis is progressive and increases with depth; however it has no lasting side or secondary effects and is relieved by ascending back to shallower depths.

...


First Deep Solo was translated and adapted from the book Les aventures d’un GO désorganisé, written by, yes, no other than myself, and available (in French) on Amazon.


« Many dead divers have been found inside [deep] shipwrecks with more than enough air remaining to have made it to the surface. It is not that they chose to die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live. »

Robert Kurson – Shadow Divers

 

 Posted at 4:41 PM in Quotes: 9 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
05
27
2009

To be pondered...

What a folly it is to dread the thought of throwing away life at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.

John Howe

 

 Posted at 6:03 PM in Quotes: 2 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
05
11
2008

Interrogation

« When the bus driver jabbers that he will have to stop at the Police Control, I immediately smell trouble. No stops have been planned and he should know that we have all the necessary authorizations. What’s worse, I don’t remember noticing any kind of control booth on our way to town.

He pulls over in a dark empty street, far away from the Saigon airport and even further still from the harbour, and I no longer have to smell it: trouble is here. The French passengers, still a little shocked by the harassment at Customs, don’t really know any better and are looking around with worried faces, probably wondering if the all-inclusive package to Guadeloupe wouldn’t have been a safer bet.

I put on my most reassuring smile and explain that there must be a misunderstanding which I will sort out at the « Control » with our driver, who has already jumped off the bus and is waving for me to follow him. I fall in with his stride, mentally noting that the houses lining the sinister street do not look at all like official buildings and worriedly looking around for a reassuring sign in the short-lived headlight halo of the rare cars driving by.

The man turns purposefully into an alley, walks across a porch and into a small inner courtyard. Still not a single light in sight. The Vietnamese must keep enforcing a good old curfew to save electricity.

We pass through a metal gate, climb a few steps and just as I am getting ready to turn around and bravely run back to the bus, the driver opens a last door and walks in. Heart beating fast, I follow him. My relief in finding relative lighting inside is soon hampered by the austere look of the room we’re in. Between four walls, a desk, a chair, a lamp. The walls are dirty and naked, the metal desk is barren and the chair occupied by a meager, stern looking woman wearing a military uniform. And as for the lamp, its articulated head is pointed straight at me.

There is no time to lose. I tap into my classical repertoire and manage to label the place under the « Communist interrogation chamber » category with a daring cross-reference to James Bond and Midnight Express.

My driver whispers a few words in Vietnamese to the uniform and then retreats to the back of the room, away from the light and out of view. I’m still unsure whether they are trying to scam me or if this is really a misunderstanding but my blood runs a little colder.

The uniform then addresses me in her language. I don’t catch a single word of her sentence and have to reply with a gesture of ignorance. She repeats her statement, punctuates it with a new comment and shows no sign of speaking anything else than her mystifying dialect. I nervously attempt communication in English, then in French, without any luck.

Tension is building in an almost tangible way.

She obviously wants something and her patience is failing. I ask the driver behind me to explain our situation but his English is so primitive that he doesn’t seem to get it, unless he’s simply refusing to help. I suspect that money would probably solve our issue but I don’t have a single dollar - or franc - on me. My concerned thoughts turn towards the passengers waiting outside in the dark bus.

Suddenly, a door I hadn’t noticed opens on my left. A man in civilian clothes and wearing thin glasses, short and hunched forward, walks in and speaks to the uniform as if continuing a conversation started in my absence. I must be nervous. Crazy options are already going through my head, from a visit to the local jail to the wild escape through the streets of Saigon.

The newcomer, seeming to rank higher on the scene, addresses me first in Vietnamese and next in a hesitant and almost incoherent English. The driver immediately starts answering in Vietnamese, in an affirmative manner that makes me fear he is confirming against my will that we are here for a control; so I interrupt him, hoping for it to be a display of authority but not arrogance.

Using a telegraphic-style English without pronouns or conjugation, I attempt to claim our rights and explain that we have been doing the shuttle between the airport and the harbour with a clearance issued by the proper authorities. I am aware that said authorities must have granted such clearance after the shuttling of some money from a hand to a pocket, but I at least have my official crew landing pass and show it to them. They don’t seem to like that, as if they had just lost an ace in their hand.

I must have been in here for 10 minutes now. The two Party officials are arguing with each other and don’t seem to agree on the procedure to follow. My driver is getting agitated behind me. It suddenly dawns on me that he might well be in on this, hoping for his share of the prize. I know only too well how everything is negotiated under the rising smell of money in the new Vietnam, and I still remember how our landing fees keep rising for no reason from one trip to the next.

On the other hand, there is a possibility that the incredibly sluggish communist bureaucracy alone might be responsible for this mess. There doesn’t seem to be, in their narrow minds and in the related rules, a clause applying to the present situation, and obviously lacking either initiative or freedom or both, they just don’t know what to do.

Then, abruptly, the opposition gives in. The man leaves the room and the woman waves me to the door with a snort and marked disdain.

I lower myself into thanks, open the door, think of slamming it behind me, but decide not to after reconsidering the local jail option.

Outside in the street, the bus is still there, which almost surprises me. My passengers are quiet and tired. I would like to comment on the incident but since that would only stain the image of the perfectly oiled machine that was supposed to welcome them to Asia, I simply announce that everything is finally in order, apologize for the delay, and we get on our way.

The driver hasn’t said a word since we walked out; I don’t break the silence, annoyed at him and rather suspicious. Once we reach the ship, I unload my travelers under the impatient watch of the bridge - it’s late and they were waiting for us to sail. More Party officials are present, gauging the boarding group, probably wondering how high to inflate the landing tax on our next layover.

I definitely don’t like the remains of the communist regime. »


Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam - 1994

 

 

 Posted at 3:39 AM in On the road: & Quotes: 2 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
05
05
2008

Fading

« The ship’s tender drops me off on an lonely pier to which are tied up a few rusty fishing boats, almost all leaning to one side as if to show their long seafaring experience, just as John Wayne wore his hat tilted sideways. But I’m not fooled by the trick and I can feel they are simply tired and worn out, aspiring to never again leave the harbour’s calm waters and this dock they now use as a crutch... »

March 27, 1994 - Lombok, Indonesia.

 

 Posted at 1:11 AM in On the road: & Quotes: No comments yet »  Post one!
01
13
2008

Good old geeky IRC

You had to be there. It was a long time ago. Long before AIM, and Gmail chat, and MSN Messenger, and Skype, and ICQ, and Trillian and the like, the ancestor of online chatting was – and still is – called IRC. It stands for Internet Chat Relay. I spent hours on it, in chat rooms called channels, using the ever-popular mIRC and ViRC programs, writing scripts, customizing my messages, implementing colors, offering roses, seeking privileges, learning the syntax and the codes, wasting precious time, getting addicted. Then I got Jouche addicted too. Mea culpa. And then I bailed.

Nowadays, modern chat clients are so much more powerful and user friendly, but they cater mostly to individual conversations and the idea of public channels never really took off until Facebook appeared.

The difference with IRC is that it was geeky and took quite a while to master. But entire online communities built themselves around those channels. Some of them still exist I’m sure, but I’ve lost touch. I’ve forgotten the language. I’ve moved on. Yet I keep a copy of mIRC on my laptop. One never knows. IRC remains a valuable resource when it comes to finding live, up-to-date info about the weirdest, most remote things, fast.

Here are a few quotes from actual IRC conversations. They were found here. They are much funnier if you’re a geek and if you were there.

(+ware) I rear-ended a car this morning. So there we are alongside the road and
(+ware) slowly the driver gets out of the car . . . and you know how you just get sooo
(+ware) stressed and life seems to get funny?
(+ware) Well, I could NOT believe it . . he was a DWARF! He storms over to my car,
(+ware) looks up at me and says, « I AM NOT HAPPY! »
(+ware) So, I look down at him and say, « Well, which one are you then? »... and
(+ware) THAT’S when the fight started . .

...

<frank> can you help me install GTA3?
<knightmare> first, shut down all programs you aren’t using
* frank has quit IRC. (Quit) **
<knightmare> ...

...

<pronstar``afk> my kazaa preformed an illegal opperation
<cCCPehlet`> isn’t that what kazaa is designed to do?

...

<fabz> I think we need to work on our communication.. one guy is talking crap, one just goes « lol » and the other one doesn’t understand what’s going on
<atsleek> lol
<Nefemus> what?

...

<idsif> you’re smarter than the average american
<ascian> of course. i’m canadian.

...

<Beeth> Girls are like internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.
<honx> well, you can stil get one from a strange country : -P

** That’s a system message that appears when a user closes his IRC program. Duh. (Vince)

 

 Posted at 1:00 AM in Bits and pieces: & ICMOL: & Quotes: 4 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
12
26
2007

Never forgotten

« … When the bus drops us off at the rendez-vous point, a long hot day is getting old and Club Med 2’s silhouette thrones on a grandiose horizon background of oranges and reds. We are granted a stunning sunset on the South China Sea, a rare occurrence since the Vietnamese coast is generally oriented towards the East. Time slows down to a halt and minutes tick by as a few lonely pirogues glide effortlessly on a glassy ocean. Then the sun sinks below the surface of the world and darkness creeps in. We return to our bright onboard lights leaving behind us the simple poverty and warm smile of these people who seem to no longer even need hope… »

Hue, Vietnam. Summer of ‘94

 

 Posted at 1:25 AM in Quotes: 5 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
12
02
2007

There and then

« ... Mother Nature is granting us an exceptional sunset through convoluted clouds in the summer sky. There is a sense of peace lingering in the air tonight that both lifts and sinks my heart. Time is simply gliding over us, flowing without a ripple. Everything is calm and serene, the islands are placidly watching us sail away and a few sampans finally go back to where they came from… »

[Halong Bay, Vietnam - July 1994]

 

 Posted at 10:04 PM in Quotes: 3 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
10
08
2007

Cheering up

Hmm, what a dark post the previous was. To lighten up the tone, here are a beautiful couple of lines from another author, whom I’m publishing without her permission, which she probabbly wouldn’t have given any way... ;-)

 « Years later, I would understand where I was by bending down to see what grew. And always, when I was lost, in one way or another, I would find myself in a garden. »

 

 Posted at 6:44 PM in Always: & Quotes: 6 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
10
06
2007

Immortal

« ... Tout cela ne vaut pas le poison qui découle
De tes yeux, de tes yeux verts,
Lacs où mon âme tremble et se voit à l’envers...
Mes songes viennent en foule
Pour se désaltérer à ces gouffres amers.

Tout cela ne vaut pas le terrible prodige
De ta salive qui mord,
Qui plonge dans l’oubli mon âme sans remord,
Et, charriant le vertige,
La roule défaillante aux rives de la mort !

... All that doesn’t come close to the poison that oozes
From your eyes, from your green eyes,
Lakes where my trembling soul sees itself upside down...
My dreams gather in a flock
To water themselves at these bitter holes.

And all that it is not worth the prodigy of your saliva.
It bites my soul,
And dizzies it, and swirls it down remorselessly.
Rolling it, fainting, to the underworld. »



Baudelaire - Le poison (Eloquently quoted by Jill and Nikopol in Enki Bilal’s Immortel (Ad Vitam) )

 

 Posted at 1:10 AM in Quotes: & Schtroumpfissime: 1 Comment » Toggle display • Reply
10
02
2007

Green eyes

« Honey you are the sea, upon which I float, and I came here to talk, I think you should know

That green eyes, you’re the one that I wanted to find, and anyone who, tried to deny you must be out of their mind

Cause I came here with a load, and it feels so much lighter, since I met you, honey you should know, that I could never go on without you

Green eyes »

 [Coldplay - Green Eyes]

 

 Posted at 11:38 PM in Always: & Quotes: & Schtroumpfissime: No comments yet »  Post one!
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