Turtles and Tension

After my first dive, we came back to the shore for a couple of hours. Then, this time with my brother-in-law joining, the five of us headed out for an afternoon two-tank dive.

Our first site was the well named Tortugas, where one can expect to see large sea turtles. It was a bit deeper than my earlier dive (without really being truly "deep"), but it did present a new challenge for me: a current. This was to be a drift dive, where the boat drops us off at one end of the site, we float through along the current, and then get picked up on the other side.

In such a dive, you're advised to stay as close to the bottom as you can, where the current will affect you the least. If you rise too much, you'll get caught up in the faster moving water and... byyyyyyyyyyye! I certainly understood the concept here, but remember that I was still getting the hang of all this. So keeping low was still firmly rooted in "easier said than done" turf for me.

So we rolled into the water, went down (I got that part better this time, at least), and began looking. In less than five minutes, we spotted our first turtle! Size is tricky to judge underwater, but it seemed a respectable turtle of several feet across. Neat! I'm going to back off just a bit, I think, so everyone else can get in for a look.

Just a bit. Wait. No. Just back! Not up! Oh crap.

Almost before I know what I've done or how I've done it, I'm something like seven feet off the ocean floor and -- as promised -- I am starting to float away. At this point, my mind splits in several pieces, all screaming instructions. And it's not that they're all necessarily contradictory, but I really can't hear myself think over the cacophony. I need to relax and exhale so I can float back down to the bottom. But I'm actually starting to float away at a somewhat alarming rate, so it seems like I'd better start swimming. But that's not working at all, because the current really is strong and... crap, I haven't got my legs properly above me, so now I'm starting to swim up even more and making this situation a whole lot worse.

As this is happening, it feels like it's taking a good minute, easily. In reality, it's probably more like ten seconds. But what so far has been more frustration tinged with embarrassment is now starting to incorporate a bit of panic, because I realize that absolutely no one is looking at me. They're all understandably circling around the turtle to get a close look, take pictures... you know, to do the stuff we came down here to do.

I'm trying to find a way to attract attention, and coming up with nothing. And I'm now at least a mile away and hundreds of feet up. (In reality, maybe twenty feet away and ten up?) Anyway, there's an ocean between us. Ha! If only I'd thought of that line at the time, maybe I'd have calmed down a bit and actually sunk like I was supposed to.

After said eternity-that-was-really-only-a-few-seconds, my boyfriend finally starts looking around. Where the hell have I gone? And then he spots me, and his mask-mounted camera -- which has been taking a photo automatically every five seconds -- perfectly captures the moment:

So everybody abandoned the cool turtle and came after me. Of course, once I actually knew that I had in fact been seen, I relaxed enough to gather my wits and drop back down to the ocean floor. Realistically speaking, I wasn't really in any actual danger here, but I'd definitely had a moment or two of panic.

Fortunately, everything went fine after that. We came upon another turtle, and actually got to hang out near it long enough to make up for the one we (I) flew by:

There were other fish in the mix as well, though my identification skills are even less developed than my scuba skills. So in a nutshell, what I remember of this dive was: "Ooo, turtle... Uh, guys? Seriously... GUYS! ... Ooo, turtle!"