Adventures Outside the Box

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"Taste it! Taste it!" our phantom guide shrieks in the marine-oil night air.

I don't know what the excitement is about. My mouth is full of live (well, not anymore) squid and there is very little danger that I'm not going to taste it. I hand the squid's head over to Stu who takes one brief look at it, then pops it into his mouth and wipes his hands on his shorts. It tastes better than V8 Juice.

Jog on a hot day, dressed in garbage bags, if you care to simulate the experience.

The unseemly agent of our current erratic direction raises the bucket of wriggling squid from the dock and Reese selects his own, hastily dispatching it to a gastronomical end. It occurs to me that the bucket and its contents probably do not belong to our intoxicated guide.

Oh wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Lets move back a few days, not quite to the start, but to the beginning of a process of immersion. A series of steps that submerge and then overload the senses. Yeah, let's do that.

So, after eleven or so hours on the highway to the coast, we storm into a suburban Vancouver, Costco warehouse outlet to pick up a few urgently needed camping supplies. My head is full of thin vapours, that weird, altered state that you get after protracted time in a moving car.

We buy some vegetables, a lawn chair and a flat of V8 juice. Actually, two flats of V8 juice, because no one can stand the stuff. Then I grab a case of off-sale beer, before we get on the ferry, deliberately choosing a dubious brand, and we sit on the ferry deck drinking out of cans that we keep hidden in our jackets, like high-school kids who've smuggled beer into the late show. In the failing light of day we storm into our campsite on Vancouver Island and set up shop before running out to a pub for a dive-planning meeting. I hate camping but I'm too tired and stressed to notice it.

Of Blindness and Bottomless Pits

Day two of the trip finds us at Orlibar Point, Gabriola Island, for our first dive. I'm stressed. Unlike my much more experienced friends, I've only dove a handful of times, all of them in lakes and none of them in the last two years. I think I can remember how to do it, but I'm not quite sure. The fact that our opening dive will be off an undersea cliff over a, for all intents and purposes, bottomless void isn't making it any more relaxing. Nor is the presence of memorial plaques mounted on the rocks, commemorating divers who vanished into that void in the recent past. A sense of history is so important.

I battle my way into a drysuit to prepare for the frigid waters of the Pacific Ocean, layering polypro and fleece underneath it for extra warmth. In the icy sea I'll be reasonably warm, on the sunny beach I'm a fast withering inferno of hermetically sealed combustion. Jog on a hot day, dressed in garbage bags, if you care to simulate the experience.

Stu proclaims the neck seal on my rented drysuit to be too loose and tightly wraps electrical tape around it to prevent leakage. The exacting seal keeps water out, but also prevents air from leaking into my lungs and I'm hurried into the water where air pressure will loosen the seal a bit, before I pass out in a hundred pounds of rented equipment. I flounder into the water, descend, violently wheeling and thrashing into a kelp bed at twenty feet, and then proceed to throw a fit in slow motion as I reacquaint myself with the incredible amount of cumbersome gear that diving necessitates. Reece, Skip and Stu hover quietly in the growing clouds of disturbed sediment until I regain my composure, then we head for the abyss.

We hit 75 feet, which is deeper than I've ever gone, but it doesn't really register much with me because I'm in a protective shell of concentration where the only things that exist are those things that I need to control in order to get things done. I monitor my gauges insidiously, keep a close eye on my dive partner Stu, and navigate along the wall, suspended over the blackness of deep, ageless void, with nothing on my mind other than exactly what I'm doing. It works and the sea delivers me safely to the surface some twenty minutes later. I emerge and take a swig of V8 juice, reeling from the violently clashing contrast of mutually exclusive vegetables swimming in close tandem. When we repeat the dive in a couple of hours time, I'll be startled to discover that I've been swimming through clouds and clouds of white jellyfish, although somehow hadn't noticed. Then I'll emerge somewhere far from shore, in current that slowly drags me towards the open sea, forcing a hellish swim, followed by a long hike in scuba gear. The first day of diving is a success.