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Diving Beyond the Cliff, Caribbean Sea

As told by Christine S.
Boston, Massachusetts

Story Narrative:

Submitted by Christine to the Women Mind the Water digital stories project, in conjunction with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street storytelling website and traveling exhibition "Water/Ways."

This story was recorded at School for the Environment, UMASS Boston.

"So my name is Christine. When I was an undergrad I studied abroad in this program down in the Caribbean on this small island. It was a marine ecology program and we had this real cool component where we got to use scuba diving as a learning tool. So one day after dinner we got to go out to this familiar dive site called Cliff. It was called Cliff not because of this rocky outcropping on the shore but because once you swam out a little ways the sea floor just dropped off straight about 80 feet. So we got to our dive site and we knew it had to do with coral reef ecology but we didn’t know the exact purpose of our dive and we suited up.

My instructor passed out the equipment. So it was just this one little piece of yellow plastic that we would wear over our masks and an extra light that turned out to emit blue light. So we went out and we got to the edge of the wall. It was dark. We only had our little white flash lights to see. We paused there at the edge. I remember looking out off the cliff wall under water and trying to see as far as I could and feeling this immense, overwhelming excitement and also a sense of foreboding. It was thrilling being there, like we were breaking the rules. So we went over the edge and descended about 15 feet or so along the wall and my instructor stopped us and had us gather around. She indicated for us to shut off our regular flash lights and turn on our blue lights.

When we did this amazing thing happened. It was like stepping into a Grateful Dead poster (laughs). All around us the scene of amazing psychedelic colors just erupted: the corals, the algae, and even some of the critters were fluorescing in the blue light. We were just seeing these neon yellows and greens and blues everywhere. It really was an alien landscape. I’ve never seen anything like it. If I could have dropped my jaw I would have but I would have sucked in a lot of water.

I remember thinking to myself: 'What a ridiculous place to be' and how incredible it was in that moment that we, the ten of us who had come from all around the world, found ourselves 40 feet under water, in the dark, in the depths, and experiencing this incredible site that to me just felt like one of those universal secrets that not everyone gets to experience. It was this powerful, emotional feeling of this connection to the ocean around me and all of things in it. I’ve always taken that with me and it’s something I always feel whenever I go to the ocean."

 

Asset ID: 8010
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