Diving for Pleasure
B) RICHARD GARNETT
TO the amateur diver the Mediterranean is the most hospitable of seas. There is no tide to disturb the mud on the bottom; the sand as a rule is too coarse to remain suspended in the water, which is therefore very clear, and the sea is so warm that you may bathe in it from May to October with no compulsion from a sense of duty. Just after the war clubs were formed in France and Italy by a number of amateur divers. Some of them were archaeolo- gists or ichthyologists, just as some mountain-climbers are geologists or botanists; but most of them were driven to explore the under-water world by the same urge that sends climbers to the top of the Alps. Their technique is extraordinarily safe, and by the end of 1951 the Club Alpin Sous-Marin of Cannes, the most active of these clubs, had made over seven thotisand dives, often to a depth of twenty fathoms, without a single serious accident. The number by now must be well over eight thousand.
The apparatus is quite self-contained and consists of one or two steel cylinders, each holding a thousand litres of free air compressed to two hundred atmospheres (about a ton and a quarter per square inch), a pressure that is illegal in England, though apparently quite safe in France. This air is fed through a demand-valve, which lowers its pressure to that of the surrounding medium and makes it possible to breathe under water as easily as on land. The diver also wears a belt weighted with lead to counteract his natural buoyancy, and the glass mask over the eyes and rubber fins on the feet that are now a familiar sight on the Riviera. The air-bottles have a reserve to enable you to reach the surface when the main supply is exhausted; and they are designed so that, if you use a pair of bottles and do not go below twenty fathoms, your air gives out before you begin to be in danger of suffering from the " bends," the unpleasant disease that afflicts deep-sea divers who come out of high pressures too quickly. The duration under water is from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half, according to the depth.
I am neithef a good nor a courageous swimmer, but I found the technique surprisingly easy to acquire, and was able to ven- ture down to the limiting depth after a couple of lessons'. There was very little to learn—merely to keep gulping air into my eustachian tubes whenever there was pressure on my ears, and to control my movements in a medium where my body seemed to have no weight and I could swim freely in any direction.
Then I went out in a boat to dive in deep water at one of the submarine cliffs round the Iles de Lerins. You do not wear ear-plugs, but sound can only be heard a few fathoms below the surface. At greater depth you have to rely on sight and touch, and I found that I was peculiarly conscious of those two senses. The bottom was dimly visible, grey and distant, seven or eight fathoms below, a deep blue curtain of sea hung on all sides, and the sun, broken by the waves into moving shafts of light, played for a few feet through the dusty water. The surface looked like a wrinkled and impenetrable ceiling of mercury just overhead. The more experienced divers had gone down first, leaving in their wake a firework-display of silver bubbles, which wobbled up in intermittent clusters. There was a faint noise, like bacon frying, made by the clash of small waves on the surface, and regularly, from somewhere below, came the distant mew of air escaping from divers' exhaust-valves.
Then I swam gulping down into silence. If I had taken an extra weight or two, I could have sunk slowly without effort until I reached the bottom. There I found the boat's anchor lying in a bed of rushy weed, with the cable curving up over- head. Suddenly the bottom was very close, and, since refraction lifts everything nearer to the plane of the glass in one's mask. it seemed even closer—and therefore larger—than it really was. Solid objects also had the disconcerting habit of moving towards me when I looked at them, and retreating when I turned away.
Not far from the anchor the sea-bed dropped suddenly for another ten fathoms or so, and the other divers had gone over the edge and down the side of the cliff. The steep rock looked a dull greenish-grey in these twilit depths, with a coat of soft fuzzy weed and here and there fronds of yellow gorgones, hard coral-like growths, standing out like horizontal trees. Large bristling sea-urchins nestled in the crevices of the rock- face, which turned out to be a warren of holes and small caves. I stuck my face into one of these holes, and peered into the gloom until my eyes became accustomed to the light. It was a garden of sponges in strange colours: slugs in grey, queer eruptions in dark terra-cotta lava, bushes in orange-brown and long fingers in a luminous purple-grey. These colours are proper to the depth, and if you take the purple sponge to the light of day it will appear a dirty pink. Likewise the browns will turn to red and orange. Branches of dark brown coral dotted with tiny white flowers grew down from the roof of the grotto; I saw the whiskers of a crayfish lurking in a corner, and I kept my eyes skinned for a lobster or a small octopus.
And there were fish everywhere, fleets of small cleanly- coloured fish ranging up and down the side of the cliff With no respect of gravity. The smallest were partly translucent, so that it would hardly have seemed surprising if they had turned to water before my eyes; and the troops of minute ultramarine ones were so vivid in colour that it was hard to see their shape, and they looked like drops of ink spattered into the sea and on the point of dissolving.. All the smaller fish seemed quite unconcerned as I swam through them like an airship blundering through a flight of starlings. Only if I made a grab at one would it dart suddenly out of my grasp, and on one occasion I even found a fish that would let me stroke it. Some divers made a habit of playing with octopuses, teasing them and toying with them till they flop down in ecstasy or exhaustion. But octopuses are an acquired taste.
There are few big fish to be seen. Many of them are too shy. Others are scarce; for instance, the merort, a creature as stupid and vulnerable as the dodo or the great auk, was almost exterminated by divers with harpoon-guns in the early days of amateur diving. Fortunately it is now illegal in France to use a harpoon with compressed-air diving-gear, and divers are just beginning to observe fish instead of killing them.
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