Diving and Leaving

Yesterday Angie took me to a dive spot called the Toilet Bowl. Not an attractive name, but a beautiful site complete with black cliffs and crystal blue water. She told me that she normally wouldn’t take a beginner to that site because it was fairly challenging, but that she felt like I could handle it.

This, of course, made me feel awesome.

The original plan was to enter at the bowl and exit at a point further down the cliffs, but the very experienced guy we were diving with had scoped it out and said he thought it was too rough. Seeing as I could hear the waves breaking from where we had parked, I agreed with him. We suited up and hauled all our gear through some muddy greenery and over a volcanic rock bed to the bowl, where the sea flows into a scoop shaped cutout in the cliffs. You throw your fins in the water, put your regulator in your mouth and jump from the ledge while holding onto your goggles so they don’t fall off. When you surface you grab your fins and pull them on while the waves surge you to and fro. Then you’re ready to dive.

This particular site has been the subject of much excitement in the local Okinawan diving community because for the past week, some very large sharks have been frequenting it and, depending on who you talk to, acting much less skittish/possibly more antagonistic than in previous years. Angie said we had a good chance of seeing them because they fishermen were out, and they chum the waters which, in turn, attracts the sharks.

Sure enough, not 30 seconds into the dive Angie turns around and makes a fin on top of her head with one hand, pointing with the other. I look out into the murky blue infinity to see a huge shark, maybe 7 or 8 feet, slowly drifting its way toward us, becoming sharper and clearer the closer it got. And it got close. The rumors were true, these sharks were in no way afraid of us tiny humans.

But their behavior wasn’t so much aggressive as it was curious. They saw us, they swam toward us, but they always meandered in another direction before getting close enough to really interact.  Nevertheless, there is no way to describe the feeling of seeing evolution’s perfect predator in the wild swimming toward you out of the open ocean while you float totally out of your element backed against a coral cliff face. It’s exhilarating and terrifying and humbling all at once.

We saw the sharks many more times. Angie said that at one point she reached down for her diving knife because she felt like one was getting a little too close and squirrely. I did not have a knife. But the sharks only swam close enough for us to admire them. This dive site was different in that it was too deep for us to hit the bottom. Instead we swam along side a vertical rock face reaching far above and far below us with only sweeping ocean on the other side. It had a lot more life than the one we went to before, and far less tourists. More than once Angie pointed out a fisherman’s line that we had to avoid getting tangled in. In addition to the Bat Fish, Clown Fish, and the Urchins we saw before, this site had an octopus hiding in one of the crevasses who didn’t seem very intimidated when we got close, only shrinking up a little as we approached, but still rolling his legs all around. There was a giant Lion Fish, and a Mantis Shrimp, whose claim to fame is that they can chop their claws at the speed of a bullet being fired from a gun. They are almost impossible to keep as pets because they are constantly breaking the glass of aquariums.

We stayed down at 60 ft. for almost 40 minutes before my air started running a little low. When we surfaced, we had to climb out of the bowl and back to the rocks while still strapped into all our gear. To do this, I took my fins off the threw them up to the ledge, then got ahold of the uppermost rocks I could and waited for an incoming wave to push me upward. When it receded I held myself up and let the water fall away, then climbed up onto the ledge.

We still had to knock out one more dive, but it was just getting a little too rough for us to do it there. So we piled back into the van and drove to the other dive site we’d gone to the day before.  The last dive was short mostly because I was exhausted and beat to hell. We did our remaining skills, swam around a bit, and got out and back. I am now officially certified to dive without an instructor.

When I got back I showered the ocean away and packed what stuff I could. I tried to look up the bus schedule in Okinawa because Friday was going to be my only real day to explore the island. Every other day had been taken up by diving and we were leaving for Tokyo Friday night. But for the life of me, I could not figure out the damn buses. The idea had been to be fully packed in the morning before I left, arrange a rendezvous point for Coston to pick me up somewhere in town and we’d go straight to the airport. But I didn’t sleep well, and I was so beat up from diving that I just opted to sleep in.

I woke up at 12:30 after a night of weird dreams in a weird mood to an e-mail from Coston. He had let a friend borrow his car the night before, and it had been impounded this morning. He said he was working on getting another car to get us to the airport, and to just go out on the town like I had planned. But by then it didn’t seem worth it, so I just finished packing, showering, and cleaning. His friend picked us up at 1:30 and drove us to another friend’s place where we got her keys and her car to drop us at the airport.

We had a little extra time, so we got to see what I really wanted to see anyway, Shuri Castle. Built in the 1400’s and obliterated in WWII, it’s been restored on the original foundation and sits in the middle of Naha, one of the two main cities on Okinawa. It's extremely picturesque.

Have had one amazing and action packed day in Tokyo, but it's bed time. I'll update on that when I can. Loves, loves, loves.