About 3.5km off Jialeshui (佳樂水), a village near Taiwan's southern tip, we popped back up to the ocean's surface in clusters. Each of us was floating smack in the middle of the broad Pacific with only a buddy in reach and a boat, our ride home, still some distance away.
Our only other company was two meters of the projecting bow of the Amorgos, the Greek freighter that ran aground on Jan. 14. Early season typhoons had since torn the ship apart. Now the bow was vertically planted in the sea floor and well over 1km away from the stern, which also showed above the water line. The ship's middle section, meanwhile, was somewhere below water, probably dashed and buried wherever the storms had seen fit.
In June the Coast Guard Administration had finally abandoned its cordon over the wreckage, which was no longer an environmental threat as the ship's oil had long been pumped off and its cargo of 60,000 tonnes of iron ore declared lost. Before our group of five explored the spot, no one in the Kenting diving community had heard of anyone diving the wreck. For all we could tell, we were the first.
Five days before the dive, however, I'd never so much as worn a scuba tank into the water. That was when I began my scuba instruction, sitting in the passenger's seat of Marcus Peterson's van.
Peterson is a scuba instructor and general know-it-all when it comes to diving in southern Taiwan, where he's been scouting around the waters for over six years. As we drove to Kenting, the premier diving town in southern Taiwan, he was having me read the 250-page Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) manual. PADI is an international scuba certification system that's standard in Taiwan as it is in most of the world.
The practical part of the course started a day later in a Kenting swimming pool. Peterson went over basic skills: assembling the equipment, breathing through a regulator, achieving buoyancy, and equalizing one's ears as the pressure doubles and triples in the course of a decent. There were also a few major safety considerations -- like that if I forgot to exhale while surfacing, the air in my lungs would expand until my lungs exploded.
Besides a burst lung, diving's other major theoretical danger is decompression sickness, which results from the body's inability to adjust to the rapid internal and external pressure changes. Usually, the condition is caused by surfacing too quickly from too deep a depth.
As it turns out, divers talk about decompression sickness and lung overexpansion all the time. And when they do, they're usually making jokes -- like Bart Deely, who insisted, "the thing that really sucks about decompression sickness is having to pay all the money to go sit in the Kaohsiung decompression chamber."
Deely, a commercial diver and former US Navy rescue swimmer with over 3,200 hours of underwater experience, was also with us when we dove the
Amorgos wreck. He's been in the Kaohsiung decompression chamber once, and even if he sounds cavalier when he's talking about it, he's not. Like most divers, he keeps bringing up the dangers to reinforce good habits in both his diving pals and himself. In diving, it's common knowledge that if you do things by the book, the sport is no more dangerous than anything else.
"In all my time underwater," said Deely, "I've only had one close call, not counting the two times I got electrocuted. The time I'm talking about was when I was doing some commercial diving, not scuba. I was breathing air through a tube when suddenly the air went off. But even that wasn't really a close call, because I wasn't very deep, so I just came up. What happened was the guy at the air pump fell asleep, and then the pump had run out of gas. So I just went up there and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing."
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