Intrepid SubmarinersOn Wednesday, Sam, his mother, Ruth, and I headed off for the much- anticipated submarine trip in Carlisle Bay. Well, of course it wasn't that simple. As part of the tour price, I was picked up at my guest house, but they wouldn't do two pick-ups so Sam and Ruth said, okay, they would meet me there at 11:45 (trip at noon). I arrived, bought the tickets, (thank you Sheila) and poked around in the gift shop. So-so. Many shells from other parts of the Carribbean, for example. At two minutes to twelve, they were not there. So I consulted (for the third time) with a ticket-taker and she examined the runes and concluded that we could go on the 1:00 tour if they didn't make it in time. And JUST THEN, they appeared mad-dog-trotting through the noonday sun. It seems when they got off the bus and inquired for the Atlantis Submarines. They were pointed in the correct direction and told "not far, just over behind the market." It's hard to know if Barbadians want to see if you have the stamina in the 90-plus weather, or if they, like Andre, the Giant, fighting Carey Elwes in "The Princess Bride,"(one of my all-time favorite movies) "...just want you to feel that you're doing well." Another interesting thing about getting around in Barbados is, of course, that they drive on the left (I wonder why they drive on the right in Belize, it was a British colony, too; maybe someone will tell me. (Mike? Therese?) Anyway that means that they walk on the left. So when you're meeting a Barbadian on the sidewalk or walking along the road, you can almost see them thinking, "Which way should I dodge?" They can tell you're British or German or Australian or North American, but which? In the parts of town overrun by tourists (St. Lawrence Gap, for example), they just give up and walk to the right, although it seems like as many British tourists as Americans and Canadians to me. This walking to the left also means that the "In" door is to the left, that you're supposed to keep to the left on stairs, that left doors open in and right doors open out, etc. It's an interesting exercise to try to remember to do it as the natives do. Keeps the brain working a little, like changing the hand you brush your teeth with. Ah, but back to the submarine trip! Finally underway, first we motored out into the harbor about half a mile to meet the submarine. Painted all white, it rose majestically our of the sea and settled along side our catamaran, a thrill in itself. The previous group climbed out and aboard our boat and then we were allowed to have our turn. Actually the guide had exhorted us to PLEASE, stay seated until someone came to get our row of seats for boarding. But, of course, everyone but us queued up as soon as they let one person across the walkway. So we were dead last. But that was good because we were right by the guide, Rodney, and could hear all his comments and jokes. The submarine holds about 40 people, back to back in two rows of seats, really one long seat with a little butt depression for each person. Some people didn't fit in the depression too well, but eveyone managed. You sit in your seat and there's a nice-sized port hole to look out, not one to a seat, more like three to five seats. But it's enough. After some silliness with Rodney and Captain Hugh, shouting "Dive! Dive!" and "A-ooo-gah!" back and forth we started to descend. The first place we looked was up at the surface and the bottom of our catamaran. The first sea-life we saw was a jelly-fish floating by. But after that it got breath-taking. At first the ocean floor at about 40' was just sandy with a few little sponges and rocks and then all of a sudden among the rubble, a green moray eel! A big one, maybe four feet, with lots of teeth and looking fierce. (Sam and I had actually seen one at the Baltimore Aquarium a few years previous, but this was much more impressive). Then, as we went closer to the reef, more fish and coral. We slowly chugged through a school of horse eye jacks, hundreds of them, who seemed to be curious about us, swimming up to the portals to get a better look. The smaller fish kept their distance, but there were so many to look at, it hardly mattered--blue or yellow, black or white, striped and spotted, all going about their business in the sea (and two or three young yellow-fin tuna, who "should" have been elsewhere, according to our guide, I think maybe deeper in the ocean). Some of this you can see snorkeling, but not the huge variety of coral and sponge, especially at the lower depths (we went ultimately to 140 feet, pretty far for even an experienced amateur diver). There were dozens of kinds of coral--brain coral and other building-materials-looking corals, one called cathedal coral that is supposedly extinct in the wild elsewhere in the the world, and most impressive to me, the soft coral. You would swear that these were plants, sea fans and feathers and whips, wafting in the current looking like grasses and ferns in the breeze. And the sponges also show great variety. One, the clam sponge, can get quite large, maybe three feet, and always has a shape with an opening like a purse or a slipper (or a clam!). The grandaddy in size of the sponges we saw was the barrel sponge, which looks like it sounds, only a little squatty and can get over 6' in diameter. We didn't see any that big, but saw many that were as big as a planting barrel (half a whiskey barrel). We went in the daytime (alas, the night trips have been discontinued), so everything was lit by natural light. This causes some interesting effects. As you go deeper, more colors are absorbed, so that people's lips and tongues look blue, red clothes turn to purple, chartreuse to yellow, turquoise to blue. Rodney explained that was also why the corals and sponges didn't look brightly-colored as you see them on a Jacques Cousteau television show. I don't know, though, the fish still looked brightly colored, if in a limited range. We also saw a ship-wreck, the Lord Willoughby, that was sunk a little over 30 years ago, at about 100' to make a dive destination and encourage new coral growth. There are 3 or 4 other ship-wrecks in this bay, but I think this is the only purposeful one. The hulk is rusting away, but the tires, that were bumpers apparently, still look like you could take them out, wash them off, put them on a rim and drive away. Wonder why they were allowed to be sunk. There have been several artificial reef projects on the east and south coasts. The most common, Rodney says, is the sterilizing and sinking of an old car body or two or three on a sand flat. Within three to six months, he says, the coral will start to grow and the fish will start to gather. I was actually too enchanted to take many notes, and pictures were impossible, so I can't report many of Rodney's jokes and facts, but here's one of each. Joke: "How many sides does a submarine have?" "No, silly, just two, the inside and the outside and fortunately you're on the correct one." Fact: If you take all the salt out of the ocean and pile it up on all the dry land, it would cover the land to a depth of 470 feet! All in all it was a glorious trip. Far too short, I could have happily sat there for hours. We didn't see any turtles or sting rays or any sea-bottom skirmishes. But they have these things timed to the minute and are making money as fast as they can. We were satisfied, though, so that's all that counts I guess. I'm sure this will be the highlight of my trip, but there a lesser lights to come. |
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