With winter in full effect, regular after-work dives have turned into full-on night dives. This markedly changes the nature of the dives, both for the guides and for the other divers. For us it is the pace of the dive that changes. In warmer weather we can have as many as 12 to 15 guests and four dive guides, with all that entails in logistics, equipment and individual divers needing assistance. This time of year we’ve got no more than a handful of the most dedicated divers, and those who dive with us now are more experienced and are trained in both drysuits and night-diving. This combination creates for all of us an almost Zen-like state, both above and below the surface of the ocean.
Last week, I was out with a few divers who had only had a few night dives after earning their certificates. It was calm and cool, but not cold, and the water couldn’t have been any flatter if a dry cleaner had ironed it. We donned our gear and entered the water.
It was a pleasant dive, in an area that always delivers a lot of animal sightings. The site is good for night dives because it’s fairly sheltered and shallow, with depths usually only around 15 feet. After about 35 minutes, the water had chilled us enough that we headed back to shore using our dive torches as guides in the darkness.
The two divers who were with me were excitedly discussing our dive as we walked back to our cars, and touched on the topic of our depth. They asked me the maximum depth, but instead of telling them, I asked them to guess rather than look at their computers. They guessed somewhere between 25 and 35 feet, though they’d noticed that they hadn’t needed to compensate as much as they’d expected to on the descent. They were deeply surprised when I told them we hadn’t been deeper than 12 feet.
This wasn’t surprising to me, however — depth may be absolute, but the experience of depth is highly relative. A dive to 100 feet in warm, crystal-clear tropical waters will, for many divers, feel less “deep” than a dive to 30 feet in murky, dark, cold waters. Ultimately, it all comes down to our stress levels, as our experience of depth is often an expression of how stressed we’re feeling by a dive. So a more challenging dive, perhaps one at night, often seems deeper than one well within the diver’s comfort zone. It all comes down to something called task loading, which I’ll cover in a later post. In the meantime, enjoy your night dives, whatever the depth may be.
