As I said in
the previous post, Ali is an interesting very personable fellow. During our hour long
conversation he spoke excitedly about a proposal he has made to the owners of
Underwater World to expand in a big way by adding another gigantic outside pool and
basically making it a “reef world” that would provide the best possible
interactive experience with a plethora of sealife for both scuba divers and
snorkelers. I would LOVE to see that happen.
Once again,
Don managed to “do his thing” by talking Ali into letting us take a small net
bag filled with 10 feed fish into the tank with us. Since it wasn’t exactly
feeding time for that tank I don’t think Ali and the tank management really
wanted us to do it, but it didn’t take too much pleading to make it happen. It
reminded me of all the times my mom used to say, “Don’t eat that cookie; you’ll
spoil your supper.”
Getting into
the other marine tank wasn’t nearly as easy as the first. To get into the tank with the big sharks all we had to do was drop into the big concrete bathtub
that performed as an anteroom, open the steel gate and swim right in. In the
second tank we had to gingerly make our way along a narrow concrete ledge and
then just as carefully lower our selves, weighted heavily down with all our dive
gear, into the water off a rock wall. Going through all that I realized that
getting out would be an even tougher process (and it was).
I went on
regulator before dropping into the water figuring to put my flippers on while
sitting on the bottom. My own fins are much easier to put on and take off,
requiring only a tug of a thick spring that fits around the back of my Achilles
over my dive bootie. To someone familiar with them the loaner fins would
probably be just as simple to use but in this case one of the fins straps had
come off and I wasn’t familiar with how to reattach it. I called Ali over and
he took care of it for me. A full 5 or 6 minutes later and I was finally ready
to explore the new tank.
I shot a
couple puffs of air into my BCD to get me off the bottom and went looking to
see what I could see. Right in the middle of the tank on the other side of the
viewing tunnel I saw a swirling mass of excited fish and realized that Don was
right in the middle of it. I pressed the on button on my camera and made my way
over to him.
Immediately
I feel a much different vibe in the second tank. Although for the most part the fish are smaller they are more
colorful and move around quickly. But what really makes that tank pop are the rays.
I LOVE those things. They are amazing creatures. They don’t swim, they fly, their wings moving
them every bit as gracefully through their element as eagles do through theirs.
At just past
5:30 in the video watch the ray as it leisurely approaches in the distance. It
reaches the top middle of the viewing tunnel and suddenly hits the accelerator,
shooting forward and reaching me literally in the blink of an eye. It streaks
directly under me and I am barely able to turn the camera fast enough to follow
it through the viewfinder. They are most certainly underwater athletes and like
any athlete rays apparently feel compelled to exercise their athleticism.
On that
note, at 5:58 one of the muscularly nimble rays takes a swooping lap around the
tank. I attempt to follow it and I do manage to keep mostly within camera
range, albeit clumsily and pathetically considering I am swimming with all my
might on the inside of its flight path. Just the same, I had a grand time
trying to stay up with it, something I wouldn’t recommend normally while on
scuba gear, since it causes one to really suck up the air. At deeper depths
that’s how you pack extra nitrogen into your body tissues, never a good thing;
but with me barely beneath the surface in a shallow tank, I hardly used any air
at all I think.
As graceful
as the rays are though, whenever they approached, nuzzling, flapping and pushing
at me, looking to be fed, I felt like laughing into my regulator from the goofy
appearance they effect with those big, seemingly smiling mouths of theirs. Several
times while feeding them bits of fish my gloved fingers would get nibbled on.
It wasn’t painful. From the feel of it, instead of teeth it felt more like they
have a hard upper and lower bony ridges with which to manipulate the food in
their mouths.
I think the
funniest part of the embedded YouTube clip takes place starting at 2:09 when a
ray approaches Don right in front of me and begins to nuzzle and hungrily chomp
on my dive partner’s head. Even though I know he’s not hurting Don I can’t help
myself when I see the ray almost envelop the top of Don’s head with his
munching mouth; I reach out and push the hungry animal away.
The images
of the hungry fish completely hiding the person feeding depicts something I’ve
already experienced many times, even when I was still but a snorkeler. There
are reefs around Puerto Galera where fish are so used to being fed by humans that
they similarly engulf people offering them food. I learned though that that
behavior is not natural as I tried bringing food with me on dives in the Coral
Cover area on the other side of the peninsula from Sabang and the fish simply
shied away from me.
Starting at
just before 5:40 there is one rather somber scene played out on the video when
Ali is seen removing a dead denizen from the confines of the tank. It had been
dead for quite some time based on the look of it. Don had been snooping behind
all the bits and inside all the nooks and crannies and discovered the stiffly
lifeless fish under and behind one of the fake coral features.
Two very
rubbery bodied spotted sharks kindly swim together in a circle almost directly
below me and I take advantage by recording several seconds of it. Watch how
they seem to use a loaded spring effect as they move their tails side to side which
easily moves them forward through the water. To go where they want to go they
simply aim their heads in the desired direction. Both the rays and the sharks,
closely related cousins on the family tree, are natural engineering marvels of
locomotion. Humans are clunky half-baked third-rate rattletrap model-Ts by comparison.
All too soon
it was time to end the dive, but we had high hopes that Ali would allow us to
finish up the considerable amount of air we had left in our tanks by giving us
a third dive in the fresh water tank with the huge catfish and arapaima. That
would definitely have been a great way to end the day but it was not to be, and
in a way, it was our own fault.
Evidently,
we had so impressed a visiting Russian family that they decided to give a tank
dive a try. We were disappointed but took it in stride. As we rinsed our gear
we watched the three young fellows go about suiting up, seemingly for the first
time ever. “Holy cow Ali, I would NEVER
want your job!”
“Why is
that?” he asked.
“I know it’s
just a shallow tank but still, being responsible for the training and safety of
three complete scuba novices in a tank full of sharks just does not sound like
a lot of fun to me.”
He smiled.
“It’s not a problem. I’m used to it. Anyway, I’m so sorry I won’t be able to
get you guys into the freshwater tank.”
We hung
around for another hour to see how Ali’s clients would do as first time divers.
Funny thing, the biggest of the three lads, a muscular crew-cut blonde fellow in his
late teens or early twenties, never did enter the tank. We didn’t stick around
long enough to find out, but he must not have been able to handle breathing
with the regulator. The other two, one a kid of about 14, and the other a young
man that I would guess to be in his late twenties, eventually did quite well;
although they probably used up just about all the air in their tanks the way
they were sucking it down like crazy. I was the same way when I first started,
the anxiety and the newness made me feel like I needed to breathe in again as
soon as I exhaled.
If I ever get back to Pattaya again I'll be sure to dive with the sharks and rays at Underwater World again. For me, once was NOT enough.
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