I have been taking a Master SCUBA diver class. This means being “required” to go on a SCUBA dive to some really interesting places every weekend. It also requires eating pizza one evening a week while talking about ideal gas laws with some friends. The classroom sessions (pizza evenings) were over, we had taken the multiple guess test and passed, but we had missed one of the dives due to bad weather. NAUI requires that we do a specific series of dives and we had not done the night dive yet. Even though both John Alred (the other student) and I had both done plenty of night dives before, the class required this one in order to get the Master Diver certificate.
Why would I want to get a Master Diver card? Well part of the reason is that taking any SCUBA class forces me to go diving more times than I often get around to in a year and this keeps me in practice. Another reason is something that my brother Paul told me. I’m taking my dive classes from NAUI, which is one of the SCUBA instruction organizations. PADI is another one and they offer a similar series of classes. To differentiate themselves from PADI and to avoid confusion caused by similar class and certification names, NAUI renamed their series of classes a few years ago. Instead of calling them “Open Water One”, Two and Three, they now call their 3 class series “Scuba Diver”, “Advanced Diver” and “Master Diver”. Paul told me that if you have a Master Diver card, people get confused and assume that you are a Dive Master, which implies that you have had instructor training. Paul says that when he shows his Master Diver card around the world, people give him respect! This has made it easier for him to rent SCUBA equipment everywhere he goes.
Another dive that NAUI requires you to do as part of this class is a boat dive. Our instructor, Jon Valez (of Underwater Adventures at http://www.svn.net/scuba/), decided instead of doing this dive off a hired dive boat, we would meet this requirement by doing our boat dive off a kayak. When I took the “Advanced Diver” class from him, he had us do one of our dives off a kayak and taught us techniques for easily getting the gear back on the boat afterwards. However, Jon had a bunch of interesting sites that he wanted to take us to as part of the class and most of them required a long swim. Or a short trip in a kayak. So every dive that we did, with the exception of the first shallow check-out dive, was done off a kayak! We did so many dives off our kayaks that I started to think that instead of a Master Diver card, I should get a “Kayak Diver” Certification card!
I have taken a NAUI Specialty Diver class from Jon, in “High Altitude Diving” which allows me to fill my SCUBA tanks in places like Lake Tahoe. So I took my high altitude card and scanned it in on a computer. I used it as a template and replaced the picture under it with a beautiful underwater picture of a shark egg sack that Jon himself had taken at the Channel Islands. (I snagged the picture off Jon’s WEB site). Using similar fonts, I forged a fake NAUI “Specialty Diver, Kayak Diver” card. I even scanned the back side of a NAUI card complete with Jon’s signature on it. I printed the top of the card at 2880 DPI on my Epson printer at home using Kodak premium ink jet paper, printed the back of the card on index stock, glued them together and cut the excess off with rounded corners like a real NAUI card. It looks a little better than the real thing! However, it isn’t waterproof and will probably not last long. I printed three of these, one for me, one for John (the other student in the class) and one for our instructor Jon. On the pizza evening (classroom session) that we took the exam, after we had been told that we both passed, I handed out Kayak Diver cards to everyone!
Paul was afraid that Jon would order us to destroy them. They look too much like the real thing, including the instructions on the back that says, “If found, please return to NAUI at … “. If one of us looses this card, it may come back to Jon and get him in trouble! But Jon liked his Kayak Diver card and seemed to take it with the sense of humor it was intended to tickle. He did not ask us to destroy our cards.
We scheduled our “make up” night dive for Saturday October 27th, and invited Paul to come along. I own a huge stable of kayaks now, but only one of them has a tank well in it. So in order for both Paul and I to do this dive, I had to borrow a kayak from someone else. We met in the evening at Gerstle Cove where the plan was to paddle a short distance out to an underwater pinnacle we had been to before in the light of day. We paddled out just a little after sunset and waited around a while for dark. I had two glow-sticks on my kayak, a light hanging from the valve on my tank, a large dive light, and a spare flashlight in a pocket of my BC (buoyancy compensation vest). Everyone else had just as many lights, plus Jon dropped a flashlight inside his bright yellow kayak ant lit it up like a Japanese paper lantern. From the top of the pinnacle, which was only 4 meters down, we could see the kayak glowing above us. Paul also left a flashlight on the beach pointing out to sea, and I left a glow-stick hanging next to it in case the batteries went dead. Jon had called the rangers and arranged to have the light left on at the visitors center above Gerstle Cove for us.
The water was very cold when we went off the edge of the pinnacle. We got as deep as 60 feet on this dive and went around the pinnacle several times, rising higher after the first circuit to extend our dive time. We swam along some very steep walls that dropped out of sight below us when we pointed our flashlights down. At one point Jon went up to each of us and mimed turning off our flashlights. When he had communicated this to all of us, we discovered that the water was full of phosphorescent organisms! When we waved our hands in front of our faces the water filled with swirling bright stars! This phosphorescence was still in the water when we started paddling back to shore after loading up our gear. Each kayak cut a glowing wake of sparkling water in a V back from the bow. The paddle blades were visible deep down in the water from the glow of disturbed organisms around them. When the paddle moved through the water it left a comet tail of light behind it like a streamer of cavitation bubbles behind a propeller in the water.