Imagine that you are floating in mid-water. It is chilly but your wetsuit is keeping you warm. All you hear is the bubbles leaving your regulator. All you see is the faint moonlight on the surface above you. When you move your hand in front of your mask, the water lights up with hundreds of tiny bioluminescent algae; like fireflies in a pitch black forest. You suck in another breath of decompressed air from the tank on your back. Before you let it back out, the singing of a distant humpback whale reaches your ear. What would that feel like to you?
For me, it feels like I am truly a part of mother nature. When I dive, nothing is on my mind. I am fully submerged in what I experience. There is no room for thoughts. Maybe that is why I like it so much.
Until today, I had never been on a night dive. Anna picked me up at my place about half an hour before sunset and we drove down to Ulua beach in her SUV with all the dive gear in the back. If you are going to live Maui, and not just live
in Maui, you need a truck or an SUV to haul around all your fun stuff, whether it be dive gear, camping gear, surfboards, a bike, or dogs. We walked from the beach and into the water at dusk, right after a beautiful sunset. The water was darker than I am used to but still light enough that we could see the reef beside us. It slowly got darker until we could see nothing without our flashlight.
Have you ever witnessed a city's transition from daytime buzz to nighttime flare? Have you ever considered how the colors, the pace and the composition of people gradually change into a whole new atmosphere? Maybe it is one of nature's unwritten laws, that there be a crepuscular transition from daytime to nighttime. The coral reef certainly changes as he light of day fades away.
Millions of tiny coral animals stretch out their tentacles in search for food and transform the coral surface from looking hard and rugged to fluffy and soft. The parrotfish wraps itself in a cocoon of mucus and goes to sleep. The butterflyfish and the triggerfish tucks into crevices in the coral reef to hide. The red and purple potter angelfish, on the other hand, is out and about for reasons only it knows. The sea stars come out from their hiding spots to look for food, as do different types of crustaceans such as banded cleaner shrimp and mantis shrimp. We even saw a slipper lobster, or as they would call it here, a "slippa lobsta." It is still lobster season so we could have picked it but we chose to leave it for other divers to see tomorrow.
This is the time of sharks. They hunt at dusk when the vision of their prey is impaired. Unfortunately we didn't see one but that doesn't mean that they didn't see us. Anna and I both know that sharks is one of the most harmless things in the world (except maybe for North Korea). Nevertheless, the thought that a 15 foot tiger shark might be lurking right outside of the flashlight beam, does create some excitement.
We visited our animal friends on the reef for over an hour before we were back where we first dove in. As I broke the surface of the water I was taken aback by the beauty of the scene that met me. Orion welcomed me back from his place high on the starry sky, and the moon was new right next to him. The beach was dark and deserted. The only sound came from the calm sea as slow waves accompanied me the last few steps back to the beach and out of the water.
