Rapture of the deep

May 30, 2008

It’s 9:30am on a Friday night and I’m off-gassing in Puerto Lopez, Ecuador. I refer not to the bodily function, mind you, but to the nitrous off gassing that takes place after scuba diving. For the first time in 8 years I once again explored the wonders of the deep.

Though scuba is a common word now, it originated as the acronym “S.C.U.B.A.”, standing for “self contained underwater breathing apparatus”. It was not coined by Jaques Cousteau as many think, but by the United States military in World War II to describe combat frogmen's oxygen rebreathers. These rebreathers were developed by Dr. Christian Lambertsen for underwater warfare. Today, scuba typically refers to the in-line open-circuit equipment, developed by Emile Gagnan and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, in which compressed gas (usually air) is inhaled from a tank and then exhaled into the water. The concentrations of normal gases in air are: 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and 1% other.

As one descends, in addition to the normal atmospheric pressure, water exerts increasing pressure on the chest and lungs. This pressure is approximately 1 bar or 14.7 psi for every 33 feet or 10 meters of depth. The pressure of the inhaled breath must almost exactly counter the surrounding pressure in order to inflate the lungs. The diver must avoid the formation of gas bubbles in the body, called decompression sickness, or 'the bends', by releasing the water pressure on the body slowly at the end of the dive and allowing gases trapped in the bloodstream to gradually break solution and leave the body, called "off-gassing." This is done by making safety stops or decompression stops and ascending slowly. The general time frame for full release of gases trapped in the blood stream due to the higher under water pressures is 24 hours.

And for those that would like just a little bit more of useless trivia or would like to expand their vocabulary, I have recently, (in the last hour), discovered that the acronym S.C.U.B.A. is an example of RAS syndrome. RAS syndrome stands for "Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome," and refers to the use of one of the words that make up an acronym as well as the abbreviation itself, thus in effect repeating that word. Technically, according to Wikipedia, this redundancy is a form of rhetorical tautology, and in many cases a pleonasm. And if you don’t know what that means, you look it up!

So back to Puerto Lopez, Ecuador. Both my two dives took place off a little island south of Puerto Lopez called Isla de Salango. This Island is so named because it lies off shore of a town by the same name. This particular part of the coast is enclosed with in the Machaclilla National Park, an area of some 55,000 hectares, concerned with preserving marine ecosystems, dry tropical forest, and archaeological sites on shore. The terrain is very similar to southern California, and Isla de Salango looks much like Santa Catalina Island, or any one of the small land masses poking out of the sea in the Channel island chain.

After a lapse of 8 years I was definitely a bit “nervioso” getting back into the ocean and descending into the murky waters of the southern hemisphere. The sun cream burning my eyes because my mask was flooding didn’t help either. My personal dive guide, Luis, had calmly taken me through the prerequisite scuba skills (In Spanish) on the boat deck before we splashed into the water. After descending down the anchor line to the ocean floor we practiced a few safety maneuvers. We established neutral buoyancy first. Then Luis had me flood my mask and clear it by exhaling through my nose and trapping the air in the mask. He also had me remove my mask completely and replace and clear it, (This provided an opportune time to wipe the sun screen off my eyes and the snot off my nose), and we practiced buddy breathing. Satisfied that I wasn’t going to self destruct underwater, Luis passed me on the skill set and we floated around a bit more before surfacing.

Our second dive was off a less protected point of Isla de Salango. Though the visiblility remained only about 10 feet, there was a lot of sea life to see through the hazy waters. We saw a large turtle, large schools of shiny silver fish, a two foot long trumpet fish, and about 5 moray eels poking their serpent heads out of their hidey holes and jawing the water.

After 8 years I’m back in my flippers. Galapagos here I come!

Dive 1:

Isla de Salango
44 min to max of 30 feet.
1500 psi left in tank post dive
10 ft visibility

1 hour surface time

Dive 2:

Isla de Salango
50 min to max of 70 feet
1000 psi left
strong surge and current
10 foot visibility