Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
May 21, 2004
I wasn’t back from my trip to the Midwest a day before my friends talked me into scuba diving off the Waianae Coast. Conditions were not ideal. It was raining, the choppy water made my companions seasick and I felt sluggish from the five-hour time change. Still, I really wanted to dive.
Why, I don’t know. Oh, of course I wanted to see the animals.
What I wondered was why, once again, I was going to jump into deep water with a steel tank on my back and lead weights around my waist. It feels so wrong.
It’s like jumping off a pier carrying a car battery.
I conquer this recurrent fear by not giving myself time to think about it. I’m usually the first one geared up and first in the water.
A second later, as I’m bobbing on the surface like an inflated pufferfish, I feel great. Diving is wonderful, I think. And I haven’t even seen a fish yet.
The key to successful diving for me was becoming familiar with my gear and getting the routine down pat.
But I dive for the exact opposite reason: thrill of the unknown. When I drop down into that water, I never know what I’m going to see.
This time I saw a huge horned helmet snail, a first for me, nearly covered with sand.
Helmet snails have large, nobbed shells, pink inside, that are sold here in roadside stands.
These shells are the only ones big enough in Hawaii to use as a trumpet, and indeed, helmet shells are what people blow when going for the ambiance of old Hawaii. Horned helmet shells grow to about 15 inches long.
Helmet snails search for, and eat, heart urchins and sea urchins, whose spines somehow don’t hurt the snail. When a helmet snail finds an urchin, it knocks the spines off an area, drills a hole through the urchin’s shell and sucks out the urchin’s insides.
This explains the purple sea urchin skeletons, called tests, I found in the area, each bearing a round hole in its side.
Near the helmet snail, an alert diver spotted two scorpionfish sitting near one another as active as two brown rocks. Scorpionfish can be hard to spot even when looking directly at them and the pantomimes divers use in pointing them out are always the same.
“Look!,” one will gesture. “Where?” shrugs the other. “Right there!” motions the first. “WHERE?” gestures the second.
This goes on until finally the second diver sees the well-camouflaged fish. And like those trick posters, it’s then impossible not to see the fish.
Scorpionfish is a family name that includes lionfish and the creatures many people call stonefish.
Stonefish have a nasty reputation in the South Pacific for killing people who step on them, but this reputation is greatly exaggerated.
Hawaii has no stonefish. The fish here that look like stones are called Titan and devil scorpionfish.
The stings from these fishes’ spines hurt a lot but are not medically dangerous.
The helmet snail and scorpionfish were good finds but what made my dive was the 3-foot-long trumpetfish that sidled up to me, apparently using me for camouflage. The fish positioned its face next to mine and hung there.
As I stared eye to eye with this big beautiful creature, I felt thankful I’d once again made that leap of faith from the boat. Diving will always be a little scary for me, but I’ll always think it’s wonderful.