A dear friend, a diver with seven decades of diving experience, once told me something that stuck with me. “I’ve never stopped learning,” he said. “I can always get some lesson, however small, out of every dive I do.”
I surfaced from my dives with a slightly different attitude after that, always taking the time to concentrate on what I’d learned and what tiny bit would — or should — remain with me. He is right: there is always something you can absorb, no matter how ordinary the dive. And, sometimes, of course, the lesson is the most important part of the experience.
Here are three valuable life lessons I’ve learned as a California diver.
Plan B can deliver A-list experiences. Every September, my husband and I do a private multiday dive trip to Santa Barbara Island. This is one of our favorite weekends of the year and the best “date night” activity we can imagine. Santa Barbara Island, however, is only accessible when conditions are ideal, and so even though conditions are often wonderful in September, we always have a backup plan. And in 2019, with a hurricane brewing near Baja just days before our departure date, we knew Plan B was a likelihood as opposed to a possibility.
I’ve gotta be honest — I wasn’t too excited about our backup options with this particular weather outlook, which I knew might limit us to a few protected coves on the frontside of Catalina. However, it had been an exhausting, stormy summer, and I was determined to make the best of things. So, I did what any reasonable underwater photographer would do: packed gear to shoot big creatures, small stuff, and everything in between, and then got ready to roll with the punches. In this case, not only did the swell arrive right on schedule, the visibility was worsening by the minute. After one or two frustrating dives in the murk, I put away my wide-angle gear, grabbed my macro setup, and turned the weekend into a sea slug safari.
This turned out to be a fantastic decision. There seemed to be more nudibranchs at Catalina than I’d seen in years, including some of my common favorites, like tiny Doto amyra, glowing blue-and-gold Antiopella barbarensis, and some outlandishly fat Hermissenda opalescens. I didn’t even care that much when the weather worsened further, adding wind to the already-present swell. Late one afternoon, I was descending near our protected anchorage at Two Harbors when I caught a brief glimpse of an unfamiliar egg mass on the shifting kelp leaves below me. I immediately dropped down and began inspecting the leaves, and when I found the source of the eggs, I almost dropped my camera: a Babakina festiva!
Nudibranch nerds will immediately recognize this species name as a reason for jubilation (for the less geeky, let’s just say it’s an exciting critter to find anywhere in Southern California, much less on an unnamed dive “site” that doesn’t exist on any map). This petite, pastel beauty is as lovely as it is uncommon; I’d seen only a single example very briefly in my years of diving California, and that was several years before. I whooped into my regulator, took a kazillion photos, and then signaled my husband to show him my find. He’s not as much of a sea slug fiend as I am, but even he recognized it as something uncommon enough to warrant an intensive photo session as well.
We returned to the same site early the next morning, anxious to see if we could find the Babakina festiva again. Much like our original dive plans, the creature had disappeared, leaving us to search for a new photo subject — perhaps something unexpected and better than we could have imagined.
You’re never too experienced to do something (extremely) stupid. I’ve been diving for almost 30 years, a stretch of time that’s inarguably long enough for a few things to have happened. It’s long enough to know that I’m a “lifer” when it comes to diving, it’s long enough to have spent obscene amounts of money on gear and dive travel, and most of all, it’s long enough to have made a few mistakes while diving. Of course, there are many kinds of mistakes, including garden-variety (kicking out from the beach to your drop point only to discover you’ve left your weights in the back of your car — did it), to mid-level (jumping in without fins — did that too). However, if you dive enough, you’re likely at some point to do something that reminds you that the ocean owes you no favors, no matter who you are or whether you’ve paid tribute to it for decades.