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Faux Snow

February 2, 2023   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

The snow is in the way, only to be a nuisance until it melts.

Let’s go diving…

Once upon a time, in the lovely Canary Island of Tenerife (400 kilometres off the Sahara west coast of Africa), in the village of Los Cristianos, life was near idyllic. Theme parks have since been erected and over 4,000 accommodation spaces are now available. 

Once though, Los Cristianos was very pleasant – where we ate at leisure in a restaurant on the beach, where a pedestrian walk way lead to more than one small bar – chose you favourite, where the barkeeper would custom mix your booze, where the tiny shops sold locally made goods and the ladies who lived in the mountains just behind the town came down and were not shy to approach you at a coffee bar to sell you their beautiful hand -stitched table cloths and light cotton shirts, all in in the sub tropics, where it is always a European spring. Bliss, it was bliss…

And I learned to scuba dive there.

Henry and Monika, a German couple, ran their business from a reasonable dive shop attached to a hotel, where they could use the swimming pool to teach people how to dive safely, right from the basics.

For me, the basics started with snorkelling, which is a skill that knows how to be in water and still breathe. Swim on the water’s surface, flippers and mask in place, mouth piece of the snorkel held firmly between my teeth, hands loose at my sides, body bottom kept just under. Kick, kick – flippers are fun.

Then, to learn to descend under the water, allowing the snorkel to fill – rise again slowly now with the breath I was holding and then – blow! And clear the snorkel for my next breath, keeping my face under water. Go around the pool and do it again lots of times because being able to snorkel is essential and easy once you believe.

Diving equipment, primarily the air tanks and weight belt, is heavy but underwater is weightless – no need to travel to space for that thrill. In fact, for anyone who doesn’t know it, astronauts first learn about life in space underwater right here on earth. Same thing, only harder than space. Water pressure as one descends affects the body variously on the way down and surviving the tons of water pressing on us as we go deeper demands attention when we began to return to the surface. This is true even in the relative safety of a swimming pool.

I was only learning to dive because I was in Tenerife with my Cockney pal John Higgs -‘Iggs, I call him, who is a deep sea diver, having done it all off many oil rigs in seas around the world. He was my dive buddy and stuck pretty close to me all the way, showing me how to pinch my nose to blow my ears as we lowered ourselves from the surface.

It was important to learn to clear my mask while still in the pool and Henry made sure I was confident about it once we were 30 feet down. Tip the top of the mask open a tiny bit and let a little water in to clear the inevitable fog – whoosh. Tip the bottom of the mask, bend my head back and blow thorough my nose –and there is the wonderful underwater world – miles of it.

Have you ever had a flying dream? It comes true underwater. To learn to breathe and join in with the colourful crowd who live there, as one of them nearly, is a real thrill. Fish are funny and curious. They invited me into their schools and once or was it twice, ‘Iggs was after me not to travel with them. Worried eyes behind his mask and a “no” finger that brought me back to the group.

We sank slowly down the face of a cliff and Henry had come prepared with treats – for the Moray eels who lived in individual holes in the cliff. They expected him and stuck their homely heads out here and there to accept a fish – this one and that. He gestured to join him and, trust is all, I did.

One eel came out like an instructor to take the fish I offered, politely as a kindly dog. Then – Henry demonstrated how to scratch its head. I hesitated – aren’t eels dangerous or grumpy at least? Not these ones. The fool thing got into the attention, enjoying the scratch as silly as a cat – who knew?

Not all marine life is this benign. In another dive with ‘Iggs off the coast of Lanzarote, we saw a very colourful creature whose bright spiny body looked “cute” waving in the water and there was a fleeting second when I started to reach out to touch it but ‘Iggs was there in a flash shaking his head. We later learned the name of the creature from another diver and that touching it led to paralysis that was often incurable.

Lesson: keep your hands to yourself except for the Moray eels that were Henry’s friends.

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