Taking the Plunge

Seventeen years, 20 pounds and one heart attack ago, I had the good sense to learn how to dive in the British Virgin Islands. It was my vow, back then, that unless the place was ruined in the interim, I would return to have my then-18-month-old son certified in scuba diving once his mother relented.

Mother did so in the summer of 1997, when Jeff was 16, and the three of us headed here, the B.V.I. not having been spoiled in the meantime. To the contrary, it was plain that the British were keeping a tight lid on these 60 specks of land 50 miles east of Puerto Rico. The dive boats were only half full, chickens still outnumbered people, and not a single condo had blossomed on the cactus hillsides.

And so I outfitted Jeff with a mask and snorkel, and a wetsuit I’d outgrown, and sent him off to his lessons. In three days the boy would earn his card, certifying a self-sufficient diver qualified to rent a tank of air on his own.

There was never much doubt about where all this would happen. Any student diver needs swimming pool conditions. The unfortunate corollary is that learners usually get swimming pool scenery. Mix boredom with hard work, and you’ve cooked a stew that few adolescents will eat.

As a classroom, the B.V.I. are different. There is instant gratification in the introductory dives here--an array of color, sea life and history that would satisfy a veteran, most of it in conditions as tame as in a high school pool. Indeed, I was able to honor my old vow only because of the singular absence of stress in this venue.

In June ’97 I was strung up in a cardiac unit. A month later I was jumping off a B.V.I. dive boat, knowing I would be challenged no more severely than if I were walking on the beach.

We saw little of our son in the three days of the certification course. I would stop by the dive shop periodically to inquire about Jeff’s progress. The attendant would point to the boat dock, where bubbles were rising in 10 feet of water. The boy was learning to buddy-breathe, and I wasn’t needed.

My wife, Debbie, by her admission, “tried not to think about it very much.” During those three days, I’d borrow a Boston Whaler from our hotel, the Bitter End Yacht Club, and we’d putter off to some deserted beach. There was precious little distraction on these expeditions, but it kept her away from the dive shop while the safe-diving lessons continued.

(On reflection, I’d advise prospective scuba divers to consider completing the pool and book work associated with certification at home, leaving only the four required open-water dives--the final exams, so to speak--to complete on vacation. Apart from saving time, there is advantage in discovering whether you really like breathing underwater before you part with a nonrefundable vacation deposit.)

Jeff’s first real dive, with his instructor but without Dad’s learned accompaniment, was the wreck of the Rhone, a 310-foot steel-hulled sailing steamer. It sank in a hurricane in 1867 just leeward of Salt Island, a green hump that blocks the trade winds and renders the Rhone’s graveyard a bathtub.

The ship’s bow rests in 80 feet of water, its stern in 30. The bow is strikingly well preserved, and with habituated residents ranging from mutton snapper to barracuda, the Rhone is one of the Caribbean’s premier wreck dives.

The stern is often the first dive on a “resort course,” a half-day immersion for I’ll-try-anything-once vacationers wanting to sample the sport.

For his first test, Jeff would be diving the bow of the Rhone. Eighty feet is a healthy descent for a novice who until then hadn’t gone much below 30.

“On the way down,” Jeff recalled of his hand-over-hand descent down the dive rope, “I was amazed at how far down that line went. And when I got to the bottom,” he added, “what struck me was that it was a long way back up too.”

Then he noticed the colors, and depth became immaterial. “I’d always thought of the ocean as a gray place,” Jeff said, “but there are no colors above the surface that come close to what you see underwater.”

The Rhone’s hull is a mess of purple and orange sponges. The drifting schools of squirrel fish are red, the grinning hogfish a flagrant blend of mauve and lemon, and the triggerfish outright Picasso-esque. The boy was dumbfounded; I could see it in his mask.

It was much the same throughout Jeff’s initiation, because the B.V.I. are not a one-hit wonder. Within a newcomer’s reach are caves “painted” with purple and yellow sponges and gardens of pastel corals. And hundreds of wrecks of every description, from airplanes to cargo ships.

In a quiet cove leeward of an island called Great Dog, in 40 feet of water, lies the base of a mile-long coral garden with a transplanted wrecked light plane nestled in the adjacent sand. I sat Jeff in the cockpit. Spotted coneys nibbled at his mask while barracuda slid over the windshield frame.

I once found a mako shark resting in a cave at Great Dog, but such critters in near-shore waters are unusual.

Out in open water, where the big fish live, lies the Chikuzen, an intact 264-foot refrigerator ship that was intentionally scuttled and had settled in 75 feet of water. Horse-eye jacks, eagle rays and schools of barracuda abound there, and it’s doubtful that any new diver could find more tolerant conditions for watching the energy of a true pelagic environment.

For his part, Jeff had caught diver’s angst. “It’s kind of frustrating,” he said. “Seventy percent of the earth is covered in water. It’s hard enough to see what you want to see of the 30% above water. Now I want to see everything underwater too.”

At 16, my son was feeling mid-life urgency, and each morning, come 8:15, he’d be on the almost empty dive boat with me, getting a head start on his new quest.

The wonder of it all is that these islands remain a pretty lonely place to learn the sport. The number of students in my 1982 B.V.I. certification class was two. Come Jeff’s turn, there were three. Because any new diver inevitably feels the fool, it is good when the novitiate can err in solitude.

The B.V.I., in fact, abound in loneliness, a world apart from the urbanized U.S. Virgin Islands, which are as close as three miles away. Only 17,000 people live in the British colony. There are no duty-free combat zones and no armadas of cruise ships. In all the B.V.I. there are only about 1,500 hotel rooms, most of them in obscure low-rise settlements where each guest has his or her own little plot of nowhere. There’s the occasional cinder-block tavern, and a hint of Hemingway. But there’s not a casino in the place. The snoozy little capital city of Road Town sells groceries, rum, some duty-free British goods and a few T-shirts.

The “belongers,” which is what B.V.I. residents call themselves, suffer so slightly from this occasional tourism that they remain, by and large, pleasant people.

Save for the occasional steel band, there is no night life, which keeps the party crowd away. And that, in turn, gives B.V.I. dive boat demographics a family bias. For a new diver, that is good. The less “attitude” in the companionship, the more comfortable a novice is likely to feel.

Above all, the B.V.I. are a haven for those who dislike socializing. Some are that way because they’re rich, more because they value the natural world and many simply because they don’t look so good in a swimsuit anymore.

By resort standards, expenses here can be modest too. While suites can average $500 a night in winter at upper-end estates on the neighboring island of Virgin Gorda, a decent room on Tortola can be had for about $150 a night, and four people can charter a 46-foot sailboat for $150 a day apiece.

Regulars quarrel over the optimal season to enjoy these islands, but for divers, late spring and late autumn are best. The former skirts the winter crowds and the sometimes rugged winds, while the latter is neatly sandwiched between hurricane season and the Christmas hordes. In both cases you can get sensible shoulder season prices.

The tourist trade, such as it is, is composed mainly of yachtsmen who slip from one blue cove to another. They pop in for lobster at the Cooper Island Beach Club on that otherwise deserted island. Or they drop anchor at the Bitter End Yacht Club on the lonely windward end of Virgin Gorda, where a steel band has been known to play as late as 11 p.m. Mostly, though, they just find some white-sand hiding spot on an uninhabited island and make the world go away.

In truth, more people learn to sail in the B.V.I. than learn to dive here. The Nick Trotter Sailing School at the Bitter End Yacht Club, for example, maintains a fleet of about 100 sailboats just for that purpose. The boats, ranging from skiff-size Lasers to 30-foot overnighters, are moored in Virgin Gorda’s sheltered North Sound, where, like the freshman diver, novice sailors can luff and learn in waters that ripple rather than roll.

The human body won’t tolerate perpetual submersion--nor will a non-diving wife and mother. When the dive boat returned each noon, a plainly relieved Debbie met us at the dock.

Family vacations are supposed to be a team endeavor. Nick Trotter’s wooden schoolhouse blocked the path between the dive boat dock and the Bitter End’s restaurant. It was a well-placed hint that our afternoon surface time would be best spent pursuing some common family enterprise.

To that end, we sat in Trotter’s old grade school desks, diagraming tacks and reaches. And we conquered North Sound in all manner of little sailboats, grateful for the gentle winds and margins of error that God had bestowed on this trainer-wheel water body.

Sure, there are more stunning dives on this planet. There are more fish in Palau, better wrecks at Truk, bigger sharks in the Solomon Sea. Since the B.V.I. gave me my wings 16 years ago, it has been my blessing to experience each of those places. But I’ve never been back to any of them. By contrast, the trip with Jeff was my third return to the B.V.I. At this rate I’ll never see that 70% of Earth’s surface that now beckons to my son.

These underwater photos were taken with a Nikonos IV camera and a 15 mm. Nikor lens. Author used an external light meter to shoot at natural light, and an Ikelite 150 strobe at one-fourth power to splash color on the immediate foreground.

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GUIDEBOOK

Divers’ Delight

Getting there: American Airlines flies from LAX to Tortola with two connections; round-trip fares start at $786. Boat taxis from airport to island hotels can run as high as $65 per person, round-trip.

The U.S. dollar is the currency of the British Virgin Islands.

Hotel tax is 12%.

Where to stay: The Bitter End Yacht Club, telephone (800) 872-2392, has 95 units clustered on a hillside, free use of boats. Rates, which include three meals a day: for two people in winter (Jan. 7-April 10), $700 daily, $4,550 weekly; off-season (April 11-Dec.1), $600 daily, $3,850 weekly.

Little Dix Bay Hotel, tel. (800) 928-3000, is as fashionable as lodgings get here. Daily winter rates for two, room only, $550 to $1,300; after May 1, $250 to $700.

Prospect Reef Resort, tel. (800) 356-8937, is in Road Town. Rooms start at $150.

Diving lessons: The following are among licensed instruction outfits. Rates run about $100 for a half-day class; full open-water certification starts at $350, depending on size of class:

Sunchaser Scuba, tel. (800) 932-4286.

Dive BVI Ltd., tel. (800) 848-7078.

For more information: BVI Tourist Board, P.O. Box 134, Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands; tel. (800) 835-8530.