A Mask, a Breath of Air, and Grace

You leave this world with a single stride. “The giant stride,” divers say. It’s as far as any of us can go in one step.

Extend that leg. Take a gulp of tropical air. Feel the weight shift on your shoulders as this small boat rocks with a swell. Follow that foot . . .

You pierce the membrane, splash, between our domain and the greater part of the planet: the undersea.

Gravity disappears in a concussion of bubbles. For a split second, the mind and body labor to reorient themselves. Then a marvel occurs. You attain grace. Never mind that you are a doughy 200 pounds on the surface. Underwater, you become as lithe as gossamer. With liquid sweeps of your Superman legs, you wing downward.

For thousands of years, people have struggled to penetrate the ocean. But only in the last half-century have they been able to do it with abandon, for sustained intervals, untethered and weightless. The jet airplane engine, the computer, fiberglass--all have been around longer than scuba, now a word but not so long ago an acronym and, before that, only a dream.

Scuba, short for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, has grown into a culture, although still a small one. Divers do not share a “look.” All they have to identify themselves is a little red flag with a single white cross-stripe, sometimes displayed as a window decal.

Scuba is also an industry. Aggressively independent, it is a business in transition: attempting, sometimes reluctantly, to grow from macho to family-friendly.

Scuba is a pastime as well. It sends people traveling to the far ends of the world, like here to the equatorial Pacific and the dive mecca of Palau, to see how much abundance and unearthly beauty nature can concentrate on a coral reef.

Most of all, scuba is a pathway into wonder--an activity where one must let go and cannot let go at the same time. Where you’re never sure which is more sublime: what you feel, or what you see.

On this dive, descending through deepening curtains of blue, you look wild nature in the eye.

Right in the eye.

You have detected shadows moving out there where the indigo swallows itself up. Then the shadows approach and take on the sinister, sleek-muscled profile of the predator we all know. Another sound you hear now: the thumping of your own heart.

The tide is changing on a barrier reef, feeding time.

The Shark in Its Realm

Consider our attitude about sharks.

Pigs kill more people than sharks do. Yet only recently have sharks begun emerging from that dark corner of the human imagination.

Just a generation ago, no less an authority than Jacques Cousteau wrote of encountering sharks in the Indian Ocean. His famous ship, Calypso, accidentally ran over a newborn sperm whale. The creature was horribly sliced by Calypso’s twin propellers. The water turned crimson. Cousteau’s crew ended the suffering with a rifle shot to the brain. More than 20 sharks moved in to feed, which today we would consider perfectly understandable scavenging behavior. But Cousteau, the most renowned naturalist of his time, felt his stomach turn.

In his book, “The Living Sea,” Cousteau described what happened:

“On deck our men had watched them devouring the whale and were overcome with the hatred of sharks that lies so close under the skin of a sailor. When we finished filming, the crew ran around grabbing anything with which they could punish a shark--crowbars, fire axes, gaffs, and tuna hooks--and they got down onto the diving platform to thrust, knock, slash and hook sharks. They hauled flipping sharks onto the deck in a production line and finished them off. . . .”

To think, we humans characterize the blood-lust of sharks as frenzied.

Today, enlightened people have a different attitude. Novelist Peter Benchley recently confessed, “[C]onsidering the knowledge accumulated about great whites in the past 25 years, I couldn’t possibly write ‘Jaws’ today--not in good conscience anyway.”

What changed our view?

The popularity of scuba diving.

Scientists and recreational divers eventually came to understand the shark in its own realm. They found animals that were dangerous, sometimes, but not evil, not deserving our hatred.

These days, divers by the thousands venture to Palau, to the Galapagos, to the Bahamas or to the Sea of Cortez purposely to encounter sharks.

Relinquishing the idea of dominion over the planet, these divers willingly descend a rung on the food chain. The sensation is not unlike spirituality--presenting oneself to a greater force and accepting its mercy.

At this moment in the waters of Palau, those shadowy fighter-plane silhouettes move in closer. They circle above and below--and, now, right in front: gray reef sharks, whitetip reef sharks and a single leopard shark. Pure energy carving easy S-turns, they maneuver through schools of baitfish. One, a gray reef shark, approaches. With eyes like polished cue balls, the creature peers into your mask.

You hold absolutely still.

How wide are your own eyes?

Ancient Homecomings

Adventure? An extreme sport? A naturalist’s quest? Mind over matter? A way to meet men, women or other couples? The means to hunt down dinner?

Of late, the scuba divers are diversifying. They are urged along by an industry that once held to the narrowest view of itself.

Today, some divers have moved beyond ordinary challenges. Using specialized equipment, these “tech divers” are pushing extremes of depth, penetrating once unreachable wrecks, exploring underwater caves, dropping under the polar ice packs--risking everything for exhilaration, and sometimes paying the price. Spear fishers, although a diminishing percentage of divers, remain zealous in those places where it is legal to hunt with scuba. But the strongest current in diving today is typified by industry leaders such as Werner Kurn. He wants even the most ordinary of us to dare the extraordinary.

The president of Ocean Enterprises, a far-flung network of dive shops headquartered in San Diego, and the freshly elected president of the dive industry’s primary trade group, Kurn approaches diving as if it’s one of those paybacks that humans earn for enduring in the age of technology, a chance to return to the birthplace of life on Earth and behold nature in its dazzling glory.

Divers do not speak about it much, but most are aware that their bodies are mostly liquid similar in composition to seawater. The human fetus, during its development, shows vestigial gills. Each giant stride off the stern of a boat is an ancient homecoming.

“Diving, it’s been my entire life for 25 years,” says Kurn. “I paid for my education diving. I met my wife diving. I’ve taught my children to dive. It’s my business--what I do every day, diving or making it so others can enjoy diving. To me, and I know this sounds strange, underwater is the best place. For 45 minutes or an hour, you are free. You parachute into this zoo of marine life, this aquarium. You have no idea what you’re going to run into.”

Burly, big-cheeked, ever grinning, Kurn is a contagious adherent. He asks a one-word question--Palau?--and six dive boats fill up. The trip is a reward for some of his employees, a service to his clients, playtime for himself. Born in Germany, he might be a ski-shop or flight-school operator today. But by chance he wound up an exchange student in high school in Southern California. He discovered that a lad--even an awkward one--could learn to soar, not on the mountain slopes or into the sky, but underwater.

From his first attempts, though, he was puzzled. The pioneers of diving, those who defined the sport and taught its skills, regarded the ocean as a heroic physical challenge. Kurn saw it differently. He found diving a serene activity in which the winner was not the person who could swim farthest or fastest but the one who could maintain the greatest equanimity. Divers who expend the least effort, who breathe with the most self-control, who meet the unexpected with the calmest presence of mind--they conserve their precious air and stay down longer.

Which, of course, is the point. Entering the domain of the fish asks us to be fishlike. Diving is Zen. Kurn is the new breed of Zen master. Breathe easy. Release yourself from the weight of the world.

Local to Exotic Waters

Maps show dive sites sprinkled along America’s coastlines. And not just here and there. Dale Sheckler, editor of the 30,000-circulation California Diving News, describes a stretch of ocean only 4 miles long off Redondo Beach. For four uninterrupted minutes, Sheckler lists underwater canyons, old piers, kelp forests and wrecks to draw divers.

There’s mystery too. Sheckler has been searching the area for years in quest of an artificial reef made of castoff toilet bowls. It is said to be thick with fish. “Still haven’t found it,” he shrugs.

Inland residents take to lakes, quarries, rivers and caves. In Texas, divers even plunge into a flooded missile silo.

For many, hometown diving is a prelude to ventures to warmer, clearer and more exotic waters. Dive resorts, from fancy to threadbare, dot the tropical reaches of the planet, and scores of live-aboard dive boats ply the remote seas.

And the most remarkable diving of all?

Ask experienced scuba travelers and you’re likely to hear Palau, a republic of 340 islands west of the Philippines, where the Pacific Ocean and Philippine Sea converge in a vast, rich swirl.

This pint-sized archipelago, formerly a U.S. trust territory and before that a volcano, rises 27,000 feet from the ocean depths to peek above the surface. It is ringed by a protective barrier reef that stands above the ocean floor with spectacular sheer cliffs. This coral reef attracts a richness of tropical sea life to stagger one’s senses. For every color in the rainbow, for every shade and hue in between, there are matching fish and giant clams and mollusks and corals and crustaceans and sea snakes and turtles. Everything from saltwater crocodiles to sperm whales has been sighted here in 80-degree-plus, reliably clear waters. And few places attract sharks every day, all day long like this reef.

But, again, the thrill is not just what one sees.

In Palau, you can clip a rope to yourself. On the other end, a steel hook 4 inches long is wedged into the coral on the precipice of a cliff as sheer as the Grand Canyon. Let go. The incoming current catches you, and you drift back until the rope tightens. You are hooked to the reef, facing the full power of the tide. Relax and stare into the profoundness of open blue. Sharks and clouds of reef fish swirl around you. You fly like a kite on a string in the wind of great oceanic currents.

Jacques Cousteau called this the Silent World, but it’s not really. Sounds are muffled, but you can hear in water, chiefly the pneumatic hiss-whoosh of your own breathing and, as you descend, the crackle of pressure equalizing against your eardrums.

One thing you cannot hear. The approach of a shark.

A Niche Enterprise

Ten million or so Americans have tried diving, according to the Dive Equipment and Marketing Assn., a trade group. Of these people, about 3 million are considered active divers. The number has remained flat for several years, with about 400,000 or so people certified as entry-level divers each year and about the same number dropping out.

In 1999, the industry reported sales of $623 million in equipment and training, with still greater sums spent on dive travel.

Believing there is far more fun--and money--to be had, the diving industry increasingly has taken to wooing women and families, and along the way changing the very premise of diving. Certifying agencies recently lowered age limits to permit 10-year-olds to dive with their parents, a move taken despite the advice of some pros who doubt whether fourth-graders are mature enough to be aware of dangers around them.

Hardheaded business efficiencies and consolidations also have begun to replace the happy-go-lucky, and oftentimes sloppy, hobby enterprises of the corner dive shop.

Still, diving has remained a niche enterprise.

You’ll hear many guesses why: It’s expensive. A setup may cost $2,000 or more--regulator, wetsuit and all the ancillary gizmos. It’s time-consuming. Divers, like pilots, need to stay current to stay confident. It’s tedious. Hours of travel and preparation and cleanup for 45 minutes underwater. It’s cold. The California current that sweeps the West Coast brings water from the north at temperatures in the 50s and 60s, requiring cumbersome protective suits. It’s unflattering. No matter how graceful underwater, the diver emerges with the dignity of a drenched spaniel.

Perhaps there is another reason too. Listen carefully to stories from those who tried diving and then gave up. In the background, often fear. Some of it is reasonable, some not. But fear is a powerful emotion.

Some people are simply uncertain about the water. That giant stride is one step too far, sharks or no.

But fear takes root in another way. People who quit diving often explain that they have trouble with their ears or some other medical problem. Question them, and you discover that somewhere--perhaps in their training--they had a momentary encounter with panic. They began to lose self-control. Maybe they were kneeling on the bottom, at 30 feet, practicing how to clear water from their masks. Suddenly they realized that other students had kicked up mud. They could no longer see very far. They began to hyperventilate. Could they suck enough air from this tube clenched in their teeth? Their heads spun. They were about to become ex-divers. Henceforth, they would have bad ears.

Lesson: Diving asks you to be alone with yourself and survive. Can you count on you? For some, that is the biggest fear of all. For others, it is the exhilaration that makes everything else worthwhile.

Famous Dive Site

Blue Corner.

There are untold thousands of places to dive on Palau’s barrier reef. This is the most famous.

When the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach sought to convey the grandness of the tropical oceans, it modeled its 350,000-gallon exhibit on this curious 50-yard-long, V-shaped tongue of coral that juts seaward from the wall of the main barrier reef.

Exposed to the full force of tidal currents, it serves as a weir to intercept nutrients, drawing them up from the deep. This food attracts the small fish, which in turn bring on the larger fish, which draw the sharks and, sometimes, a bubbling string of curious humans--each one trying to remember to breathe easy and stay calm, even as the senses scream.

This is the second attempt by Werner Kurn and our team of eight to dive Blue Corner. The first time, we were blown off the cliff face by a sudden, 180-degree shift in the current. Now we intend to approach from a different angle.

“I don’t know,” says Darrell Moore, a muscled ex-Navy SEAL, who is diving with his fiancee and her two teenage boys. He gauges the boiling tide under the boat as potentially overpowering. Kurn, diving with his freshly certified 10-year-old son, Mario, looks into the clear rushing waters with his own worried expression. I notice sharks circling under the keel of our anchored boat.

Keep calm? Breathe easy?

“It’s OK; let’s go,” says guide Keith Santillano, a onetime accountant for PepsiCo. in St. Louis who followed his dreams here 11 years ago and now runs his own company, Dive Palau. He has journeyed down to Blue Corner more than 1,000 times, and no one doubts his judgment. Ker-splash.

It remains a perpetual surprise: immersed in water, one never feels wet.

We descend 50 feet to the top of the coral tongue, hanging onto the boat’s anchor line to keep from being swept away, flapping like oversize pendants on the quivering rope, pinching our noses every couple of feet and blowing to equalize the pressure on our ears, watching for sharks, trying to remember our composure. Once atop the reef, we let go of the anchor line and pick our way forward, resting behind the shelter of coral outcroppings, sometimes crawling ahead, trying not to touch living coral, urchins or any of the many things that can sting or bite or be damaged. A single hawksbill turtle paddles out of our path, but there are few fish.

After five minutes, we reach the edge.

The reef drops away in a vertical cliff.

The blue below becomes cobalt and filters into black, forever black.

Bars of sunlight reach down from above, like those that break through and soften the profile of a thunderstorm. Swimming through this angled light: a galaxy of sea life.

Here to greet the incoming tide, the creatures of Blue Corner have massed.

Looking for lunch out in the open water, an intricately green-veined Napoleon Wrasse, perhaps a 300-pounder, cruises nonchalantly through a school of chrome-sided jacks. Barracuda hover like collected mist in the sunlight overhead, shafts of light glinting off shimmering torsos that appear almost translucent. Closer to the coral cliff, tropical reef fish gather in a wriggling blanket of color--butterfly fish, angel fish, parrot fish, tangs, surgeon fish, blennies, damsel fish, trigger fish, groupers.

Who thought up these patterns? Blue with yellow stripes. Yellow with blue stripes. Half-and-half: solid yellow on one end and iridescent blue on the other. Zebra stripes of crimson and black. Black with hash marks of silver and red. Black with orange trimmings. Velvet black with a baby-blue bow tie. Eleven shades of green as if melted from fresh crayons. Clown paint. Pinstripes. Polka dots. Kaleidoscopically vivid. Every detail sharply drawn. Palau has 1,000 species of fish. Most seem to be boulevardiers saying, “Look at me.”

Then, from the shadows: sharks, white-bellied, taut, fast. One torpedoes from the right. I turn my head to gauge its size, but the tide flow tugs as if to rip my mask off.

We fasten ourselves onto the edge of the cliff with our reef hooks. Eight gangly kites unfurl over Blue Corner.

Inhale and I rise, gaining buoyancy as air fills my lungs. Exhale and I descend, hugging the coral. When a shark swims close, I exhale deeply. The reef offers the illusion of security: protection on at least one flank. At this point, an illusion is better than nothing.

Diving is almost always undertaken in pairs; often in groups. So why do you always feel so alone in this wonder of the world?

Werner Kurn has wrapped his big hairy arms around his son. They are flying tandem. But they are still alone, except by touch.

When the shark ghosts safely past, I suck in a fresh hiss-breath and slowly porpoise upward. The slightest angling of my swim fins shoots me to the left, then back to the right, tugging on the slender line that holds me to the reef. Another gray reef shark cruises near, eyeballs shimmering like a cat’s.

The bars of light suddenly dim. Look up. The wrinkled mirror of the ocean’s skin is dimpled by a passing rain squall.

If you smile too broadly, saltwater creeps into your mouth, past the protective cup of your regulator. But it is hard not to smile. Our bubbles sweep behind us like funnel clouds made of glass. There is a shark right above me. I wonder if there is one right behind me too. Isn’t it a marvel?

Cousteau Contribution

It was 1943. War raged. That June on the French Riviera near Bandol, a bony, hawk-nosed French Naval officer who was to become one of the most recognizable people on Earth felt his hands tremble as he unwrapped a package. No child ever opened a Christmas present with greater excitement, he recalled.

Inside were three cylinders connected by hoses to a canister the size of an alarm clock.

Jacques Cousteau and his designer Emile Gagnan did not actually invent scuba. But this first “aqualung” they devised made it practical.

Cousteau rushed to a cove where he could experiment in secret. The demand regulator worked: It provided air on demand. Cousteau breathed in, and his device answered. More, it regulated the flow according to the surrounding water pressure. The deeper Cousteau went, the more air he drew to keep his lungs inflated against the rising weight of the water. That day, humans learned to swim like fish. Cousteau called himself a “man fish.”

After the war, Southern California became the capital of diving in America.

In 1948, a distant Cousteau cousin, Rene Bussoz, opened a dive shop in Westwood, near the UCLA campus. He stocked the first Aqua Lungs in the United States. As the history is now told, Bussoz sold 10 and figured that the market was saturated.

But Cousteau’s television documentaries captivated millions. Lloyd Bridges inspired many with his action TV drama “Sea Hunt.” Skin Diver magazine first went to press in Lynwood, Calif., in December 1951 with a cover featuring a spear fisherman carrying a 4-foot-long white sea bass at Laguna Beach.

Early dive standards came from Southern California clubs such as San Diego’s Bottom Scratchers, which required members to prove their skills by spearing a shark at least 6 feet long, among other things. In 1954, the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation began a standardized, military-style training course for divers.

Within a decade, this macho culture was under challenge.

“They were chasing people out of diving,” recalls John Cronin, who in 1966 co-founded the Professional Assn. of Diving Instructors (PADI), now the world’s largest certifying agency thanks to a more accommodating attitude about the water.

Today, divers can obtain initial certification over a long weekend, or more wisely with a few weeks of study and practice. Most training organizations adhere to standards devised by themselves without government regulation--a point of never-ending pride for the dive industry.

Other advances made diving safer and more pleasurable--particularly by shielding the body from heat-sapping exposure to water.

“Everybody thinks it was the regulator that made diving possible. But it was also the concurrent development of the wetsuit,” recalls Jim Stewart, one of California’s diving trailblazers.

Stewart, now 73, is diving officer emeritus for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. A member of diving’s Hall of Honor, Stewart has logged more than 11,000 dives. His career is one of the most varied and colorful in the world: under the Antarctic ice pack, into a bomb crater off Eniwetok three days after the first test of a hydrogen explosion, on the maiden crew of Aquanauts to live for a sustained interval on the ocean floor.

In 1961, diving off Wake Island in the Pacific, a gray reef shark nearly severed one arm at the elbow. The hamburger of scar tissue he wears is a grim reminder to those who swim with sharks: “Like lightening--it only takes one.”

“Today,” he says, “I’d probably dive in a spot where there weren’t so many sharks.”

Panic Can Kill

Danger is relative and always a balance.

“We sell diving as an adventure sport,” says Ken Kurtis, co-owner of the oldest continuously operated dive shop in the Los Angeles area, Reef Seekers Dive Co. in Beverly Hills. “Maybe that’s wrong, because if your heart is pounding at the end of a dive, you’ve done something wrong.”

Since 1970, scuba diving has claimed 3,016 lives, just more than 100 per year. More recently, the average has dropped into the range of 80 or so deaths per year. The Divers Alert Network, a membership medical service, reports another 449 annual injuries on average for the last 13 years, not counting minor matters.

These statistics reassure many of those in diving. In its 2000 annual review, DAN observed that fatalities and injuries were once commonplace in diving. “Today they are rare and often seem to be associated with unsafe behaviors or hazardous conditions.”

The problem, in many cases, is predictable: A mistake in judgment snowballs into panic.

But there also is nitrogen to contend with.

Since the scuba regulator “regulates” the pressure of air released into the lungs to equal the surrounding water, a diver at 33 feet is breathing air at twice the pressure as on the surface--meaning, twice as many molecules of oxygen and otherwise inert nitrogen with each breath.

Nitrogen, the largest component of air, accumulates in blood like carbonation in a bottle of champagne. If a diver surfaces too quickly, the blood fizzes just as the champagne does. These bubbles can cause permanent tissue damage and sometimes death.

Recreational divers are supposed to dive no deeper than 130 feet to minimize risk. But tech divers, using exotic mixes of breathing gases without nitrogen, have pushed the frontiers many times deeper. The U.S. Navy has sent divers to at least 2,000 feet--far beyond where light can penetrate.

The Best Comes Last

Now the payoff.

The risks, the expense, the bad airline rides, the fruitbat soup at dinner, the clumsy gear, the fussy gear, the cramped boat, the hours of preparation--all of it has brought us to Ulong Channel.

Not as well known as Blue Corner, the Ulong Channel of Palau’s barrier reef is a slingshot ride.

For a week, we have sharpened our skills. Twice we plunged from waist-high water into “blue holes” in the coral--descending through vertical tunnels that open into cathedral-sized caverns, shot with light and shadow and fish life. We have dived into pitch-dark caves of stalactites. At night, like spacemen on Mars, we followed the beams of our flashlights to the sunken wreck of the World War II Japanese tanker Iro. We swam with manta rays in the flats and drifted along coral cliffs and threaded our way through gardens of giant clams. Our guide, Keith Santillano, saved Ulong Channel for last.

After a half-hour cruise through the green mushroom-shaped islands of Palau, he ties his 30-foot fiberglass cruiser, Moonshadow, to a fixed buoy line where the great reef drops away into the sea. If you drained the oceans, the islands behind us would be the tops of mountains almost as tall as the Himalayas. In front of us, 700 miles of open sea. We wait.

Equatorial squalls build in the distance. Breezes wrinkle the surface of the sea. Still we wait. Our timing must be precise. Our wetsuits leak perspiration. Sunscreen drips into our eyes.

Then the Moonshadow begins to tug on the buoy line. The incoming tide is building. Ker-splash. Again we descend the rope, hand over hand, flapping like so much laundry in a squall.

This is a two-stage dive. Reaching the top of the coral reef, we drive our hooks into the edge of the cliff and gather our wits. Sharks swarm around us; wits, we can attest at this moment, are not so easily gathered. A gray reef shark ambushes me from behind, swooping over my shoulder, close enough to feel the darkness of its shadow. Too close, my wits tell me. I think of Jim Stewart at Scripps and his mangled arm that aches every time he lifts a beer bottle. Would I have his presence of mind to probe torn flesh and pinch off my own artery?

After a few minutes, Santillano gives a signal. We release our hooks. The tidal current sweeps us back with the force of a fire hose. Santillano aims for a gully that cuts through the reef. We follow--lumpy torpedoes, propelled by millions of tons of water answering the pull of a distant moon, unstoppable until yonder lagoon is filled.

The reef topography is rough cut like a desert, painted in psychedelic colors of coral: gullies branch into washes that gather into small canyons and fan out into more gullies. Santillano leads. I extend my arms. Superman on the fly, pillowing over lumps of cabbage coral, ruddering around corners, shooting down straightaways. We rouse a dopey turtle from its shelter in the lee of a coral head, and he is swept into the current with us. Ahead, we see the gaping, fanged jaws of a school of barracuda, facing us, waiting for scraps of food. They hesitate, then part as we rocket past.

How fast are we traveling? I don’t think I could peddle a bicycle this fast. I feel like I’m water-skiing 50 feet beneath the surface. Five minutes, 10, 15. We hurtle faster as the reef rises and squeezes this mighty rush of water into a narrower course. Doubtlessly, there are fish nearby, but we see only the large ones, and then as mere flashes of color. Santillano tries to point out a 5-foot giant clam that passes in an eye blink.

Now Santillano is signaling emphatically. He points. Ahead 100 feet is a second buoy line. We aim for it, bearing down with all the intensity of pilots seeking the arresting cable on an aircraft carrier. We must not miss. Beyond are shallows where surf pounds onto the coral.

Awhile back, a group of divers surfaced in a strong Palau current. The engine stalled in their chase boat. They drifted out of sight. Eight perished.

I seize the line. It trembles. It is slick with algae. The current pushes my body onward, and I unfurl. I feel the creak of my shoulder sockets as my momentum jerks to a halt and the water rushes past. My snorkel rips off and disappears. I glance and the others cling fast too. We climb slowly up the rope. The Moonshadow has moved ahead and is tied above us.

One by one, we regain the burden of gravity and wriggle aboard. Noses drip with snot and seawater. Mouths gape and close, like fishes’. For the moment we are speechless.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Guide to the Gear

Weight belt: Weights are added or subtracted from belt to help diver achieve neutral buoyancy.

Flashlight: Carried by divers to illuminate dark areas and reveal color underwater.

Fins: Enable divers to propel themselves through the water more quickly and easily.

Wetsuit: A flexible, neoprene suit for protection and warmth. It floats, requiring the diver to wear a weight belt.

Mask: A mask provides an air space in front of the eyes, which allows the diver to focus underwater and see clearly.

Air tank: A cylinder, made of steel or aluminum, holds the diver’s oxygen. Must be inspected and tested yearly.

Regulator: Reduces the air pressure in the tank to match the pressure of the surrounding water.

Mouthpiece: Conducts air from the tank.

Gloves: For warmth and protection.

Snorkel: A tube used for breathing while floating face-down on the surface.

Essential Gauges: Submersible pressure gauge: Indicates air pressure in the cylinder.

Depth gauge: Indicates depth of the diver by measuring water pressure.

Booties: Worn under the fins for protection and warmth.

*

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue assisted with this story.