Almost Heaven
Posted By Paul Kotik on 7 June 2004
Today's competitive freedivers, those of the post-Big Blue generation, are fond of slipping dialogue from the film into everyday conversation..
"Take me back down !" groans a would-be champion as I wake him before dawn to make an early boat.
" It's always that stupid actress, or Mama !" complains another, having failed to make her target depth.
We are usually kidding around when we parrot the film script, but most, I think, have a more serious regard for Enzo Molinari's rebuke of the meek doctor who tried to stop him from diving. When we speak of the sea being ready for us, or not ready for us, we are often voicing a heartfelt truth.
This is a story about a day when the sea was ready - oh, so very ready -for me, but I was not ready for her.
I had left Hawai'i late in April and after a few days of personal overhead in Boston, resumed the journey East. A short stop in London and a pleasant flight on a brand new British Airways Boeing 777 brought me to my destination in the Middle East, almost exactly halfway around the planet from Maui. About as far away from Hawai'i as one can get.
Geographically, and in every other way.
After a grinding, nerve-wracking week of business in Tel Aviv, I was wound tighter than a piano string.
I finally managed to break away, driving through the Negev desert, past Sodom (so what was it they were doing in Gomorrah ?) and rolling down the Arava highway in the dead of night toward the Red Sea resort town of Eilat. Time for some water sports.
The drive itself was not entirely tranquil. The region is not tranquil.
Bombings, shootings and steadily escalating confrontation are the order of the day, and while the Tel Aviv - Eilat corridor is popularly thought to be relatively safe, the conflict is never far.
An hour out of Eilat , we heard on the radio news that the town had been placed under curfew. Security forces were searching for infiltrators spotted crossing the Jordanian border. This did not soothe my nerves , nor did the Turkish coffee at the gas station. The next news broadcast had the infiltrators captured and everything back to merely abnormal.
We arrived late, checked into our 5-star hotel, with the usual 2-star aggravation at Reception, and drifted off into a fitful sleep.
Awoke early the next morning , and not at all refreshed. After a light buffet breakfast, my nephew Ronen and I drove down the coast to Divers' Village, an ancient and venerable dive operation on the beach a mile or two north of the Egyptian border. Ronen has been diving with them for years. The owner and senior employees are French-speaking immigrants, and I know of the owners' daughters' reputations as accomplished freedivers.
We had planned to scuba dive on this day, but as Angel outfitted me with my rental gear she promised to talk freediving with me later on. The clientele milling about under the shop's thatched roofs were mostly Israeli, mostly young and characteristically ...shall we say, not reserved, and not circumspect in their behavior. A scuba version of the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, all shouts and gestures.
The more modest manners of European and American tourists were another casualty of what is politely referred to as the "security situation" in the region, which is keeping away foreigners in droves. Not much aloha here !
The first dive did not go entirely well.
We had agreed to follow the gently sloping bottom out to a site called Japanese Tables, in about 30m of water, nose around the coral formations there for a while, and then swim back to shore along the bottom, using the gentle slope to regulate our ascent and provide a safety stop.
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