Stewart: Taking the plunge, at last, to try scuba diving

By

Cox News Service

ST. BARTS, French West Indies — Most of us, I suspect, have "somedays" in our lives, days on which we promise ourselves we will get around to doing something we've always meant to do. Someday, we vow, we will travel to South America. Someday we will buy a Jaguar convertible. Someday we will clean the leaves out of the gutter.

My somedays always have included scuba diving. I don't know why. I have no real interest in watching fish do whatever it is they do in the privacy of their own ocean. Although I guess swimming with the fishes is a lot better than sleeping with them. But someday, I said, I would scuba dive.

So when we are walking along the harbor on this tiny Caribbean island and I notice a catamaran offering scuba diving for beginners, I realize that "someday" has come. And the next afternoon, I am standing in the cabin of the catamaran, wearing a black-and-blue wet suit, with a lovely French woman telling me the most important thing I need to remember when I am 18 feet under water.

"Never stop breathing," Marion Noury says. There is some other stuff, too, but the breathing thing is the one that sticks in my mind.

Marion Noury and her husband, Franck, own and operate Plongee Caraibes. Their 45-foot cat pulls out of the harbor three times a day, ferrying divers with varying skill levels. Our trip includes nine divers, eight of whom can put flippers on their feet all by themselves.

"I will show you some hand signals," Marion says as she guides my right foot into a flipper.

"This means 'descend,' " she says, holding her hand out with the palm facing down.

"This means 'ascend,' " she says, holding her hand out, palm up.

"And this," she says, putting her hand against her forehead with her fingers pointing up, "means 'shark.' "

"Good one," I say, chuckling at her obvious attempt to make me relax. It is not until I am stepping off the end of the boat that it occurs to me that Marion did not chuckle. And by then, it is too late, because I am in the water trying to remember whatever it was she said about breathing.

Slowly, she guides me under the warm, clear water of the Caribbean into a strange and perfectly silent world. Except for the sound of me sucking frantically on my oxygen and creating more bubbles than a Jacuzzi. Eventually, though, I get the hang of the breathing thing and begin to relax as I follow Marion deeper. We drift over coral and other stuff that makes the floor of the ocean resemble the surface of the moon, only a lot wetter. Marion points out improbably colored fish, a small barracuda and a couple of giant lobsters that would require at least a gallon of drawn butter.

As we descend to 18 feet, the same thought runs through my mind that probably has occurred to any person who ever has explored this strange and beautiful world.

"Shark?"

But 25 minutes later I'm back on the boat, uneaten and glad I took the plongee.

Because someday we all reach a point when we realize we have used up a lot more opportunities for somedays than we have left.

D.L. Stewart writes for the Dayton Daily News. E-mail: dlstewart AT DaytonDailyNews.com