Water Adventures

My family was big on almost anything having to do with playing in the water.

We romped with wild abandon at the ocean, and lakes but especially at Petaluma’s new huge pool where (sadly) they used to have four diving boards with a 12-foot-deep end to dive into. Today, they’re gone, and with them went one more tool for making great childhood memories.

Here’s what they looked like.

If you were there in the late 60s and 70s, you’ll recall the knobs – those wheels you can just barely see on the far side of each board. They were wet-foot-operated by each diver while holding onto the handrails to adjust the flex of the board before each glorious launch. I always selected the most flex so I could fly as high and far as physics would permit.

I loved those boards.  From the high dive, you could catch some serious air, get just a taste of flying as you arced out over the deep end of the pool and maybe try a new twist or flip.  Of course, you had to agree to absorb a few poorly executed splashdowns, but most of the pain would then be soothed by the oos and ahhs of those standing in line for their own attempts.  From the 3-meter high-dive in particular – there was a steep price to pay for pulling a bellyflop.

Incrementally I taught myself how to use that high board, adjusted for the best bounce of course, to swan dive, do a single flip and even a one and a half then the back dive and back flip. With all that, the multi-bounce for height and then sailing off as high and as far as I could reach before slipping quietly back beneath the surface was by far the best of times. Even with the few bellyflops, I could not have been happier.

The pool itself was wonderful. Beneath that 12-foot-deep end was a world where, for as long as you could hold your breath, you lay on the bottom and watch kids come crashing through a ceiling of water from those diving boards attended by a white explosion of bubbles and flailing limbs.  It was especially entertaining if you had a mask.

I didn’t often have one but one day, I developed a way to make a mask using only your hands. You could only look down, but this was sufficient to find small things that were too blurry to see without a mask – like that quarter you were saving for a candy bar – or better still, your friend’s quarter when he began griping that he lost it in the pool somewhere. It was quite a racket until the word got out that I knew how to do it.

It takes practice, but you just use your hands to surround your eyes and pinch your fingers together tight. Then look down and blow out just enough air to collect bubbles around your eyes and use your hands to keep them in place. Until that air leaks away, your view will be crystal clear, and you will see everything on the bottom. Then just pick out and retrieve any coins and stray jewelry as your finders-keepers treasures.

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Mom was devoted to keeping my sisters and I engaged in things she thought would both encourage our growth into decent adults and would keep us out of trouble enough to allow her to work parttime at Carither’s department store.

It troubled me when, one summer, she announced that we were joining the Petaluma Swim Club. Ugh – another attempt to get me involved in team sports.

She made it clear that not doing this was not an option. “You’re signed up, dues paid, information packets are in-hand, and are all starting next week.”

I hated most of this because most of what happened was swimming laps – endless, triple-digit numbers of mind-numbing laps. How is this even a team thing? I wondered. We can’t even talk to one another while swimming all these pointless laps. The only thing that kept me from trying to whine my way off the team was that during those laps, I realized that my mind was free to wander as long as I appeared to be trying to keep up with the others. I needed only to keep on swimming but could think about anything I wanted to. There were endless things that I wanted to think through and now I had a chance to do so without being bothered by anyone as long as I kept on swimming and stayed in my own lane. I had almost zero desire to be a competitive swimmer, so all those day-long meets were duller than wet-dirt which kept me outside of the in-group who took it seriously.

I did manage to fall in lust with a cute gal but was too shy to do anything about it. Later, I was thankful for having endured all those laps when we ran into each other after graduation because by then I could use the experience to approach, get to know, then date her for a while. She was wonderful but life eventually took us opposite directions, and I was left with some great memories of her smile and sense of humor.

So – was swim club worth the effort?  Yea, once again, the girl made all the difference.

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Our family had a boat we used to ski behind or explore remote swimming coves or campgrounds. That boat gave so many adventures. Just imagine the fun of:

• Your first success on a single ski only to have dad swing you over 2-foot-deep water at 20 miles per hour. Scared to death, I wiped out right as the water got deep again – whew!
• or boating with your friends too late to get back before sunset and getting lost. Then once you found your bearings and were following the shore back to camp, powering full speed into a dark and shallow peninsula resulting in a great crash, where no one was hurt, but only barely.
• Or teaching your friends how to ski so you could get them up, then up to speed, then snaking them across the wakes of other boats and watching them loose control and perform some high-speed reentries that were nightmare quality trauma that would haunt them for years.
• or, one of my favorites, taking the boat off the trailer, beside the loading dock and having one of your friend’s girlfriend ask for a piggyback ride because she didn’t want to put her shoes on, and the ground was too hot. She was killer cute so of course I agreed, only to have her switch to mockery mode with me as her horse. Mockery comes with a cost, so  I hurried down to the dock and off the end into the lake with her screaming on my back. Gotcha! The stunt almost backfired on me because I had the only key to the truck in my breast pocket and – yep – it went to the bottom of the lake when I dove in. I was standing on the dock looking into the dark water when it occurred to me that the water wasn’t very deep, maybe 10-12 feet, and I always had a dive mask handy (so to speak) so I jumped in and went down until I felt the bottom. I did the mask trick with my hands, and the key was right there in front of me. Without my ever-handy mask, I never would have found it in that murky water. Visibility was less than 3 feet, but on the first try, I came up with the key in hand. Everyone who wanted a ride home cheered.
• or finally, everyone else’s favorite event, when my girlfriend was skiing and hit a wave weird, did a few cartwheels across the surface before wiping out. I spun the boat around thinking she was most likely fine and circled near her to make sure. She refused to face us and finally admitted that she’d lost her bathing suit top in that wipeout. Okay – that was funny but . . .

“Out my way so I can hand her a towel and  . . .”

“Stay away from me!”

“Umm, or not.”

She recovered in a few weeks.weeks.

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Dad had a friend who got him involved in scuba diving and he enjoyed teaching me how to as well.

Do you recall the late 1950’s TV show, ‘Sea Hunt’ staring Lloyd Bridges.  I recall little about this show except for two things:

• My dad loved it and,
• Mr. Bridges set my expectations for what scuba diving was supposed to ‘look like’.

Even when better gear was developed in the following years, it wasn’t right if there weren’t two big air hoses coming around your shoulders because that was what Llyod Bridges used.

My father, bought or traded for all the gear, including one regulator with twin hoses that I always wanted to use.

I recall when he first took me to a friend’s pool to try my first dive. Once he verified that everything worked as expected, he taught me how to use it and, YES! I was suddenly underwater breathing through those twin hoses. It was so very cool.

Dad taught me, when using a scuba tank, never to ascend up towards the surface without exhaling. Dad put it simply, “If you do, even small changes in depth will cause the air in your lungs to expand and blow holes in your lungs.”

Say what!? How is that possible? I studied one of his books and dad was right. Physics and our biology are not compatible if scuba tanks are used, and people die if they don’t follow this rule. Cool – huh?

From that same day, I also recall Dad’s friend’s daughter, who was in my same 5th grade class. I was poking around the bottom getting the feel of breathing down there when she dove in wearing an incredible white bikini. I had a mask, but she didn’t and just the sight of her triggered all kinds of chemistry in me that made it extra hard to breath – gracious!

Relax. Slowly inhale and exhale. Don’t go up without exhaling. You’ll never live down blowing holes in your lungs because of a white bikini. It was an image I never forgot.

Learning to use this gear was one of the first steps my dad had in mind before hitting the open ocean out near Bodega Bay – yes – where they filmed the movie, “The Birds” which I watched recently and can attest that it will still creep you out.

Dad told me I’d have to wear a wet suit because the water is so cold. I’ll say it here and own the fact that I do not like swimming in really cold water, so I was really not looking forward to this dip into the Pacific Ocean. I was mixed about wearing the wet suit.  It just looked like a full body straight jacket to me, but I really did not want to test my hypothermic tolerance, so sure, let’s do the wet suit.  “By the way Dad, why do they call it a wet suit? That it gets wet is kind of stating the obvious.”

“It’s called that because all the parts don’t seal completely.  It’s going to let water in but will quickly warm up.”

“So, I’m going to get cold anyway.  Who thought this was a good . . . ?”  and at that point he pushed me in.  This is where I learned the lesson of just getting it over with and everything will work out fine.

GASP – the thing certainly was not watertight, and water freely flowed in causing instant, thermal shock everywhere my suit parts had overlapping openings but, dad was correct, it did quickly warm up and once the water got everywhere, it stopped coming in. I was comfortable again in – about – 3 hours. Brrrr. . .

“You okay?” he asked as I settled down. The suit felt restrictive of any motion I made, but once I got used to it, I decided I could live with it if it really kept me from freezing.

“Y – y – yes – ss. I – th – think – so,” I managed to respond as the invading salt water warmed.

“Good. Ready to try a dive?” Finally, this is what I was waiting for, the chance to explore the world beneath the Pacific Ocean waves. I nodded and he gave me leave to dive. I threw my arms into a diving position and kicked my flippers and nodded my head down. I kicked like crazy but could not get my waist below the surface. I stopped trying because something was clearly wrong, and I knew I must have looked like an idiot flipping my feet in the air while floating like a cork. As I came back up to see my dad smirking like – well like a dad – I realized that the wet suit was too buoyant to let me submerge, and dad had deliberately let me go in without a weight belt like I always saw him use.

Once I came aboard and corrected this, I was able to get beneath the waves and begin exploring. Dad stayed nearby and put up with me when I brought up my first treasure, a 2-foot-wide sun starfish. I did not stick the starfish on my back because that just would not have fit my idea of adventure, but that critter looked a lot like the one in the photo – very cool! Doesn’t it looked positively alien?

“Dad, can I keep him?” I dearly wanted to put it in my sister’s room while they slept so they could wake up to it the next day.

Can you imagine the howling that would have caused?

Soon, I was able to dive with dad for abalone where only snorkels were legal and scuba equipment wasn’t.

When diving for abalone, you wore your wet suit, carried a mesh bag and an abalone iron which was just a piece of metal with a handle. The idea was simple: you would sneak up on the mollusk, quickly jam the iron between its foot and the rock and pry it away before it could lock down. If you delayed – the critter sucked itself hard onto the rock surface and then you were lucky to get your iron back because almost no one is strong enough to pry an abalone away once it has locked down.

Abalone meat tastes amazing sliced, pounded soft, and pan fried with an egg and spiced bread crumb batter.

One day dad took me to a place where the surf was pretty rough and the rocks we were hunting were huge, forming deep 15 foot caverns where you had to hold on to the seaweeds to keep from being washed away. It was freaking me out even though riding the waves up and down through those rocks was kinda neat. It was obviously dangerous.

I knew the next wave was about to arrive. I looked to see so I could be ready and sure enough, that wave was coming. bubbles and surf debris were flushing towards me and then I saw it – a huge eel was also coming at me with the current. It was weaving through the current, completely comfortable with the environment. I wanted nothing to do with him and shot to the surface hoping it would pass beneath me. Once I was above the water, my heart was pounding because I didn’t know what to do if the critter decided to follow me. I looked back down in time to see the eel – no wait – damn –it’s just a ribbon of eel-colored seaweed washing in with the wave.

The wave reached me and the submerged funnel of this canyon below me forced the surface to rise quickly and lifted me further above the scary kelp monster. If my innards hadn’t been so enriched with fear-induced adrenalin, it would have been fun, instead I was left trying to wrangle my flight or flight instinct.

On the surface, I had much less control of where I drifted from the waves coming in or out and was at risk of being dragged across the exposed, barnacle-covered rocks which would easily tear my suit and skin to shreds so I decided that I’d had enough of this adventure for one day.

I worked against the waves to get back to where Dad and I had entered the water which was just a wide rock with a surface that was low and high enough to allow us to enter and leave with relative ease. I say relative because nothing about this ‘felt’ anything but awkward. There are good reason humans, whatever they think about the ocean, don’t live in it. We’re simply not designed for it. We could come and play in it for a change or for a challenge, but we were made for solid ground and to it, I now wanted to return to settled down.

I awkwardly climbed to a point that left me well above the wash of each wave where I could sit and watch Dad and his good friend continue the abalone hunt without me.

I told myself that this type of water adventure would take me some time to master and maybe even enjoy. But what actually happened was I became more and more nostalgic for those old diving board that let me fly above the Petaluma swimming pool.

My beloved high diving board was so much safer. . .

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