That is now many years passed, and while I am nostalgic about it, I'm ambivalent about whether I miss it. Or, at least, miss it enough.
On the one hand it is local and can be challenging. The boat captains and crews are entertaining at least and good friends at best. When you're diving locally you get to be a part of a cadre of weirdos who spend their time appreciating what their very own ocean is capable of and you get to visit local marine wildlife which, while it might not have the colors of the Caribbean, it is all still curious, abundant, and cute.
On the other hand... and this, I find, is the dominant hand... there are the 4:00AM wake-ups and the two hour drive to the boat. The loading and unloading of gear while you're jostling for parking and still 1/2 asleep in a marina lot that stinks of yesterday's fishing charters. There's wind fetch and off-shore storms that could get a charter called only an hour after you've left the harbor. The $120 ticket per ride. There's whole seasons where you make the emotional and psychological preparations for boat after boat, just to get a call at 8:00 every night before every charter to say that the wind is against us. To say nothing of running tanks around NYC to get filled for these charters when helium is damned expensive and there are cops waiting in every subway station to do random bag searches who would be none-too-pleased to find compressed oxygen in a 3 liter bottle in your messenger bag.
And there's the salt.
If you haven't had to rinse salt off of 300lbs of gear -- including 1/2 dozen scuba tanks and a rebreather -- in a second floor walkup's bathtub then had to find a place to hang it all to dry in under 900 square feet... well, you haven't REALLY gotten to appreciate the NY dive experience.
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| The land of Bon Jovi and Pork Roll |
I used to be proud of my ability and my background as a Northeast wreck diver. Hell, I've got this image tattooed on my chest over my heart!
For the years I was living in Hawaii people would often ask, "Where is your favorite place to go diving?" And without any irony or pause I would say, "New Jersey!" I missed my wrecks while I was out in the middle of the Pacific, I thought about them often and dreamed of, one day soon, returning to them and seeing how the ocean had treated them.
So what happened? Have I grown lazy? Burned out?
I have been back for five years, now. Every year I vow that THIS will be the year that I'll revisit the wrecks that I loved and longed for. And every season comes and goes with, at best, a small handful of unphenomenal dives.
So why don't I miss the wrecks now? Or, at least, miss them enough?
I hope I will. This season is all but finished; I'm scheduled to go out one more time with the NYAquarium folks in about a month. And I do look forward to it.
I look forward to jumping off the back of the boat into the cool, green water and descending through the haze with only the line to guide me. I look forward to the shadow of the wreck materializing into the outline, then the clear angles of a shipwreck below me. I look forward to the silence the sea imposed on this once-great tool of humanity and the quiet reflection of impermanence and change that is so accessible when you're surrounded by marine life and rust. I look forward to the rush that I lived for for years.
I do not look forward to the salt. Or my alarm clock going off.
Perhaps it's a function of age. Or maybe I'm just a grumpy, old bastard anymore.
I want to be as excited about this facet of the sport as I used to be. But I'm not.
I guess I'm just a cave diver now.
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