Sailing away from the shore, just a GPS to track our location at sea, with a professional team of divers and one sailor, the above pic was that blessed moment when I kneeled on the seabed at the bottom of Bay of Bengal.
Like my previous post, while adventurous, unlike on ‘the roof of the world’, this is about kneeling on the seabed underwater, where not even a splinter of sound of the world above ground reaches.
This is the most soundless place I have ever experienced, where the only sound you can hear is your own breath.
But of course, I did a lot of training first.
As a volunteer diver I was treated like a new member of the team than some crazy adventure-seeker ticking off his bucket list. I volunteered to help the team lug the oxygen tanks and other equipments.
Squeezing myself into a wetsuit for the first time in my life, I even joined the team’s briefing early morning on the day of the dive. With Rob, our main instructor from Australia, Reene a French who is also an instructor, two Indian trainers, another diver and a local sailor, it was a team.
The task was that while we were going diving for fun, we could also try and install an artificial reef underwater to encourage the fishes and other wildlife to thrive. I am proud that I was a part of this endeavor.
I think the water gods and goddesses did listen to our pledge as I noticed a school of fishes immediately. Although I didn’t see any shark, a bunch of scary barracudas were active. Trust me, the only place you would want to see a barracuda is on a dining plate. Because underwater they are very fast and aggressive. They can literally take a chunk of your flesh if they attack.
The dive!!!
Also, my ‘dive buddy’ who was supposed to be alongside me at all times didn’t speak English or a language I fluently knew. But that didn’t matter. Any trained scuba-diver in the world knows that when you are underwater, the only language you use is the underwater sign language.
