I was dreading this day. As part of the Dive Master course you have to produce a map of a dive site. I’m outrageous with directions. I’m terrible with maps. I can hardly follow one, let alone create it! And the compass! I don’t like compasses. I have to relearn how to use it every time I need it for some diving course. It’s bad. Maybe this exercise will finally make me remember the “trick” once and for all.
We had to do mapping in buddy teams. I was paired up with Kelly, a girl from Connecticut who is here for the DM training. We took the truck to La Caleta, a little harbor where the boats “live”. I have a special emotional connection to La Caleta. Good memories. It was the starting point of my 100th dive. Bad memories. This place will always remind me of how painfully cold it was for me to dive last year. Every time the weather was not that good (the wind is strong but not bad enough for the port to be closed), we started dives from La Caleta. The strong wind and no sun usually means freezing during the surface interval. I don’t know how many second dives I missed last year because I was too cold to get back in the water. Of course, now that I have my power semi-dry 8-mm suit, it’s not a problem at all. Today, we started from here not because of the bad weather (thank God), but because the dive site we’re mapping – Cordona – is located between San Francisco and Punta Tunich, very close to La Caleta.
The best way to make a map is to snorkel above the reef first to get its general contour and then do one or two dives to record the depths, distances and marine life in the area. It’s good to do it in pairs because then one person can focus on depths while the other does distances. Both people must create their own map to record numbers on and then you compare the notes, which ideally should be similar, and transfer the finalized version onto paper.
By now I’m kind of used to the fact that everything I’m scared of turns out to be fun and not scary at all. Mapping was no exception. It is quite a task to be able to trace all the curves and nooks of the site as you get carried by a pretty strong current. Especially, when all of a sudden your slate breaks into two and the whole east side of the map slowly starts sinking deeper and deeper, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it because your “power” semi-dry suit is so buoyant that it doesn’t even allow you to immerse your head completely underwater, let alone free dive for the escaping piece of paper. Helplessly, I twitched my body every which way in an attempt to go down, all in vain. But this is when another advantage of mapping in buddy teams comes into play. Kelly, who – thank God – was wearing just a regular wetsuit, retrieved the east side for me in a second.
You have only one chance to get the shape right – the surface current is pretty strong and there’s no way you can stop, or even slow down, to perfect your work in progress. Impossible is nothing though (I love this slogan!), and you quickly learn to accept that your map will be schematic at best and move on.
I was surprised to realize how different the reef looks from the bottom compared to the bird’s eye view. I’m not very good with spatial thinking, and I’m glad I got the snorkeling overview first, otherwise I would never be able to figure out the real shapes. Since I’ll have to guide soon, I wish I could get a snorkeling “tour” of every major dive site of Cozumel, but who are we kidding, it will never happen…
The original plan was for Kelly and I to be on the opposite sides of the reef taking depths and whenever we couldn’t see each other anymore we should come up a bit and measure the distance between us. Well, our brilliant plan didn’t work. We quickly realized that although the corals looked pretty short from the top, it was actually impossible to see the other side for the most part. So Kelly and I revised the plan and continued together. I was struggling with the depth finder that I borrowed from a friend in the hope that it would help us measure distances more efficiently. In theory, it does sound easier than keeping a count of your kick cycles or crawling on the bottom of the sea with your arms constantly stretched. In practice, it is not that simple. The problem is that the device is super sensitive and doubles as a fish finder, so every time I pointed it toward a boulder and a random fish passed by, I would get the distance to the fish and not the boulder. Another annoying thing about it is that for some reason it insists on taking the temperature on every second click. Seriously, why do I need so many temperature readings? So in the end, I had to take several readings for each distance to make sure it was correct. Still better than arm lengths and kick cycles though. Kelly was obsessed with taking depths. Her computer was set in meters for some reason and when I saw a series of “10.5 10.6 10.4 9.9” clustered around a boulder, it made me laugh – my depth records read, “30 feet” on the west side of my broken slate and “18 feet” on the east side. I’m exaggerating, of course, but not by much.
In the afternoon, we got together to finalize our map. I was thrilled to learn that apparently Kelly went to an art school for years. We went all in. Empowered by the fact that our maps looked very similar (we both were scared of this exercise and had no faith that we could possibly do a decent job), excitedly we compared depths, shapes and notes. Almost everything was identical, and what was not, served as a good complement to the other map. It was simply perfect. And we drew a simply perfect map. We even used colored pencils. Our map was the best. Really.
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