Taking a dive… just like Jacques and Jacqueline
But now I’m all set to join Jackie and co-star Nick Nolte in an underwater treasure hunt, as long as the treasure is no more than, say, four feet underwater. We can call it “The Shallow.”
A relative lack of depth was totally OK with me as I embarked on the adventure of the Go Dive Now Pool Tour, the national learn-to-dive program that made its annual stop this summer at the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium. As usual, “Big Wave” Dave Reidenbach of Wisconsin – last I checked, his home state isn’t anywhere near an ocean – was on hand to coordinate the event.
He greeted me enthusiastically at the portable 20-by-30-foot pool set up especially to accommodate wannabe divers, most of whom are a lot younger and a heck of a lot smaller than yours truly.
“I do have Triple-X,” Dave said as he led me to a rack full of diving suits. My regular shirt size is Double-X, so I figured I’d be good to go.
Not so fast, literally. Squeezing into a rubber outfit can be a protracted process, especially when the wearer has trekked from the zoo’s parking lot to its PNC Pavilion on a mercilessly muggy morning.
Squeezing size-14 flippers onto my feet went much more expediently, and I finally was ready for my lesson with Jordan Gollard, a Peters Township resident who’s served as a Go Dive Now instructor the past two seasons.
Now, the late Jacques-Yves Cousteau may have made it look easy when he’d take his Aqua-Lung – the breathing apparatus he invented, not the Jethro Tull song – underwater. But the requisite tanks of life-giving gas are heavy and, if you’re not used to wearing them, decidedly awkward.
That was my big takeaway: Make sure those suckers are strapped on tightly and securely. If not, they’re likely to shift to one side and make your body go belly-up, which could lead to severe problems if you’re in more than, say, four feet of water.
Once everything was adjusted accordingly, I took a deep breath and realized that I had no need to take a deep breath. That’s what the oxygen is for, genius.
As I sloshed around below the pool’s surface, I enjoyed myself imagining what it would be like to do something similar among the sea creatures that constitute the Great Barrier Reef, or in the clear blue of the Caribbean off the Caymans. That would be a far cry from my childhood vacations with the brownish murk of the Atlantic off New Jersey.
Still, I was glad to be able to periodically stand up, poke my head above water, remove my goggles and even to breathe our good ol’ Pittsburgh air. I’ll need to work on the nuances of diving a whole lot more before I’m ready for the deep.
In the meantime, there’s always “The Deep.”