I must be a mermaid for I have no fear of depth and a great fear of shallow living.
The ability to dive to over 100ft below the surface allows my true mermaid to shine through, but I want to go deeper. Way deeper.
I have this dream that I know could be nearly impossible to accomplish, but what’s the point of a small dream? I want to go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. (For those of you who don’t know, the Trench is almost 11km/36000ft deep!)
They say to break up a big dream into small steps, so that’s exactly what I started to do. I started my adventures into the deep unknown by going to 1000ft(0.3km) below the surface. In typical scuba gear this was going to take a lot of preparation and would come close to the deepest scuba dive ever at 1090ft, so I took a different path…I took a submarine.
With Substation Curacao, located in the Curacao Sea Aquarium, I was able to take 2 dives – a deep dive as well as a night dive. The deep dive took me down to a maximum depth of 1011ft, while at night we dove to a little over 500ft, and both dives were absolutely phenomenal.
The Substation crew were fantastic. When we arrived, we met the team and were taken to the sub where the parts were explained to us and we could ask any questions or voice any concerns that we had. After a little more discussion on land, we headed outside to see the sub lifted by crane to be placed into the water which was a full team operation.
Once inside the sub, we started our descent, and the feeling was so incredible, it’s almost indescribable. The last time I remember feeling that first-time rush of excitement and being left in such awe of everything around me was when I first donned scuba gear and took my first breath underwater.
The colours and fish of Curacao were beautiful. As we dove deeper the scarcer corals and life became, but the more intriguing the life that we did see became. Diving further and further below the surface, the light penetration became less and less, until we reached about 700ft, when there was no more sunlight penetrating below the water. Being in almost total silence and in complete darkness is a feeling I will never be able to forget.
As we continued to descend using the lights on the sub as our only source of light, we came across a small fishing boat wreck around 750ft, which was not void of life. Starfish dotted around the wreck and the occasional fish would swim by the light of the sub. At this depth and as we continued our descent to 1000ft, life was rare, but even just looking out of the dome into nothingness while watching the depth gauge continue to show a greater depth was captivating.
When we reached our max depth of 1011ft, a starfish greeted us, but I had a sense of sadness wash over me. Diving deeper seemed so close. I could look out the dome and see the slope of the sand in front of me, calling me into the deeper and darker waters. I wanted to tell the pilot to keep going. Just a bit further. I still craved depth. I still needed to go deeper.
The sadness quickly passed because we still had to ascend and there were still so many things to see, but once I tasted the thrill of diving into the deep, I knew that I would need to continue.
My experience with Substation Curacao not only exceeded my expectations, but fueled my desire for more. While I have yet to dive to a depth even close to that again so far, my dream of heading to the bottom of the Mariana Trench is still firmly in tact, and I am determined to make more sub dives in the future to keep my curiosity of the deep fed.
